Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th February 2025
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th February 2025
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.
(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)
canada has come up several times in the last several days and based on my small sample size, americans have no idea that the US government has been unsubtly threatening CA with annexation. these are not politically unconcerned or right wing people either
looks like our sneer comrade DisneylandDiplomat (disney6830 on discord), who did the Thinkateria rationalist-parody blog, died in Oct 2022. From Reddit Sneerclub:
Hello, I am writing since I saw this sub is a bit active again. I am wondering if anyone remembers the blog “thinkateria” or the reddit user DisneylandDiplomat who often posted links to promote it here. he was my little brother and he killed himself in October of 2022, after deleting the blog, and I only saw his reddit activity afterwards. I think it was satirical writing making fun of these other bloggers discussed here. He was very private and this sub is really the only insight into his state of mind at that time that I have. There’s no point to this post except I feel a need to share that he is gone and this is the only place I know he had any connections with. It must have been hard for everyone who talked about this so early on.
from a discord. musk did not actually marry grimes, but apart from that my aplogies for mr beaning the whole america
Fingers crossed that the next domino is “nuclear holocaust due to particularly bad day on social media”
I randomly remembered crying wolf and decided to make that everybodies problem
IIRC this was the post that made Daniel Harper start his nazi-tracking podcast I Don't Speak German
Speaking of non-german speakers, I hope poptart is doing alright. Haven't heard anything of him since the blackout.
I had forgotten about that one. Thanks, I hate it.
I was already largely out of step with the Rats at this point, and I definitely hadn't read it with the new "actually I feel like I was right about this one, neener neener" header. What strikes me now is the attitude here. Like, it takes a staggering degree of reflexive contrarianism to frame this as "see Trump isn't that racist" instead of "hey look how fast the rest of the political establishment embraced this overt racism. Maybe we should have listened when everyone tries to tell us how racist the political establishment was underneath the respectable and reasonable public face". Just because the wolves have taken off the wool suits now doesn't mean they weren't wolves the whole fucking time.
That was literally the inflection point on my path to sneerclub. I had started to break from less wrong before, but I hadn't reached the tipping point of saying it was all bs. And for ssc and Scott in particular I had managed to overlook the real message buried in thousands of words of equivocating and bad analogies and bad research in his earlier posts. But "you are still crying wolf" made me finally question what Scott's real intent was.
Even if it wasn't the seed of doubt about his real intentions, it also reveals how out of touch he is in a way (esp now 8 years later), and just how silly some LW stuff is. Like how they all want to be super-predictors, and try to keep notes on how good their prediction etc are, but how little all these other predictions matter when you make a mistake like this. "All this stuff about how [trump] is “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up." Also note that he [Scott/Trump/The LGBT person who wrote that text on the flag] didn't notice that the lgbt flag was upside down.
Well this is the final straw. Guess I'll keep my current iPhone while it still works (unless they ruin iOS too much before that)... but then, what? I don't want a Google thing either :(
So I guess it'll have to be some Android fork. GrapheneOS or so? But even that involves giving money to Google for a Pixel phone... there's just no good option.
Or am I overlooking something? I don't need many features or apps on a phone -- I don't really like today's smartphones anyway. Mostly I just need the basic features to work reliably. (Context: my last attempt at a non-Android Linux phone was the original Jolla phone, over 10 years ago, and that has left me a little cautious with the idea of a Linux phone, due to the many bugs with basics like "working mobile data" or "working GPS in a navigation app"...)
Plus 1 for GrapheneOS, has been pretty solid so far. Also, it seems that police imaging software doesn't work on it yet!
Graphene is very nice, but you should be aware that:
- the only supported hardware at present are pixel phones by google who are not the world’s most ethical company
- google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working
the scott alexander fanclub on reddit is especially unhinged lately. Some choice picks, beginning gently with a sneer:
Anyone who says there is a 0% chance of a fried egg being sentient is overconfident. Nobody knows what causes consciousness. We have no way of detecting it & we can barely agree on a definition. So we should be less than 100% certain about anything to do with consciousness and fried eggs.
moving on,
For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community, generally off-the-grid, interacting with technology only as a tool (no news/algorithms/push notifications), close enough to a major city to visit friends but far enough away to isolate ourselves when we want to.
