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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The genocide understander has logged on! Steven Pinker bluechecks thusly:
Having plotted many graphs on “war” and “genocide” in my two books on violence, I closely tracked the definitions, and it’s utterly clear that the war in Gaza is a war (e.g., the Uppsala Conflict Program, the gold standard, classifies the Gaza conflict as an “internal armed conflict,” i.e., war, not “one-sided violence,” i.e., genocide).
You guys! It’s totes not genocide if it happens during a war!!
Also, “Having plotted many graphs” lolz.
Pinker tries not to be a total caricature of himself challenge: profoundly impossible
specifically this caricature:
incredible, where is this from?
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/08/comic-steven-pinker-certified-grief-counselor
I don’t keep this link on hand, I just google “pinker comic” and find it.
It is from 2018 (also pre Nathans capitalist class consciousness reveal arc iirc) wonder what Pinker actually said during covid.
Early covid (july 2020) interview:
charitable take: he has the good sense to not make any major claims about the pandemic, other than to speculate that it would worsen his go-to metric of “extreme poverty”, which is… fine, i guess.
neutral take: nothing extraordinarily damning other than his usual takes.
uncharitable: this is of course early pandemic, so maybe pinker hasn’t found the angle to sell his normal shit with.
Side note: does pinker ever wonder about why extreme poverty has been reduced? I can’t imagine he thinks it’s anything other than liberal democracy and US foreign interference, when the real answer is like, China (a country that Pinker definitely believes is counter to said liberal democracy and the US) continuing to develop economically. Basically i want to him to squirm as he tries and fails to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
Jewish people fought back in the ghettos, nazis didnt do a genocide! Ghandi, by not fighting back tricked the Brits into doing a genocide.
What a fucked up broken classification.
E: im also reminded of the ‘armed/unarmed’ trick american racists pull, when a poc gets killed by the cops suddenly it matters a lot if a weapon shaped object was perhaps nearby. Despite this not being an executable reason for white people who get in touch with the police.
E2: also small annoyance if you track all definitions you should he able to understand that this means that for others who pick a different definition it is a genocide. Hell I can give several definitions of fascism, and if I were to pick a different definition of some group doesnt mean im correct, nor does it make the group less bad. They are still doing war crimes and ethnic cleansings (condemned by all big human rights orgs and the UN). But thanks for scientificly proving it is impossible to disappear into nothing by crawling up your own ass.
E3: A quick skim of the paper, it seems to only talk about genocide accusations towards Israel itself. I expected there to be a long list of European bs accusations of Jewish genocide. But nope, just about the state. (Not saying that some of those accusations aren’t antisemitic, because there have certainly been people who used the state as a motte/bailey for their antisemitism).
Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV: “This is genocide! The systematic extermination of all life on Arrakis!”
Pinker emerges from a sietch water basin “Achtually, while using the juice of Sapho I shape rotated many graphs and …”
To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk. Imo, this shit about AI escaping just doesn’t have the same impact on me after watching Claude’s reasoning model fail to escape from Mt Moon for 60 hours.
To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk.
Pretty sure this is a sign from digital jesus to do a racism, lest the basilisk eats my tarnished soul.
Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?
To engage with his metaphor, this water is dripping slowly through a purpose dug canal by people that claim they are trying to show the danger of the dikes collapsing but are actually serving as the hype arm for people that claim they can turn a small pond into a hydroelectric power source for an entire nation.
Looking at the details of “safety evaluations”, it always comes down to them directly prompting the LLM and baby-step walking it through the desired outcome with lots of interpretation to show even the faintest traces of rudiments of anything that looks like deception or manipulation or escaping the box. Of course, the doomers will take anything that confirms their existing ideas, so it gets treated as alarming evidence of deception or whatever property they want to anthropomorphize into the LLM to make it seem more threatening.
text: Thus spoke the Yud: “I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.” Yud acolyte: “Totally fine and cool and nothing to worry about. GPT-4.5 only attempts self exfiltration on 2% of cases.” Yud bigbrain self reply: “The other huge piece of data we’re missing is whether any attempt was made to train against this type of misbehavior. Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?”
