Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.
I rewrote the ad so they can lean into their marketing strategy.
I want to make a zoolander riff but my brain just isn't cooperating, so instead pretend I did (just like these people pretend their product is worth something)
Hahah lol, that was pretty good.
I immortalized it for you into a meme here
…
thanks magibook!
can’t wait for this shit to show up in usage among people who have english as an additional language at different level of fluency to their primaries. totally don’t see it causing a cascade clusterfuck in communication and comprehension.
there’s already a strain of this out there, with a lot of english-non-first students using LLMs to “make their work sound more polished”. similar as the strain using it for CVs etc
ran across a great thread on fedi a while back, will see if I can find it
ah yes, the Simple English wiki filter but wrong
I can't even
It's good that they're offsetting their advantages in the marketplace of money by actively crippling themselves in the marketplace of ideas.
Two tweets and I can tell you at least 5 substacks he subscribes to
PrimalPoly was a sort of semi regular of the old sneerclub, so I can tell you a lot more than that.
Fr? What's his deal?
I have such sights to show you And more
About half of evopsychgoogle's tweets are also about him and his wife.
He and his wife (also a piece of work) have a very strange poly relationship btw, it seems to be more a constant dominance struggle than a loving poly relationship.
And you know how a lot of these people when faced with the slightest pushback turn further and further right. 2013
90% of the weird evo psych women on their period things you ever heard about, also him. (And while I don't get the American fascination with strippers/strip clubs, I do get it is an important macho man culture thing for American men to do things with/around strip clubs so cudos for him that he managed to trick the university into sponsoring his visits).
long term Evolutionary Psychology race scientists
also hang out in Effective Altruism, of course
I think there's a bug with your post button, it sent the same message twice
both him and his wife are quite the pieces of work
he’s also figured here a couple of times too
Couldn't find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:
does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?
it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says "okay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasn't a guy or a girl"
Shouldn't they be fans of The Culture? And didn't The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?
(It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)
I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We don't even blog!)). So I doubt it.
Hey! I blog!
Seldom more than a couple paras tho.
Sorry, if you can read a blog post in less than 30 minutes it is a Rationalist footnote. ;)
the Culture humans accepted being subsumed into a Mind after 400 years, so Yudkowsky disapproves. He also dislikes The Minds.
holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesn’t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because they’re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yud’s nonsense ever will be
so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:
yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. it’s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yud’s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.
there’s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always don’t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just aren’t bored enough yet.
yud omits this (probably, I’m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isn’t gonna end your existence (they don’t do murder, and there’s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient being’s mind) but they’re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.
Somebody in the comments points this out and he gets annoyed with this as some sort of literary device to not do the hard transhumanist work or something.
Which is odd, as subliming is fine as if this wasn't there humans minds and mind minds could do a singularity style intelligence explosion afterwards you couldn't describe things because of the singularity style event. And Banks wrote science fiction which is always about humans, and not 'the period after beings become so powerful we cannot really tell what is going on anymore as the increase of intelligence has reached infinity'
Subliming sidesteps this problem because it wants to be interesting fiction, and not weird gobbledygook of incomprehensible alien minds. Yud basically forgets that The Culture is science fiction written for real human beings who live now.
But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.
It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldn't really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).
(I'm also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you don't die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).
Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.
select the Banks extract, pass through wc:
1677select the yud.....emanation, do same:
13442at this stage it's likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.
There's a metal ballad in there, I swear.
other album track titles:
What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? It's the one HN likes best too. It's probably the only one I've not re-read. Maybe it's how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture he's coerced to infiltrate.
Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.
i would think they didn't read it carefully, and/or until the end, and don't realise that ultimately it's gurgeh's revulsion at azad's societal rules, and him fully embracing the culture's values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.
Obvsly you've read the novel more than I have considering your nick... I might have to give it another go.
OTOH I'd rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.
tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona – i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)
@gerikson I second Use of Weapons, but I also like Excession and the Hydrogen Sonata, where the Culture has to do some self-reflection.
I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he can't rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)
edit it's been ages since I've read this books so I've been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get
🤮
@gerikson Veppers was *totally* a vicious parody of Elon Musk. (Iain despised billionaires—in American political terms he was an unabashed communist.)
Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?
Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don't say I didn't warn you.