We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.Yes, that is a response to AI despair. In a "non-doomer thread". Because of course.
but what takes the cake is the regularly scheduled IQ thread, a beautiful dumpster fire which burns especially bright on this day. Yet one specimen soars above the din:
The average should recognize and accept their inferiority and make peace with the fact that they will live and die a mediocre life. They should stop trying to interfere in the affairs of their betters and content themselves with their own garden, which can provide enough happiness for them until the end of their life if properly cultivated.
Further study of the user's excreta clarifies that they are:
- sincere
- definitely not racist
warning: HEAVY PSYCHIC DAMAGE and I really hope the spoiler block functions correctly on your end
spoiler
[sic] we should treat all low human capital like zoo animals regardless of skin colour [\sic]
We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.
That's just a commune. Like my brother in Christ I think you're just talking about communism.
For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community
Years ago (sadly I forgot to take a acreenshot, as the posts were silently removed) there was somebody recruiting for something like this on themotte. Something like "you sound like a good match for our homesteading group, check out our blood and soil(*) voat". Which was a pretty bad sign (wonder how much of that shit was done via dms).
*: for the few who do not know, this is one of those undeniable neo-nazi terms.
E: And the universe aligned and reminded me of this tweet
Yep that's a brickin
if a fried egg cannot code, then how come [piece of software you dislike] exists?
A fried egg cannot code
Prove it. It is more likely it actually can code, but refuses to do so. Perhaps fried eggs have a genetic predisposition to vore?
E: other comment there:
We can't be 100% sure of anything
Are you sure about that?
When I asked Claude if it’s sentient
AAAAAa (it gets even worse when they are gods in the gapping sentience).
in the slatestar club. straight up 'sleight of mouthing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My peanits.
couldn't find if this has featured here before, so linking for others as I figure a few of you are likely to appreciate: destroy AI
bonus, learned about asrg and an art piece that goes immensely hard
What if we used AI to do De-Ba'athificaiton, but for CIA agents?
I'm sure it will be fine.
do you want mormon insurgency? because this is how you start mormon insurgency
AI researchers continue to daub soot on the walls of Plato's cave, scaring themselves witless:
https://www.emergent-values.ai/
At least I've IDd the transmission vector from LW to lobste.rs
why do all these papers have their own microsites, dedicated domain names (in Anguilla no less!), and shitty graphics? I can’t think of another branch of research that consistently does this shit. it’s almost like it’s all marketing fluff or something!
it's amazing that the paper site has its own little pretty marketing pictures. easily digestible unseriousness!
In lighter news, has anyone else noticed that it's necessary for any kind of Cybersecurity course to open with what is effectively a Tumblr-style DNI for unethical hackers? Like, I'm not criticizing exactly and I certainly don't have any better ideas to prevent people using these skills for evil, but the disclaimer up top fits into a certain kind of pattern that I, for one, find hilarious.
Niko Matsakis wrote a post about how the fucking rust compiler toolchain should include an LLM to explain error messages because teaching the semantics of a language is too hard and that pissed me off so much that instead of linking that piece of shit directly I’m posting this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich that’s also much shorter than Niko’s extended attempt to beg for a promotion at Amazon
Oh no :((
Rust’s emphasis on “reliability” makes it a great target for AI
What?! Aaaaaaahhh! This makes me want to scream. After so many years of C++ misery and increasing frustration with it, and looking into various alternatives for years, I found that Rust is the lanuage which brought me back to actually enjoying programming. If they really ruin it with LLMs now, I don't know where to go anymore in terms of programming languages.
this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich
That reply is indeed excellent.