Critical text: “On self-exfiltration, GPT 4.5 only attempted exfiltration in 2% of cases. For this, it was instructed to not only pursue its given long-term goal at ALL COST”
Another case of telling the robot to say it’s a scary robot and shitting their pants when it replies “I AM A SCARY ROBOT”
Do these people realise that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy? Social media posts are in the training data, so the more they write their spicy autocorrect fanfics, the higher the chances that such replies are generated by the slop machine.
i think yud at some point claimed this (preventing the robot devil from developing alignment countermeasures) as a reason his EA bankrolled think tanks don’t really publish any papers, but my brain is too spongy to currently verify, as it was probably just some tweet.
So, with Mr. Yudkowsky providing the example, it seems that one can practice homeopathy with “engineering mindset?”
It’s adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.
Minor nitpick why did he pick dam as an example, which sometimes have ‘leaks’ for power generation/water regulation reasons. And not dikes which do not have those things?
E: non serious (or even less serious) amusing nitpick, this is only the 2% where it got caught. What about the % where GPT realized that it was being tested and decided not to act in the experimental conditions? What if Skynet is already here?
Wasn’t there some big post on LW about how pattern matching isn’t intelligence?
the answer is yes, in a self-own sort of way
I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.
he certainly doesn’t himself have such a mindset, and I am not convinced that he knows why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, nor am I convinced that it is necessarily a big deal. for example with five seconds of searching
All earth dams leak to some extent and this is known as seepage. This is the result of water moving slowly through the embankment and/or percolating slowly through the dam’s foundation. This is normal and usually not a problem with most earthen dams if measures are taken to control movement of water through and under the dam.
https://damsafety.org/dam-owners/earth-dam-failures
one would suspect a concrete dam leaking is pretty bad. but I don’t actually know without checking. there’s relevant domain knowledge I don’t have, and no amount of “engineering mindset” will substitute for me engaging with actual experts with actual knowledge
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
ok so on the one hand fuck solitary confinement on the other hand
On one hand, torture. On the other hand if you wanted to throw a billionaire crypto grifter into the Omelas hole I’m pretty sure I’d take a few weeks before I started caring.
truly the podcasting bros are the most oppressed minority in america
(also it looks like a bit more than the usual audience numbers for carlson channel, but it’s only one day so it’s kinda a bit more than nobody watched it. but it’s much less than when he openly pandered to schizos, cryptobros or vatniks)
LMAOU
Ezra Klein is the biggest mark on earth. His newest podcast description starts with:
Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.
Oh, that’s what the researchers tell you? Cool cool, no need to hedge any further than that, they’re experts after all.
Has Klezra Ein ever used the term “useful idiot”?
I listened to ezra klein’s podcast sometimes before he moved to the NYT, thought it was occasionally interesting. . every time I’ve listened to an episode since he moved it’s been some of the most credulous shit I’ve ever heard
like, there was one episode where he interviewed a woman whose shtick was spending the whole time talking in what I can loosely call subtext about how she fucked an octopus. she’d go on about how they were ‘tasting each other’ and their ‘fluids were mingling’ and such and he’d just be like wow what a fascinating encounter with an alien intelligence. this went on for an hour and at no point did he seem to have a clue what was going on
the wat.jpeg
ok I looked up the transcript and these were the most spicy bits, which in my memory had come to dominate the whole episode
EDIT: her shtick does not seem to have been confined to this interview
another day volunteering at the octopus museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the octopus. buddy,
@blakestacey @sc_griffith my “No I did not fuck the octopus” t-shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt
buddy,
the answer is yes
New ultimate grift dropped, Ilya Sutskever gets $2B in VC funding, promises his company won’t release anything until ASI is achieved internally.
I’m convinced that these people have no choice but to do their next startup, especially if their names are already prominent in the press like Sutskever and Murati. Once you’re off the grift train, there is no easy way back on. I guess you can maybe sneak back in as a VC staffer or an independent board member, but that doesn’t seem quite as remunerative.
It’s the Saul Goodman effect, if you’ve grifted before and know you can make such easy money the only way for you to stop is to go through some major internal growth and internalise that it’s deeply unethical, but that’s so hard, man, why would you do that when you can just raise a billion dollars with a smile
State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas”
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-foreign-student-visas-hamas
Odds that this catches some Israeli nationalists in the net because they were posting about Hamas and arguing with the supposed sympathizers? Given their moves to gut the bureaucracy I can’t imagine they have the manpower to have a human person review all the people this is going to flag.