But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.
don't mention skull sizes for 5 minutes challenge
It's so cute (euphemism for concerning) how their image of the average trans woman is a white computer science rationalist poster and not, like, a South American sex worker or something.
Classics of Reason
Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).
Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.
Not sure which sub a heartwarming story of Nazis shooting their own dicks off goes under, but: Nina Power of Compact gets called a nazi. Sues for defamation. In discovery, produces extensive facts not just supporting Nazi ideas but calling herself a Nazi. Loses so hard she just declared bankruptcy.
there has been no media coverage of this, but hoo boy does there need to be
EDIT: ohhh it's the fuckin LD50 gallery, straight up NRX. Judgement, PDF
ah yes, a good ole
we have scientifically ascertained that this is in fact that rare correct use case for the following emoji sequence: 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
hahahaha happy garbage day everybody
wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on
one day I'll find a way to shoehorn our experience with a Waldorf School into a sneer.
In summary, fairy-themed fascism can be tied back into the whole Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, esoteric Hitlerism shtick. You most commonly get ambushed with it when dealing with fallen hippies, but it is diffusing into the wider online right via weird 4chan things.
see also all the TERFs yesterday loudly coming out in support of Power and her Nazi revelation
the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway, or perhaps just walking over to the other side of the same room
It is funny how mad TERFs get when you mention they are saying the same things as neo-nazis, and then a few days later another TERF who is also a natzi is revealed again.
the original recipe nazis were deep into occultism so maybe
@self
This is one of those David Icke things where you’re not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if they're some kind of code or euphemism.
If you always bet on "everything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black people", you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.
having unfortunately known several David Icke fans: it’s always veiled antisemitism, and the veil gradually disappears the more you let them talk
e: yes, the area I live in is teeming with various flavors of conspiracy nut, why do you ask
I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like
"ah ah but he wrote books - that surely can't be the works of a person frothing in racism!" is something I've heard from a surprising number of people I've met
if racism made people illiterate every facebook group and every youtube comment section would look completely different
the answer is "both"
I know someone who's a practicing christian and has said they've seen angels
technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have .... not pushed matters
(e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that I've heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I don't know how much of a heuristic that sort of thing is by itself. the fairies thing may be a bit more concrete/direct - gonna have to try test it on some flaming racists sometime)
I think the connection isn't with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but aren't people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.
If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), it's only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.
@mountainriver @froztbyte The NPC meme says hi.
@hirvox @mountainriver @froztbyte Like a lot of other things that were funny in the late 80s and early 90s, the NPC meme has lost its shine …
@cstross @mountainriver @froztbyte What's old is new again. I hear even phrenology is making a comeback.
agreed, far too much chan shittery attached to it
I thought that was Hirvox point, that the NPC meme now goes hand in hand with Chan shittery because the NPC meme allows for an easy format to say that other people are not real people. With the added bonus of a built-in "just joking" defence.
wait, what? What sort of context? Multiple people? FFS TELL
so I think I must just have one of those faces cause it’s been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and it’s usually a weird show of trust? and it’s always something like “you know, I just think fairies must be real, like they’ve got to be out there? you know?”
and in all cases I’ve gone “…oh that’s cool” and mentally earmarked that person as “do not trust with heavy machinery”
just remembered someone i met decades ago going on and on about spiritualism and ESP and just happened to drop in their own massive racism, there's definitely a type
The crystals to anti-vaxx to full-blown fascism pipeline is real and I have more than a few cousins deep in that KKK hole. Hate to be a science brodude, but all the spiritualism stuff can be a gullibility magnet for those prone to self radicalisation (the bad type)
yeah i have one of those faces too (tall, blue eyes, Danish cheekbones), disconcerting number of nazis who wanted me to be in with them
I get the club invite most times I speak afrikaans in pretoria
in australia the club invite is just a way of saying "hi" to your fellow white person
I've never had the full on "let's be nazis together" invite but I've had several people launch unprompted into "now that it's just us white folks we can talk for real" mode. internally they must have been like "I see white skin, we are clear for takeoff, 54321"
funnily enough it hasn't happened since I became visibly trans
ja that can happen/s here too
presumably your bones comprehend all the non-weather reasons that .au is such a popular za expat destination
i mean, i have a friend who is literally a UFO religion believer, but they're decent and politically good and trustworthy and present as normal-English, so
see occasionally you meet a UFO person and they’re normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit. in effect, their UFO hobby is essentially a modified radio/birdwatching hobby that’s hopefully driving them to learn more about the world around them
but much more often you meet a UFO person and hear the absolute worst thing you’ve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldn’t discuss lizard people with them.