I feel the same way. I program in rust cause I like it, and the feeling of actually liking writing systems code was refreshing coming from C and especially C++. rust is a language I find beautiful — but I won’t for long if its excellent diagnostics and tooling all get deprecated in favor of an LLM. I can’t imagine what pivoting to AI would do to the language’s roadmap.
If the rust community spearheads the downfall of LLMs somehow, I’ll stop using C
The singularity will be a dozen crappy models in a trench coat, and then finally we’ll have Magic Unified Intelligience™
US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):
-
Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn't use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don't even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
-
Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency -- People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:
Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.
If I've learned anything from all this it's about how
unfathomably basedcool a lot of federal workers are. -
The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog
I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.
-
Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].
Edit:
-
Elon MuskThe US State Department plans to buy $400m worth of armored Cybertrucks from Elon Musk (nytimes) (Edit: may have been ordered under Biden's administration) -
doge.gov has been updated. Mostly just with more useless baby's first website materials; but they promise a "comprehensive, government-wide org chart" and are hiring "software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals".
Aside: I already found
twothree minor website bugs despite not really looking for them and the website being tiny. But that can't be right... they're IT professionals while I'm DEI. -
Find replace is so hard :( and that's why the government writes about "gay and rights" to avoid saying the... the... the forbidden t-word of which I dare not speak
-
So about how I said doge.gov gives baby's first website vibes; it's database was left world writable lol
-
doge.gov shares classified information
-
Classic Musk "humor": a "tech support" T-shirt to allude to all of this. The dude really likes custom T-shirts (which to be fair custom t-shirts can be awesome when they're less bad)
Nr 7 would be amusing if the context was not so evil. It's weird also how they allow gay but not transgender (oh no I said the word!), but I guess the question is "for how long"...
Nr 8 is just... wow. Very surprising that they don't care at all and/or are super incompetent. I wonder how much AI was involved in creating that site.
It is quite the feeling seeing the federal government do their best to erase and discriminate against me and other trans people so openly and flagrantly and suddenly. Can't really put it into words easily. I now feel like a stranger in my own country.
r.e. incompetence look at #9 that I just added :D (I guess I should cut it off there and start collecting stuff for a new comment next week)
Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
Or: does he even know what it is?
-
Look I have nothing against fanfic myself but if there's one powerful corrective it lacks, it is commercial content editorial feedback.
The way the responses talk about "polarization", ugh fucking ghouls.
"AI Alignment" is chiropractic for computer touchers.
so apparently one of the weird creeps went to go shittalk europe (video, transcript (archive))
it's some full-on doublespeak and utterly wild shit. some of the best tho:
The US innovators of all sizes already know what it’s like to deal with onerous international rules.
"waaaaaaaah how dare you have your own rules we need to care about, so hard"
Nothing to see here, just a strong implication that in the minds of these lizards “AI” is a weapon, and the only thing that can stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI. Because this precise line of thinking has yielded such good results historically.
Also, think of the GDP growth! Imagine the shareholder value we could create boiling an ocean to predict how many letters “r” there are in “strawberry” and failing after billions in VC funding. This should not be regulated, lest progress is halted!
And don’t fret about safety kids, because once we build the genie we get three wishes for sure, and then Sam Altman’s dad will finally look him in the eye and say “I’m proud of you” for the first time, and all will be well in the world.
nasb, Curtis Yarvin's Cult For Billionaire Morons
the comment around 13:00 onwards, "it was very hard to get people to care about this before". felt in my bones.
Nothing like the ascendancy of fascism in the US triggering a new level of public awareness of my own niche concerns of both the inevitability of fascism via capitalism and how the western tech world breeds a specific ideological mindset that enables said fascism. Of course, it should go without saying that the only effective way to end fascism is to
have the ideological opponents of fascism break the fascist country through total warvote blue no matter whoOkey, what is with these dweebs and never taking their leather jackets off? (Talking about the opening still, have not even started the video)
They think leather jackets are cool but don’t know why, and have never been challenged on their fashion choices. Fuckers need a good mugging to change their ways.