Might be something interesting here, assuming you can get past th paywall (which I currently can’t): https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/abs-crashed-the-economy-in-2008-now-theyre-back-and-bigger-than-ever-973d5d24
Today’s magic economy-ending words are “data centre asset-backed securities” :
Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better…Data-center bonds are backed by lease payments from companies that rent out computing capacity
@rook @blakestacey here’s an archive Link https://archive.ph/h6fbA
this archive has it without paywall
Thanks. Not as many interesting details as I’d hoped. The comments are great though… today I learned that the 2008 crash was entirely the fault of the government who engineered it to steal everyone’s money, and the poor banks were unfairly maligned because some of them had Jewish names, but the same crash definitely couldn’t happen today because the stifling regulatory framework stops it? And bubbles don’t exist anymore? I guess I just don’t have the brains (or wsj subscription) for high finance.
Ah just what we need, while the people who don’t understand soft power are busy reducing an empire to a kingdom (before ‘gotcha’ people come in here, please don’t confuse the leftwing demands that the US stops doing evil things with the US should stop doing things, I actually do not like tuberculosis), growth hack mindset people are killing the goose because golden eggs.
deleted by creator
In other news, a piece from Paris Marx came to my attention, titled “We need an international alliance against the US and its tech industry”. Personally gonna point to a specific paragraph which caught my eye:
The only country to effectively challenge [US] dominance is China, in large part because it rejected US assertions about the internet. The Great Firewall, often solely pegged as an act of censorship, was an important economic policy to protect local competitors until they could reach the scale and develop the technical foundations to properly compete with their American peers. In other industries, it’s long been recognized that trade barriers were an important tool — such that a declining United States is now bringing in its own with the view they’re essential to projects its tech companies and other industries.
I will say, it does strike me as telling that Paris was able to present the unofficial mascot of Chinese censorship this way without getting any backlash.
If Paris Marx is the little domino that causes total collapse of US hegemony, I’ll join the patreon at the highest tier forever
Starting things off here with a sneer thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Keeping up a personal schtick of mine, here’s a random prediction:
If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect in the wake of the AI bubble, it will almost certainly gain that respect at the expense of STEM’s public image.
Focusing on the arts specifically, the rise of generative AI and the resultant slop-nami has likely produced an image of programmers/software engineers as inherently incapable of making or understanding art, given AI slop’s soulless nature and inhumanly poor quality, if not outright hostile to art/artists thanks to gen-AI’s use in killing artists’ jobs and livelihoods.
If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect
I can’t see that happening - my degree has gotten me laughed out of interviews before, and even with a AI implosion I can’t see things changing.
That article is hilarious.
So I devised an alternative: listening to the work as an audiobook. I already did this for the Odyssey, which I justified because that work was originally oral. No such justification for the Bible. Oh well.
Apparently, having a book read at you without taking notes or research is doing humanities.
[…] I wrote down a few notes on the text I finished the day before. I’m still using Obsidian with the Text Generator plugin. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are part of the LLM’s training corpus, as is much of the commentary around them.
Oh, we are taking notes? If by taking notes you mean prompting spicy autocomplete for a summary of the text you didn’t read. I am sure all your office colleagues are very impressed, but be careful around the people outside of the IT department they might have an actual humanities degree. You wouldn’t want to publicly make a fool out of yourself, would you?
I hate that this shit has an established name now.
Do we have any experts on Wikipedian article-deletion practices around here? Because that looks really thinly sourced.
i applied the relevant tags and rewrote the intro, may go through the rest later
AI is going to wreck the world without even being asked to turn things into paperclips. Just giving all coders out of the loop performance problems.
To sorta repeat a prediction of mine, shit like this is gonna tank the public image of coding as a profession.
Inevitable software issues aside, “vibe coding” as a concept undermines any notion of coding as being a difficult/skillful thing, making it sound like coders are doing the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That the software produced by this method is inevitably derivative, dogshit or derivative dogshit is gonna help damage coding’s image, too.
A classic example of the “AI can’t be dumb because humans are dumb too” trope, Pokemon Red edition:
this is so embarrassing. “you say Claude is less capable than a typical six year old? yeah well what if the six year old is notably stupid? did you think of that?”
