Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.
I rewrote the ad so they can lean into their marketing strategy.
Hard book have hard word and make head hurt, AI make book easy! More book read for you. No hard word. This good idea!
the part of me that sometimes spends an hour just choosing the right words for the couple of paragraphs I’m writing is fucking screaming
…
there is a screaming noise that comes from me while I write
thanks magibook!
ah yes, the Simple English wiki filter but wrong
It's good that they're offsetting their advantages in the marketplace of money by actively crippling themselves in the marketplace of ideas.
I can't even
Couldn't find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:
does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?
it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says "okay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasn't a guy or a girl"
Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?
Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.
Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don't say I didn't warn you.
But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.
don't mention skull sizes for 5 minutes challenge
It's so cute (euphemism for concerning) how their image of the average trans woman is a white computer science rationalist poster and not, like, a South American sex worker or something.
Why didn't evolution give females big heads if it would make them all geniuses? Another anecdote. My sister has a big head. She was valedictorian in high school I think. She hit her head one day in middle school during gym class by running into a wall. She also fell off a bike and hit her head in high school. I have never hit my head and I think the main reason is that my arms are strong enough to catch myself. So maybe the big headed women would-be-ancestors fell and hit their heads.[1]
Classics of Reason
Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).
Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.
the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: "communities" managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data
We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.
if this were running you would be unlikely to know about it. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it's trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result
Not sure which sub a heartwarming story of Nazis shooting their own dicks off goes under, but: Nina Power of Compact gets called a nazi. Sues for defamation. In discovery, produces extensive facts not just supporting Nazi ideas but calling herself a Nazi. Loses so hard she just declared bankruptcy.
there has been no media coverage of this, but hoo boy does there need to be
EDIT: ohhh it's the fuckin LD50 gallery, straight up NRX. Judgement, PDF
ah yes, a good ole
we have scientifically ascertained that this is in fact that rare correct use case for the following emoji sequence: 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
hahahaha happy garbage day everybody
The logs also show Ms Power claiming that "the social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy races", and that "black and white were alien races and very different".
wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on
one day I'll find a way to shoehorn our experience with a Waldorf School into a sneer.
In summary, fairy-themed fascism can be tied back into the whole Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, esoteric Hitlerism shtick. You most commonly get ambushed with it when dealing with fallen hippies, but it is diffusing into the wider online right via weird 4chan things.
the original recipe nazis were deep into occultism so maybe
This is one of those David Icke things where you’re not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if they're some kind of code or euphemism.
I know someone who's a practicing christian and has said they've seen angels
technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have .... not pushed matters
(e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that I've heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I don't know how much of a heuristic that sort of thing is by itself. the fairies thing may be a bit more concrete/direct - gonna have to try test it on some flaming racists sometime)
Have to wonder what happened to her brain since the days when she had stuff published at the Guardian.
When my local civilians get drawn into the conflict
via Little Bubby Child
I could hear this while reading it ahaha
Right?!
Being far from home at the moment, I really appreciate Bubby's mountain vibes. Feels like a trip to Granny's house.
Every day I become more convinced that this acct is an elaborate psyop being run by Yann LeCun to discredit doomers. Nobody could be this gullible IRL, right?
im doing my part
I went to the study, and that's the global market size for all sex toys annually, and just eyeballing another chart, butt plugs might be 10% of that. So butt plugs are around $3 or $4 Billion. On the bright side, unlike AI safety, butt plugs actually serve a function.
Meatloaf didn't anticipate the budgetary implications of enlisting us all in the Armies of the Night. Thus, humanity was ill-prepared when Skynet attacked..
Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.
Amazing.
I also remember another time people did the 'let two AI's (no idea what time it was at the time, certainly not an LLM, some other ML technique) talk to each other, but in a actual production setting (E:I was wrong on the setting, see the article for better info->), the Facebook/Meta one (First link I could find on google, didn't read it, just a way to find out more for people who never heard about it). But then it started to produce gibberish/'their own language'. Of course this was also a sign of it 'waking up'.
