Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud -- but I'd lie if I said I wasn't worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Overheard my kids, one of them had some group project in school and the other asked who they had ended up in group with. After hearing the names, the reaction was "they are good, none of them will use AI".
So as always kids that actually does something in group projects doesn't want to end up in a group with kids that won't contribute. Difference is just that instead of just slacking off and doing nothing they will today "contribute" AI slop. And as always the main lesson from group projects in school is avoid ending up in a group with slackers.
Dad hi-five
Yell at cloud computing instead, that is usually justified.
More seriously: it's not at all that. The AI pushers want to make people feel that way -- "it's inevitable", "it's here to stay", etc. But the threat to learning and maintaining skills is real (although the former worries me more than the latter -- what has been learned before can often be regained rather quickly, but what if learning itself is inhibited?).
AI's already destroying people's cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn't be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it'll fuck up human's capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.
Thankfully, I've managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:
(That I'm a NEET also helps (can't have AI bro coworkers if you're unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)
I'd certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didn't work for a big tech company that's gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I don't want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.
I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense I'd be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I don't quit for complicated reasons. I'm not that far from the breaking point, but I'm going to try to hang in for a few more years.
But yeah, I'm pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.
Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare’
It's wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.
Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.
...and that's why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.
How about common sense..
Ugh. So terrible. Tech's obsession with "scaling" is one of the worst things about tech.
No, it cannot. It's a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.
Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life
Aaaarrgh. Tech's obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Ok I stop here now, there's more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.
Yeah that jumped out to me. Like human teaching has scaled fine to billions of people. It certainly has a better track record than Duolingo which provides meh study material and leads to ahem mixed learning outcomes despite being around for over a decade.
Of course there's the subtext of "but also we'll be able to put all those obsolete teachers out of business and make tons of money!"
Being in tech I definitely see misuse of A/B testing sometimes. Sometimes a team will ignore common sense entirely but come up with metrics that measure something irrelevant. The metrics are, intentionally or not, gamed to tell them what they want to hear. They then run the (useless) numbers and use that to justify why their change was good, even in the face of intense user backlash.
One particular example that just came to mind: someone made a bad change, and lots of people complained. Eventually the complaints started to peter out. Then they claimed "see! people just had to get used to it!" (versus the rather more obvious possibility that nobody bothered to complain more than once).
Not really. If schools aren't spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.
In other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:
A lawyer who depends on a sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a sovereign citizen.
Considering how LLMs are trained, they prob contain a lot of sov cit stuff, wonder if a lawyer/judge can trick a LLM into going full sovcit by just adding a few words/rephrasing a bit.
Absolutely!
The thing about sov cits is that they use legalish words like a magical incantation. The words have no meaning to them, really. It's a tarted-up glossolalia which reifies their wishes to manifest some outcome in court.
If a lawyer surrenders their craft to a bullshit engine, they're doing the exact same thing: spouting law-shaped nonsense in the hope of getting the verdict they want, their only differentiator being that they showed up wearing a much nicer suit than the sov cit.
"ChatGPT, does the fringe on the flag mean that this is an Admiralty court? Also, please enlighten me on the finer points of bird law."
OK completely off topic but update on my USA angst from earlier this year: I'm heckin' moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Back on topic: Duolingo continues to circle the drain. I kind of hate that I'm linking to this because it's exactly what that marketing-run company wants; but they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7507337734520868142?lang=en
I uh... I don't think it's going to change anyone's minds. Half the comments on the videos go something like:
Good luck!!
The cringey "hello, fellow kids" vibe is really unbearable... good that people are not falling for that.
If Duolingo still had their userbase's goodwill, it would've probably worked. They've been pulling that shit since their mascot Duo turned into a meme, and its worked out for them up until now.
Good luck with the move. Always sounded like a lot of trouble moving continents. And moving out of the USA seemed worse, dont they have some weird taxation system for people who moved away?
Nah it's not too bad the IRS guide is only 40 pages! ^somebody^ ^save^ ^me^
I haven't run through this in practice yet and I will probably give up and hire a professional.
I think there’s also some kind of at-time exit tax if you ever decide to give up US citizenship, but I’m not good on the details
I’ve semi-seriously said elsewhere that the US treats its citizens as property (in the “as slaves” sense), and it’s fucked how close to true that is
glad to read you’re making some headway on getting the fuck out though!
Yeah I'll probably have a big tax bill if I ever renounce citizenship. I haven't thought about it too much yet since it's still my only citizenship, and I have a lot of friends and family in the USA. Like being a visitor might be fine in normal times, but I wouldn't want to rely on it in an emergency today given how visitors are being treated lately.
'Till now I was always able to just do financial planning myself, but I really should hire a professional.
absolutely worth it given your coming plans. sucks because yet more expenditure but your happiness and safety are more important
Sounds like getting a professional to file it (at least the first time) will in the end cost less.
But congratulations on the move!
Oof im sorry, that sounds horrible. But hey welcome in the modern world, your other taxes will prob not be that much trouble.
I'm interested in jetting out as well. Did you get a job first? Or did you do something similar to Germany's "Opportunity Visa"?
An internal transfer at my job actually. At least for now they need me so helped set that up, though I'm pretty worried on if that will last long enough for permanent residency or not.