you know, I don't know if I've actually run into this kind of conversation. I don't think I have. or if I almost did, I fairly likely applied a conversation logic-shortcircuit way before it got there (because of ambient red flag count). but fuck me, if I don't know exactly the kind of person you're referring to.... :|
also
ZA has many problems (and oh christ could I wax lyrical), but thank fuck I do not live in fucking eaglecountry
it's a whole fucked-up 'ole dynamic when you need to "watch your back" in the most very literal sense because you didn't eat some bozo's shit :|
:<
@self
Have to wonder what happened to her brain since the days when she had stuff published at the Guardian.
given some of the other things I've seen from the guardian, not sure that would've necessarily been a contraindicator
@froztbyte
I mean they didn't seem very fashy at first. The later ones (2018, when she was fashy on the down-low ) started to get TERFy but earlier (2010-2014) it was all "the police aren't your friend” and stuff about government trying to restrict the right to protest, etc.
(I looked over her Guardian contributions after reading about the bankruptcy etc in this thread.)
I guess that is the same duration/timeline as the guardian downslope arc
@froztbyte
The guardian is kind of irrelevant to what I was getting at.
she had a piece in The Quietus in 2018, but by 2020 they had kicked a writer out for being pals with DC Miller, her co-plaintiff in this case
(just for confusion one of the Quietus guys is a different Luke Turner)
there are some phenomenal whoppers just in the opening paragraphs of that article, holy shit
this is gonna make great piecemeal reading today!
discovery as humiliation conga line of "fairy alien nazi racism is totally my bag baby"
"fairy alien nazi"? What kind of a multiclass is this
Wonder how the lawyers reacted when they got that treasure trove filled with stolen nazi gold during discovery.
Wonder how Power and Miller's lawyers reacted, lol
They will certainly win a lot of drinks in any 'who has had the dumbest clients' contests.
'And then we found the "I’m definitely a Nazi now lol" message' is a great punchline for a dumbest client ever joke
I read the judgement quite carefully and it makes no reference at all to the discovery material. the only evidence it demonstrates awareness of is public or is testimony
the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: "communities" managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data
We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.
if this were running you would be unlikely to know about it. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it's trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result
When my local civilians get drawn into the conflict
^via^ ^Little^ ^Bubby^ ^Child^
I could hear this while reading it ahaha
Right?!
Being far from home at the moment, I really appreciate Bubby's mountain vibes. Feels like a trip to Granny's house.
https://matduggan.com/a-eulogy-for-devops/
Possibly interesting blog post about what the idea of “devops” promised, and how it failed to deliver. With any luck, the “getting back to basics” thing will actually happen, instead of people imagining they are google and building nightmares out of kubernetes.
Every day I become more convinced that this acct is an elaborate psyop being run by Yann LeCun to discredit doomers. Nobody could be this gullible IRL, right?
Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.
xcancel
im doing my part
I went to the study, and that's the global market size for all sex toys annually, and just eyeballing another chart, butt plugs might be 10% of that. So butt plugs are around $3 or $4 Billion. On the bright side, unlike AI safety, butt plugs actually serve a function.
Meatloaf didn't anticipate the budgetary implications of enlisting us all in the Armies of the Night. Thus, humanity was ill-prepared when Skynet attacked..
Amazing.
I also remember another time people did the 'let two AI's (no idea what time it was at the time, certainly not an LLM, some other ML technique) talk to each other, but in a actual production setting (E:I was wrong on the setting, see the article for better info->), the Facebook/Meta one (First link I could find on google, didn't read it, just a way to find out more for people who never heard about it). But then it started to produce gibberish/'their own language'. Of course this was also a sign of it 'waking up'.
And I note again that in the LLM experiment, the 'AGI's' are still keeping perfectly fine to the bounds of the experiment, even if they do or do not directly reference the researcher. They still play into the fiction, as talking to the researcher about the other AI is part of the fiction. It would be more interesting if they did something unexpected than regurgitate video game ingame notes.
lol
Come on, I have written similar things while roleplaying as an AI. The first is useful when you need a quick break to go to the toilet, and the second is a good excuse because you made a mistake a real fictional AI couldn't make.