And I note again that in the LLM experiment, the 'AGI's' are still keeping perfectly fine to the bounds of the experiment, even if they do or do not directly reference the researcher. They still play into the fiction, as talking to the researcher about the other AI is part of the fiction. It would be more interesting if they did something unexpected than regurgitate video game ingame notes.
static dot dot dot emergency dot dot dot shutdown
lol
'multiple realities'
Come on, I have written similar things while roleplaying as an AI. The first is useful when you need a quick break to go to the toilet, and the second is a good excuse because you made a mistake a real fictional AI couldn't make.
E: also funny that they worry about the shoggoth behind the friendly face and then get freaked out when the AI's talk in normal science fiction fluff to each other, and it doesn't become incoherently weird. (like the example above).
I’ve sat and had beer with someone (who’s worked in the space but not LLMs) who read the Bitter Lesson and got real into the idea of humans “just being universal function approximators” and had wholesale bought into the idea that we should throw everything we possibly can into this shit, no resource cost or requirement is too high or too uncertain, that it would definitely be the right thing to so
so I can tell you without no uncertainty that there are definitely people who buy into it
I poked the conversation gently, to see how far the conviction went. it was pretty comprehensively bought-in. was a somewhat surprising experience tbh
Dan Luu's "A discussion of discussions on AI bias", about techbros trying to gaslight the rest of the world into thinking ML models don't have problems
Another example which doesn't make a good viral news story is my not being able to put my Vietnamese name in the title of my blog and have my blog indexed by Google outside of Vietnamese-language Google — I tried that when I started my blog and it caused my blog to immediately stop showing up in Google searches unless you were in Vietnam. It's just assumed that the default is that people want English language search results and, presumably, someone created a heuristic that would trigger if you have two characters with Vietnamese diacritics on a page that would effectively mark the page as too Asian and therefore not of interest to anyone in the world except in one country.
the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real
I run into this exact problem so often with music: it’s extremely fucking annoying to convince search engines or other kinds of things that, yes, I do in fact want that turkish/finnish/russian/brazilian/thai/irish/….. result set from this english query, and there’s just almost zero affordance for it
they segment things into de facto silos and if you don’t already happen to have some way in which to pull on a string to lead the way there (or can input the desired query in the applicable language and spelling) you’ll have a bitch of a time. check a couple of those items from my entries on the music thread a while back for references to test with
god damn those recasting images
it will never not be hilarious how pathetic this technology/approach is
https://matduggan.com/a-eulogy-for-devops/
Possibly interesting blog post about what the idea of “devops” promised, and how it failed to deliver. With any luck, the “getting back to basics” thing will actually happen, instead of people imagining they are google and building nightmares out of kubernetes.
Cloudflare making the bet there's money in offering AI-scraping protection:
Off Topic: Politcs
spoiler
Best of luck to our folks in the UK, enjoy the Tory tears!
I doubt any of you are following Dutch politics. But it is day 3 of the new (far right) cabinet, and day 1 and 2 were already a clown show. I think today they are going on 'vacation' (summer recess), so nothing will be done. "Lekker gewerkt jongens"
I remember I used to watch this guy's videos, and the icon for the image viewer in serenity was pepe the frog. And he also admitted to browsing 4chan. And he changed his twitter link to x.com before even twitter changed it. Also it was kinda weird that he had some private discord channels whose contents he was very secretive of. Now that he's making a nonprofit with github's former CEO, there is absolutely zero barriers to the exact same bullshit from all the companies he complains about.
Ehhhh. This is the identical PR they ended up accepting: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648
I have feels about the implied “the author behaves like a shithead because he’s ESL” but eh. If it works.
yeah, pretending that this is just a misunderstanding of the language is a bit disingenuous, but i'm not going to argue with the results.
this:
ah fuck I didn't know Ladybird had those people involved (was only aware of project existence and reasons), fuck :<
well this fucken sucks. I was rooting for the dude and his projects.
me talking to someone after describing a dumb and horrible LW thing:
i feel like i'm describing a livejournal fanfic cult, which i guess i am
one of the worse things about LW is that even just explaining their beliefs to uninvolved people makes you look like a complete weirdo
I’ve (irl) met a “part-time” LW reader and tried to have a conversation about some of the shit, and … same experience
just utterly had no ability to even receive the information about the longstanding sexual abuse or statements of yud being a charisma-for-nerds grifter
(had an earlier conversation with ‘em some many months prior calling out many of issues in coiner world after they’d gone laser-eyes having read the bitcoin paper, and they eventually got their head out of their ass, so…. I’m hopeful it’s not all lost yet)
Personally haven’t seen a headline about Ol’ Billy Boy ever since word got around that he was a diamond medallion member of the lolita express airlines. William Gatorade thinks AI’s got what climate craves, i.e. waste heat.
Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.
Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.
Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
i think that openai also wanted to solve their problems with fusion, but they got a step further, they made a startup for this. not normal nuclear power plant hot rock machine, no, they want tech that is perpetually Just A Decade Away. it makes some perverse sense if your funding is dependent on misguided hype only
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
Ugh, so many people are working the "AI will solve X problem" mill. I don't need nor want AI to be there increasing output.
fusion research is just thinnest disguise for thermonuclear weapons research, especially the inertial confinement fusion variety
Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.
Biblically Accurate Gymnasts
Now this is the shit. This right here. The only usecase for genAI - massively uncanny shitposts meant for consumption at 3AM in a dark corner of YouTube while on vibes enhancing substances.
This is what god wouldn't have wanted and therefore is what we must pursue.
vibes enhancing substances
fuck yes
@BlueMonday1984 The machines are finally starting to understand art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K7aY-_b9sk
we finally posted Diz's LLM logic puzzle post to Pivot to AI! Let's see if this draws flocks of excited new users to awful.systems ... we're doing Ray Kurzweil tomorrow, lol.
There was a warcraft 3 pro who played build orders created by Chat-GPT and it was fascinating the degree to which it was able to perfectly imitate the form of the kind of thing you'd find on liquidpedia or some other guide but simultaneously make nonsensical errors that betrayed that it had no awareness. Like, telling you to build a unit of a different race or build without meeting prerequisites.
I'm so sick of "if only we had more humanities in education the elites wouldn't be fucking up the world." that has nothing to do with reality, it never has, it never will
if only king leopold had been exposed to the humanities bro 😞
traveling back in time and teaching the rulers of the british empire about a little thing called literature
i thought it was a part of prevention of future engineer disease cases
Yeah same, but hey my cs education had courses both on basic ethics and how to run businesses, so some attempts were made at least.
it ought to be named philosopher's disease
It really is unwarranted self importance. t humanities major
Is law considered part of the humanities because lawyers have been fucking things up in society since at least the French revolution.
Dan Hendrycks wants us all to know it's imperative his AI kill switch bill is passed- after all, the cosmos are at stake here!
https://xcancel.com/DrTechlash/status/1805448100712267960#m
Super weird that despite receiving 20 million dollars in funding from SBF & co. and not being able to shut the fuck up about 10^^^10 future human lives the moment he goes on a podcast, Danny boy insists that any allegations that he is lobbying on behalf of the EAs are simply preposterous.
Now please hand over your gpus uwu, it’s for your safety 🤗 we don’t allow people to have fissile material, so why would we allow them to multiply matrices?
Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(
Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated "poetry"
Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn't it? Burn it all down.
turns out there was a good reason they wanted to turf us, we just didn't know it yet
never really seen ludicity blog before, now that i read up ten posts on so in a single sitting i lowkey want to fuck off to live in a cabin in the woods
the sheer wastefulness of it all, bubbleness of its economics, piling technical debt, institutional stupidity, and the man also feels off in a way that i can't put my finger on (maybe just by association)
ludic be like: this industry makes no sense and causes untold suffering, but if you emit right vibes you can get by and make a pile of cash. Let me help you make a bank off those rubes
Well, there is no ethical work under capitalism.
Also he clearly has good intentions when it comes to what jobs he seeks.
I've noticed something similar with a lot of folks on the younger side in tech, although I haven't had the headspace to dig into it. the thing I noticed is a lot of folks still willing to go into this dysfunctional shit getting highly paid because of knowing how bad things are elsewhere. afaict it's not quite so much fygm as "just" trying to hoarde in the wake of 2+ decades of multiple world once-in-a-lifetime economic clusterfuck, as well as in the face of the total existential disaster that exists otherwise
(this is the impression I get in a wider sense. I'm not sure if it's right, or applicable particularly here)
(there's also a form of that which is quite strong in USA-based folks, but I don't think ludic hails from the states)
the fuck
the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:
”Mirrors” is one of our services that developers and non-developers could use on their websites or in their favorite web browsers. It can reduce server load by acting as an extra caching layer for every direct link available on your website.
