New LessWrong review winner UI ("The LeastWrong" section and full-art post pages)

I guess this isn’t terribly important information to communicate in this particular context, anyway…

I do actually think in user testing, seeing people fill the urge to "fill out the picture" by reading a lot of the content, or at least checking it out, seemed like something that brought people a bunch of joy.

Edit: An initial attempt is "The LeastWrong" feels a bit like a global claim of "these are the least wrong things on the internet". 

This is how it feels to me. 

Whether you can find a logic in which that interpretation is not coherent doesn't seem relevant to me. You can always construct a story according to which a particular association is actually wrong, but that doesn't stop people from having that association. (And I think there are reasonable grounds for people to be suspicious about such stories, in that they enable a kind of motte-and-bailey: using a phrasing that sends the message X, while saying that of course we don't mean to send that message and here's an alternative interpretation that's compatible with that phrasing. So I think that a lot of the people who'd find the title objectionable would be unpersuaded by your alternative interpretation, even assuming that they bothered to listen to it, and they would not be unreasonable to reject it.)

I thought the "tribal" line was:

Rationality from EY: pause AI for 30 years at the level of GPT-4. Nuclear war for defectors. After 30 years, very slow, careful adoption and slow forward progress for anything you need AI to accomplish. Very similar world to today.

e/acc : AI is now proven feasible, race to exploit it as fast as possible, if it results in human extinction that's what the laws of physics wanted. Many negative outcomes are the cost of progress*, similar to the 1960s in the USA. Geohot will expressly mention this when plotting the slowing of progress in the 1970s.

• eg asbestos, still one of the most fireproof substances found.

If you thought reality makes { flying cars, futuristic cities, fusion vtol shuttles, terra forming, life extension to see this in person } require AI, for the reason that humans have not made much progress in these domains without it in 50+ years, and these things are all incredibly expensive, doesn't this "carve reality at the joints"?

Without the intelligent robotic labor you need AI for, it won't happen, in the same way humans would not have reached this point without engines.

Am I using "carving reality" wrong in this context, ignoring the details of the way I think future technology all has AI as a pre-requisite?

Ah, it’s an outdated browser issue. (Mac, Chromium 103.) (Lack of support for the :has() pseudo-class, specifically, in the selector .TopPostsPage-imageGridPostBody:hover:not(:has(.TopPostsPage-imageGridPostHidden)) .TopPostsPage-imageGridPostAuthor, is what’s causing the problem.)

It's a nice idea to have an optional field on posts for the author to submit a summary with a max-length.

My worry was that having summaries only inconsistently adds a lot of mental complexity to track to the page. Now only sometimes when you hover over something do you see some kind of preview, and if you have ~60 items on a single page, adding any kind of indicator for that quickly makes things very cluttered.

And you would have to redesign the page quite a bit to have a good place for summaries without adding a huge amount of clutter or flashing or movement on the page.

I think they wouldn't work well for this the vast majority of time. I think if you see all the reviews and can quickly skim them they are useful, but they definitely are not that helpful for deciding whether to read a post. It's either a pretty generic "this post was great and useful", or a really in-depth review that definitely assumes you've read the post and is very hard to parse without having read it. 

Note that the selectionchange event will report the currently selected hit for the searched text, not all highlighted hits, so this should not be a problem. (As the user presses Cmd-G [Find Next], or Enter in the search box, the browser will cycle through the highlighted hits, firing a new selectionchange event each time.) Thus, each time the event is fired, you can expand whatever section the currently-selected hit is in (and collapse its neighbors in the row).

Update: I just checked, and it seems like this stopped being true at some point; I am now seeing selectionchange events fired only on the initial search (when the user first spawns the Search box, by invoking the Find command or the Find Next / Find Previous command) and also when that box is dismissed, but not on subsequent invocations of Find Next/Previous (or the Enter key) when the Search box is open. (It is still the case that only a single selected hit, and not all highlighted hits, are reported.) This reduces the usefulness of the technique I described, though does not entirely eliminate it. @habryka

(Must you require hover for that, though? I’d make that change unconditionally, frankly.)

Yeah, I might consider it. I do think it makes the initial pageload a lot more drab, and removes a lot of the beauty from the page (and logged-in users who haven't read most of the posts already have much stronger text-contrast).

Note that the selectionchange event will report the currently selected hit for the searched text, not all highlighted hits, so this should not be a problem. (As the user presses Cmd-G [Find Next], or Enter in the search box, the browser will cycle through the highlighted hits, firing a new selectionchange event each time.) Thus, each time the event is fired, you can expand whatever section the currently-selected hit is in (and collapse its neighbors in the row).

Oh, that's great, I didn't realize that's how it works. 

I would also suggest deepening the text shadow, changing it from text-shadow: 0 0 3px #000 to, e.g., text-shadow: 0 0 3px #000, 0 0 5px #000, 0 0 8px #000, which looks like this:

Oh, this is also a pretty good idea. I had forgotten that you can do multiple text-shadows at the same time. I'll give it a try.