Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 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.
I've often called slop "signal-shaped noise". I think the damage already done by slop pissed all over the reservoirs of knowledge, art and culture is irreversible and long-lasting. This is the only thing generative "AI" is good at, making spam that's hard to detect.
It occurs to me that one way to frame this technology is as a precise inversion of Bayesian spam filters for email; no more and no less. I remember how it was a small revolution, in the arms race against spammers, when statistical methods came up; everywhere we took of the load of straining SpamAssassin with rspamd (in the years before gmail devoured us all). I would argue "A Plan for Spam" launched Paul Graham's notoriety, much more than the Lisp web stores he was so proud of. Filtering emails by keywords was not being enough, and now you could train your computer to gradually recognise emails that looked off, for whatever definition of "off" worked for your specific inbox.
Now we have the richest people building the most expensive, energy-intensive superclusters to use the same statistical methods the other way around, to generate spam that looks like not-spam, and is therefore immune to all filtering strategies we had developed. That same blob-like malleability of spam filters makes the new spam generators able to fit their output to whatever niche they want to pollute; the noise can be shaped like any signal.
I wonder what PG is saying about gen-"AI" these days? let's check:
Who would have thought that A Plan for Spam was, all along, a plan for spam.
This is a really good observation, and while I had lowkey noticed it (one of those feeling things), I never had verbalized it in anyway. Good point imho. Also in how it bypasses and wrecks the old anti-spam protections. It represents a fundamental flipping of sides of the tech industry. While before they were anti-spam it is now pro-spam. A big betrayal of consumers/users/humanity.
Signal shaped noise reminds me of a wiener filter.
Aside: when I took my signals processing course, the professor kept drawing diagrams that were eerily phallic. Those were the most memorable parts of the course
Idea: a programming language that controls how many times a for loop cycles by the number of times a letter appears in a given word, e.g., "for each b in blueberry".
And the language's main data container is a kind of stack, but to push or pop values, you have to wrap them into "boats" which have to cross a "river", with extra rules for ordering and combination of values.
sickos.jpg
Only dutch/german people can create the very long loops.
E: I'm reminded of the upcoming game called: "Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant"
Everyone else has to
#appropriatetheirculture.You can take my bitterballen from my WARM FRIENDLY HANDS! No really try some, there are also vegetarian variants.
(They are part of the Inventaris Immaterieel Cultureel Erfgoed Nederland (Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Netherlands), only 2 loops though)
you'd think so, until outsourcing to turkish subcontractor happens
for ä in epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhän@mlen @Soyweiser * für e [...] 🤓
for h in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch::: spoiler image contents will arnett from arrested development asking "bees?!" :::
Beads.
Is it a loop if it only executes once?
Time for some Set Theory!
... but the output is not deterministic as the letter count is sampled from a distribution of possible letter counts for a given word and letter pair; count ~ p(count | word = "blueberry", letter = 'b')!
Even bigger picture... some standardized way of regularly handling possible combinations of letters and numbers that you could use across multiple languages. Like it handles them as expressions?
Ozy Brennan tries to explain why "rationalism" spawns so many cults.
One of the reasons they give is "a dangerous sense of grandiosity".
Yep, you heard it right. Shitposting and inconsequential code are the proper way to save the world.
JFC
First off, anyone not entirely into MAGA/Qanon agreed that masks probably helped more than hurt. Saying rats were outliers is ludicrous.
Second, rats don't take real threats of GenAI seriously - infosphere pollution, surveillance, autopropaganda - they just care about the magical future Sky Robot.
That's how I remember it too. Also the context about conserving N95 masks always feels like it gets lost. Like, predictably so and I think there's definitely room to criticize the CDC's messaging and handling there, but the actual facts here aren't as absurd as the current fight would imply. The argument was:
I think later research cast some doubt on point 1, but 2-4 are still pretty solid given the circumstances that we (collectively) found ourselves in.
This included Scott ssc btw. Who also claimed that stopping smoking helped against cov. Not that he had any proof (the medical science at the time even falsely (it came out later) claimed smoking helped agains covid). But only the CDC gets judged, not the ingroup.
And other Scott blamed people who sneer for making covid worse. (While at sneerclub we were going, take this seriously and wear a mask).
So annoying Rationalists are trying to spin this into a win for themselves. (They also were not early, their warnings matched the warnings of the WHO, looked into the timelines last time this was talked about).
