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…)
Found on HN:
[Working with AI is] An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force
25 upvotes, no comments yet…
pedal to the metal on the content and information theft, folks:
seems it’s this lot. despite their name, there appears to be almost nothing artful or artistic about them - it’s all b2b shit for Selling Better
Incorporating into your workflow a company that is a shell around other companies that are selling their products at a loss with no path to profitability seems like quite an unacceptable business risk to me. But I dont get paid the big bux
as long as you can mark it up and as long as the charade lasts, and as long as there’s someone willing to pay, this will make money. when spicy autocomplete provider collapses just pack your bags and leave
I think when you have integrated all this into your workflows doing that and going back might be hard esp on the enterprise level.
wait, what do you mean “integrating it into workflows”. this juicero of outsourcing won’t work as advertised and it’s probably cheaper and less prone to fucking up to hire a couple of southeastern asians or eastern europeans. as long as business is selling of these juiceros, they’ll be fine as long as they can find suckers. these suckers, tho, might be in trouble even before openai goes under for unrelated reasons
oh but that’s not my problem, and those who got in that very stupid position deserve every last bit of it
For the enterprise using it, yes. For the enterprise selling it, probably not so much.
@fullsquare @Soyweiser “I’ve sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook, and by gum, it put them on the map!”
somebody had to do the design + layout for that banner. i wonder what was going through their head then.
“I should start the Butlerian Jihad”
“God I wish I was an AI so i didn’t have to do this”
apparently a complete archive of scott siskind’s old livejournal. found on the EA forum no less. https://archive.fo/fCFQx
That is odd in a way, you would expect them to honour is wishes of that data no longer being available, but nope.
couldn’t help myself, there are seldom more perfect opportunities to use this one
Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Don’t have a source more concrete than this yet:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365
(and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)
It’s a lot like this:
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
Extreme sent at 4am energy.
That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)… ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I’ve had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).
Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.
But “AI”… it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn’t. There’s nothing to learn from resulting failure, except “don’t use AI”.
In this case, given shopify’s general behaviour, I won’t be sad at all though if they crash and fail.
I also thought ‘guess LLMs dont work as an editor’.
And blockchains did massive damage, all the ransomware crime would be impossible if the tech world had not jumped into blockchain as much as they did and created and kept maintaining the ecosystem. (It also caused the techbro people who now pivot to AI rise, so it is connected). Note that the damage done by BEC is still greater than ransomware, so not cybersecurity advice.
But I get your point, I think a real example would be facebooks pivot to video. Which destroyed companies.
Yes, that’s true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldn’t be sad anyway if they went away…).
What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didn’t willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didn’t put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.
blockchain targeted libertarian post-goldbug pro-cyberpunk-dystopia fuckheads, llms target management types (you will replace workers with machines!), maybe that’s why
yeah, no I agree that blockchain is a bad example, just think we shouldn’t understate the massive damage that has done. Not just in actually damaged systems but also just in additional cost that now everybody has to worry about this. Same as how AI is not just causing climate change problems by running it, but the scraping as well has increased the cost of running a webserver by 50% in load alone. (which on a global scale is just horrid). And then there is the forcing of it in everything, the burning of the boats.
:( looked in my old CS dept’s discord, recruitment posts for the “Existential Risk Laboratory” running an intro fellowship for AI Safety.
Looks inside at materials, fkn Bostrom and Kelsey Piper and whole slew of BS about alignment faking. Ofc the founder is an effective altruist getting a graduate degree in public policy.
that’s CFAR cult jargon right?
Mesa-optimization? I’m not sure who in the lesswrong sphere coined it… but yeah, it’s one of their “technical” terms that don’t actually have academic publishing behind it, so jargon.
Instrumental convergence… I think Bostrom coined that one?
The AI alignment forum has a claimed origin here is anyone on the article here from CFAR?
Mesa-optimization
Why use the perfectly fine ‘inner optimizer’ mentioned in the references when you can just ask google translate to give you the clunkiest, most pedestrian and also wrong part of speech Greek term to use in place of ‘in’ instead?
Also natural selection is totally like gradient descent brah, even though evolutionary algorithms actually modeled after natural selection used to be their own subcategory of AI before the term just came to mean lying chatbot.
I’m thinking they hired Jar-Jar Binks to the team.
Mesa-optimization… that must be when you rail some crushed-up Adderall XRs, boof some modafinil for good measure, and spend the night making sure your kitchen table surface is perfectly flat with no defects abrasions deviations contusions…
and you wrap it off with some linux 3d graphics lib hacking
Not sure! What is CFAR?
Center For Applied Rationality. They hosted “workshops” were people could learn to be more rational. Except there methods weren’t really tested. And pretty culty. And reaching the correct conclusions (on topics such as AI doom) were treated as proof of rationality.
Edit: still host, present tense. I had misremembered some news of some other rationality adjacent institution as them shutting down, nope, they are still going strong, offering regular 4 day
brainwashing sessionsworkshops.
