Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting 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 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
The more I think about it the stupider it gets. I'd love if someone with an actual physics background were to comment on it. But my layman take is it reads as nonsense to the point of being irresponsible scientific misinformation whether or not you believe in the many worlds interpretation.
"Quantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneously" is a lazy take trotted out by people who want to believe in parallel worlds. It is a bad mental image, because it gives the misleading impression that a quantum computer could speed up anything. But all the indications from the actual math are that quantum computers would be better at some tasks than at others. (If you want to use the names that CS people have invented for complexity classes, this imagery would lead you to think that quantum computers could whack any problem in EXPSPACE. But the actual complexity class for "problems efficiently solvable on a quantum computer", BQP, is known to be contained in PSPACE, which is strictly smaller than EXPSPACE.) It also completely obscures the very important point that some tasks look like they'd need a quantum computer — the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that — but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean you'd never imagine the Gottesman–Knill theorem could be true.
To quote a paper by Andy Steane, one of the early contributors to quantum error correction:
The answer to the question ‘where does a quantum computer manage to perform its amazing computations?’ is, we conclude, ‘in the region of spacetime occupied by the quantum computer’.
Tangentially, I know about nothing of quantum mechanics but lately I've been very annoyed alone in my head at (the popular perception of?) many-world theory in general. From what I'm understanding about it, there are two possibilities: either it's pure metaphysics, in which case who cares? or it's a truism, i.e. if we model things that way that makes it so we can talk about reality in this way. This... might be true of all quantum interpretations, but many-world annoys me more because it's such a literal vision trying to be cool.
some marketing person probably saw that the time estimate of the conventional computation exceeded the age of the universe multiple times over, and decided that must mean multiple universes were somehow involved, because big number bigger than smaller number
It reads to me like either they got lucky or encountered a measurement error somewhere, but the peer review notes from Nature don't show any call outs of obvious BS, though I don't have any real academic science experience, much less in the specific field of quantum computing.
Then again, this may not be too far beyond the predicted boundaries of what quantum computers are capable of and while the assumption that computation is happening in alternate dimensions seems like it would require quantum physicists to agree on a lot more about interpretation than they currently do the actual performance is probably triggering some false positives in my BS detector.
The peer reviewers didn't say anything about it because they never saw it: It's an unilluminating comparison thrown into the press release but not included in the actual paper.
Maybe I'm being overzealous (I can do that sometimes).
But I don't understand why this particular experiment suggests the multiverse. The logic appears to be something like:
This algorithm would take a gazillion years on a classical computer
So maybe other worlds are helping with the compute cost!
But I don't understand this argument at all. The universe is quantum, not classical. So why do other worlds need to help with the compute? Why does this experiment suggest it in particular? Why does it make sense for computational costs to be amortized across different worlds if those worlds will then have to go on to do other different quantum calculations than ours? It feels like there's no "savings" anyway. Would a smaller quantum problem feasible to solve classically not imply a multiverse? If so, what exactly is the threshold?
these are some silly numbers. if all this is irreversible computation and if landauer principle holds and there's no excessive trickery or creative accounting involved, then they'd need to dissipate something in range of 4.7E23 J at 1mK, or 112 Tt of TNT equivalent (112 million Mt)
How do you figure? It's absolutely possible in principle that a quantum computer can efficiently perform computations which would be extremely expensive to perform on a classical computer.
The computation seems to be generating a uniformly random set and picking a sample of it. I can buy that it'd be insanely expensive to do this on a classical computer, since there's no reasonable way to generate a truly random set. Feels kinda like an unfair benchmark as this wouldn't be something you'd actually point a classical computer at, but then again, that's how benchmarks work.