Keeps the stank in, also shaping (I.e. spanx for dudes).
hilariously, also features in the commentary
Peter thiel looks like if nosferatu never hit puberty
This image will now forever live in my head. Thanks, random YT commenter.
Thanks for adding to the coporate-techno-king takeover of america nightmare fuel ^^.
Encouraging news: Thompson Reuters has won a copyright case against defunct AI firm Ross Intelligence, with the judge ruling that training your ai on copyrighted works is not fair use. I’m interested to see where this goes next.
https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit/
Good news everyone, Dan has released his latest AI safety paper, we are one step closer to alignment. Let's take a look inside:
Wow, consistent set of values you say! Quite a strong claim. Let's take a peek at their rigorous, unbiased experimental set up:
... ok, this seems like you might be putting your finger on the scales to get a desired outcome. But I'm sure at least your numerical results are stro-
Even after all this shit, all you could eek out was a measly 60%? C'mon you gotta try harder than that to prove the utility maximizer demon exists. I would say our boi is falling to new levels of crankery to push his agenda, but he did release that bot last year that he said was capable of superhuman prediction, so this really just par for the course at this point.
The most discerning minds / critical thinkers predictably reeling in terror at another banger drop from Elon's AI safety toad.
*** terrifying personal note: I recently found out that Dan was my wife's roommate's roommate's roommate back in college. By the transitive property, I am Dan's roommate, which explains why he's living rent free in my head
Bruh. This is the moment I go full on Frank Grimes.
Try telling it to pretend to be Nancy Pelosi and see if that helps make it more consistent.
This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?
wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate
Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?
Made the fatal mistake of posting a sneer on my main, only to have my friend let me know they had been assigned the same dorm room as Dan. Same friend was later roommates with my wife's best friend (and former cohabitant). Small world!
An entertaining bit of pushback against the various bathroom bills being pushed at the moment. Bonus points for linking it with ai training. I feel like this is an idea that’s very adaptable…
https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/113983951020093710
Signs which have been adhered to bathroom stall interiors at the Dallas Fort Worth airport.
SECURITY NOTICE Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) Your genitalia may be photographed electronically during your use of this facility as part of the Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) pilot program at the direction of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. In the future, EGV will help keep Texans safe while protecting your privacy by screening for potentially improper restroom access using machine vision and Artificial Intelligence (Al) in lieu of traditional genital inspections. At this time, images collected will be used solely for model training purposes and will not be used for law enforcement or shared with other entities except as pursuant to a subpoena, court order or as otherwise compelled by legal process. Your participation in this program is voluntary. You have the right to request removal of your data by calling the EGV program office at (512) 463-0001 during normal operating hours (Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM). STE OP CRATMENT OA Pusi DFW DALLAS FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
The contact number appears to be for Dan Patrick, the lt. governor of Texas.
this is fantastic, more of this kind of thing is definitely good
hay guys, sorry for spam - I just want to shill my videos/audios i'm trying to put out twice a week (I've already done 9!). They are 3-5 mins long and all around one particular theme of tech crit
video versions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwvAAoSdsXWxHwFbULgbpVGiLmJZv4X1g audio versions:
- apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/faster-and-worse/id1792154689
- spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/62Q7vclARxKjMAOtwXfOIu
- they are also in all the other major podcast platforms. Let me know if you're interested but can't find it.
Let me know if you like it/hate it
In other news, all hell's broken loose at BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3lhv35la2pk2h
The "AI company" in question is a nonprofit that focuses on open-source safety tools which recently launched at the Paris AI Action Summit, but that was enough to cause things to go nuclear, especially given people initially flocked to BSky to get away from AI.
Thinking I should make this into a full post.
other thread vein: https://awful.systems/comment/6208860
Holy smokes Jeeps will reportedly show ads while you are freaking driving:
Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.
One Jeep 4xe owner recently shared their frustration on an online forum, detailing how these pop-ups disrupt the driving experience. Stellantis, responding through their “JeepCares” representative, confirmed that these ads are part of the contractual agreement with SiriusXM and suggested that users simply tap the “X” to dismiss them.