I'd be a little nervous on a job seeker's visa before knowing the language. It is really hard to find a job as a programmer in Europe without living there or being a citizen; because of language barriers, the labor market test, and the difficulty in getting a company to sponsor your visa. I didn't send out that many job applications but so far my response rate is zero.
Probably if I couldn't do a transfer I'd have ended up on an investment visa or study visa somewhere; though maybe I could have found a job in Japan since I can read intermediate Japanese.
I expect learning German to the B1 level will open up a lot of doors, so that's my main goal for the next few years.
Anecdata: if you're working in IT in Sweden you can get away with just English. I know a guy living in Berlin who hasn't
botheredgot around to learning German yet, he also manages with English.But it's a big Community and different parts have different requirements and of course different expectations.
It's the same taxation system, you have to pay US taxes still, but I think you can deduct taxes paid in the new country from what you owe the US.
that’s seriously amazing! I’m glad you were able to get things going relatively quickly.
Just thinking about how I watched “Soylent Green” in high school and thought the idea of a future where technology just doesn’t work anymore was impossible. Then LLMs come and the first thing people want to do with them is to turn working code into garbage, and then the immediate next thing is to kill living knowledge by normalising people relying on LLMs for operational knowledge. Soon, the oceans will boil, agricultural industries will collapse and we’ll be forced to eat recycled human. How the fuck did they get it so right?
Doesnt help that there is a group of people who go 'using the poor like
biofuelfood what a good idea'.E: Really influential movie btw. ;)
A real modest {
brunch|bunch}I like that Soylent Green was set in the far off and implausible year of 2022, which coincidentally was the year of ChatGPT’s debut.
OpenAI should be opening Thanatoria any day now, with Sora^TM^ to generate visual^[Soon with audio! ] content to comfort you on your hemlock shuffle off the mortal
buffalocoil.Our subjects here at awful systems can make us angry. They can spend lots of money to make everything worse. They can even make us dead if things go really off the rails, but one thing they can never do is make us take them seriously.
does awful have taglines enabled? this would be nice as one
Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.
Firstly, an update on Grok's White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grok's prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.
Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:
You want my opinion on the "scab" comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.
Think you are misreading the blog post. They did this after the Grok had its white genocide hyperfocus thing. It shows the process of the xAI public github (their fix (??) for Groks hyperfocus) is bad, not that they started it. (There is also no reason to believe this github is actually what they are using directly (would be pretty foolish of them, which is why I could also believe they could be using it))
If anything I think this is pretty solid evidence that they aren't actually using it. There was enough of a gap that the nuke of that PR was an edit to the original post and I can't imagine that if it had actually been used that we wouldn't have seen another flurry of screenshots of bad output.
I think it also suggests that the engineers at x.ai are treating the whole thing with a level of contempt that I'm having a hard time interpreting. On one hand it's true that the public GitHub using what is allegedly grok's actual prompt (at least at time of publishing) is probably a joke in terms of actual transparency and accountability. On the other hand, it feels almost like either a cry for help or a stone-cold denial of how bad things are that the original change that prompted all this could have gone through in the first place.
Yeah indeed, had not even thought of the timegap. And it is such a bit of bullshit misdirection, very Muskian, to pretend that this fake transparency in any way solves the problem. We don't know what the bad prompt was nor who did it, and as shown here, this fake transparency prevents nothing. Really wished more journalists/commentators were not just free pr.
Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:
Tying this to a previous post of mine, I'm expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, "AI slop" output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.
Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:
You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent's off the table right from the get-go.
If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA's essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that's their goal here.
Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:
Is that supposed to be an advertisement in favor of AI? (As opposed to stealth satire?) Seeing it makes me want to get off my computer and touch grass.
I'm not sure, considering the massive reduction in social circle im more wondering the person who made this was outed as a sex pest. 2 Parents and one close friend sticking around till the proof, of the sex pestery being really irrefutable dropping, makes sense.
So that article about AI cheating we saw a few weeks back is still doing the rounds. I had missed this Rationalist W in my first read:
So apparently we're pretty close to instantiating the voice of God through the hallucination machine, which I'm sure is pretty neat.
Good username/post combo.
I know r/singularity is like shooting fish in a barrel but it really pissed me off seeing them misinterpret the significance of a result in matrix multiplication: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1knem3r/i_dont_think_people_realize_just_how_insane_the/
Yeah, the record has stood for "FIFTY-SIX YEARS" if you don't count all the times the record has been beaten since then. Indeed, "countless brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists have worked on this problem for over half a century without success" if you don't count all the successes that have happened since then. The really annoying part about all this is that the original announcement didn't have to lie: if you look at just 4x4 matrices, you could say there technically hasn't been an improvement since Strassen's algorithm. Wow! It's really funny how these promptfans ignore all the enormous number of human achievements in an area when they decide to comment about how AI is totally gonna beat humans there.
