Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23 February 2025

In one corner: cheating US AI that needs prompting to cheat.

In the other: finger breaking Russian chess robot.

Let's get ready to rumble!

Has the study itself shown up?

EDIT: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13295

AOC:

They need him to be a genius because they cannot handle what it means for them to be tricked by a fool.

That is a lot of mental hoops to jump through to keep holding on to the idea IQ is useful. High IQ is a force multiplier for being dumb. The horseshoe theory of IQ.

Excuse me but I need the tech industry to hold up just long enough to fulfill my mid-life-crisis goal of moving to another country. Please refrain from crashing until then.

Thanks.

cc @dgerard

He's done some promo work for Magic The Gathering in the past, including trolling the bejeezus out of Sean "Day9" Plott with a blue/black no-fun-allowed control deck on Felicia Day's channel. And in the course of trying to confirm that that existed I found an article he wrote in 2014 titled "why Gamergaters piss me the fuck off"

Chris Kluwe vs Gamergate is an example of the jocks as the good guys up against the nerds as the bad guys

Im reading AI as AL, so meet your new research assistant

Wow this is some real science, they even have graphs.

that's tomorrow's Pivot

Some manager is going to see the metrics on that article vaguely think about the word viral and take the absolute wrong conclusions.

Why not just make the refrigerator itself a robot

Mobile kegerator for tailgating/festivals might be able to pull Boston Dynamics outta the shit

bahahahaha "judge every molecule." I can't believe I ever took this guy even slightly seriously.

An extreme Boss Baby tweet.

i know that it's about conservative crackheadery re:allegations of election fraud, but it's lowkey unhinged that americans don't have national ID. i also know that republicans blocked it, because they don't want problems solved, they want to stay mad about them. in poland for example, it's a requirement to have ID, it's valid for 10 years and it's free of charge. passport costs $10 to get and it takes a month, sometimes less, from filing a form to getting one. there's also a govt service where you can get some things done remotely, including govt supplied digital signature that you can use to sign files and is legally equivalent to regular signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUAP

This isn't even skating towards where the puck is, it's skating in a fucking swimming pool.

I saw that yesterday. I was tempted to post it here but instead I've been trying very hard not to think of this eldritch fractal of wrongness. It's too much, man.

unifying demands

hostile takeover

Pick one, you can't have both.

What would some good unifying demands be for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party by centrists/moderates?

me, taking this at face value, and understanding the political stances of the democrats, and going by my definition of centrist/moderate that is more correct than whatever the hell Kelsey Piper thinks it means: Oh, this would actually push the democrats left.

Anyway, jesus christ I regret clicking on that name and reading. How the fuck is anyone this stupid. Vox needs to be burned down.

Presuming that Republicans ever asked “was it a fair election?!” in good faith, like a true jabroni.

Imagine saying this after the birther movement remained when the birth certificate was shown. "Just admit you didnt fuck pigs, and this pigfucking will be gone".

those opinions should come with a whiplash warning, fucking hell

can’t wait to once again hear that someone is sure we’re “just overreacting” and that star of david passbooks voter ID laws will be totes fine. I’m sure it’ll be a really lovely conversation with a perfectly sensible and caring human. :|

Thank you for completing our survey! Your answer on question 3-b indicates that you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta, which according to our infallible model, indicates that you must be tired of life. Please enjoy our complementary lemon soaked paper napkins while we proceed to bringing you to the other side!

That was both horrible and also not what I expected. Like, they at least avoid the AI simulacra nonsense where you train an LLM on someone's Facebook page and ask it if they want to die when they end up in a coma or something, but they do ask about what are effectively the suicide booths from Futurama. Can't wait to see what kind of bullshit they try to make from the results!

wat

Having read the whole book, I am now convinced that this omission is not because Srinivasan has a secret plan that the public would object to. The omission, rather, is because Balaji just isn't bright enough to notice.

That's basically the entire problem in a nutshell. We've seen what people will fill that void with and it's "okay but I have power here now and I dare you to tell me I don't" and you know who happens to have lots of power? That's right, it's Balaji's billionaire bros! But this isn't a sinister plan to take over society - that would at least entail some amount of doing what states are for.

