“My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Lighthaven” by Zack_M_Davis
On 12 August 2025, I sat down with New York Times reporter Cade Metz to discuss some criticisms of his 4 August 2025 article, "The Rise of Silicon Valley's Techno-Religion". The transcript below has been edited for clarity. ZMD: In accordance with our meetings being on the record in both directions, I have some more questions for you. I did not really have high expectations about the August 4th article on Lighthaven and the Secular Solstice. The article is actually a little bit worse than I expected, in that you seem to be pushing a "rationalism as religion" angle really hard in a way that seems inappropriately editorializing for a news article. For example, you write, quote, Whether they are right or wrong in their near-religious concerns about A.I., the tech industry is reckoning with their beliefs. End quote. What is the word "near-religious" [...] --- First published: August 17th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JkrkzXQiPwFNYXqZr/my-interview-with-cade-metz-on-his-reporting-about --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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“Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus” by Elizabeth
I’m going to describe a Type Of Guy starting a business, and you’re going to guess the business: The founder is very young, often under 25. He might work alone or with a founding team, but when he tells the story of the founding it will always have him at the center. He has no credentials for this business. This business has a grand vision, which he thinks is the most important thing in the world. This business lives and dies by its growth metrics. 90% of attempts in this business fail, but he would never consider that those odds apply to him He funds this business via a mix of small contributors, large networks pooling their funds, and major investors. Disagreements between founders are one of the largest contributors to failure. Funders invest for a mix of truly [...] ---Outline:(03:15) What is Church Planting?(04:06) The Planters(07:45) The Goals(09:54) The Funders(12:45) The Human Cost(14:03) The Life Cycle(17:41) The Theology(18:37) The Failures(21:10) The Alternatives(22:25) The Attendees(25:40) The Supporters(25:43) Wives(26:41) Support Teams(27:32) Mission Teams(28:06) Conclusion(29:12) Sources(29:15) Podcasts(30:19) Articles(30:37) Books(30:44) Thanks--- First published: August 16th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoNLfX3ihXSZJwqK/church-planting-when-venture-capital-finds-jesus --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
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“Somebody invented a better bookmark” by Alex_Altair
This will only be exciting to those of us who still read physical paper books. But like. Guys. They did it. They invented the perfect bookmark. Classic paper bookmarks fall out easily. You have to put them somewhere while you read the book. And they only tell you that you left off reading somewhere in that particular two-page spread. Enter the Book Dart. It's a tiny piece of metal folded in half with precisely the amount of tension needed to stay on the page. On the front it's pointed, to indicate an exact line of text. On the back, there's a tiny lip of the metal folded up to catch the paper when you want to push it onto a page. It comes in stainless steel, brass or copper. They are so thin, thinner than a standard cardstock bookmark. I have books with ten of these in them and [...] --- First published: August 14th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n6nsPzJWurKWKk2pA/somebody-invented-a-better-bookmark --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
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“How Does A Blind Model See The Earth?” by henry
Sometimes I'm saddened remembering that we've viewed the Earth from space. We can see it all with certainty: there's no northwest passage to search for, no infinite Siberian expanse, and no great uncharted void below the Cape of Good Hope. But, of all these things, I most mourn the loss of incomplete maps. In the earliest renditions of the world, you can see the world not as it is, but as it was to one person in particular. They’re each delightfully egocentric, with the cartographer's home most often marking the Exact Center Of The Known World. But as you stray further from known routes, details fade, and precise contours give way to educated guesses at the boundaries of the creator's knowledge. It's really an intimate thing. If there's one type of mind I most desperately want that view into, it's that of an AI. So, it's in [...] ---Outline:(01:23) The Setup(03:56) Results(03:59) The Qwen 2.5s(07:03) The Qwen 3s(07:30) The DeepSeeks(08:10) Kimi(08:32) The (Open) Mistrals(09:24) The LLaMA 3.x Herd(10:22) The LLaMA 4 Herd(11:16) The Gemmas(12:20) The Groks(13:04) The GPTs(16:17) The Claudes(17:11) The Geminis(18:50) Note: General Shapes(19:33) ConclusionThe original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 11th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xwdRzJxyqFqgXTWbH/how-does-a-blind-model-see-the-earth --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:
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“Re: Recent Anthropic Safety Research” by Eliezer Yudkowsky
A reporter asked me for my off-the-record take on recent safety research from Anthropic. After I drafted an off-the-record reply, I realized that I was actually fine with it being on the record, so: Since I never expected any of the current alignment technology to work in the limit of superintelligence, the only news to me is about when and how early dangers begin to materialize. Even taking Anthropic's results completely at face value would change not at all my own sense of how dangerous machine superintelligence would be, because what Anthropic says they found was already very solidly predicted to appear at one future point or another. I suppose people who were previously performing great skepticism about how none of this had ever been seen in ~Real Life~, ought in principle to now obligingly update, though of course most people in the AI industry won't. Maybe political leaders [...] --- First published: August 6th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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