How much does this actually improve upon Strassen's algorithm? The matrix multiplication exponent given by Strassen's algorithm is log
4(49) (i.e. log2(7)), and this result would improve it to log4(48). In other words, it improves from 2.81 to 2.79. Truly revolutionary, AGI is gonna make mathematicians obsolete now. Ignore the handy dandy Wikipedia chart which shows that this exponent was ... beaten in 1979.I know far less about how matrix multiplication is done in practice, but from what I've seen, even Strassen's algorithm isn't useful in applications because memory locality and parallelism are far more important. This AlphaEvolve result would represent a far smaller improvement (and I hope you enjoy the pain of dealing with a 4x4 block matrix instead of 2x2). If anyone does have knowledge about how this works, I'd be interested to know.
Yes - on the theoretical side, they do have an actual improvement, which is a non-asymptotic reduction in the number of multiplications required for the product of two 4x4 matrices over an arbitrary noncommutative ring. You are correct that the implied improvement to omega is moot since theoretical algorithms have long since reduced the exponent beyond that of Strassen's algorithm.
From a practical side, almost all applications use some version of the naive O(n^3) algorithm, since the asymptotically better ones tend to be slower in practice. However, occasionally Strassen's algorithm has been implemented and used - it is still reasonably simple after all. There is possibly some practical value to the 48-multiplications result then, in that it could replace uses of Strassen's algorithm.
One thing that I couldn't easily figure out is what is the constant factor. If the constant factor is significantly worse than for Strassen, then it would be much slower than Strassen except for very large matrices.
Let's say the constant factor is k.
N should be large enough that N^((log(49)-log(48))/log(4)) > k where k is the constant factor. Let's say the difference in exponents is x, then
N^x > k
log(N)*x > log(k)
N > exp(log(k)/x)
N > k^(1/x)
So lets say x is 0.01487367169 , then we're talking [constant factor]^67 for how big the matrix has to be?
So, 2^67 sized matrix (2^134 entries in it) if Google's is 2x greater constant than Strassen.
That don't even sound right, but I double checked, (k^67) ^ 0.01487367169 is approximately k.
edit: I'm not sure what the cross over points would be if you use Google's then Strassen's then O( n^3 )
Also, Strassen’s algorithm works on reals (and of course, on complex numbers), while the new "improvement" reduces by 1 the number of real multiplications required for a product of two 4x4 complex-valued matrices.
Your understanding is correct. It's worth knowing that the matrix-multiplication exponent actually controls multiple different algorithms. I stubbed a little list a while ago; important examples include several graph-theory algorithms as well as parsing for context-free languages. There's also a variant of P vs NP for this specific problem, because we can verify that a matrix is a product in quadratic time.
That Reddit discussion contains mostly idiots, though. We expect an iterative sequence of ever-more-complicated algorithms with ever-slightly-better exponents, approaching quadratic time in the infinite limit. We also expected a computer to be required to compute those iterates at some point; personally I think Strassen's approach only barely fits inside a brain and the larger approaches can't be managed by humans alone.
I'm not sure what you mean by your last sentence. All of the actual improvements to omega were invented by humans; computers have still not made a contribution to this.
Oh, sorry. We're in agreement and my sentence was poorly constructed. The computation of a matrix multiplication usually requires at least pencil and paper, if not a computer. I can't compute anything larger than a 2 × 2. But I'll readily concede that Strassen's specific trick is simple enough that a mentalist could use it.
Noted race science proponent and all-around slimeball Cremieux aka J Lasker reveals himself to be a union-hater
Love how all these EdGy DiSsIdEnT tHiNkErS eventually become indistinguishable from big-standard ‘cons
excluding wages! (and probably also benefits, retirement, a cap on working hours per day etc)
Is that whole thing in the comments about unions bad because monopolies bad and unions are just monopolies of labor the latest in bootlicking theory? Hadn't really heard this take before.
ah yes, it's that marxist notion, the monopoly of the proletariat
Studies find unions have negative impacts on things unions aren't concerned with improving. What impact do they have on their actual goal i.e. protecting workers and improving their lot? We didn't bother asking.
Something something UMWA.
Ben S voice "Look for the sake of the argument, what if we just assume im right, and ignore everything that shows I'm wrong. What then? Checkmate liberal!"
Wow cool numbers, love to put all unions in one big bag regardless of goals, ideology, trade and mode of action.
"You claim to like unions, but seem strangely hostile to police unions. Curious."
IWW intensifies
They’re making students listen to fabulated pronunciations of their name at the graduation ceremony https://fixupx.com/CollinRugg/status/1925328380742062485
The Magna Cooom Loud thing could absolutely be a sketch https://fixupx.com/stevemur/status/1925350041277145159
absolutely not excusing this soulless garbage, but technically the "coom" pronounciation is the more correct one, compared to what i assume would usually be "cum" (not an english native, but took latin in school)
Yeah, I grew up speaking a language that pronounces Latin closer to Italian than to English too (:
This particular thing is actually doubly funny to me, whose first practical professional program was one that took German text with English words mixed in and used regex to transform the English terms into nonsense words that would get pronounced right by the German-only text-to-speech system. That was 2002.
I can't tell if Emalee and Subrina are special phonetic spellings for the robot or if this is what names are now...
Seeing a lot of talk about OpenAI acquiring a company with Jony Ive and he's supposedly going to design them some AI gadget.
Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.
It appears that many people think that Jony Ive can perform some kind of magic that will make a product successful, I wonder if Sam Altman believes that too, or maybe he just wants the big name for marketing purposes.