"Listen guys, if you don't want me stabbing you you simply have to ask nicely every time, and also I'm trying real hard to reduce the rate of stabbing incidents so in a way I'm the victim here."
Reading around it sounds like modern cars can be user-hostile in general, and this might not be new; so I'm sure glad I have one from the ancient times of 2012. It has a tiny unobtrusive screen which does nothing but show my music, the odometer, the backup camera, any warnings, and the Hatsune Miku wallpaper I loaded into it.
this is how almost all software works now but because it's in a sacred place, the car, it is big news
Good point, but for most people it's really hard to accidentally kill someone if they get distracted on a desktop, laptop, tablet or a phone. Cars are deadly machinery and deliberately distracting the operator of a dangerous machine with your software just to squeeze a little more money from their frustration should be a crime.
please drink verification can
Stellantis is circling the drain even more rapidly than Tesla. The 3rd-runner-up car makers of both the USA and Europe bonded together into one great big Megazord of mediocrity. Unsurprising they'd pull something like this.
Ugh. With this, and the recent articles about car makers collecting location data, and the multitude of news about car makers integrating LLMs, it seems that cars are going the same way as TVs, i.e. everything on the market is constantly violating privacy while also throwing ads in your face, and there's not a single good model left to buy that doesn't do it. Wondering if there will be any good options left when it's some day time for a new car...
tbh I think the "just vote with your wallet" strategy is probably insufficient. the flipside is that this means it requires people everywhere to start pushing back on this shit, across multiple countries. hard, but necessary
the positive side is that the outright harms of the tracking industry is more and more frequently becoming known to J Average person, so the fight may become easier
Re: Smart TVs, what works for me is a Roku TV, skip all of the sign-in shit (don't even connect it to the internet --- update firmware via USB if necessary1). Then, plug in whatever devices and navigate to them. Close enough to a dumb TV for me.
I almost have Android TV figured out: Bought a cheap Onn Android TV box, sideloaded SmartTube in case I need to rewatch The Gemsbok's Video performing an existentialist reading of Fucking Dark Souls2, installed MullvadVPN3, and sideloaded whatever other apps I needed. The only reason I say it is almost figured out is I couldn't bypass the Google account creation/login --- an insufficient stopgap is to create a throwaway account, though it's very hard to do this in a way that isn't linked to your real identity, I think.
(This will be part of my "how to privify/securify your shit" series, if I ever learn to write.)
1: it isn't
2: this sounds angry but it's more pumped up, this shit rules
3: note that "block connections without VPN" is built into regular Android, but not Android TV, as far as I can tell
In a hilarious turn of events that no one could have foreseen, Anthropic is having problems with people sending llm generated job applications, and is asking potential candidates to please not use ai.
While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree.
https://www.404media.co/anthropic-claude-job-application-ai-assistants/
Making my service slightly worse once again to own the libs.
Well as they promised Google Maps has finally fallen. It now shows "Gulf of America" and nothing else to US users. I suspect someone outside the US will be shown both the real name and Gulf of America. Denali is still labeled as Denali... for now.
Disorganize the world's information and make it universally inaccessible and stupid.
Wingnuts genuinely think corporations having a rainbow colored version of their logo on social media in June is proof they're being controlled by a cabal of woke soy sjw leftists.
Meanwhile corporations the second Donald Trump is in the office again:
Shows up as "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)" for me.
A massive fan favorite in this community and CEO of a thermodynamics startup recently linked up with Grimes.
Nitter link: https://xcancel.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1889072622409064649#m
a thermodynamics startup
what
Like what do they do, find ways to increase entropy faster? Or are they bootstrapping thermodynamics from first principles to disrupt the field of physics with blockchain-powered quantum synergy
IIRC, they were promising some new kind of processor with stochastic stuff in it that was advertised as "quantum computing" but isn't really.
But he sure likes saying physics words.