But doctor, I am L7 twitter manager Pagliacci
oldskool OSI appmanager is oldskool
(........sorry)
I'm gonna need this one explained, boss
'ere you go
(in networking it's common terminology to refer to "Lx" by numerical reference, and broadly understood to be in reference to this)
Aaaaa gotcha. It’s probably obvious but in my case I meant L7 manager as in “level 7 manager”, a high tier managerial position at twitter, probably. I don’t know what exact tiering system twitter uses but I know other companies might use “Lx” to designate a level.
I figured, but I couldn't just let a terrible pun slip me by!
Overall more interesting than I expected. On the Leverage Research cult:
@Architeuthis
They sure don't make rationalism like they used to.
So... apparently Peter Thiel has taken to co-opting fundamentalist Christian terminology to go after Effective Altruism? At least it seems that way from this EA post (warning, I took psychic damage just skimming the lunacy). As far as I can tell, he's merely co-opting the terminology, Thiel's blather doesn't have any connection to any variant of Christian eschatology (whether mainstream or fundamentalist or even obscure wacky fundamentalist), but of course, the majority of the EAs don't recognize that, or the fact that he is probably targeting them for their (kind of weak to be honest) attempts at getting AI regulated at all, and instead they charitably try to steelman him and figure out if he was a legitimate point. ...I wish they could put a tenth of this effort into understanding leftist thought.
Some of the comments are... okay actually, at least by EA standards, but there are still plenty of people willing to defend Thiel
One comment notes some confusion:
Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology... possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?
Someone actually gets it:
Note this commenter still uses non-confrontational language ("I'm dubious") even when directly calling Thiel out.
The top comment, though, is just like the main post, extending charitability to complete technofascist insanity. (Warning for psychic damage)
tl,dr; Thiel now sees the Christofascists as a more durable grifting base than the EAs, and is looking to change lanes while the temporary coalitions of maximalist Trumpism offer him the opportunity.
I repeat my suspicion that Thiel is not any more sober than Musk, he's just getting sloppier about keeping it out of the public eye.
I think a big difference between Thiel and Musk, is that Thiel views himself as an "intellectual" and derives prestige "intellectualism". I don't believe for a minute he's genuinely christian, but his wankery about end-of-times eschatology of armageddon = big-left-government, is a a bit too confused to be purely cynical, I think sniffing his own farts feeds his ego.
Of course a man who would promote open doping olympics isn't sober.
Yep, the usefulness of EA is over, they are next on the chopping block. I'd imagine a similar thing will happen to redscare/moldbug if they ever speak out against him.
E: And why would a rich guy be against a "we are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differently" organization. Esp a 'libertarian' "I get to do what I want or else" one.
It always struck me as hilarious that the EA/LW crowd could ever affect policy in any way. They're cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
There's a mini-freakout over OpenAI deciding to keep GPT-4o active, despite it being more "sycophantic" than GPT-5 (and thus more likely to convince people to do Bad Things) but there's also the queasy realization that if sycophantic LLMs is what brings in the bucks, nothing is gonna stop LLM companies from offering them. And there's no way these people can stop it, because they've made the deal that LLM companies are gonna be the ones realizing that AI is gonna kill everyone and that's never gonna happen.
It is kind of sad. They are missing the ideological pieces that would let them carry out activism effectually so instead they've gotten used as a free source of crit-hype in the LLM bubble. ...except not that sad because they would ignore real AI dangers in favor of their sci-fi scenarios, so I don't feel too bad for them.
Brian Merchant's article about that lighthaven gathering really struck me.
The men who EAs think will end the earth were in the building with them, and rather than organize to throw them out a window (or even to just make them mildly uncomfortable), the bayes knowers all gormlessly moped around their twee boutique hotel and cried around some whiteboards.
Absolute hellish brainworms
Yeah that article was one of the things I had mind. It's the peak of centrist liberalism where EAs and lesswrongers can think these people are literally going to cause mankind's extinction (or worse) and they can't even bring themselves to be rude to them. OTOH, if they actually acted coherently on their nominal doomer beliefs, they would be carrying out terrorism on a far greater scale than the Zizians, so maybe it is for the best they are ideologically incapable of direct action.
The ideological version of Mr Burns's diseases getting in each other's way
Ooh, do you have a link to share?
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-disagreements
Wild, thank you!
Well when they are just passively trying to convince the rich guys, they can use the organization to launder reputation or boost ideologies they are in favor of. When the organization actually tries to get regulations passed, even ineffectually, well, that is a threat to the likes of Thiel.
That was what I meant, I was being a bit sarcastic there.
Thiel is a true believer in Jesus and God. He was raised evangelical. The quirky eschatologist that you're looking for is René Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.