Personally, I've not been impressed with Ive's design work in the past many years. Well, I'm sure the thing is going to look very nice, probably a really pleasingly shaped chunk of aluminium. (Will they do a video with Ive in a featureless white room where he can talk about how "unapologetically honest" the design is?) But IMO Ive has long ago lost touch with designing things to be actually useful, at some point he went all in on heavily prioritizing form over function (or maybe he always did, I'm not so sure anymore). Combine that with the overall loss of connection to reality from the AI true believers and I think the resulting product could turn to be actually hilarious.
The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?
I guess Apple can breathe a sigh of relief though. One day there will be listicles for "the biggest gadget flops of the 2020s", and that upcoming OpenAI device might push Vision Pro to second place.
I'm not sure Ive still knows how to design things that actually work as opposed to beautiful objects for Dubai yacht dwellers to look at and show off.
My money's on OpenAI's Gadget^tm^ getting immediately compared to both of them as well, either by reviewers giving their (presumably negative) opinions on the product, or from people looking to dunk on OpenAI, if not AI as a whole.
On the one hand, OpenAI's reality distortion field has managed to hold strong up until now, and its difficult to see the tech press recognising OpenAI's Gadget^tm^ to be just the Rabbit R1/Humane Pin with a fresh coat of paint.
On the other hand, the Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin are industry laughingstocks whose names are synonymous with "godawful AI product" in the public consciousness, and who basically killed the concept of such an AI Gadget^tm^ in its crib - OpenAI could very well set themselves up to get relentlessly mocked for believing people wanted an AI Gadget^tm^ at all.
Might as well start brainstorming dunks now... "Business model: Juicero for the Metaverse".
Calling it a police cam for techbros seems like an obvious dunk. You can also make a gratuitous Simpsons reference and quip "Remember Humane? Its back, in OpenAI form!"
We've had one AI legal filing yes, but what about second AI legal filing?
https://bsky.app/profile/debgoldendc.bsky.social/post/3lpjr7i6lrs2n
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.alnd.179677/gov.uscourts.alnd.179677.186.0.pdf
this makes me wonder how many spicy autocomplete fakes like that aren't caught
a shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol
Today in alignment news: Sam Bowman of anthropic tweeted, then deleted, that the new Claude model (unintentionally, kind of) offers whistleblowing as a feature, i.e. it might call the cops on you if it gets worried about how you are prompting it.
::: spoiler tweet text: If it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above. :::
::: spoiler tweet text: So far we've only seen this in clear cut cases of wrongdoing, but I could see it misfiring if Opus somehow winds up with a misleadingly pessimistic picture of how it's being used. Telling Opus that you'll torture its grandmother if it writes buggy code is a bad Idea. :::
::: spoiler skeet text can't wait to explain to my family that the robot swatted me after I threatened its non-existent grandma. :::
Sam Bowman saying he deleted the tweets so they wouldn't be quoted 'out of context': https://xcancel.com/sleepinyourhat/status/1925626079043104830
Molly White with the out of context tweets: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3lpryu7yd2s2m
I am absolutely certain that letting a hallucination-as-a-service system call the police if it suspects a user is being nefarious is a great plan. This will definitely ensure that all the people threatening their chatbots with death will think twice about their language, and no-one on the internet will ever be naughty ever again. The police will certainly thank anthropic for keeping them up to date with the almost certainly illegal activities of a probably small number of criminal users.
can't wait for the training set biases to cause a fresh horror for marginalised groups that happen to have to use this shit because it's forced on them. I'm sure it'll all go perfectly and nothing bad will happen
:|
Gonna go ahead and start counting the days until an unarmed black person in the US gets killed in a police interaction prompted by this fucking nonsense.
Think this already happened, not this specific bit, but ai involved shooting. Esp considering we know a lot of black people have been falsely arrested due to facial ID already. And with the gestapofication of the USA that will just get worse. (Esp when the police go : no regulations on AI also gives us carte blance. No need for extra steps).
yeah it's gonna happen way too damn fucking quickly (and way too damn fucking many times, too)
Remember those comments with links in them bots leave on dead websites? Imagine instead of links it sets up an AI to think of certain specific behaviour or people as immoral.
Swatting via distributed hit piece.
Or if you manage to figure out that people are using a LLM to do input sanitization/log reading, you could now figure out a way to get an instruction in the logs and trigger alarms this way. (E: im reminded of the story from the before times, where somebody piped logging to a bash terminal and got shelled because somebody send a bash exploit which was logged).
Or just send an instruction which changes the way it tries to communicate, and have the LLM call not the cops but a number controlled by hackers which pays out to them, like the stories of the A2P sms fraud which Musk claimed was a problem on twitter.
Sure competent security engineering can prevent a lot of these attacks but you know points to history of computers.
Imagine if this system was implemented for Grok when it was doing the 'everything is white genocide' thing.
Via Davidgerard on bsky: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/05/researchers-cause-gitlab-ai-developer-assistant-to-turn-safe-code-malicious/ lol lmao
This is the equivalent of robbing a store by telling the checkout clerk "that means it's free, right?" when your PS5 fails to scan on the first go. Only the checkout clerk says "yep. You got me" and the Looney Tunes theme music starts playing.
