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tl;dr it's the same feature he's talking about, but also he's wrong in a very Yudkowsky way. I was curious about this so I hunted it down: https://youtu.be/AaT
by kemayo 2y ago
tl;dr it's the same feature he's talking about, but also he's wrong in a very Yudkowsky way.
I was curious about this so I hunted it down: https://youtu.be/AaTRHFaaPG8?si=NbIe3hBSovvOQA-G&t=4483 https://youtu.be/AaTRHFaaPG8?si=NbIe3hBSovvOQA-G&t=4483
He speculates that Wikipedia got the idea from Arbital. Insofar as I can tell, that seems to be a wiki-like website that started around 2015 -- I had never heard of it, so it might be older? That does predate this specific implementation of popups on Wikipedia, which is from 2018.
The fun context here is actually discussed in the article -- the genesis of the Wikipedia popups was a community gadget on Wikipedia (Navigation Popups) that's from much earlier. Oldest version I could casually dig up on Wikipedia is from 2007. Unless Arbital is vastly older than I think (older than LessWrong itself, which is from 2009), the chain of inspiration is presumably in the other direction. Or completely independent.
The article is, overall, about why it took so long to go from that working example to something more robust.
- throwaway314155 2y agoFor me, the idea that one could even lay claim to having "invented" a feature like that is very suspicious. Surely it was discovered independently by several people and the stakes are so low in any case that it just felt like Yudkowsky trying to get technical credit for it by having it edited into his wikipedia after regurgitating it on a popular podcast (or something similarly shady and ultimately petty). The actions of a man who is insecure about his lack of accomplishments (aside from having money and using that money to prop himself up).