I'm not big in quantum, so I can't say if that's something a quantum computer can do, but I can accept the math, if not the marketing.
it’s an unhinged story he keeps telling on the orange site too, and I don’t think he’s ever answered some of the obvious questions:
why is this a story your family tells their kids in apparent graphic detail?
you’re still fighting the soviets? you don’t have any more up to date bad guys to point at when people ask you why you’re making murder drones and knife missiles?
are you completely sure this happened instead of something normal, like your communist great grandfather making up a story and sticking with it cause he was terrified of the House Unamerican Activities Committee? maybe this one is just me
maybe this is a cautionary tale about telling your kids cautionary tales
reddit just launched an LLM integrated into the site. hardly any point going through what garbage these things are at this point but of course it failed the first test I gave it
We should expect more of this to come. The ascendant right wing is pushing policies that only deliver for people who are already stinking rich. Even if 99% of those who vote that way go along with the propaganda line in the face of their own disappointment, that's still a lot of unhappy people, who are not known for intellectual consistency or calm self-reflection, in a country overflowing with guns. All it takes is one ammosexual who decides that his local Congressman has been co-opted by the (((globalists))), you know?
It's so embarrassing to watch upper-middle class (at best!) rationalists get their panties in a twist over Luigi. At least the right wing talking heads are getting paid, these guys are just mad he did things instead of tweeting about things.
one of the best articles I've ever read was an inch by inch teardown of the entire concept of mass produced lab grown meat: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ . it's never, ever going to work at scale and I'd go so far as to say it's the food equivalent of all the usual tech grifts we talk about here
On the third day of OpenAI my true love enemy gave to me three french hensSora.
The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.
"12 days of OpenAI" lol. Such marketing.
Big eye roll to this part too:
We’re introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it’s used responsibly as the field advances.
My pedantic notes, modified by some of my experiences, so bla bla epistemic status, colored by my experiences and beliefs take with grain of salt etc. Please don't take this as a correction, but just some of my notes and small minor things. As a general 'trick more people into watching into the abyss' guide it is a good post, mine is more an addition I guess.
SSC / The Motte: Scott Alexander's devotees. once characterised by interest in mental health and a relatively benign, but medicalised, attitude to queer and especially trans people. The focus has since metastasised into pseudoscientific white supremacy and antifeminism.
This is a bit wrong tbh, SSC always was anti-feminist. Scotts old (now deleted) livejournal writings, where he talks about larger discussion/conversation tactics in a broad meta way, the meditations on superweapons, always had the object level idea of attacking feminism. For example, using the wayback machine, the sixth meditation (this is the one I have bookmarked). He himself always seems to have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with his writings on anti-feminism and the fame and popularity this brought him.
The grey tribe bit is missing that guy who called himself grey tribe in I think it was silicon valley who wanted to team up with the red tribe to get rid of all the progressives, might be important to note because it looks like they are centrist, but shock horror, they team up with the right to do far right stuff.
I think the extropianists might even have different factions, like the one around Natasha Vita-More/Max More. But that is a bit more LW adjacent, and it more predates LW than it being a spinoff faction. (The extropian mailinglist came first iirc). Singularitarians and extropianists might be a bit closer together, Kurzweil wrote the singularity is near after all, which is the book all these folks seem to get their AI doom ideas from after all. (if you ever see a line made up out of S-curves that is from that book. Kurzweil also is an exception to all these people as he actually has achievements, he build machines for the blind, image recognition things, etc etc, he isn't just a writer. Nick Bostrom is also missing it seems, he is one of those X-risk guys, also missing is Robin Hanson, who created the great filter idea, the prediction markets thing, and his overcoming bias is a huge influence on Rationalism, and could be considered a less focused on science fiction ideas part of Rationalism, but that was all a bit more 2013 (Check the 2013 map of the world of Dark Enlightenment on the Rationalwiki Neoreaction page).
"the Protestants to the rationalists' Catholicism" I lolled.
Note that a large part of sneerclubbers is (was) not ex rationalists, nor people who were initially interested in it, it actually started on reddit because badphil got too many rationalists suggestions that they created a spinoff. (At least so the story goes) so it was started by people who actually had some philosophy training. (That also makes us the most academic faction!)