Utterly rancid linkedin post:
text inside image:
Why can planes “fly” but AI cannot “think”?
An airplane does not flap its wings. And an autopilot is not the same as a pilot. Still, everybody is ok with saying that a plane “flies” and an autopilot “pilots” a plane.
This is the difference between the same system and a system that performs the same function.
When it comes to flight, we focus on function, not mechanism. A plane achieves the same outcome as birds (staying airborne) through entirely different means, yet we comfortably use the word “fly” for both.
With Generative AI, something strange happens. We insist that only biological brains can “think” or “understand” language. In contrast to planes, we focus on the system, not the function. When AI strings together words (which it does, among other things), we try to create new terms to avoid admitting similarity of function.
When we use a verb to describe an AI function that resembles human cognition, we are immediately accused of “anthropomorphizing.” In some way, popular opinion dictates that no system other than the human brain can think.
I wonder: why?
This is too fucking dumb to even be called sophistry.
slophistry
Its almost like flapping part isn’t a requirement for something to fly.
of course MBA came up with this
an airplane doesn’t flap its wings
You ever see a random shitpost video, like the backgroud music, look it up and realize you already have the vinyl record? That just happened to me.
additional layer is that according to comments first track is also used in chinese nature documentaries
Dijkstra did it first, but it is very ai-booster to steal work without credit or understanding, I guess.
The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
I can use bad analogies also!
- If airplanes can fly, why can’t they fly to the moon? It is a straightforward extension of existing flight technology, and plotting airplane max altitude from 1900-1920 shows exponential improvement in max altitude. People who are denying moon-plane potential just aren’t looking at the hard quantitative numbers in the industry. In fact, with no atmosphere in the way, past a certain threshold airplanes should be able to get higher and higher and faster and faster without anything to slow them down.
I think Eliezer might have started the bad airplane analogies… let me see if I can find a link… and I found an analogy from the same author as the 2027
fanficforecast: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HhWhaSzQr6xmBki8F/birds-brains-planes-and-ai-against-appeals-to-the-complexityEliezer used a tortured metaphor about rockets, so I still blame him for the tortured airplane metaphor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gg9a4y8reWKtLe3Tn/the-rocket-alignment-problem
JFC I click on the rocket alignment link, it’s a yud dialogue between “alfonso” and “beth”. I am not dexy’ed up enough to read this shit.
Yes the 2 rs in strawberry machine thinks. In the same way that an airplane flies. /s
E: it gets even worse as half the AI field says the airplanes fly like how birds do. That is why the anthropomorphization is bad. Because it both doesn’t think as in the function, nor think as in the system. And by anthropomorphizing people make it look like it can do both.
tesla: “your car is not your car and we have deep, varied firmware and systems access to it on a permanent basis. we can see you and control you at all times. piss us off and we’ll turn off the car that we own.”
also tesla: “sorry no you can’t return it”
I wonder how often Musk fires employees who explain to him that, no using tesla cars for distributed computing is a bad idea and we should stop working on this.
Solid, high-quality sneer from Adactio - the end is a particular highlight:
The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.
If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers.
The kokotajlo/scoot thing apparently made it to the new york times.
So this is what that was about:
stubsack post from two months ago
On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trump’s term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.
edit: also @gerikson is apparently a superforcaster
when you say “made it”, i think FUCKING ROOSE
Spooks as a service
Check out the by-line. Big surprise!
missed that at the time, but you’d think scoot would have an easy time finding a contact at a major publication like the NYT…
“Imagine a technology so useless you cannot run doom on it” https://bsky.app/profile/sosowski.bsky.social/post/3lm63a2srgc24
LW: “being a younger brother makes you gay, the Catholic hierarchy is full of younger brothers, ergo 80% of the Vatican is gay”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybwqL9HiXE8XeauPK/how-gay-is-the-vatican
Considering how rightwingers have tried to link gayness to pedophilia this is a subject I would avoid if I was them. E: and gwern just goes there.
The comments are … “a hoot”
I would bet pretty hard on option #3. The older the parents are at the time of conception, the lower the quality of their gametes, which can translate into various negative health and cognitive effects on the child.
combines ageism, ableism ,and homophobia into one neat package
Also that weird ‘breed early’ fetish common in a lot of rw spaces. And last I looked at it this whole ‘older people do worse’ thing while it mostly seems (it is complicated and lot of things can happen etc)to exist mostly affects the pregnancy less so the child, and even then the effects didnt seem to be big. Not big enough to be relevant here. (But iirc 99.99% of the research in this is only in about pregnancies, so wouldn’t put much stock in ‘older parents affect on IQ’ style research, due to the type of people interested in that).
But im not a researcher, just a person who looked at the stats a couple of years back and apart from pregnancy risk i wasnt that worried.
E: and look at that the op there agrees with me.
The modern father of this literature is Ray Blanchard
🚨🚨🚨 Do not take Ray Blachard’s work seriously !
Ray “Asian cartoons cause trans people” Blachard.