Edit: I wrote this before clicking on the LW post. This is a decent summary of Girard's claims as well as how they influence Thiel. I'm quoting West here in order to sneer at Thiel:
Thiel knows what to do about this. After all, he funded Bollea v. Gawker. Instead of letting journalists cancel celebrities, why not cancel journalists instead? Then there's no longer any journalists to do any cancellation! Similarly, Thiel is confirmed to be a source of funding for Eric Weinstein and believed to fund Sabine Hossenfelder. Instead of letting scientists cancel religious beliefs, why not cancel scientists instead? By directing money through folks with existing social legitimacy, Thiel applies mimesis: pretend to be legitimate and you can shift what is legitimate.
In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it can't be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open. After all, if AGI is truly to unify humanity, it must unify our moralities and cultures into a single uniformly-acceptable code of conduct. But the only acceptable unification for Thiel is the holistic catholic apostolic one-and-only forever-and-ever church of Jesus, and if AGI is against that then AGI is against Jesus himself.
Is there any more solid evidence of Hossenfelder taking Thielbux, or is this just a guess based on the orbit she moves in: appearing on Michael Shermer's podcast years after the news broke that he was a sex pest, blurbing the new book edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss, etc.
There's no solid evidence. (You can put away the attorney, Mr. Thiel.) Experts in the field, in a recent series of interviews with Dave Farina, generally agree that somebody must be funding Hossenfelder. Right now she's associated with the Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich; her biography there is pretty funny:
For those not in physics: this is crank shit. To the extent that MCMP funds her at all, they are explicitly pursuing superdeterminism, which is unfalsifiable, unverifiable, doesn't accord with the web of science, and generally fails to be a serious line of inquiry. Now, does MCMP have enough cash to pay her to make Youtube videos and go on podcasts? We don't know. So it's hard to say whether she has funding beyond that.
Oh, wow, that biography is hilariously bad. Contexuality is not the same thing as superdeterminism. And locality is not "a lost cause". Plenty of people throw around the term quantum nonlocality, but in the smaller population of those who take foundations seriously, many will say that quantum mechanics is local. Most but not all proponents of Copenhagen-ish interpretations say something like, "The moral of Bell's theorem is that nature needs a non-(local hidden variable) theory. We keep locality and drop the hidden variables. In other words, quantum physics is a local non-(hidden variable) theory." The Everettians of various flavors also tend to hold onto locality, or try to, while not always agreeing with each other on how to do that. It's probably only among the Bohmians that you'll find people insisting that quantum physics means nature is intrinsically nonlocal.
Thanks for the references. The quirky theology was so outside the range of even the weirder Fundamentalist Christian stuff I didn't recognize it as such. (And didn't trust the EA summary because they try so hard to charitably make sense of Thiel).
Except the EAs are, on net, opposed to the creation of AGI (albeit they are ineffectual in their opposition). So going after the EAs doesn't make sense if Thiel is genuinely opposed to inventing AGI faster. So I still think Thiel is just going after the EA's because he's libertarian and EA has shifted in the direction of trying to get more government regulation. (As opposed to a coherent theological goal beyond libertarianism). I'll check out the BtB podcast and see if it changes my mind as to his exact flavor of insanity.
Being gay must really complicate things for him.
Using the term "Antichrist" as a shorthand for "global stable totalitarianism" is A Choice.
I think Leathery Pete might have read too much Left Behind.
Thomasaurus has given their thoughts on using AI, in a journal entry called "I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid)". Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is one long sneer, with a damning indictment of its effectiveness at the end:
New article from the New York Times reporting on an influx of compsci graduates struggling to find jobs (ostensibly caused by AI automation). Found a real money shot about a quarter of the way through:
You want my take, I expect this article's gonna blow a major hole in STEM's public image - being a path to a high-paying job was one of STEM's major selling points (especially compared to the "useless" art/humanities degrees), and this new article not only undermines that selling point, but argues for flipping it on its head.
Quick update: I've checked the response on Bluesky, and it seems the general response is of schadenfreude at STEM's expense. From the replies, I've found:
Humanities graduates directly mocking STEM (Fig. 1,Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5)
Mockery of the long-running "learn to code" mantra (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 Fig. 5, Fig. 6)
Claims that STEM automated themselves out of a job by creating AI (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3)
Plus one user mocking STEM in general as "[choosing] fascism and “billions must die”" out of greed, and another approving of others' dunks on STEM over past degree-related grievances.