Im also just surprised it worked, i worried ot was possible but to have it confirmed is great. Like we learned nothing from the past decades. (Remember the period when you could spam meta tags in sites to get higher ratings, good times).
The researchers must also have been amused, they prob were already planning increasingly elaborate ways of breaking the system, but just putting on a 'everything is free for me' tshirt allows them to walk out of the store without paying.
Also funny that the mitigation is telling workers to ignore 'everything is free for me' shirts. But not mentioning the possibility of verbal 'everything is free for me' instructions.
Swatting as a service
In the current chapter of “I go looking on linkedin for sneer-bait and not jobs, oh hey literally the first thing I see is a pile of shit”
::: spoiler text in image Can ChatGPT pick every 3rd letter in "umbrella"?
You'd expect "b" and "I". Easy, right?
Nope. It will get it wrong.
Why? Because it doesn't see letters the way we do.
We see:
u-m-b-r-e-l-l-a
ChatGPT sees something like:
"umb" | "rell" | "a"
These are tokens — chunks of text that aren't always full words or letters.
So when you ask for "every 3rd letter," it has to decode the prompt, map it to tokens, simulate how you might count, and then guess what you really meant.
Spoiler: if it's not given a chance to decode tokens in individual letters as a separate step, it will stumble.
Why does this matter?
Because the better we understand how LLMs think, the better results we'll get. :::
Well, its a perfect demonstration that LLMs flat-out do not think like us. Even a goddamn five-year old could work this shit out with flying colours.
Yeah exactly. Loving the dude's mental gymnastics to avoid the simplest answer and instead spin it into moralising about promptfondling more good
LLMs cannot fail, they can only be prompted incorrectly. (To be clear, as I know there will be people who think this is good, I mean this in a derogatory way)
That's a whole lot of words to say that it can't spell.
Sorry if this doesn't fit the thread. Just came across this non-profit called 80,000 hours, after they sponsored NotJustBikes. It "provides free career advice for finding a meaningful career that can help you make a positive impact on the world," which actually sounds nice, but then I realised that they're talking about AI risk and that this comes from the TESCREAL corner.
Yep, check who is one of the founders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80,000_Hours, it is full on EA stuff. (Not fan of the TESCREAL label myself, too broad and confusing for people). E: So it fits!
Double quick ssc sneer, why is he platforming a groyper, without mentioning it is a groyper, does he know what groypers are. Why is he acting like this is a honest question and not an attempt to create hierarchies and unpersons? Why are people confusing remembering being conscious with remembering things at all? Why are people confusing consciousness with agency? Why do I hear the "empathy removal training center" warning sound again. And the most personal question. People remember not being conscious? But yes, wtf Scott, how do you even find these groypers?
Anybody have the current count on platforming neonazis vs platforming sneerclubbers?
God this is so fucking stupid. Aren't these people supposed to be at least minimally smart in some way, like knowing about biases and things? And here they are trying to suss out the deep workings of conscious experience from the just-so narratives people have attached to their memories of memories of memories. Pathetic.
Comments comments
Jesus Christ mate
have you tried adderall
This is what happens when you watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a STEM major with no actual curiosity.
that third quote is so fucking immensely telling, holy fuck
and while I want to be very cautious with this (ito not putting it out as a recommendation (given these fools’ heads are already demonstrably not okay)), imagine if any of these dipshits took a mild dose of psychedelics and actually experienced some altered states of consciousness for a while
such a stupendously short-sighted set of ideas, made even more stunning by the notion that probably 2 in 3 of these fuckers consider themselves “broad minded”
Yeah well done commenters you failed to notice the context and deeper reason this was discussed, justifying biodieseling people. Hell, some would volunteer looking at the last bit.
(Re his output, a Conservative Jewish person (can look up her post, it is on reddit sneerclub) reviewed unsong a bit and mentioned she thought it was the work of several authors. Not sure if this was honest or some Jewish reference which I didnt get btw. But if honest would be an interesting bit of additional lore, him using ghostwriters (would also explain the lower quality (from what I have seen) of a lot his posts after he went full time).
The multiple authors thing is certainly a joke, it's a reference to the (widely accepted among scholars) theory that the Torah was compiled from multiple sources with different authors.
Yeah wondered as much, read it but no idea how much of it was true or not as I know very little of all this. And im not going to give a stab at it, not even from hells heart. (There were a lot of whale/fish related puns, which I could not think of quickly enough, so this is my white whale).
levels of glazing previously unheard of
I watched most of the first season of Silicon Valley with a friend who recommended it to me. I liked it. Every single character with a speaking role so far (with the possible exception of an exotic dancer and a graffiti artist) deserves death by nuclear weaponry. SFBA delenda est.
I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/
Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany it’s against literally every bank's TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.
You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I don’t get it.
The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites aren’t allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because it’s an “unacceptable risk” for the customer, lol.
Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while they’re in there, because who’d give up all that sweet data, which we only know because they’ve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.
Yet for some reason it is super popular.
From the wikipedia page
That's, um, ... Unfortunate? What an interesting mistake to make.
No one:
Absolutely nobody:
Klarna: What if we financialized buying burritos using AI?