Oh look, it’s a penis! I should put some sort of ring around it and see what gets it slightly erect! Repeatedly! For science!
You know, what I find most hilarious about the “fraternal birth order effect” is that they’re so obsessed with eugenics and biological essentialism that they’re ignoring that the very very obvious social fact of growing up with older brothers might have a lil bit more of an effect than “maternal antibodies to the neuroligin NLGN4Y protein”.
edit: Oh right, they pretend they’re accounting for that! Yeah no, I’ve heard all about your “twin studies” and things, I’m not joining your cult.
Reminds me of an SMBC comic that had a setup along the same lines, that if male birth order correlates with homosexuality and family size trends being what they are, the past must have been considerably gayer on average.
Obligatory Colm Tóibín: Among the Flutterers
Gumroad’s asshole CEO, Sahil Lavingia, NFT fanboy who occasionally used his customer database to track down and get into fights with people on twitter, has now gone professional fash and joined DOGE in order to hollow out the department of veterans affairs and replace the staff with chatbots.
https://tedium.co/2025/04/06/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama/
some more wild sneers, this time about MS ripping off Q2 for a time-limited shitty experience
This demo is powered by a “World and Human Action Model” (WHAM)
George Michael must be spinning in his grave
Considering PC Gamer bought the AI hype hook, line and sinker a few months ago, I’d say this is a particularly notable sneer.
This is pure gut instinct, but it seems AI bros’ ability to bedazzle the press is fading fast.
Forced mass-adoption of this stuff by consumers is here, now, demanding our approval, attention, and precious time. A public tech demo exists to impress, and the Copilot Gaming Experience does not. Doom on a calculator, but we had to boil a lake or two to get it and are being told it’s the future of games. I reject this future. Not only do I find it philosophically and ethically repugnant, it also made my tummy hurt.
💯 no notes
In the late 2000s, rationalists were squarely in the middle of transhumanism. They were into the Singularity, but also the cryonics and a whole pile of stuff they got from the Extropians. It was very much the thing.
These days they’re most interested in Effective Altruism (loudly -the label at least) and race science (used to be quiet, now a bit louder). I hardly ever hear them even mention transhumanism as it was back then.
Did rationalists abandon transhumanism?
Is it just me? What happened?
Yeah this kind of stuff is why im not the biggest fan of the tescreal label.
still holds - it’s still a bunch that needs a label and that’s the label
even as TREACLES was right there
(i asked emile, they said it was TESCREAL is very searchable. i mean fine)
Tired: Sand Hill Road
Wired: Treacle Mine Road
Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn’t seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don’t have a copy of any of Kurzweil’s books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they’re surely way off.
Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don’t doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I’ve seen a couple of signs of that already.
Yes, there was a big hype in the upcoming biotech revolution in popular transhumanist media a ~decade ago. Lot of it seems to have fizzled out or gone nootropics like stuff. (And even that is meh).
One of the most popular and controversial ways in recent times to use technological means to improve human condition and overcome its natural limitations is gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy. Transhumanism is woke now — hell, “trans” is right there in the name!
It’s possible that the most popular fora for discussions of the other topics were drowned out by AI doomerism and the people who are interested in them simply left.
As to cryonics… for both LLM doomers and accelerationists, they have no need for a frozen purgatory when the techno-rapture is just a few years around the corner.
As for the rest of the shiny futuristic dreams, they have give way to ugly practical realities:
-
no magic nootropics, just Scott telling people to take adderal and other rationalists telling people to micro dose on LSD
-
no low hanging fruit in terms of gene editing (as epistaxis pointed out over on reddit) so they’re left with eugenics and GeneSmith’s insanity
-
no drexler nanotech so they are left hoping (or fearing) the god-AI can figure it (which is also a problem for ever reviving cryonically frozen people)
-
no exocortex, just over priced google glasses and a hallucinating LLM “assistant”
-
no neural jacks (or neural lace or whatever the cyberpunk term for them is), just Elon murdering a bunch of lab animals and trying out (temporary) hope on paralyzed people
The future is here, and it’s subpar compared to the early 2000s fantasies. But hey, you can rip off Ghibli’s style for your shitty fanfic projects, so there are a few upsides.
-
Sometimes, checking the Talk page of a Wikipedia article can be entertaining.
In short: There has been a conspiracy to insert citations to a book by a certain P. Gagniuc into Wikipedia. This resulted in said book gaining about 900 citations on Google Scholar from people who threw in a footnote for the definition of a Markov chain. The book, Markov Chains: From Theory to Implementation and Experimentation (2017), is actually really bad. Some of the comments advocating for its inclusion read like chatbot (bland, generic, lots of bullet points). Another said that it should be included because it’s “the most reliable book on the subject, and the one that is part of ChatGPT training set”.
This has been argued out over at least five different discussion pages.
“Conspiracy” is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).
A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:
Despite Malparti warning that “it would be a waste of time for everyone” I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as “the unique solution” to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be “eventually achieved”, with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a math book review that said “Do not use for anything.”
“This book is not a place of honor…”