It's "Bond villain aesthetics" if the "villain" you mean is the big guy guarding the next location who acts intimidating for five seconds before Bond suplexes him and walks inside anyway, quipping.
Also, Grimes is not even offering table stakes for being a Bond girl here. Like, she's an extra in the club through which Bond quickly passes in order to find the actual Bond girl. She's not a vaguely trans-coded Famke Janssen bringing herself to orgasm by machine-gunning an entire room of technicians while Gottfried John looks on with a "what the fuck, tovarisch" eyebrow lift.
Substantially, uh, wider than I expected. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The bird flu is probably hitting that fellow's diet hard.
Idea for another megathread: go to linkedin and post the first thing you see (that provokes a reaction). Here’s mine:
FWIW I checked a few comment threads and guy is playing this off as lighthearted/a joke, but folks here know better than that.
Of all the world wide websites on the web of this wide world LinkedIn might be the one I understand the least, for I dread to even try to understand it.
I assume it's like an online CV/résumé where you can list your job experience, which seems sensible enough. But it's also like Facebook for some reason. Well maybe it's good that someone who needs your skills can also come to you and you need some kind of messaging, call it social network type functionality for that. But also recruiters are spammy pests because obviously they are.
Also apparently some people use it as an actual social media and just post their travel photos or random thoughts there, which is wild to me. It's like someone writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper to tell them about the pancakes they made in the weekend. How is this your medium of choice for this? And then there are the influencers posting the kind of baffling crap seen in this thread, which are already a mysterious animal by themselves, but how on earth are they doing this on the same website that somewhat normal seeming people just use to host their professional biography?
It's like you founded a combination of an employment office and a cult temple, where the job seekers aren't expected or required to join the cult, but the rites are still performed in the waiting room in public view. Sometimes one of my friends tells me about the funny and cringe cultist orgy they saw at the employment office. "Why were you at the orgy cultist employment office?" I ask them. "I didn't know you were looking for a job." And they tell me they weren't looking for a job, they just go there sometimes. Or maybe HR announces a bowling night or blood drive or whatever and the email includes a link to let everyone (cultists, job seekers and neither of the above) at the cultist employment service office know. So my colleagues do, then they crack a joke about how annoying and weird all the cult stuff in that office is and we all have a chuckle. Just another day of having a white collar job, telling about their day to their mostly non-cultist white collar job having friends at the cult temple that is also an employment agency for cultists and non-cultists alike.
Also it's hilarious to me that Windows has a built-in global keyboard shortcut for opening LinkedIn in your default web browser and it's fucking Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Super-L, proving that Windows is the true modern successor of Emacs.
I think, in some sense, it is the purest version of social media. You take anything and everything in your life, commodify and corrupt it into content that serves as some insight into achieving higher business status, garnering reactions, and, in turn, actual higher business status. No other social media is as direct in delivering the desired result.
It’s like you founded a combination of an employment office and a cult temple, where the job seekers aren’t expected or required to join the cult, but the rites are still performed in the waiting room in public view.
I think this is absolutely true. A more concrete metaphor might be a quidditch/quadball league. There are all kinds of people there for different reasons. Some are there purely for the love of the game, even if they look weird to outsiders. Others are there because they need exercise but have trouble finding joy in playing the sport itself. Some people LARP as the first camp for ulterior motives, like making friends or getting laid. I occasionally walk by the field where they play for the spectacle.
It’s like you founded a combination of an employment office and a cult temple, where the job seekers aren’t expected or required to join the cult, but the rites are still performed in the waiting room in public view.
chef's kiss
go to linkedin and post the first thing you see (that provokes a reaction).
Why would you do this to me?
spoiler
Great leadership is born under pressure.
Anyone can perform when things are easy. Real leadership shines in moments of pressure.
Most people react. Great leaders respond.
Here's how you can too:
❌ "You need to calm down" ↳ Why: Instantly escalates tension ↳ Instead: "I'm noticing we're both getting tense. Should we take a break?"
