Introducing HBD Forum

And some commentary on LLMs

I’ve started a new website at hbdforum.net. Please join!

I liked mid-form content internet forums. I think they’re a great space to think and interact with intelligent people. Unlike a blog, a forum is a community, and should have a low effort-barrier to posting, although good forums have a high talent-barrier. That means bright people who don’t want to “build an audience” can post interesting ideas and get them seen by other smart people who are interested in discussion. On Substack, where content is likewise medium form, you mainly pander to an audience, which takes in and does not give back. Without a lot of pandering, nobody sees your writings.

There are always young people out there who are very intelligent, and have interesting things to write, but who don’t want to pander to audiences with slop. If such a young person is interested in HBD, then HBDForum is a great place for them.

I’m going to try to replace my Discord with HBDForum. I have a number of reasons why. The first is that Discord supports medium form content, but the organization promotes shortform, and I don’t like how servers are walled gardens. At the bottom of HBDForum is a live chat and a voice chat feature.

These effectively replace those draws to Discord which classic forums don’t have. Another reason I wanted to do this is that Discord is Orwellian spyware. Discord’s spying practices should be illegal. Sadly, they are popular among boomers and government officials. On Discord, even DMs aren’t private. Discord is always reading your DMs with hired moderators and AI. If a DM is construed to possibly possess illegal content, Discord actively violates your privacy by using its extensive IP logs to forward all of your information to your respective government.

HBD Forum is not intended to be a place for content which is illegal in the United States. However, Europe has stricter “hate speech” laws which could potentially criminalizes some HBD discussions, like race differences in intelligence. HBDForum is hosted in the United States and logs nothing it doesn’t need. I don’t even have it set up to log IP, so proving that someone is posting from the EU is not possible. There are no data retention laws for web forums in the United States, so this is perfectly legal. Logging IP is taken for granted but I’ve never built a website that does it. It’s not default behavior. Any website that does it is essentially malicious spyware.

I hope that younger people realize the goodness of strict, HIPAA like privacy laws that minimize what data internet enterprises are allowed to retain, what type of content they are allowed to let AI or humans read without permission (should only be public content), and what they are allowed to show to any 3rd party, including the government, without any legal order. Boomers conceptualize the internet as a public place that you visit momentarily, and see privacy as like wearing a ski mask to a shopping mall. Younger people use the internet as an extension of their home. A private Discord server is a chat with friends in your kitchen. It’s not a speech on a soapbox on the sidewalk of a busy downtown area. Nobody should ever have a politically incorrect opinion stated to their close friends in their home broadcast to the world.

I made this website in about 24 hours. It was very easy. I used GPT Codex 5.3. It’s not purely vibe-coded slop because I have enough web-dev experience to audit the code and fine-tune it. I’m like a senior engineer and GPT is currently like a really fast junior engineer. I made all of the architectural decisions and an AI skid would have probably made something 200% more sloppier due to taking whatever GPT first gives it But AI is now so good at web dev I’m convinced it’s not a long-term career option any more. There will be people employed in web infrastructure, but they will probably do 10 people’s jobs as of ~2025 for about $100,000 per year in 2026 dollars. I, personally, could probably replace 5 people right now with a good LLM and the firm I work for would have the same level of productivity as of a year or two ago. Productivity is instead going up, which is why that hasn’t happened, but that increase probably won’t absorb all of the LLM boost. That happened for no new technologies like this: cotton gin, calculator, internet, etc. Rather, smart people will have to learn something else besides JavaScript.

I see that as a hugely positive thing. I always thought the idea of a really bright person pooping out web code as ugly. I am glad that it is clear that this will not be the preponderance of my future career. I am glad I can spin up in 24 hours what took a team of millenials 1000 man hours back in 2017. I think smart people will be okay and the proletariat-ressentiment fantasy of smart people digging ditches alongside them or beneath them won’t come to fruition. Smart people are always okay because smart people learn quickly and are better workers. But the question right now is what will smart people do that LLMs can’t do?

One obvious answer is robotics. LLMs are restricted to the digital world. We need to build humanoid bodies for them so they can do embodied tasks we currently rely on functionally illiterate people, who are really egotistical and demand significant control of the political system, for. I think there will be a robotics businesses boom and a lot of web engineers will go there. A lot of the remainder will stay in the web world to “pilot” the LLMs and make the responsible decisions. They will be needed for at least 10 years in the web world because of all of the missing web software; there’s still a ton to be built and LLMs won’t be self-sufficient by definition until the whole economy is automated. There’s a lot of work to be done making sure literally everything informatic is done through a really premium website and producing robots that can automate embodied labor. For one, every government administration in the world needs to be significantly digitized. Every government still uses paper or 00s jank pages for their bureaucracies. My present firm will probably not lay off anyone in tech for at least 5 years because it’s the same there. There’s a ton that needs to be rebuilt from scratch by competent LLMs drivers and a lot that needs to be created for the first time.

I would also like to see more serious science, although I’m not sure if that can happen naturally. Freeing up high IQ people means there are more people available for research, but a lot of research is not profitable. We’ll need a massive expansion of academic research roles, but I’m sure the blessed People will resist this, because they’re narcissists who hate Faustian science and love boosting funding to socialism & People’s safety organizations like old age pensions, schools, secret police, airport security, and so on. Maybe AI will lead to a huge economic boom and there will be money laying around? If it increases the pie it should, once all of the Trump drama is finally over.

The research I mentioned is only important if it’s math-driven. Like physics, quantitative sociobiology (including statistical genetics), machine learning theory, and so on. So the three frontiers I’m seeing are robotics, technical computer infrastructure, and hopefully mathematical science.

Anyway, I would love to discuss this further on hbdforum.net! Please join us.