Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024

data moat

Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn't know how much of a fool RMS was. : "RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt." (It gets worse btw).

Top level comment at time of posting:

“This might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSR…”

???

No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.

the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.

of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein's victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn't underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around

I don't think anything in the report is new, is it? Isn't this the exact weirdness that got him kicked off the board in the first place? I was shocked when he was quietly added back to the board; I really thought the allegations would stick the first time.

Nice to have it all in one place though.

(Rationally) "If there's grass on the field play ball"

Ignorance is a choice. That thread is full of bad choices.

I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.

It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.

Sadly I think the only way to trust you are not getting a lot of AI art is by starting to follow a lot of artists you like on social media. Just going to a site which sells things seems a bit risky atm.

e: for example 40k stickers

the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)

given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends

This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.

twitter gon' have nothin' left but the cranks

kache miss

I need to look up what auth protocols this guy has worked on so I can stay away from them.

Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didn't not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script

Boo! Hiss! Bring Saltman back out! I want unhinged conspiracy theories, damnit.

It feels like this is supposed to be the entrenchment, right? Like, the AGI narrative got these companies and products out into the world and into the public consciousness by promising revolutionary change, and now this fallback position is where we start treating the things that have changed (for the worse) as fair accompli and stop whining. But as Ed says, I don't think the technology itself is capable of sustaining even that bar.

Like, for all that social media helped usher in surveillance capitalism and other postmodern psychoses, it did so largely by providing a valuable platform for people to connect in new ways, even if those ways are ultimately limited and come with a lot of external costs. Uber came into being because providing an app-based interface and a new coat of paint on the taxi industry hit on a legitimate market. I don't think I could have told you how to get a cab in the city I grew up in before Uber, but it's often the most convenient way to get somewhere in that particular hell of suburban sprawl unless you want to drive yourself. And of course it did so by introducing an economic model that exploits the absolute shit out of basically everyone involved.

In both cases, the thing that people didn't like was external or secondary to the thing people did like. But with LLMs, it seems like the thing people most dislike is also the main output of the system. People don't like AI art, they don't like interacting with chatbots in basically anywhere, and the confabulation problems undercut their utility for anything where correlation to the real world actually matters, leaving them somewhere between hilariously and dangerously inept at many of the functions they're still being pitched for.

After he started rambling about his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, it was obvious his brain was cooked.

As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Arrow of time and all that, innit? And God help me, I actually read part of the post as well as the discussion comments where the prompt fondlers were lamenting that all it takes is one rogue ai code to end the world because it will "optimize against you!" I assume Evil GPT is constructing anti matter bombs using ingredients it finds under the kitchen sink.

The first image in that second link is perhaps the most incoherent political cartoon I've ever seen. Why is Uncle Sam as played by Angry Jeff Bridges wearing the Chinese flag as a cape??

Future headline: “Google quietly shuts down six nuclear power plants”

the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran only three dark rituals the election is over

who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto

Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.

In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.

I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.

The what in the what now?

What a terrible day to tech.

Thus leading to this sneer on HN. I'm quoting it in entirety; click through for Poe's Law responses.

I was telling someone this and they gave me link to a laptop with higher battery life and better performance than my own, but I kept explaining to them that the feature I cared most about was die size. They couldn't understand it so I just had to leave them alone. Non-technical people don't get it. Die size is what I care about. It's a critical feature and so many mainstream companies are missing out on my money because they won't optimize die size. Disgusting.

wtf are NPUs anyway? some specialised vector maths thing?

God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.

This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.

this is one hell of a hat trick

Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.

That’s amazing, I wish I had that kind of discipline to learn!

I can’t decide what’s worse: the fucking insulting tone that sounds like I’m about to get a pamphlet about Joseph Smith or GameStop or some shit, or that the suggestions just make up opinions you don’t have and events that didn’t happen

That will certainly improve the mh of yters who already feel they are under extreme pressure.