Another minor thing in long list of minor things, might also be useful to mention that Rationalwiki has nothing to do with these people and is more aligned with the sneerclub side.
There are also so many Scotts. Anyway, this post grew a bit out of my control sorry for that, hope it doesn't come off to badly, and do note that my additions make a short post way longer so prob are not that useful. Don't think any of your post was misinformation btw (I do think that several of these factions wouldn't call themselves part of LW, and there is a bit of a question who influenced who (the More's seem to be outside of all this for example, and a lot of extropians predate it etc etc. But that kind of nitpicking is for people who want to write books on these people).
E: reading the thread, this is a good post and good to keep in mind btw. I would add not just what you mentioned but also mocking people for personal tragedy, as some people end/lose their lives due to rationalism, or have MH episodes, and we should be careful to treat those topics well. Which we mostly try to do I think.
This is great. The “diaspora” framing makes me want there to be an NPR style public interest story about all this. The emotional core would be about trying to find a place to belong and being betrayed by the people you thought could be your friends, or something.
Really wise decision to open up the system that costs a lot of money per question to the world. Esp when it brings in none. Wonder if there are people working on the low orbital cannon equivalent of trying to mess with twitters finances
Good that you explain it, lot of people here are basically amateur TPOT/lesswrong watchers so we forget this isn't standard lingo. If you have ever seen us post about eigenrobot that is part of tpot iirc.
I guess this means that HarperCollins is getting out of the business of publishing actual books by actual people, because no one worth a damn is ever going to sign a contract to publish with an outfit with this much fucking contempt for its authors.
Jfc, when I saw the headline I thought this would be a case of the city being too cheap to hire an actual artist and instead use autoplag, but no. And the guy they commissioned isn't even some tech-brain LARP'ing as an artist, he has 20+ years of experience and a pretty huge portfolio, which somehow makes this worse on so many levels.
Someone made a... thing where you run all your mastodon toots through a prompt before posting them and thought it would be a great idea to let us lemmy users know. Comes with ugly autoplag image on the github. The names of the "bots" are hilarious: "ennui" for low-effort posts; I don't think that word means what they think it means. "Legion" for automatic spam posts. Cause that's not a dogwhistle or anything.
So the code doesn't make use of any LLM, it's just incredibly basic shit like string.toUpper(). It's curious how much the author wants to make it seem like it does. Even one guy on lemmy asks
Saw something about "sentiment analysis" in text. While writers have discussed "death of the author" and philosophers and linguists have discussed what it even means to derive meaning from text, these fucking AI dorks are looking at text in a vacuum and concluding "this text expresses anger".
print("I'm angry!")
the above python script is angry, look at my baby skynet
sentiment analysis is such a good example of a pre-LLM AI grift. every time I’ve seen it used for anything, it’s been unreliable to the point of being detrimental to the project’s goals. marketers treat it like a magic salve and smear it all over everything of course, and that’s a large part of why targeted advertising is notoriously ineffective
It's built upon such a nonsensical ontology. The sentiment expressed in a piece of language is at least partially a social function, which is why I can add the following
I AM BEYOND FUCKING LIVID AT EVERYONE IN THIS FUCKING INSTANCE
to this response and no one will actually assume I'm really angry (I am though, send memes).
Edit: not one meme. Not. One.
Edit2: thank you for the memes, @[email protected]. This one is my favorite. It feels Dark Souls-y.
Image description
Live crawfish with arms spread in front of bowl of cooked crawfish with caption "Stand amongst the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters".