E: also funny that they worry about the shoggoth behind the friendly face and then get freaked out when the AI's talk in normal science fiction fluff to each other, and it doesn't become incoherently weird. (like the example above).
I’ve sat and had beer with someone (who’s worked in the space but not LLMs) who read the Bitter Lesson and got real into the idea of humans “just being universal function approximators” and had wholesale bought into the idea that we should throw everything we possibly can into this shit, no resource cost or requirement is too high or too uncertain, that it would definitely be the right thing to so
so I can tell you without no uncertainty that there are definitely people who buy into it
I poked the conversation gently, to see how far the conviction went. it was pretty comprehensively bought-in. was a somewhat surprising experience tbh
How did they respond to the counterargument that humans are simply... built different?
that was the response. and this is a person with exposure to (and their own undertakings in) creative works
it was a pretty wild conversation tbh
Cloudflare making the bet there's money in offering AI-scraping protection:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click
Dan Luu's "A discussion of discussions on AI bias", about techbros trying to gaslight the rest of the world into thinking ML models don't have problems
the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real
I run into this exact problem so often with music: it’s extremely fucking annoying to convince search engines or other kinds of things that, yes, I do in fact want that turkish/finnish/russian/brazilian/thai/irish/….. result set from this english query, and there’s just almost zero affordance for it
they segment things into de facto silos and if you don’t already happen to have some way in which to pull on a string to lead the way there (or can input the desired query in the applicable language and spelling) you’ll have a bitch of a time. check a couple of those items from my entries on the music thread a while back for references to test with
god damn those recasting images
it will never not be hilarious how pathetic this technology/approach is
Aaaand, there it is.
I remember I used to watch this guy's videos, and the icon for the image viewer in serenity was pepe the frog. And he also admitted to browsing 4chan. And he changed his twitter link to x.com before even twitter changed it. Also it was kinda weird that he had some private discord channels whose contents he was very secretive of. Now that he's making a nonprofit with github's former CEO, there is absolutely zero barriers to the exact same bullshit from all the companies he complains about.
Ehhhh. This is the identical PR they ended up accepting: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648
I have feels about the implied “the author behaves like a shithead because he’s ESL” but eh. If it works.
yeah, pretending that this is just a misunderstanding of the language is a bit disingenuous, but i'm not going to argue with the results.
this:
well this fucken sucks. I was rooting for the dude and his projects.
ah fuck I didn't know Ladybird had those people involved (was only aware of project existence and reasons), fuck :<
Off Topic: Politcs
::: spoiler spoiler
Best of luck to our folks in the UK, enjoy the Tory tears! :::
I doubt any of you are following Dutch politics. But it is day 3 of the new (far right) cabinet, and day 1 and 2 were already a clown show. I think today they are going on 'vacation' (summer recess), so nothing will be done. "Lekker gewerkt jongens"
Sounds like a real "Dog caught the car" situation. Do you think they'll be able to cause much permanent damage to the institutions before they get turfed out?
Sadly I think they will do quite a lot of damage, but most of it is by just not solving any issues which are issues currently (and pretending non-issues, like immigration, are huge problems). They don't really seem competent enough yet to do real damage. (yeah, I'm including Wilders, who has been a politician all his life in this list). But a lot of damage has already been done. A lot of racists feel like they are allowed to be racist again for example. (a similar thing you heard coming from France, with the current rise of Le P, people going 'ah soon we are going to bash the gays again').
Oddly our cabinet has always been mostly rightwing basically (at least the past 14 years), so it is really weird to see the far right pretend like the left has had any power.
A lot of the dumb plans also cannot be done because of the EU. So a lot of people who voted for the current parties (like the radicalized bougie farmers) will be hurt a lot, so it will get worse later after they can't get jack shit done. (Which, as always with protofascists, will be purely blamed on others).
I hate how so many people are genuine assholes at heart.