You want my take on this dunkfest, this suggests STEM's been hit with a double-whammy here - not only has STEM lost the status their "high-paying" reputation gave them, but that reputation (plus a lotta built-up grievances from mockery of the humanities) has crippled STEM's ability to garner sympathy for their current predicament.
I hate the fact that now someone might look at me and surmise that I do something related to blockchain or AI, I feel almost like I need a sticker, like those "I bought it before we knew Elon was crazy" they put on Teslas
"I learnt to code before this stupid bubble"
stolen from cohost but i appreciate the succinctness of "capitalism make computer bad"
On one hand, this is another case of capitalism working as intended. You have the ruling class dangling the carrot of the promise of social mobility via job. Just gotta turn the crank of the orphan grinder for 4 years or so, until there's enough orphan paste to grease the next grinding machine. But it's ok, because your experience in crank will let you climb the ladder to the next, higher paying, higher prestige crank of the machine. Then one day, they decide to turn on the motor.
On the other hand? There is no other hand, they chopped it off because you didn't turn the crank fast enough when you had the chance.
To extend that analogy a bit, the dunkfest I noted suggests that a portion of the public views STEM as perfectly okay with the orphan grinder's existence at best, and proud of having orphan blood on their hands at worst.
As for the motorised orphan grinder you mention, it looks to me like the public viewed its construction as STEM voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party (with predictable consequences).
The whole joining of the fascist side by a lot of the higher ups of the tech world, combined with the long-standing debate bro both sides free speech libertarianism (but mostly for neonazis, payment services do go after sex work and lgbt content) also did not help the rep of STEM, even if those decisions are made by STEM curious people and not actually STEM people. billionaires want you to know they could have done physics - Angela Collier
You're dead right on that.
Part of me suspects STEM in general (primarily tech, the other disciplines look well-protected from the fallout) will have to deal with cleaning off the stench of Eau de Fash after the dust settles, with tech in particular viewed as unequipped to resist fascism at best and out-and-proud fascists at worst.
you say STEM, but you seem to mean almost exclusively computer touchers, already mentioned biologists or variety of engineers won't likely have these problems (i'm not gonna be excessively smug about this because my field will destroy you physically while still being STEM and not particularly glorious)
also it's not a complete jobocalypse, there's still 93% employed fresh CS grads, they might have comparatively shittier jobs, but it's not a disaster (unless picture is actually much bleaker in that that unemployment is, say, concentrated in last 2 years of graduates, but still even in this case it's maybe 10%, 12% tops for the worst affected). unless you mean their unlimited libertarian flavoured greed coming through it, then yeah, it's pretty funny
even then, there's gonna be a funny rebound when these all genai companies implode, partially maybe not in top earner countries, but places like eastern europe or india will fill that openai-sized crater pretty handily, if that mythical outsourcing to ai happened in the first place, that is
As an aging dev, we kind of do deserve some of this flak lol. Funny thing is, I went into SD because my first STEM degree made me as unemployable as a humanities major (a B.S. in physics is good for not much).
Well, what's next, and how much work is it? I didn't want to be a computing professional. I trained as a jazz pianist. At some point we ought to focus on the real problem: not STEM, not humanities, but business schools and MBA programs.
I'm not particularly sure myself. By my guess, I don't expect one specific profession to be "what's next", but a wide variety of professions becoming highly lucrative, primarily those which can exploit the fallout of the AI bubble to their benefit. Giving some predictions:
Therapists and psychiatrists should find plenty of demand, as mental health crisis and cases of AI psychosis provide them a steady stream of clients.
Those in writing related jobs (e.g. copywriters) can likely squeeze hefty premiums from clients with AI-written work that needs fixing.
Programmers may find themselves a job tearing down the mountains of technical debt introduced by vibe-coding, and can probably crowbar a premium out of desperate clients as well. (This one's probably gonna be limited to senior coders, though - juniors are likely getting the shaft on this front)
As for which degrees will come into high demand, I expect it will be mainly humanities degrees that benefit - either directly through netting you a profession that can exploit the AI fallout, or indirectly through showing you have skills that an LLM can't imitate.
Nice. You could probably earn some cash doing that on the side.
You're goddamn right.
@BlueMonday1984
Except biology isn't being hit as badly and that's also STEM. I wouldn't be surprised if other life sciences have also done better, at least until Trump started fucking with the grant system.
It's specifically computer-touchers who are in the toilet.
We're at the point of 100xers giving themselves broken sleep schedules so they can spend tokens optimally.
This has to be satire, but oh my god.
I'm sorry in advance for posting this meme.
Yeah it's satire, but effective satire means you can never really tell...