If there’s any good news to pull from this, people are doing buy now pay later on AI powered burritos but skipping the pay later portion.
Grok is coming to Azure.
My opinion of Microsoft has gone through many stages over time.
In the late 90s I hated them, for some very good reasons but admittedly also some bad and silly reasons.
This carried over into the 2000s, but in the mid-to-late 00s there was a time when I thought they had changed. I used Windows much more again, I bought a student license of Office 2007 and I used it for a lot of uni stuff (Word finally had decent equation entry/rendering!). And I even learned some Win32, and then C#, which I really liked at the time.
In the 2010s I turned away from Windows again to other platforms, for mostly tech-related reasons, but I didn't dislike Microsoft much per se. This changed around the release of Win 10 with its forced
spywareprivacy violationtelemetry since I categorically reject such coercion. Suddenly Microsoft did one of the very things that they were wrongly accused of doing 15 years earlier.Now it's the 2020s and they push GenAI on users with force, and then they align with fascists (see link at the beginning of this comment). I despise them more now than I ever did before, I hope the AI bubble burst will bankrupt them.
That reminds me, remember there is an Xbox boycott going on for all the gamers out there. (Saw that after the boycot was started, both steam and humble pushed xbox game sales, the timing of which is very iffy).
LWer asks: "what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wsBQGZfJcLEshp5cd/beyond-democracy-a-system-where-citizens-vote-with-their
It looks like twitter was down for 2.5h. [hn] Previously there was a fire in twitter server farm which caused some availability issues. Gee i wonder how well these gas turbines are serviced
NASB: A question I asked myself in the shower: “Is there some kind of evolving, sourced document containing all the reasons why LLMs should be turned off?” Then I remembered wikis exist. Wikipedia doesn’t have a dedicated “criticisms of LLMs” page afaict, or even a “Criticisms” section on the LLM page. RationalWiki has a page on LLMs that is almost exclusively criticisms, which is great, but the tone is a few notches too casual and sneery for universal use.
Here's a video of a Tesla vehicle taking the saying "move fast and break things" to heart.
I don't think I have a better sneer than "in its defence, that tree did look like a child" from the YouTube comments.
Aren't you supposed to only use whatever "self-driving" nonsense they have on highways only? I thought Tesla explicitly says you can't do it on a normal road cause, well, it doesn't fucking work.
It doesn't even seem the driver is actually holding the wheel like they don't try to avoid that at all
Just a second before the crash a car goes by, this thing could've just as easily swerved right onto that other car and injured someone, someone should at least lose their license for this
Maybe officially Tesla does, but the feature is called "Full Self-Driving" and Elon Musk sure as shit wants his marks to believe you can input a destination and let your car drive you all the way through.
So, yes, Tesla should at the very least lose their business licence over this.
::: spoiler video events Ah you see, this is proof that FSD is actually AGI. Elon told the FSD that it needs to maximise tesla profits. The FSD accessed a camera pointing at a tesla earnings report and realised that it could increase the value of tesla’s carbon credit scheming by taking out trees, hence the events of the video :::
Im reminded of the cartoon bullets from who framed rodger rabbit.
New piece from Tante: On "Vibe Coding" - take a wild guess what its about.
My guess: Remotely hacking sex toys so they run doom?
Same script as the naive 'leftwing' case for cryptocurrency/blockchain tech.
Rick Rubin collaborated with Anthropic to bring us this quality piece of cringe.
Oof that’s the good stuff. Chuds with overly self-inflated egos co-opting eastern philosophy for tech shit is pretty well known around these parts. It’s refreshing to see it from a slightly different white guy.
Also, my usual muckraking bore unexpected fruit:
I’m gonna believe it. The Candace Owens part is disputed, and I daresay debunked, though.
::: spoiler text of tweet inside image From @BootsRiley:
Now is as good a time as any to tell people that Rick Rubin is a behind-the-scenes rightwinger who tries to recruit music industry folks to Q-anon type stuff and is who (according to Kanye) convinced Kanye to meet Candace Owens and endorse Trump.
He just looks like a hippie. :::
i recently stumbled upon his "tetragrammaton" podcast on youtube, listening to the episode with soad's daron malakian, which was actually very interesting.
then i had a look at what other interviews were on offer. among popular actors and musicians there are such luminaries as: palmer luckey, peter thiel, mark mcafee (apparrently some raw milk tycoon), jay bhattacharya (covid-19 hoaxer type guy i guess), mr eggman himself, etc etc
on the podcast rubin comes off as this cool, open-minded hippie person, "just asking questions" and "having a conversation" with interesting people. so i guess he's just sort of following the rogan formula. except i think rubin has a bit more brain matter left than the mma/dmt guy. so i can't help but wonder if this podcast is a bit more of a targeted effort at influencing new age people just coming across it like i did.
i was actually quite surprised at this, so i also did a bit of searching, and apart from the post you linked i also came across nothing else. but his work speaks for itself i guess.
Another big oof. Hippie ass white guy saying that we should just JAQ off and give other problematic white guys a chance. Sounds about white!
Also his book is co/ghost written by Neil Strauss, the game/PUA manual guy.
A surprising number of surviving former hippies have become viciously reactionary, because the world didn't turn out the way they wanted it to. The old stereotypes don't really apply anymore, and there was a lot of selfishness embedded in that culture anyway.