But users like engagement! Which means seeing that the person wrote a thing and not reading the thing and making a human connection with someone who is, y'know, engaged in conversation.

I know chatbots don't track meaning, but I'm pretty sure words still mean things.

Eurgh!

Good sneer from "Internet_Janitor" a few comments up the page:

LLMs inherently shit where they eat.

Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership)

The unspecificity is damning. "Facts about their membership" might range from "what racial separatist group is Skum Shitt (R, NC) a former member of" to "am I eligible to join The Brotherhood of Untarnished Ejaculate".

and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates.

That's an interesting example to pair up with the one about racist hate groups. Unconventional in what way, motherfucker?

tl;dr of the article: ever since the ousting of altman, microsoft, which virtually owns openai, has been suspicious of openai's actual worth. therefore MS has cut down on the infinite resource flow. openai employees are whining about this.

there is one additional point in three of the near final paragraphs, which I'll quote in full because they are so amusing to me

Still, OpenAI employees complain that Microsoft is not providing enough computing power, according to three people familiar with the relationship. And some have complained that if another company beat it to the creation of A.I. that matches the human brain, Microsoft will be to blame because it hasn’t given OpenAI the computing power it needs, according to two people familiar with the complaints.

Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies.

The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.

anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we’ll see

I suspect we'll see a fair amount. Giving some specifics:

1. I suspect we'll see Sammy accused of endangering all of humanity for a quick buck - taking Altman at his word, OpenAI is attempting to create something which they themselves believe could wipe out humanity if they screw things up.

2. I expect calls to regulate the AI industry will louden in response to this - what Sammy's doing here is giving the true believers more ammo to argue Silicon Valley may potentially trigger the robot apocalypse that Silicon Valley themselves have claimed AI is capable of unleashing.

Kinda surprised World(Coin) was still ongoing, thought saltman would have quietly buried the project now he's busy shilling ChatGPT

Create the problem and sell the solution.

This is a license for stalkers & abusers ! No surprise from someone like Elon I suppose

He also put 'everything you post is now training data for ais' in his tos apparently. So nightshade poison those images and start building a following on other sites artists. (And as a non artist, reminder to self to like and repost more artists I like).

E: quick source

I’m really really not happy about this. There is one person I’ve been trying to keep out for the last few years and now they can come crawl all my fucking posts?? And report my account!?

Edit: apparently being protected should offer me some protection still.

I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.

Does anyone read these things before or after they’re sent?

It sounds like spam - by my guess, they usually aren't read at all.

There's no way this works, right? It's like a 5y.o.'s idea of a gotcha.

This would be like starting a tax-exempt charity to gather up a large amount in donations and then switching to a for-profit before spending it on any charitable work and running away with the money.

I don't know what's worse, that or some of the weird twitter responses it's getting

You know, I can't tell if this is supposed to be "I know you're saying that calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, but it's more complicated than that" or "I know calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, and I'm honestly okay with that".

Gonna guess the latter given where it's coming from and the fact that the actual "more complicated" is a salad of non sequiturs.

arggghhh no one can make me feel blind rage like this smarmy nazi piece of shit can

the second is characteristically christian and associated with dignity culture.

homeless people bear the imago dei. they are not intrinsic moral superiors but their plight is a shame to us because it denudes them of the dignity that should be theirs by right of their humanity.

Lol yes, that's exactly the way mainstream Christians view homelessness, their lack of Work Ethic :tm: is a "shame to us". Lmao even.

Christian charitable organisations are so well-known for their ethos of inherent human dignity.

Awful.systems defaults to dark mode.

Thank for letting me know there are other people indifferent to dark mode. Sometimes I feel I am the only one.

alignment offer

That's sure a choice of words, ain't it

this guy's information diet is 90% recycled memes by volume, isn't it

Somebody on the twitter is doing an expose on TP0 (This is part 2, part 1 also linked).

Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.

Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))

If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?

Quick sidenote, you cocked up the formatting on the hyperlink - you're supposed to put [text in square brackets and](the link in circle brackets) like this