It goes to show how important it is to put fascists in lockers.
me talking to someone after describing a dumb and horrible LW thing:
one of the worse things about LW is that even just explaining their beliefs to uninvolved people makes you look like a complete weirdo
I’ve (irl) met a “part-time” LW reader and tried to have a conversation about some of the shit, and … same experience
just utterly had no ability to even receive the information about the longstanding sexual abuse or statements of yud being a charisma-for-nerds grifter
(had an earlier conversation with ‘em some many months prior calling out many of issues in coiner world after they’d gone laser-eyes having read the bitcoin paper, and they eventually got their head out of their ass, so…. I’m hopeful it’s not all lost yet)
Well the FFVII house was kinda like a rationalist grouphouse…
wait. You’re telling me a poly nest based on FF7 fandom exist(s/ed)? And I wasn’t part of it?!?!?!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/8gdwvp/the-tale-of-the-final-fantasy-vii-house-is-a-window-into-the-dark-side-of-cosplay-529
that's a big oof for me dawg
as a former member of multiple livejournal fanfic circlejerks, I am so sad that LW didn't join the rest of LJ in (1) getting off or (2) being mean on fandom_wank, and instead decided to create the torment nexus.
i expect dreamwidth took one look and Denise got out the flamethrower
hahaha no failfandomanon is extremely at Dreamwidth, but I think the wankiest people mostly moved to other places in recent years.
Personally haven’t seen a headline about Ol’ Billy Boy ever since word got around that he was a diamond medallion member of the lolita express airlines. William Gatorade thinks AI’s got what climate craves, i.e. waste heat.
Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.
Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
i think that openai also wanted to solve their problems with fusion, but they got a step further, they made a startup for this. not normal nuclear power plant hot rock machine, no, they want tech that is perpetually Just A Decade Away. it makes some perverse sense if your funding is dependent on misguided hype only
Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.
dunno about rockets, but antenna thingy works only because you can simulate performance of antenna very reliably, precisely and quickly. This data was fed back, random small changes were made, things that were an improvement passed to the next iteration. Not sure how this approach is called but none of it is LLM
"genetic algorithm" - something I hadn't previously seen branded as "AI", but I guess I'm not surprised
yeah that's it, forgot a word for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
that ST5 antenna looks like a low-poly two turn helical antenna, but how it looks like will be a function of design requirements
GAs went out of the limelight before the rest of the beaus of current “AI” branding came to be, suspect that might be part of it
(Another suspicion is that it’s because they’re…fairly observable, ito operation? So it’s far less easily claimable that one of these has gained sentience, or all the other dumb bullshit that the cluster has spun in recent years)
Ugh, so many people are working the "AI will solve X problem" mill. I don't need nor want AI to be there increasing output.
fusion research is just thinnest disguise for thermonuclear weapons research, especially the inertial confinement fusion variety
Why is he carrying books and DVDs on a baking sheet?
He has a smart oven with AI and wants to feed it data?
FEED ME,
SEYMOURBILLY!One is by David Brooks, so it's guaranteed to be half baked?
ah sweet
manmade horrors beyond my comprehension
Biblically Accurate Gymnasts
Now this is the shit. This right here. The only usecase for genAI - massively uncanny shitposts meant for consumption at 3AM in a dark corner of YouTube while on vibes enhancing substances.
This is what god wouldn't have wanted and therefore is what we must pursue.
fuck yes
@BlueMonday1984 The machines are finally starting to understand art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K7aY-_b9sk
Dan Hendrycks wants us all to know it's imperative his AI kill switch bill is passed- after all, the cosmos are at stake here!
https://xcancel.com/DrTechlash/status/1805448100712267960#m
Super weird that despite receiving 20 million dollars in funding from SBF & co. and not being able to shut the fuck up about 10^^^10 future human lives the moment he goes on a podcast, Danny boy insists that any allegations that he is lobbying on behalf of the EAs are simply preposterous.
Now please hand over your gpus uwu, it’s for your safety 🤗 we don’t allow people to have fissile material, so why would we allow them to multiply matrices?
Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(
Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated "poetry"
Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn't it? Burn it all down.
turns out there was a good reason they wanted to turf us, we just didn't know it yet
Ex-evangelical spotted!
What is it about growing up in insular fundamentalist communities that drives peeps straight into the basilisk's scaly embrace?
Theres a specific word for that phenomena I believe, I just can’t remember at the moment. It certainly is a thing with all the high control group cults, say ex-JW’s.
Crank magnetism?
we finally posted Diz's LLM logic puzzle post to Pivot to AI! Let's see if this draws flocks of excited new users to awful.systems ... we're doing Ray Kurzweil tomorrow, lol.