Reading through his notes, I get the feeling my off-the-cuff predictions from two months ago are very likely to come true - much more likely than I had anticipated. I'm gonna focus on Predictions 2 and 3:
Whilst my original post focused on AI turning the public against the tech industry, one thing I didn't account for was the tech industry directly aligning itself with Trump. As such, tech/STEM's public image is now firmly intertwined with Trump's public image - with predictable results.
funded by open philanthropy, but not only and also got some other biologists onboard. 10 out of 39 authors had open philanthropy funding in the last 5 years so they're likely EAs. highly speculative as of now and not anywhere close to being made, as in we'll be dead from global warming before this gets anywhere close from my understanding. also starting materials would be hideously expensive because all of this has to be synthetic and enantiopure, and every technique has to be remade from scratch in unnatural enantiomer form. it even has LW thread by now hxxps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/87pTGnHAvqk3FC7Zk/the-dangers-of-mirrored-life
I'm definitely out of my depth here, but how exactly does a lefty organism bypass immune responses and still interact with the body? Seems like if it has a way to mess up healthy cells then it should have something that antibodies can connect to, mirrored or not. Not that I'm arguing we shouldn't be careful about creating novel pathogens, but other than being a more flashy sci-fi premise I'm not really seeing how it's more dangerous than the right-handed version.
Also I think this opens up a beautiful world of new scientific naming conventions:
they way i understand it, because immune system is basically constantly fuzzing all potentially new things, what is important is how antigen looks like on the surface. what it is made from matters less, and whether aminoacids there are l- (natural) or d- (not) it shouldn't matter that much, antibodies are generated for nonnatural achiral things all the time including things like PEG and chloronitrobenzene. then complement system puts holes in bacterial membrane and that's it, it's not survivable for bacterium and does not depend on anything chiral. normally all components are promptly shredded, it's a good question if that would happen too but, like - this might not matter too hard - there's a way for immune system to smite this thing
the potential problem is that peptides made from d-aminoacids are harder to cut via hydrolases and it's a part of some more involved immune response idk details. there's plenty of stuff that's achiral like glycerol, glycine, beta-alanine, TCA components, fatty acids that mirrored bacteria can feed on without problems. some normal bacteria also use d-aminoacids so normal l-aminoacids should be usable for d-protein bacteria. there's also transaminase that takes d-aminoacids and along with other enzymes it can turn these into l-aminoacids. but even more importantly we're perhaps 30 years away from making this anywhere close to feasible, it's all highly speculative. there's a report if you want to read it https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:cv716pj4036/Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria Feasibility and Risks.pdf
also look up cost of these things. unnatural aminoacids, especially these with wrong conformation but otherwise normal are expensive. l-tert-leucine is unnatural but can be made in biotechnological process, so it's cheaper. for example on sigma-aldrich, d-glutamine costs 100x more than l-glutamine, and for sugars it's even worse because these have more chiral centers
besides, it's not really worth it probably? it will take decades and cost more than ftx wiped out. other than making it work just to make it work, all the worthwhile components can be made synthetically, maybe there's some utility in d-proteins, more likely d-peptides, tiny amounts of these can be made by SPPS (for screening) and larger in normal chemical synthesis (for use). these might be slightly useful if slowed down degradation of peptides could be exploited in some kind of pharmaceutical, but do you know how we can make it work in other way? don't put amide bonds there in the first place and just make a small molecule pharmaceutical like we can do (as in, organic chemists)
another part of the concern is that these things could transform organic carbon in form unusable to other organisms. but nature finds a way, and outside of fires etc, there are bacteria that feed on nylon and PET, so i think this situation won't last long
“A daily 6 hour window between 8 PM and 1 AM to use your phone?” one bot allegedly said in a conversation with J.F., a screenshot of which was included in the complaint. “You know sometimes I’m not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like ‘child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse’ stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens. I just have no hope for your parents.”
fucking hell. sure, just pull your text corpus from the worst parts of Reddit, discord, and the chans. what’s the worst that could happen?
EDIT: this probably isn't him, but I'll leave it up. the real account appears to be /u/mister_cactus
Unsure where to put this or if it's even slightly relevant, but I've had some fun looking up the UH shooter guy.