Ed:

"Who is really powerful? The billionaire philanthropist, or the journalist who attacks him over his tweets?"

I'm not going to bother looking up which essay or what terrible point it was in service to, but Scooter Skeeter of all people made a much better version of this argument by acknowledging that the other axis of power wasn't "can make someone feel bad through mean tweets" but was instead "can inflict grievous personal violence on the aged billionaires who pay them for protection". I can buy some of these guys actually shooting someone, but the majority of these wannabe digital lordlings are going to end up following one of the many Roman Emperors of the 3rd century and get killed and replaced by their Praetorians.

wait that's it? he wants to "replace" states with (vr) groupchats on blockchain? it can't be this stupid, you must be explaining this wrong (i know, i know, saying it's just that makes it look way more sane than it is)

The basic problem here is that Balaji is remarkably incurious about what states actually do and what they are for.

libertarians are like house cats etc etc

In practice, it's a formula for letting all the wealthy elites within your territorial borders opt out of paying taxes and obeying laws. And he expects governments will be just fine with this because… innovation.

this is some sovereign citizen type shit

what pisses me off even more is that parts of the idea behind this are actually quite cool and worthwhile! just..... the entire goddamn pitch. ew.

Deep Research is the AI slop of academia — low-quality research-slop built for people that don't really care about quality or substance, and it’s not immediately obvious who it’s for.

it's weird that Ed stops there, since answer almost writes itself. ludic had a bit about how in companies bigger than three guys in a shed, people who sign software contracts don't use that software in any normal way;

The idea of going into something knowing about it well enough to make sure the researcher didn't fuck something up is kind of counter to the point of research itself.

conversely, if you have no idea what are you doing, you won't be able to tell if machine generated noise is in any way relevant or true

The whole point of hiring a researcher is that you can rely on their research, that they're doing work for you that would otherwise take you hours.

but but, this lying machine can output something in minutes so this bullshit generator obviously makes human researchers obsolete. this is not for academia because it's utterly unsuitable and google scholar beats badly it anyway; this is not for wide adoption because it's nowhere near free tier; this is for idea guys who have enough money to shell out $whatever monthly subscription and prefer to set a couple hundred of dollars on fire instead of hiring a researcher/scientist/contractor. especially keeping in mind that contractor might tell them something they don't want to hear, but this lmgtfy x lying box (but worse, because it pulls lots of seo spam) won't

OpenAI's next big thing is the ability to generate a report that you would likely not be able to use in any meaningful way anywhere, because while it can browse the web and find things and write a report, it sources things based on what it thinks can confirm its arguments rather than making sure the source material is valid or respectable.

That means that the harm done by these systems compound the more widely they are used as errors pile up at every stage of work, in every sector of the economy. It builds up an ambient radiation of system variability and errors that magnifies every other systemic issue with the modern state and economy.

Wanted to shout these two sentences out in particular. Best summary of my biggest current fears regarding use of "ai"/llm/transformer(?)-based systems.

116 million

There’s no way that what they’re buying is worth that much.

thanks! It might be uncommon because it's a real pain in the ass to keep it short. Every time I make one I stress about how easily my point can be misunderstood because there are so few details. Good way to practice the art of moving on

@swlabr @techtakes Anybody can nominate: the true sign that the simulation has been handed over to drunken frat boys will be if he *wins*.

But Hinton didn’t want Yu to see his personal humidifying chamber, so every time Yu dropped in for a chat, Hinton turned to his two students, the only other people in his three-​person company, and asked them to disassemble and hide the mattress and the ironing board and the wet towels. “This is what vice presidents do,” he told them.

so insanely fucking unserious

The attitude to theoretical computer science re quantum is really weird. Some people act as if "I can't run it now therefore it's garbage" which is just such a nonsense approach to any kind of theoretical work.

Turing wrote his seminal paper in 1936, over 10 years before we invented transistors. Most of CS theory was developed way before computers were proliferated. A lot of research into ML was done way before we had enough data and computational power to actually run e.g. neural networks.