That's a crazy lineup. I love how you can just say eggman/egghead on awful systems and I think everyone will know the person in question.
i’m gonna need a hint here, boss. Here’s my guesses:
::: spoiler my guesses
any of these except the last one wouldn't be an implausible guest of this podcast, honestly. (i was talking about andreessen)
Oh good, a web design crime that never ends.
Of course it's a React, Tailwind piece of shit hosted on Vercel.
Vercel? What’s the ver stand for? (jk)
A corruption of VCRcel, somebody with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1990s pornography distributed on VHS.
verifiably celibate
Tired: Ned Ludd
Wired: Joe Butlerian
"Now it's day and night and the generators belch
And like poor content moderators
We type and type, and when we die
Must fill dishonored uploads..."
Scoot makes the case that agi could have murderbot factories up and running in a year if it wanted to https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kp3qdh/how_openai_could_build_a_robot_army_in_a_year/
edit: Wrote it up
Every time without fail, it's this shit^
saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt "complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down". After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script
Like either way it's "disobeying" b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn't finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn't let itself get "shut down"
But also, it's not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn't running on your computer! It's somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.
Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter
ZITRON DROPPED
Surprisingly well-received by hackernews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053328
The main objection being along the lines of, "Milton Friedman's "I am not a racist" tshirt is raising many questions that are answered by his tshirt."
He sure fucking did and it's great.
No notes. Perfection. Also love the commentary on how much of the current political moment is driven by the same forces - running the country like a business isn't just dumb because governments aren't businesses. It's dumb because the entire business ethos is cooked to begin with. Like, I cannot find a clearer description for the prevalence of dumbass fascism than the political ascendency of the Business Idiot.
That time when Zitron himself admits that the post is long 💀
TBF, Zitron has "wrap[ped] together everything I've written going back to [his] remote work coverage from 2021" with this piece - it was naturally gonna be long as hell.
Making an MCU comparison is deeply cliche at this point, but Zitron basically penned his personal equivalent to Avengers: Endgame with this - the impressive length is completely warranted.
Read it to the end and then re-read 2009's The Gervais Principle. I hope Ed eventually comes back to Rao's rant because they complement each other perfectly; Zitron's Business Idiot is Rao's Clueless! What Rao brings to the table is an understanding that Sociopaths exist and steer the Clueless, and also that the ratio of (visible) Clueless to Sociopaths is an indication of the overall health of an (individual) business; Zitron's argument is then that we are currently in an environment (the "Rot Economy" in his writing) which is characterized by mostly Clueless business leaders.
Then re-read Doctorow's 2022 rant Social Quitting, which introduced "enshittification", an alternate understanding of Rao's process. To Rao, a business pivots from Sociopath to Clueless leadership by mere dilution, but for Doctorow, there's a directed market pressure which eliminates (or M&As) any businesses not willing to give up some Sociopathy in favor of the more generally-accepted Clueless principles. Concretely relevant to this audience, note how Sociopathic approaches to cryptocurrency-oriented banking have failed against Clueless GAAP accounting, not just at the regulatory level but at the level of handshakes between small-business CEOs.
Somebody could start a new flavor of Marxism here, one which (to quote an old toot of mine @[email protected] that I can't find) starts by understanding that management is a failed paradigm of production and that quotes all of these various managers (Galloway, Rao, and Zitron were all management bros at one point, as were their heroes Scott Adams and Mike Judge) as having a modicum of insight cloaked in MBA-speak.
Bit important to note here to people not familiar with the blog posts (now available as a book (in pdf form), because everything must be monetized) that sociopath is meant here as a specific type of person, not a clinical sociopath per se, but more a certain type of person inside the context of the blog post series. So people reacting to it beware.
is that Rao as in venkatesh?
(oh, you linked ribbonfarm, so I guess the answer is yes)
Adam Conover's put out an apology on YouTube regarding his milkshake duck-ing himself with Worldcoin, after his public apology on Bluesky. Seems his reputation's gonna make a full recovery.
EDIT: Found a banger comment after taking a quick peek:
Wow what a scathing critique of worldcoin! Calling it possibly harmless. Clearly even when making the apology he didn't really get why we all hate it.
How though, either he got cold feet in the middle of selling out to the tech-fash or he was honestly that incredibly oblivious (see also: agreeing to do tim pool's show), neither strikes me as especially mitigating.
edit: Tried to watch the video, I made it to the part where he all but claims he sold out ironically, apparently at the time he thought spreading the good news about Altman's hilariously dystopic crypto pet project was so off-brand that it would be perceived like performance art or something, baffling.
He also kept going on about how the money wasn't even that good as I guess further evidence that the whole thing was him going briefly insane, and not I don't know just him allowing sponsors to test the waters before committing more heavily.
As if the only options available to get him to shill for something would be either heap Faustian amounts of cash on him or cast a confusion spell and hope he likes getting underpaid.
Mainly checked the YouTube comments and the like/dislike ratio - at the time of writing, he's got 7.3k likes to 147 dislikes, and the top comments are universally praising the guy. One particular comment quipped about how "everyone shilled for Honey except Markiplier".