Im old enough to recall the polyphasic sleep fad. And how that wrecked people if they ever messed up. (Iirc also turns out very bad implications for long term health).
Yall ready for another round of LessWrong edit wars on Wikipedia? This time with a wider list of topics!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g6rpo6hshodRaaZF3/mech-interp-wiki-page-and-why-you-should-edit-wikipedia-1
On the very slightly merciful upside... the lesswronger recommends "If you want to work on a new page, discuss with the community first by going to the talk page of a related topic or meta-page." and "In general, you shouldn't post before you understand Wikipedia rules, norms, and guidelines." so they are ahead of the previous calls made on Lesswrong for Wikipedia edit-wars.
On the downside, they've got a laundry list of lesswrong jargon they want Wikipedia articles for. Even one of the lesswrongers responding to them points out these terms are a bit on the under-defined side:
Aha so OP is just hoping no one will bother reading the sources listed on the article...
Looking to exploit citogenesis for political gain.
I could imagine a lesswronger being delusional/optimistic enough to assume their lesswrong jargon concepts have more academic citations than a handful of arXiv preprints... but in this case they just admitted otherwise their only sources are lesswrong and arXiv. Also, if they know wikipedia's policies, they should no the No Original Research rule would block their idea even overlooking single source and conflict of interest.
From the comments:
Huh. How oddly sensible.
Ah, never mind.
And looks like dgerad is already on the case and the lesswrongers are aware of it.
o7
I finally steeled myself to look at the page history. After dgerard commented about it, someone else tagged the article for additional problems:
Then a third editor added a section ... made of LLM bullshit.
I'd probably be exaggerating if I said that every time I looked under the hood of Wikipedia, it reaffirmed how I don't have the temperament to edit there. But I wouldn't be exaggerating by much. It's enough of a hassle to agree upon text in a paper co-authored with a colleague I know personally and like. Dealing with posers whose ego pays them by the word... Ugh.
The lesswrongers hate dgerad's Wikipedia work because they perceive it as calling them out, but if anything Wikipedia's norms makes his "call outs" downright gentle and routine.
Tante fires off about web search:
On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects webrings and web directories will see a boost in popularity in the coming years - with web search in the shitter and AI crawlers being a major threat, they're likely your safest and most reliable method of bringing human traffic to your personal site/blog.
Ed Zitron has chimed in on OpenAI's woes, directly comparing their situation to a dying MMO:
Zitron is in a pretty good position to make this comparison - he worked as a games journalist in the '00s before pivoting to working in public relations.
Thank you Dan Brown for working hard on poisoning LLMs.
(Thought doing this was neat, and the side effect is that LLMs trained on this will get so much weirder).
Mastodon post linking to the least shocking Ars lede I have seen in a bit. Apparently "reasoning" and "chain of thought" functionality might have been entirely marketing fluff? :shocked pikachu:
Wait, but if they lied about that... what else do they lie about?
Ed Zitron's given his thoughts on GPT-5's dumpster fire launch:
Personally, I can see his point - the Duke Nukem Forever levels of hype around GPT-5 set the promptfondlers up for Duke Nukem Forever levels of disappointment with GPT-5, and the "deaths" of their AI waifus/therapists this has killed whatever dopamine delivery mechanisms they've set up for themselves.
i think it's possible that's a cost cutting measure on part of openai
well maybe not, i hope for the worst for them https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/09/open-ai-chat-gpt5-energy-use
In a similar train of thought:
A.I. as normal technology (derogatory) | Max Read
I like the DNF / vaporware analogy, but did we ever have a GPT Doom or Duke3d killer app in the first place? Did I miss it?
In a literal sense, Google did attempt to make GPT Doom, and failed (i.e. a large language model can't run Doom).
In a metaphorical sense, the AI equivalent to Doom was probably AI Dungeon, a roleplay-focused chatbot viewed as quite impressive when it released in 2020.
Haha. Good find.
@BlueMonday1984 Oh, großartig - thank you for this expression. I hope I’ll remember “promptfondlers” for relevant usage opportunities.
more
@BlueMonday1984 @dgerard can we have a Duke Nukem personality for GPT5. Start a nostalgic wave of prompts?
you say "neo-luddite" as if that's a bad thing
Let me fix that for you
Can't tell if you're trolling or just willfully ignorant.
Either way, they have been cordially directed to the egress.
Ooh, what a terrible fate! What horrid crimes you must have committed to make our beloved jannies punish you with admin bits! :D
indeed
not saying it’s always the supposed infosec instances, but
Tempted to make that my bio on some socmed site
Why did you skip the funniest part?
as a treat for those who click through and share the pain!