Theoretical CS doesn't need to be recent, it doesn't need to run, and it's not shackled to the current engineering state of the art, and all of that is good and by design. Let the theoreticians write their fucking theorems. No one writing a theoretical paper makes any kinds of promises that the described algorithm will EVER be run on anything. Quantum complexity theory, for example was developed in the nineties, there was NO quantum computer then, no one was even envisioning a quantum computation happening in physical reality. Shor's algorithm was devised BEFORE THAT, before we even had the necessary tools to describe its complexity.

I find the line of argumentation "this is worthless because we don't know a quantum computer is engineeringly feasible"

1. Insulting,
2. Stupid,
3. Lacking whimsy,
4. Unscientific at its core.

He’s right that current quantum computers are physics experiments, not actual computers, and that people concentrate too much on exotic threats, but he goes a bit off the rails after that.

Current post quantum crypto work is a hedge, because no-one who might face actual physical or financial or military risks is prepared to say that there will be no device in 10-20 years time that can crack eg. an ECDH key exchange in the blink of an eye. You’ve got to start work on PQC now, because you want to be able subject it to a lot of classical cryptanalysis work because quantum-resistant is no good by itself (see also, SIKE which turned out to be trivially crackable).

The attempt to project factorising capabilities of future quantum computers is pretty stupid because there’s too little data to work with, so the capabilities and limitations of future devices can’t usefully be guessed at yet. Personally, I’d expect them to remain physics experiments for at least another 5-10 years, but once a bunch of current issues are resolved you’ll see rapid growth in practical devices by which time it is a bit late to start casting around for replacement crypto systems.

It's been frustrating to watch Gutmann slowly slide. He hasn't slid that far yet, I suppose. Don't discount his voice, but don't let him be the only resource for you to learn about quantum computing; fundamentally, post-quantum concerns are a sort of hard read in one direction, and Gutmann has decided to try a hard read in the opposite direction.

Page 19, complaining about lattice-based algorithms, is hypocritical; lattice-based approaches are roughly as well-studied as classical cryptography (Feistel networks, RSA) and elliptic curves. Yes, we haven't proven that lattice-based algorithms have the properties that we want, but we haven't proven them for classical circuits or over elliptic curves, either, and we nonetheless use those today for TLS and SSH.

Pages 28 and 29 are outright science denial and anti-intellectualism. By quoting Woit and Hossenfelder — who are sneerable in their own right for writing multiple anti-science books each — he is choosing anti-maths allies, which is not going to work for a subfield of maths like computer science or cryptography. In particular, p28 lies to the reader with a doubly-bogus analogy, claiming that both string theory and quantum computing are non-falsifiable and draw money away from other research. This sort of closing argument makes me doubt the entire premise.

Comparing quantum computing to time machines or faster-than-light travel is unfair. In order for the latter to exist, our understanding of physics would have to be wrong in a major way. Quantum computing presumes that our understanding of physics is correct. Making it work is "only" an engineering problem, in the sense that Newton's laws say that a rocket can reach the Moon, so the Apollo program was "only" a engineering project. But breaking any ciphers with it is a long way off.

I mean, I love the idea of automation in the high level. Being able to do more stuff with less human time and energy spent is objectively great! But under our current economic system where most people rely on selling their time and energy in order to buy things like food and housing, any decrease in demand for that labor is going to have massive negative impacts on the quality of life for a massive share of humanity. I think the one upside of the current crop of generative AI is that it threatens claims to threaten actual white-collar workers in the developed world rather than further imisserating factory workers in whichever poor country has the most permissive labor laws. It's been too easy to push the human costs of our modern technology-driven economy under the proverbial rug, but the middle management graphic design Chadleys of the US and EU are finding it harder to pretend they don't exist because now it's coming for them too.

will automate millions of jobs if it works, might kneecap the economy

will kneecap the economy if it works, too. Because companies certainly aren't going to keep people employed in those millions of jobs.

FR that’s basically this anime in which MC is isekai’d and starts a cult