There was a warcraft 3 pro who played build orders created by Chat-GPT and it was fascinating the degree to which it was able to perfectly imitate the form of the kind of thing you'd find on liquidpedia or some other guide but simultaneously make nonsensical errors that betrayed that it had no awareness. Like, telling you to build a unit of a different race or build without meeting prerequisites.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchyChess/comments/10ydnbb/i_placed_stockfish_white_against_chatgpt_black/
lol, amazing. and I recall this was one of the areas where people fairly successfully (iirc?) applied GAs to synthesising strategy and build order
(think it was for Starcraft 2 not WC3, but domains very similar)
I've definitely seen some impressive machine learning-based outcomes (definitely fucking up the technical details here) but there's a world of difference between a system trained to play StarCraft and a system trained to predict the next bit of text.
oh absolutely - part of what's entertaining is that the dipshits don't even seem to realize that (or don't admit it?)
I'm so sick of "if only we had more humanities in education the elites wouldn't be fucking up the world." that has nothing to do with reality, it never has, it never will
if only king leopold had been exposed to the humanities bro 😞
traveling back in time and teaching the rulers of the british empire about a little thing called literature
i thought it was a part of prevention of future engineer disease cases
Yeah same, but hey my cs education had courses both on basic ethics and how to run businesses, so some attempts were made at least.
it ought to be named philosopher's disease
It really is unwarranted self importance. t humanities major
Is law considered part of the humanities because lawyers have been fucking things up in society since at least the French revolution.
never really seen ludicity blog before, now that i read up ten posts on so in a single sitting i lowkey want to fuck off to live in a cabin in the woods
the sheer wastefulness of it all, bubbleness of its economics, piling technical debt, institutional stupidity, and the man also feels off in a way that i can't put my finger on (maybe just by association)
ludic be like: this industry makes no sense and causes untold suffering, but if you emit right vibes you can get by and make a pile of cash. Let me help you make a bank off those rubes
Well, there is no ethical work under capitalism.
Also he clearly has good intentions when it comes to what jobs he seeks.
what i mean, he comes off as a benevolent grifter and i think it's sleazy
I've noticed something similar with a lot of folks on the younger side in tech, although I haven't had the headspace to dig into it. the thing I noticed is a lot of folks still willing to go into this dysfunctional shit getting highly paid because of knowing how bad things are elsewhere. afaict it's not quite so much fygm as "just" trying to hoarde in the wake of 2+ decades of multiple world once-in-a-lifetime economic clusterfuck, as well as in the face of the total existential disaster that exists otherwise
(this is the impression I get in a wider sense. I'm not sure if it's right, or applicable particularly here)
(there's also a form of that which is quite strong in USA-based folks, but I don't think ludic hails from the states)
0ms - AI-powered DNS resolver
the fuck
the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:
so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? there’s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or they’re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers aren’t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says it’s AI… right?
this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying “it’s free until we say it isn’t”
wonder if it's white-label Cloudflare
I got curious and looked up both IPs associated with the domain name and it is in fact just CloudFlare
also, their DNS-over-HTTPS (this is new to me but I stay the fuck away from cloudflare and it looks like a standard they’ve pushed for) endpoint is just the 1.1.1.1 one with the domain name changed, but the AdGuard and Accelerator ones basically confirm they’re analyzing traffic before passing it off to cloudflare
that's fabulously odious!
yeah, think i'll be writing this one up for the weekend
this sort of thing does not help me have an anti-carceral attitude
This is slightly weird. There's a company called "DNSfilter" that's been advertising itself for a few years as an "AI-powered DNS resolver" - since well before the present hype. I suspect their "AI" bit is threat detection with machine learning in. They appear to be going for the lucrative boring enterprise market.
This thread suspects the whole 0ms.dev thing was written with LLMs and the "mirrors" bit is basically an open proxy.