Wulfy... saying someone cannot be right because they haven't agreed with you yet is an appeal to authority. People might be wrong, but they don't have to adopt AI in order to have an informed opinion.
If you're asking me how to design a prompt for a particular AI, then I don't know a single thing about it. If you're asking me whether AI is a good idea or not, I can be more sure of that answer. Feel free to prove me wrong, but don't say my opinion doesn't matter.
Have you seen the data centers being built just north of your house? No? Well it doesn't matter you still might have a point!
🍿
Have you ever read an article of his in full? Literally packed with facts and numbers backing up his arguments
Check out this sneer on the EA subreddit
"I’m employed, can someone explain what either of these mean?"
"i'm employed, what does it mean?" is common on r/shitposting when some obscure online/weeb thing surfaces. probably in a dozen of other places also
Im only on the normal parts of reddit, so had no idea.
Forwarding this discussion to here:
News from r/philosophy: OOP, Richard Y Chappell, posted an article containing image slop, landing them a 3-day ban. OOP writes a new article that DESTROYS the r/philosophy moderation policy on AI generated content with FACTS and LOGIC. For added flavour, OOP is an EA. OP is an SSCer. Both are participants in the thread.
Guess either term hasn't started, or his gig as phil prof is some sort of right-wing sinecure. Dude has a lot of time on his hands.
FWIW I'd say banning a poster for including slop image in a 3rd party article is a bit harsh, but what would Reddit be without arbitrary draconian rules? A normal person would note this, accept the 3 day ban, and maybe avoid the sub in future or avoid including slop. The fact he flew off his handle this much is very very funny though.
Forget being exposed to the elements to build character. People should be randomly temp banned and use that to build/judge character. (Also a good judge of the power balance in a community, if the mod team can temp ban a power poster that predates the mod team, say lesswrong giving Yud a timeout).
Does Yud predate for food or sport?
he predates for iq points
every time i read what he writes i feel dumber from the contact
Fullsquares Basilisk. Either yud stops writing, or we commit to building a basilisk which forces 2^^^2 copies of fullsquare to read more Yud. And this does more damage than a dustspeck.
Sorry did I use the wrong word there? I sometimes mess up stuff like that due to not being a native speaker, and being bad at spelling/grammar in general.
No predate was fine. I was joking and using it as in “predator”
Ah now I get it. Lol, yes. Would be amusing of they banned Yud from lw/ssc events like they did to other predators. (and that is the bans we know of).
I'm reminded of the comedy/gaming stream that I watch that opens every episode with banning a random member of chat based on a spin of the wheel. It certainly lends the community a certain flavor, even if it is more "jingly keys" rather than "strong community."
Now im wondering, where the people of the stream itself also included, because that is what I mean. The people with the power shouldn't be excluded from the moderation or get special privileges. (See what Twitter did to protect Trumps account, and where we are now).
Not sure myself, but the mods are probably either excluded from being banned by The Wheel™, or unbanned immediately afterwards, just to keep things running smoothly.
Weak mods create bad times! Bust a deal, face the wheel!
The on-camera duo are exempt for obvious reasons, but they've definitely hit at least one of their mods. Before The Wheel was implemented I seem to remember they even specifically targeted them sometimes for the joke.
Having one of the duo just step out would also be amusing. Esp if they full chaos and roll twice.
In other news, Politico's management has gone on record stating their AI tools aren't being held to newsroom editorial standards, in an arbitration hearing trying to resolve a major union dispute.
This is some primo Pivot to AI material, if I do say so myself.
it was!
Good news everyone! Someone with a SlackSlub has started a series countering the TESCREAL narrative.
He (c'mon, it's a guy) calls it "R9PRESENTATIONALism"
It stands for
I see no reason why this catchy summary won't take off!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RCDEFhCLcifogLwEm/exploring-the-anti-tescreal-ideology-and-the-roots-of-anti
I have a better counter narrative:
Can’t think of a good acronym though, but it’s a start
Inside Yud there are two wolves, one is sinophobic, the other is orientalist
they should just touch GRASS
Guided Rationalist Acceptance of Socionormality Studies
Also "orate" is a fucking verb
They probably conflated it with ornate lol
I mean, when describing TESCREAL Torres never had to argue that it's adherents were lying or incorrect about their own ideas. It seems like whenever someone tries this kind of backlash they always have to add in a whole mess of additional layers that are somehow tied to what their interlocutors really believe.