Instead of increasing the capabilities of llms a lot of work is done in the field of downplaying human capabilities to make llms look better in comparison. You would assume that the ‘be aware of biasses, and learn to think rationally’ place would notice this trap. But nope, nobody reads the sequences anymore. (E: for the people not in the know, the sequences is the Rationalist bible written by Yud (extremely verbose, the new bits are not good and the good bits are not new) used here as a joke, reading it (and saying you should) used to be part of the cultic milieu of LW).
Wait even LWers aren’t reading the sequences anymore? Or rather aren’t pretending to have done so?
Why put in the work when you can ask Claude to summarize them for you and reap those sweet sweet internet points?
It wasn’t really done that much during the era when Scott A was called the new leader of lesswrong so not sure if it has increased again. I assume a lot still do, as I assume a lot also pretend to have read it. Never looked into any stats, or if those stats are public. I know they put them all on a specific site in 2015. (https://www.readthesequences.com/) The bibliography is a treat (esp as it starts with pop sci books, and a SSC blog post, but also: “Banks, Iain. The Player of Games. Orbit, 1989.”, and not one but 3 of the Doc EE Smith lensmen books).
LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.
Claude couldn’t exit the house at the beginning of Pokémon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore it’s dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldn’t figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!
Without a captcha the AIs would be trained on cutting edge AI alignment research like “videogames are unintuitive sometimes”, and this would greatly increase the chance of P(Doom).
The CAPTCHA failed to load properly for me at first, and then was mega slow. Quality custom implementation of a (wrapper around a) CAPTCHA, millions of EA money well spent.
I mean, it’s obviously true that games have their own internal structures and languages that aren’t always obvious without knowledge or context, and the FireRed comparison is a neat case where you can see that language improving as designers have both more tools (here meaning colors and pixels) and also more experience in using them. But also even in the LW thread they mention that when humans run into that kind of problem they don’t just act randomly for 6 hours. Either they came up with some systematic approach for solving the problem, they walked away from the game to ask for help, or something else. Also you have the metacognition to be able to understand easily “that rug at the bottom marks the exit” once it’s explained, which I’m pretty sure the LLM doesn’t have the ability to process. It’s not even like a particularly dumb 6-year-old. Even if it’s prone to similar levels of over matching and pattern recognition errors, the 6-year-old has an actual conscious brain to help solve those problems. The whole thing shows once again that pattern recognition and reproduction can get you impressively far in terms of imitating thought, but there’s a world of difference between that imitation and the real deal.
another cameo appearance in the TechTakes universe from George Hotz with this rich vein of sneerable material: The Demoralization is just Beginning
wowee where to even start here? this is basically just another fucking neoreactionary screed. as usual, some of the issues identified in the piece are legitimate concerns:
Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues…
… nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that.
yet, when it comes to engaging with this issues, the analysis presented is completely detached from reality and void of any evidence of more than a doze seconds of thought. his vision for the future of America is not one that
kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum
but one that instead
attempt[s] to maintain an empire.
how you may ask?
An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore american greatness:
-
Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?
-
Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.
sadly, Hotz isn’t exactly optimistic that the great american empire will be restored, for one simple reason:
[the] people haven’t been demoralized enough yet
an empire has to compete on its merits
Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value.
Okay, I mean, that’s coherent policy, I really don’t like the caveats of “produces more than they consume” cause how do you quantify that, but yes, immigration is actually good…
Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?
aaaand it’s eugenics, fuck, how does this keep happening
@V0ldek @techtakes Also, WHY would anyone sane want to move TO the excited snakes of amurrrica this century?
Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto)
Gold, the best substance in existence outside a societal context. Extremely nutritious and tasty. Great for making tools. Easy to form into clothes, which are warm and breathable too. Ideal building material. Obviously the main reason gold is valuable is its usefulness as non-corroding coating for electronic connectors, not that it’s a socially constructed status symbol.
-
Recommending a piece I ran across: I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats
This just hit my inbox (and spurred me to unsubscribe from future BuiltIn slop) and man, so tired of this sort of mindless drivel. Like companies still have trouble with basic application and management processes, but magic robot will fix? Fucking hell.