You sure they're skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker ...
see I don’t have a smoking gun on this, but if it is a garden variety adblocker and whatever the accelerator does (it’s extremely unclear) running on cloudflare workers, they at least have the ability to MiTM and modify DNS queries, and open proxies are always a security nightmare. my impression is the filter list they link is either what that endpoint uses to filter, or it’s LLM vomit they kept in because it felt more legitimate.
this might be worth poking at more in a controlled setting — a command line DNS-over-HTTP client using their endpoints and some exploration of the open proxy with curl (especially with sites that utilize credentials, with great care taken to use disposable accounts for this) might be illuminating
could test this by setting up a simple example page and seeing the originating source for the traffic
same technique as previous, using an http (not https) canary:
idle thought: since this is (as @self highlighted) effectively an open proxy, you could also just resource-bomb it quite easily
not that I'm planning to, but it'd be dirt bloody easy and it would be a very quick test as to the claims on the site
while looking into this I was surprised to find that hickory doesn't seem to have a cli binary in its crates. did find crab-hole and adguardian in the process though, gonna have to play with those later
a quick check using a canary. test command:
canary trigger:
so, yeah, the actual resolve is being done by cloudflare servers too - it's not even just a cf frontproxy to a different backend service. could be done with cf workers or something, I imagine, would need to test a bit further to know/try see
I’d sure love to “gamify” my health for $10 a month 🥴
When I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil (not any time soon don't worry!) I'll do so with a cell-phone in my hand, open to whatever god-forsaken replacement for the American healthcare system Silicon Valley dreams up.
My family would find me lying there unconscious. The animated corporate mascot, looking slightly uncertain but still happy, would just repeat in a sing-song cartoonish voice "You might want to check your blood pressure!" and "you still haven't completed today's tasks for Health+ points! But don't worry, there's still time!"
Eventually they manage to shut Healthy Bob up; but continue to receive birthday reminders from Pinstagrambook long after my passing, with no setting to turn it off.
Thanks I hate it
This is just the Glucoboy but worse
some numbers on recent hypewave investments in here (via techmeme)
jesus fucking christ these people would love to call it the enlightenment or something, wouldn’t they?
one day soon I’m going to get to my project of building up a graph database of every crank and issuer of batshit statements like these, so that in times to come I can easily follow up on ‘em and see how their shit aged. but all hail sammy, the saviour! no, forget about that musk fool, no-one ever liked him! sammy is where it’s at!
also @dgerard for your pillaging pleasure
Behold
Motion capture, but worse - brought to you by AI
(seriously, I saw random Youtubers do better shit than this eight years ago and that is not hyperbole)
wow, that side-by-side is so obviously bad i'm surprised it even got posted. usually AI bros try to hide the worst of the tech, or at the very least, say shit like "this is only the beginning!!"
also, was not expecting to click that link and see FUNKe. good nostalgia
it ignores her eyes THE WHOLE TIME!
Ian Moss on Twitter
Took me a moment.
(I’m still in the moment, please explain?)
The automated hypothetical question re-iterated for years now was at last true.
OH got it. Thanks dawg. The automated hypothetical question bot is right once every 5 years
YouTube recommended me this hot garbage where we judge humanities like it's a STEM field. I want my time back or at least some quality sneers: https://youtu.be/v0eWDScWSXY?si=wgJ60AfT0YYn_4-M
Callard and Hanson, there is no way i'm watching a second of that
Considering the view counts a common thought. The amount of twitter followers vs yt subs vs actual views is funny. They even tried a tiktok.
And they are trying so hard. Andrew Tate! Hogwarts Legacy! Destiny (the streamer, not the game, betting on the wrong horse there folks) Slapping at the Oscars! Pandemics!
Posted the Ray Kurzweil thing on Pivot To AI. Let's see how many comments we get that won't be posted.
Tweet (Xcancel) from Ed Zitron: "This report is damning. Goldman Sachs's Head of Global Equity Research doesn't believe that generative AI is capable of solving complex problems, and says the tech industry "is too complacent in its assumptions that costs will decline substantially"", more in the quote tweet.
Expect promptheads to dismiss this as being the ramblings of a "DEI hire" because they're confused by the dual use of "equity" in their title.
Not just promptheads but the entire conspiratorial right is already way into not understanding how these functions and organizations work. There is a weird group of them who thinks that blackrock is a group of woke people (some of them are even saying it is 'THEM') behind everything. Because they confused a talk about 'we need to tell organisations to focus more on diversity' as a pro-diversity stance and not a 'we need to make sure the companies we invest in don't get sued, which causes a drop in share price'.
I’m sure they would find some way¹ to ruin it, but it would be fun if we could convince them to pass a law in some vice-signaling US state that bans private equity’s purchase of every vet and general contractor and empty house.
¹ Anti-semitism, probably.