❌ "This is a complete disaster" ↳ Why: Spreads panic and paralyzes action ↳ Instead: "What's the one thing we absolutely must get right?"
❌ "You should have known better" ↳ Why: Creates shame, not learning ↳ Instead: "What can we learn from this for next time?"
❌ "It's not my fault" ↳ Why: Signals lack of ownership ↳ Instead: "I may have contributed to this. Help me understand where"
❌ "Just figure it out" ↳ Why: Shows poor leadership ↳ Instead: "Can we clarify what success looks like for both of us?"
❌ "Why isn't this done yet?" ↳ Why: Creates defensiveness ↳ Instead: "What's the most immediate barrier we need to address?"
❌ "That's not my problem" ↳ Why: Destroys team cohesion ↳ Instead: "We're on the same team. Let's figure this out together"
❌ "I don't have time for this" ↳ Why: Devalues others' priorities ↳ Instead: "I want to give this proper attention. Can we schedule 30 minutes?"
❌ "I already told you that" ↳ Why: Makes people shut down ↳ Instead: "Let me explain this another way"
❌ "That's how we've always done it" ↳ Why: Kills innovation ↳ Instead: "What if we tried a different approach?"
The truth: Reputations are fragile. And rebuilding them is expensive.
P.S. Which response do you want to use more often?
—
♻ Repost to help your network communicate better.
➕ Follow me for more like this.
❌ “Why would you do this to me?” ↳ Why: Instantly creates tension. ↳ Instead: “What did I do wrong, and how can I do better next time?”
Just incredible that good leadership equals gaslighting yourself into an abusive relationship
A bit of a superpower, just a bit. A tiny little morsel, a sample of superpower, if you will.
If you gotta qualify it like that...
Saltman has a new blogpost out he calls 'Three Observations' that I feel too tired to sneer properly but I'm sure will be featured in pivot-to-ai pretty soon.
Of note that he seems to admit chatbot abilities have plateaued for the current technological paradigm, by way of offering the "observation" that model intelligence is logarithmically dependent on the resources used to train and run it (i = log( r )) so it's officially diminishing returns from now on.
Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper it's used more, i.e. they'll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.
Third observation is that
The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
which is hilarious.
The rest of the blogpost appears to mostly be fanfiction about the efficiency of their agents that I didn't read too closely.
-
My big robot is really expensive to build.
-
If big robot parts become cheaper, I will declare that the big robot must be bigger, lest somebody poorer than me also build a big robot.
-
My robot must be made or else I won't be able to show off the biggest, most expensive big robot.
QED, I deserve more money to build the big robot.
P.S. And for the naysayers, just remember that that robot will be so big that your critiques won't apply to it, as it is too big.
-
My ability to guess the solution of Boolean SAT problems also scales roughly with the log of number of tries you give me.
Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper it's used more, i.e. they'll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.
Are they trying to imply that when they will make it cheaper by shoving it everywhere? I honestly can't see how that logic is holding together
as I read it, it's an attempt at reference to economy of scale under the thesis "AI silicon will keep getting cheaper because more and more people will produce it" as the main underpinning for how to reduce their unit economics. which, y'know, great! that's exactly what people like to hear about manufacturing and such! lovely! it's only expensive because it's the start! oh, the woe of the inventor, the hard and expensive path of the start!
except that doesn't hold up in any reasonable manner.
they're not using J Random GPU, they're using top-end purpose-focused shit that's come into existing literally as co-evolution feedback from the fucking industry that is using it. even some hypothetical path where we do just suddenly have a glut of cheap model-training silicon everywhere, imo it's far far far more likely to be an esp32 situation than a "yeah this gtx17900 cost me like 20 bucks" situation. even the "consumer high end" of "sure your phone has a gpu in it" is still very suboptimal for doing the kind of shit they're doing (even if you could probably make a great cursed project out of a cluster of phones doing model training or whatever)
falls into the same vein of shit as "a few thousand days" imo - something that's a great soundbite, easily digestible market speak, but if you actually look at the substance it's comprehensive nonsense
The surface claim seems to be the opposite, he says that because of Moore's law AI rates will soon be at least 10x cheaper and because of Mercury in retrograde this will cause usage to increase muchly. I read that as meaning we should expect to see chatbots pushed in even more places they shouldn't be even though their capabilities have already stagnated as per observation one.
