Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 25 August 2024

things genai is good at:

• spam
• deepfakes
• misinformation
• inventing new forms of racism

The GMO melons attached to that high school girl nearly took me out, but the boderline race-porn title is what killed me.

/r/AnimeCircleJerk

Always a coin flip on if circlejerk subs are fascist or not. But this one looks pretty alright at first glance! Lots of making fun of transphobia and creepy people.

This author seems to write what is fairly typical escapism porn LNs. According to this summary the plot is about as stupid and problematic as you might expect for such a thing. If the Alya-san anime goes well this will probably get at least a manga.

All this is just adding up to: hack author is formulaically chasing trends and trying to parlay some genAIed trash into a manga and maybe an anime.

The plot thickens!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/19/mike-lynchs-co-defendant-in-us-trial-fatally-struck-by-car-while-jogging

I'm fascinated by the fucking size of that yacht and did some more research and found more stories about obscenely expensive boats going to the bottom.

https://www.superyachttimes.com/news?filter=Casualty

Still feel bad about those missing though.

modern-day

Wait what, don't they normally say 'real life' unless ... they think batman is a documentary?

suggests goverment role

Imagining Batman sitting in Congress as an elected representative

O’Leary is a huge fraudulent piece of shit.

Delightfully non-ominous bio on @[email protected]

Free humanity from work.

ong this is the funniest shit i've seen in a while, pls be real

Nobody expects the spanish rickroll.

Problematic Nazi developer

Problematic developer with AI crush

I thought this was gonna go in a completely different direction.

Setting: romantic sunset beach, without a crowd in sight. There is no sound but that of a gentle breeze, waves lapping at the shore, and seagulls in the distance. Ryan turns to his girlfriend Tiffany. He gets down on his knees, the sand muddying his pants. Tiffany clasps her hands over her mouth in disbelief. Ryan says: "Tiffany you are the light of my life. You have made me a better man. I can't see me living with anyone else but you. Will... will you marry m-- bzzt. Thank you for using Virtua-Boyfriend, unfortunately we ran out of VC money so are shutting down.".

This is the girl who went off the rails and started posting about neoreaction, right?

You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists?

No, but I'd say its a good sign we're getting close to an AI winter

elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity

girl my life already too complex, ain't no one need elevation to an even higher state of complexity

can we maybe do a lower one?

In classic Rationalist fashion, she noticed something she didn't like, hypothesized a cause with no real evidence, and then proceeded to rant about the implications of that unproven hypothesis.

My suspicion, on the other hand, is that because Claude is just reproducing statistical patterns from its training data is simply reflecting the fact that she is referred to as a Nazi coder far more often than she is as some kind of open-source luminary. Unless her github metadata signs everything "Justine T the open-source developer" then that association isn't reflected in the patterns extrapolated from the training data.

only a month and a bit sooner and she could have answered my question herself lol

:( I just wanted to see how many electrons I could make dance on the head of a wafer, I didn't mean to hurt anyone :(

The turn against tech can’t come fast enough.

Happy birthday!

xcancel link, and it’s a fairly interesting set of posts too (with exactly the type of dumbass hustle culture replies one would expect from Twitter, with people essentially demanding first dibs on the domain)

(In other other news, its my 24th birthday.)

happy birthday!

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday. I thought you were 40 years old!

🎂

Thank god I misread your comment and thought he had pivoted to AI.

lol, poor helpless joanne just can’t help but run headlong into the wall

saw something drift by that she’d also deleted a bunch of tweets in the quiet time, so her coming out swinging is doubly funny

Procreate is an example of what good AI deployment looks like. They do use technology, and even machine learning, but they do it in obviously constructive scopes between where the artist's attention is focused. And they're committed to that because... there's no value for them to just be a thin wrapper on an already completely commoditized technology on its way to the courtroom to be challenged by landmark rulings with no more room ceiling to grow into whooooooops.

but if he’s just being held accountable for running a service where others did nefarious things, then this should be a chilling effect for all founders.

ok. chill them

outrage that the arrest order was issued while Durov was in the air, so he couldn’t evade justice (this is unconfirmed)

Clearly arrest warrants should be made like hide-and-seek where the seeker has to count to 100 days before arresting the hider and publish "ready or not here I come!" to their social media account.

Even Moot knew you couldn't do this. Congrats on being slower on the uptake than 4chan HN.

lol, lmao even.

This is going to hit some crypto scammers pretty hard, innit?

I was wrong, Manmade horrors...

This wasn’t the first love triangle in the Heinlein residence (they had earlier been in a consensual threesome with L. Ron Hubbard)

UNSEE UNSEE

it’s unfortunate that all the Google alternatives big enough to matter are all-in on making the exact same mistakes as Google at roughly the same time, probably in hopes that one of them can swoop in and take the top dog spot when the monopoly ruling finally makes Google stumble

and if that sounds like a fucking stupid plan, you’re right, and that’s why neither of us are advertising executives

Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably won't be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:

• All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they aren't having their own unique dumpster fires)

• AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order

• Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now

My experience talking with people has been often this same situation; they have some specialty expertise and for whatever reason now accept ChatGPT as all knowing and use it a lot day to day. It worries me since the response to “why” is usually along the lines of humans aren’t always right but this is AI so it will keep getting better eventually.