All data will be cached for 86400 seconds or 1.00 day(s), and distributed globally, effectively increasing performance and reliability, which will lead to an improved user experience.
so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? there’s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or they’re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers aren’t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says it’s AI… right?
Q: Is this really free?
A: If it's not, you should already see a Pricing page.
this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying “it’s free until we say it isn’t”
I’d sure love to “gamify” my health for $10 a month 🥴
When I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil (not any time soon don't worry!) I'll do so with a cell-phone in my hand, open to whatever god-forsaken replacement for the American healthcare system Silicon Valley dreams up.
My family would find me lying there unconscious. The animated corporate mascot, looking slightly uncertain but still happy, would just repeat in a sing-song cartoonish voice "You might want to check your blood pressure!" and "you still haven't completed today's tasks for Health+ points! But don't worry, there's still time!"
Eventually they manage to shut Healthy Bob up; but continue to receive birthday reminders from Pinstagrambook long after my passing, with no setting to turn it off.
Thanks I hate it
This is just the Glucoboy but worse
YouTube recommended me this hot garbage where we judge humanities like it's a STEM field. I want my time back or at least some quality sneers: https://youtu.be/v0eWDScWSXY?si=wgJ60AfT0YYn_4-M
Callard and Hanson, there is no way i'm watching a second of that
Considering the view counts a common thought. The amount of twitter followers vs yt subs vs actual views is funny. They even tried a tiktok.
And they are trying so hard. Andrew Tate! Hogwarts Legacy! Destiny (the streamer, not the game, betting on the wrong horse there folks) Slapping at the Oscars! Pandemics!
some numbers on recent hypewave investments in here (via techmeme)
Last year, Tom Loverro, an investor at IVP, predicted a “mass extinction event” for start-ups and encouraged them to cut costs. Last week, he declared that era over and christened this time the “Great Reawakening,” encouraging companies to “pour gas” on growth, particularly around artificial intelligence
jesus fucking christ these people would love to call it the enlightenment or something, wouldn’t they?
“Sam Altman canceled the recession,” joked Siqi Chen, founder of the start-up Runway Financial
one day soon I’m going to get to my project of building up a graph database of every crank and issuer of batshit statements like these, so that in times to come I can easily follow up on ‘em and see how their shit aged. but all hail sammy, the saviour! no, forget about that musk fool, no-one ever liked him! sammy is where it’s at!
also @dgerard for your pillaging pleasure
YouGov just asked me "if there were a general election tomorrow which way would you vote" and I felt sad that the question machine had been working towards this moment all its life and then didn't have the sentience to know it had finally made it.
Behold
Motion capture, but worse - brought to you by AI
(seriously, I saw random Youtubers do better shit than this eight years ago and that is not hyperbole)
wow, that side-by-side is so obviously bad i'm surprised it even got posted. usually AI bros try to hide the worst of the tech, or at the very least, say shit like "this is only the beginning!!"
also, was not expecting to click that link and see FUNKe. good nostalgia
it ignores her eyes THE WHOLE TIME!
Posted the Ray Kurzweil thing on Pivot To AI. Let's see how many comments we get that won't be posted.
Tweet (Xcancel) from Ed Zitron: "This report is damning. Goldman Sachs's Head of Global Equity Research doesn't believe that generative AI is capable of solving complex problems, and says the tech industry "is too complacent in its assumptions that costs will decline substantially"", more in the quote tweet.
Expect promptheads to dismiss this as being the ramblings of a "DEI hire" because they're confused by the dual use of "equity" in their title.
Not just promptheads but the entire conspiratorial right is already way into not understanding how these functions and organizations work. There is a weird group of them who thinks that blackrock is a group of woke people (some of them are even saying it is 'THEM') behind everything. Because they confused a talk about 'we need to tell organisations to focus more on diversity' as a pro-diversity stance and not a 'we need to make sure the companies we invest in don't get sued, which causes a drop in share price'.