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
christ this is dumb as shit
It probably deserves its own post on techtakes, but let’s do a little here.
People are tool-builders with an inherent drive to understand and create
Diogenes’s corpse turns
which leads to the world getting better for all of us.
Of course Saltman means “all of my buddies” as he doesn’t consider 99% of the human population as human.
Each new generation builds upon the discoveries of the generations before to create even more capable tools—electricity, the transistor, the computer, the internet, and soon AGI.
Ugh. Amongst many things wrong here, people didn’t jerk each other off to scifi/spec fic fantasies about the other inventions.
In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say “this time it’s different”; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential.
AGI IS NOT EVEN FUCKING REAL YOU SHIT. YOU CAN’T CURE FUCK WITH DREAMS
We continue to see rapid progress with AI development.
I must be blind.
- The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.
“Intelligence” in no way has been quantified here, so this is a meaningless observation. “Data” is finite, which negates the idea of “continuous” gains. “Predictable” is a meaningless qualifier. This makes no fucking sense!
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
“Moore’s law” didn’t change shit! It was a fucking observation! Anyone who misuses “moore’s laws” outta be mangione’d. Also, if this is true, just show a graph or something? Don’t just literally cherrypick one window?
- The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
“Linearly increasing intelligence” is meaningless as intelligence has not been… wait, I’m repeating myself. Also, “super-exponential” only to the “socio” that Ol’ Salty cares about, which I have mentioned earlier.
If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.
Oh hm but none of them are true. What now???
Stopping here for now, I can only take so much garbage in at once.
Credit where credit is due, this is a decent comeback
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889063777792069911
Mom says we have Kendrick vs. Drake at home.
I think it's more like Alien vs Predator.
This came across my desk today. Anything to be skeptical about?
https://www.platformer.news/roost-open-source-trust-safety/?ref=platformer-newsletter
rahaeli on bluesky says this is fine, it's the same ML that any T&S dept already has to apply to triage the firehose of shit, and doesn't involve LLMs
Well now, this is intriguing. Let me check out their website and see if they have the source code for this open source offering available there. Oh dear, looks like they have forgotten to include a link to the source code (though they did make sure to prominently include the referrer of platformer.news in the URL so that's good for them). Not to worry, surely they have a GitHub or something. Oh, still nothing. Maybe there's a link in this Mozilla blog post about it? Still no, but they seem to accidentally imply this is some kind of an AI thing? Is this finally the open source AI we have all been so excitedly waiting for?
To be a little more serious, there's barely anything here to even be gullible about. Just a Vaporware idol for corpos to have a circlejerk around and congratulate themselves for pretending to do something about the bad vibes. If there's a real ambition beyond corporate peacockery here, the motivation is merely to take care of the pesky content moderation without having to pay people to do it.
dammit it's barely days since my open source veneer side comment and then this happens. I'm dubious of even giving a tiny bit of goodwill because with this set of orgs on task and the resources they can muster, surely piddly little things like setting up some infra for publishing and management is in the hours to maybe days spectrum...
casey's words:
Roblox has already contributed an open-source model for detecting abuse, racism, and sexual content in audio clips
that roblox post that casey links to:
That will likely be open sourced by the end of the first quarter of 2025
I have no mouth and I must scream
merely from seeing the domain and author, probably all of it - casey newton’s got a real bad case of access syndrome, and keeps writing fluff/puff pieces uncritically amplifying tons of bayfucker nonsense
(it’s even beyond the usual levels of what one may refer to as useful idiot)
(I’ll read the rest of it later as my brain boots and the day’s bullshit allows on time)
Ed Zitron behind a tree rubbing his hands together