Tools should be 100% correct. Your work has regressed because you swapped out good tools and practices for spicy autocorrect

"Hey you said I maybe killed 5 children with murder drones on a mountain could you maybe not?"

"sorry to hear you're not liking it! it's currently not possible to opt out since this is just an experiment. but if you get a response that you feel is unhelpful or irrelevant, you can let us know by submitting feedback via these steps: https://goo.gle/3ySHg00"

Oh gosh that's such a corporate response.

noice

ABSOLUTELY CURSED

Hey, that's the epic battle fantasy guy. I loved his games back in the flash days.

It would be pretty funny for someone to be so awful that they get haunted by an Atheist. I mean, it's unlikely, but if it were possible then this would do it.

decentralized cult which worships the concept of rational thinking as superior to evidence. has lots of little rituals which are supposed to invoke rational thinking. uses AI in the place of angels and demons. no core holy texts, but the closest things are a sequence of blog posts and a harry potter fanfic. very influential in silicon valley, very intermingled with various explicitly fascist groups

Longer than I'd intend, but the way I describe it is probably as

1. A mystical Harry Potter based sex cult deeply embedded in the techbro scene. They want what many cults want: to commune with God, achieve immortality or enlightenment, and obtain power in the current world, but they dress it in the trappings of science and computer programming.

2. Do to demographic features, their desire to be clever, and a certain contrarian attitude, they will often seek to rationalise harmful social practices, which leads them to support anti-feminist and race realist positions with shocking frequency.

3. Because of their close connections to the tech scene, along with the personal relationship the cult founder had with Peter Thiel, and the fact that the cult has been indoctrinating kids since the aughts, they are shockingly influential in the AI scene.

4. As most cults, they claim to want to teach people to think correctly (rationally), but they actually value the community of being in a cult (and the potential social networking and financial benefits) over thinking rationally.

5. In terms of style, they like long works with unclear arguments, being clever or witty over being right, and strongly signalling their rationality (sometimes even using good tools), but not allowing that to interfere with the core features of being a cultist.

(1-3) are what I'd consider core. (4-5) are what I'd add if the person seems interested. If they seem really interested, I'd also discuss other connections (e.g. to Effective Altruism, the Future of Humanity Institute, George Mason University, Future Perfect, neoreaction), their ideology in more specific terms (e.g. the Sequences, Roko's Basilisk), and associated members (e.g. EY, SSC, Aella, SBF).

the problem of my life. I have literally found it easier to explain Scientology than Roko's basilisk.

SV Scientology, they can't land you a leading role in a summer blockbuster but they sure as hell can put you in the running for AI policy related positions of influence or for the board of a company run by one of their more successful groomings. Their current most popular product is court philosophers for the worst kind of aspiring technofeudalist billionaire.

If this gets them interested you'll eventually get your chance to do a deep dive to any details of cosmist lore you find relevant.

It's a little bit like a tiny version of the Mormons if Joseph Smith had read the collected works of Isaac Asimov instead of the Bible and also his name was Yud.

Or to go with less of a sneer, the Rationalist/TESCREAL/Californian Ideology is a loose grouping of fringe beliefs rooted in old-school science/tech fetishism with a lot of science fiction overlays and libertarian/reactionary politics that effectively define "let ultrawealthy tech capitalists do whatever they want" as the only reasonable choice and make it a moral imperative.

Techish (I would use the word techbro here, but that needs an explantion even) people who want to make their fictional science fiction utopia real, but got so scared of their own science fiction ideas going wrong and killing everybody they started a cult around rationality, sort of a Vulcans fan club. They have a pattern where they think they and their methods are smarter and better than actual experts.

When trying to do their own research with an open mind, but they left their minds so open that all kinds of sexists and racists crawled in. Who are welcomed as long as they are verbose enough.

And to close it off, Musk is a fan.

Personally I might try explaining some of the foundational stuff before going into the big R. Scientism, utilitarianism would be my starting points.

I'm sorry but did the company not have anyone in their org who has had kids???

Bassinets are, as mentioned, used for 5-6 months. Reselling expensive baby gear that's only used for the first months of infancy is very common. Established companies, like those making baby carriages or car seats, know this and make their money upfront at purchase time, preying onrelying on baby-braineddoting parents with more money than sense to buy the latest and greatest.

The people designing this product and/or their financiers should be ashamed of themselves.

Or they could have open-sourced the protocol and relied on dudes like this one to keep it going:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285690

A friend of mine recently had a kid and gave the snoo a good review. If it’s really that good a product, it should be nationalised in the name of public health.

was recently trying to explain to someone how The Games is the best Olympics memory I have

oh noes my throne

that’s a good question! I’ll probably have to brainstorm this with @[email protected] later today. in the meantime, is there any precedent for how to do it on Mastodon? we might be able to adopt whatever they do — or maybe at the very least, if there’s a good way to do it there, we could link to a Mastodon thread for the bracket and keep discussion on here.