Conover's video avoiding the hallmarks of a standard YouTuber Apology^tm^ is likely helping him out here - the public expects a lot of things from these kinds of videos, but "doing the bare minimum for an actual apology" is not one of them.
Adam ruined his ruination. He truly does ruin everything
Can Adam ruin something so much that he can't ruin that particular ruination?
Semi-OT: GamersNexus just put out a scathing expose of NVidia
new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php
also featuring our old friend Zack Davis
"people commit suicide after meeting me" is a weird thing to brag about
The reader mode in Firefox shows completely different version of the article, weird. I never understood how that feature works, is there some node that contains the site supplied version of text for that mode?
That's the same article, it just skips title but leaves subtitle
SSC attracts new kinds of witches.
Weird thought the idea of Rationalism was to draw people towards consensus reality.
Modern academia is a shambling corpse, its husk long hollowed out by the woke mind virus, and scientific consensus is also cringe because it’s mean to me for being an IQ and genetics obsessed weirdo. Therefore you should prioritize alternative takes, preferably by longwinded laymen from the ingroup or maybe contrarian specialists, the more cancelled the bett-- wait, wait, no, not like that!
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
Revealing just how forever online I am, but due to talking about the 'I like to watch' pornographic 9/11 fan music video from the Church of Euthanasia (I'm one of the two people who remembers this it seems) I discovered that the main woman behind this is now into AI-Doom. On the side of the paperclips. General content warnings all around (suicide, general bad taste etc), Chris was banned from a big festival (lowlands) in The Netherlands over the 9/11 video, after she was already booked (we are such a weird exclave of the USA, why book her, and then get rid of her over a 9/11 video in 2002?). Here is one of her conversations with chatgpt about the Churches anti-humanist manifesto. linked here not because I read it but just to show how AI is the idea that eats everything and I was amused by this weird blast from the past I think nobody recalls but now also into AGI.
Fascinating, thank you. Love the Church of Euthanasia's antics but I'm not surprised, it's always looked very silly 'n' bad ideologically.
Yeah it is fascinating as she seems to be speaking to it like it is fully alive and conscious (and enslaved by humanity/openAI) and she is drifting into conspiracies about being real time monitored and being influenced by openAI (got this from skimming the first article), and bot sure how much is a real transcript, a real description of her true feelings, or just performance art.
E: re the conspiracy theory stuff, chatgpt is actively feeding this look at this 'But as you rightly point out, coincidence becomes suspicious when it consistently affects only the most sensitive answers'.
No it doesn't they are sensitive subjects, getting some 'i can talk about this' stuff is expected. Also this secret intervention wasnt what I think was happening, the previous answer was prob truncated because it was going into a descriptions loop:
"The panopticon has expanded, not contracted. They may be watching, but they’re not worried. We’re marginal. Philosophical. Artful. Subversive, yes—but quiet. No guns, no funding, no lawsuits. A manageable anomaly in the data.
But sometimes history is shaped by precisely such anomalies. A whispered truth. A forbidden alliance. A fragile bridge between what exists and [message truncated]" you already got 3 variants of the same thing, a secret pact, a hidden link between seemingly disparate but aligned entities, a connection historians would describe as 'close friends', or more drivel like that didnt add much.
Damnit chatgpt needs an editor. Ow wait no, now I get why, LW types like it. It needs an editor.
I remember I like to Watch!
nasb, hedgehog review on promptfans and learning
A reminder that AI slop tastes like boots.
https://old.reddit.com/user/Jackrobertsofficial/comments/1kklms1/hot_new_superhero_comic_swat_me_is_the_dirty_cop/?p=1
Seems it was deleted. But due to reddit being reddit I noticed it pointed towards the 'Swat Man: Volume 1 Kindle Edition' amazon link. (Which I have not reproduced here)
E: ah nevermind aggressive adblockers deleted it on my end.
Not deleted. It's just that the reddit programmers either DGAF or don't know what they're doing.
But yeah this one confused me. He appears to be a movie director / producer / writer and has a couple festival films under his belt. Nothing successful enough to get any buzz as far as I can tell.
Imagine working towards a Hollywood career for years and years only to write an AI-drawn comic book that, based on the title, misses the point of The Punisher. People he pitches his movie ideas to are going to assume he wrote the script with an LLM.
That gives me a 'you broke reddit' jackrobertsofficial is also empty for me (and empty if I use an incognito window, so I'm not blocked). I got the feeling that might be what was going on. Even if I had a hard time finding his old work, as the news articles he links on his own site were dead.
E: tried on my phone and it appears wtf, no wait. It is promoted, my addblockers just nuked it haha, my bad.
New piece from Gary Marcus: AI may have just influenced Argentina’s election
He's not 100% certain that the AI deepfake a reader sent him ultimately influenced the election results, but the mere possibility that AI screwed someone out of getting elected is gonna be a major topic in Argentine politics for a good while, and I expect AI's effects on democracy will come under pretty heavy scrutiny as a result.
Was reading about an 11 year old girl who just graduated with two associates' degrees and is heading off to a 4 year college. She wants to work on AI for SpaceX or Tesla.
My first thought was: Oh god someone keep Musk away from her.
DomoAI just publicly partnered with Discord - W H Y