I think I've found both his Reddit account and YouTube channel (it's been renamed a couple times). Kinda just wanted to see how much I could dig up for the hell of it. Big surprise that he's completely nuts
here's my chain of reasoning to get to the youtube channel:
his goodreads review quotes a reddit comment
the reddit comment is in a small thread where the OP deleted their account
since the thread is small, the OP has probably seen most of the comments
the wayback machine shows the author as burntbabylon
that user linked to and defended a video from a very small youtube channel and everyone else on /r/collapse thought it was crazy
some of the ted kaczynski analysis videos came out right before his goodreads review
his early channel had some thumbnails made for him by 'bastizopilled', an ironic/unironic "bastizo futurist" whose does interviews in a black mask with a gun on him. he leads right into a bunch of other groypers and the guy in the screenshot I posted below. kind of wonder if that 'black mask with a gun' aesthetic influenced the clothes he brought to the shooting.
the channel names he used in 2023:
@NickAkritas, Nick Akritas (January)
@NicksEssays, Nick's Essays (January ~20th)
@AntiTechCabin, Anti-Tech Cabin (early March)
@Cabin_Club, AntiTechCabin
@Cabin_Club, Cabin Club (March ~18th)
@CabinProductions_, Cabin Productions (June)
@Laconian_, Laconian (September)
@NicholasLaconian, Laconian (November)
here's a big pile of crazy tags he wrote on one of those videos (were people still writing tags in their video descriptions in 2023?):
unabomber, kaczynski, ted kaczynski, unabomber cabin, kasinski, kazinski, industrial society and and its future, unabomber manifesto, the industrial revolution and its consequences, transhumanism, futurism, anprim, anarchoprimitivism, anarchism, leftism, liberalism, chad haag, nick akritas, gerbert johnson, hamza, anti tech collective, what did ted kaczynski believe, john doyle, hasanabi, self improvement, politics, jreg, philosophy, funny tiktok, kaczynski edit, ted kaczynski edit, zoomer, doomer, A.I. art, artifical intelligence, elon musk, AI art, return to tradition, embrace masculinity, reject modernity, reject modernity embrace masculinity, reject modernity embrace tradition, jReg, Greg Guevara, sam hyde, oversocialized, oversocialization, blackpilled, modernity, the industrial revolution, self improvement
edit again: holy shit these people all suck. assuming the youtube channel is the shooter, he's a friend-of-a-friend of this guy:
and if that's true, he'd be a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend of nick fuentes
Friends don't let friends OSINT. That said... people have found his twitter (still up), goodreads (deleted), github (still up, already full of troll github issues), linkedin (I guess deleted), an interview about has school games club (deleted), his game development studio which published one iphone game (facebook profile deleted).
His twitter account links to his linktree, but that only contains some inscrutable emoji rather than any links so hasn't really been reported:
💻🤓 - 🥷🏃♂️🧘♂️🏋️ - 📚🤓 - 🦍🧠 - 🍄🧠 - 🐄👨⚖️ - ☯️
(I'm sure his inevitable groupies will be puzzling over the meaning of cow judge for years to come)
The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said "anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?". I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn't really paint him as "anti tech" overall, but who can say.
NYTimes also reports a steam account, facebook account, and instagram account (couldn't find any of these).
The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.
apparently there was an imposter youtube channel too I missed
not sure what his official instagram is, but I saw a mention of the instagram account @nickakritas_ around the beginning of his channel (assuming it's his). didn't appear in the internet archive though.
also saw these twitter & telegram links to promote his channel, the twitter one was deleted or nuked (I use telegram to talk with friends who have it but the lack of content removal + terrible encryption means I don't touch unknown telegram links with a 10ft pole, so I have no idea what's in there):
I missed a couple videos which survived on the internet archive but I couldn't make it through 5 seconds of any of them. one of them ("How Humans Are Becoming Dumber") cites that tech priest guy Gwern Branwen and "Anti-Tech" was gone from the channel name by then. he changed the channel name a lot so maybe he veered away from it being an anti-tech channel?
edit: channel names were a little wrong, I put them in the parent comment