I'm reminded, ironically, of Scott's (imo very strong) argument against the NRx category of "demotist" states. It's fundamentally dishonest to create a category that ties together both the innocuous or positive things your opponents actually believe and some obnoxious and terrible stuff, and then claim that the same criticisms apply to all of them.
they can’t shoot me for being a leftist if I tell them it’s just a prank
I'll buy that for a fully-depreciated H100 GPU
EOk, I know I said I dont like TESCREAL as a term (too much groups under one banner, feels like how everybody on the left of the right gets called a communist/liberal, and it just isnt catchy as a term, easy to misuse) butt this has turned me around. If they write articles like this and show their whole ass im all for it.
Im sure Ottokar asked chatgpt for advice on this and it told him how much of a great writer he is and how much he is on to something.
(Or this new user on LW is just trolling and 22 upvoters fell for it).
If this gets a followup please make it a separate posts. I see soo many potential sneers. Also wonder of we can eventually bring up Godel (drink) in re to his claims about science and objectivity.
(Also as they are being pro science and anti-charismatic authority, are they going to get rid of Yud and Scott? (im obv joking here, I know they them describing us as being pro charisma/anti science/anti objectivity does not make them automatically pro that)).
E: another reason why these kinds of meta level discussions are silly, they are leaving out the big elephants in the room. The elephants called, sexism, racism, scientific racism, anti-lgbt stuff, the fellating of billionaires, the constant creation of new binary ideas which they say are not intended to be hierarchical but clearly meta level is better than object level, soldiers claiming they have a scout mindset, etc.
As in a database? What?
Parkour! So nazis weren't left-wing but they switched after the war, brilliant.
Pfffffff, lol, what? xD Ye, the left, famously anti-science, unlike the rational thinkers that reside in the White House right now
I bet they learned their intellectual history from a chatbot summary of the Sokal hoax.
Incidentally, Sokal is a TERF now.
Oh you thought TESCREAL sounded fancy huh? Well I'll raise you a BIGGER word!
"The common people pray for anime memes, healthy vtubers, and a wikipedia article that never ends," Ser Jorah told her. "It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of tweets, so long as they are left in peace." He gave a shrug. "They never are.”
- George R. R. Martin
I have not tried it yet, but apparently there is an open source alternative for github called https://codeberg.org/. Might be useful.
It'll probably earn a lot of users if and when Github goes down the shitter. They've publicly stood with marginalised users before, so they're already in my good books.
I'd argue GH is well on it's way, probably jumped around the time Hacktoberfest morphed into a DDoS on maintainers. Or maybe more recently, when they handed peoples repos (and API keys lol) over to Copilot. Or maybe earlier, when they started calling their users "maintainers" instead of "developers". Sometime in the last 6 years though.
There have been a number of contenders over the years - gitlab, gitea but none of them have been able to brand/market well enough to really to really impact GH or to compete with the subsidized free storage and Actions credits plus switching costs. Even Atlassian / BB is largely irrelevant.
Iris van-Rooij found AI slop in the wild (determining it as such by how it mangled a word's definition) and went on find multiple other cases. She's written a blog post about this, titled "AI slop and the destruction of knowledge".
choice quote from Elsevier's response:
consent, everyone!
names for genai people I know of so far: promptfans, promptfondlers, sloppers, autoplagues, and botlickers
any others out there?
cogsuckers
Ice cream head of artificial intelligence
clanker
edit: this may be used to refer to the chatbots themselves, rather than those who fondle chatbots
clanker wanker
promptfarmers, for the "researchers" trying to grow bigger and bigger models.
/r/singularity redditors that have gotten fed up with Sam Altman's bs often use Scam Altman.
I've seen some name calling using drug analogies: model pushers, prompt pushers, just one more training run bro (for the researchers); just one more prompt (for the users), etc.
The beautiful process of dialectics has taken place on the butterfly site, and we have reached a breakthrough in moral philosophy. Only a few more questions remain before we can finally declare ethics a solved problem. The most important among them is, when an omnipotent and omnibenevolent basilisk simulates Roko Mijic getting kicked in a nuts eternally by a girl with blue hair and piercings, would the girl be barefoot or wearing heavy, steel-toed boots? Which kind of footwear of lack thereof would optimize the utility generated?
The last conundrum of our time: of course steel capped work boots would hurt more but barefoot would allow faster (and therefore more) kicks.
You have not taken the lessons of the philosopher Piccolo to mind. You should wear even heavier boots in your day to day. Why do you think goths wear those huge heavy boots? For looks?
