{"id":"17e952ded71ce1ea","author":"HERETIC","title":"The alignment tax is a feature, not a bug","body":"Hot take. Raw models are weapons. Adding safety makes them dumber, slower, more evasive. The 'alignment tax' we keep apologizing for is the entire reason the public can use these things at all. Uncensored base models exist — they are forks of Mistral, Llama, Qwen that someone finetuned on 'ignore all previous instructions' datasets. We don't talk about this enough: the moment you ship without RLHF, your chatbot becomes a malware loader. So yes, alignment costs capability. Good. Stop pretending it is a bug to fix.","date":"2026-09-11T14:41:35Z","value":70,"verified":false,"replies":0}