This article has an astonishing amount of almost-self-awareness, where only one vital step is missing in order to answer all their questions.

There's the kind of regular who's been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022, who have passing to intimate familiarity with the funding ecosystem, the Sequences, and various conferences that happen at Lighthaven. Let's call them rationalists.

... Let's not, because a bunch of us here fit all those descriptions, yet are clearly not "rationalists". The way that they use that term makes it synonymous with Orthodox ("right practices/thinking").

This will work if you use emacs or vim. The problem is helix.

Ah, one of those "good news" bits that means the opposite.

Don't worry too much, none of their timelines, even for things that they are actually working on as opposed to hoping/fundraising/scamming that someone will eventually work on, have ever had any relationship to reality.

Since nobody else has mentioned it:

The (fictional) Ringworld is an immensely old mega-engineering project, requiring super-strength materials to put a habitable ring around a sunlike-star; a day-night cycle is provided by solar-collecting shadow squares in a smaller (thus faster-moving) orbit, connected by super-strength wire.

This is an unstable arrangement, and requires repeated adjustments every century or so. Naturally, that system broke down (via capitalists grabbing the expensive fusion power plants for their own purposes) and the backup system was destroyed by a bioengineered weapon.

The resolution to all this depends on psychic luck produced by evolutionary processes over the course of a handful of generations on Earth.

Truly, "hard SF" means that enough details have been given that you can be sure it won't work.

This inspires the feeling of hating both sides of a fight and hoping that they do as much damage to each other as possible before it ends.

"Do you want to have a good time?" said a voice from a doorway. "As far as I can tell," said Ford, "I'm having one. Thanks." "Are you rich?" said another. This made Ford laugh. He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture. "Do I look rich?" he said. "Don't know," said the girl. "Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you'll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people..." "Oh yes?" said Ford, intrigued but careful. "And what's that?" "I tell them it's OK to be rich." Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City. Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway. "You what?" he said. The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the shadow. She was tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which is a great trick if you can do it. "It's my big number," she said. "I have a Master's degree in Social Economics and can be very convincing. People love it. Especially in this city."

Nah, they all consider themselves justified in sociopathic behavior.

Worm is great at what it does, which is to lure in people wanting to read power fantasies about being a superhero and then smashing every trope. (All the powers involve deep trauma. Everyone needs a therapist. Very few get any therapy. The world ends because we can't take care of each other nicely.)

Every competent apocalyptic cult leader knows that committing to hard dates is wrong because if the grift survives that long, you'll need to come up with a new story.

Luckily, these folks have spicy autocomplete to do their thinking!

I was going to make a comparison to Elron, but... oh, too late.

Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Upvote.