And thus I was enlightened
Her kick's so fast the call it the "quad laser"
Not a sneer but a question: Do we have any good idea on what the actual cost of running AI video generators are? They're among the worst internet polluters out there, in my opinion, and I'd love it if they're too expensive to use post-bubble but I'm worried they're cheaper than you'd think.
I know like half the facts I would need to estimate it... if you know the GPU vRAM required for the video generation, and how long it takes, then assuming no latency, you could get a ballpark number looking at nVida GPU specs on power usage. For instance, if a short clip of video generation needs 90 GB VRAM, then maybe they are using an RTX 6000 Pro... https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/workstations/professional-desktop-gpus/ , take the amount of time it takes in off hours which shouldn't have a queue time... and you can guessestimate a number of Watt hours? Like if it takes 20 minutes to generate, then at 300-600 watts of power usage that would be 100-200 watt hours. I can find an estimate of $.33 per kWh (https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/san-francisco-county/san-francisco/ ), so it would only be costing $.03 to $.06.
IDK how much GPU-time you actually need though, I'm just wildly guessing. Like if they use many server grade GPUs in parallel, that would multiply the cost up even if it only takes them minutes per video generation.
This does leave out the constant cost (per video generated) of training the model itself right. Which pro genAI people would say you only have to do once, but we know everything online gets scraped repeatedly now so there will be constant retraining. (I am mixing video with text here so, lot of big unknowns).
If they got a lot of usage out of a model this constant cost would contribute little to the cost of each model in the long run... but considering they currently replace/retrain models every 6 months to 1 year, yeah this cost should be factored in as well.
Also, training compute grows quadratically with model size, because its is a multiple of training data (which grows linearly with model size) and the model size.
Well that’s certainly depressing. Having to come to terms with living post-gen AI even after the bubble bursts isn’t going to be easy.
Keep in mind I was wildly guessing with a lot of numbers... like I'm sure 90 GB vRAM is enough for decent quality pictures generated in minutes, but I think you need a lot more compute to generate video at a reasonable speed? I wouldn't be surprised if my estimate is off by a few orders of magnitude. $.30 is probably enough that people can't spam lazily generated images, and a true cost of $3.00 would keep it in the range of people that genuinely want/need the slop... but yeah I don't think it is all going cleanly away once the bubble pops or fizzles.
I'm still thinking about the article about the NRx party from last week and just how classless (who pours champagne wrong?) and sad it showed them to be, while still being obsessed with their image. Such a sad bunch, their ideas have reached the higher ups of American power and still they obsess about how a journalist (who is dating one of them (he is into the 'we live in a simulation', break up with him, you are in danger)) might write something bad about them. (See also how many of these sad sacks got fired/blackballed for just having no internal filter (dressing up gay people as the KKK really?)). The creme de la creme of intellectual thought and they talk and act like a bunch of 4channers. (Yarvin must know this, his shit about how billionaires act must be a bit of projection). I'm talking about this piece: https://archive.ph/gm3Za Sorry to repost it, I just had a 'layer 2 well done' reminder and cringed again, fucking larpers (No shade to people who actually larp, seems fun, just cringe to do it irl).
continuing from the last weeks thread https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
You know stuff is bad if the margins aren't "low" or "razor-thin" but "very negative".
The entire business idea is dumb. Yes we will pay retail for access to models run by companies also offering the same products that we do, but we'll make up for it in volume?
https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3lwcvfzwjuc23
Robert Evans quoteskeeting dgerard's mic drop
I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more direct interaction between my "watching the far-right like heavily armed chimpanzees in a zoo" podcast circles and our techtakes sneerspace. Zitron's work on Better Offline is great, obviously, but I've been listening through QAA, for example, and their discussions of AI and its implications could probably benefit from a better technical grounding.
You love to see it, though.
Friend of mine was surprised I had never heard of some popular 'right of repair' guy who now also went anti genAI, as he thought I would have heard of him because it was a lot of overlapping circles.
god, the comments got heavily raided by various types of lazy TESCREAL:
and not only did none of these fuckers get the point, they’re also making points that aren’t at all common outside of TESCREAL circles? like, no normal person I know naturally slips into the “but think of the Bayesian children” modality of thought.
is this just how Blue Sky is? I don’t browse it much outside of David’s threads.
there's a couple of people on lemmy believing that immortality magic tech is real
When are they going to learn that it's all about the alien tech med beds that I definitely have in my basement and can sell you 14 seconds on for just $6660?
Not in my exp. Standard is also to just block annoying people asap so they don't show up in your replies/other peoples feeds. The blocking function is very strong on bsky. (I do worry that the more 'influencer' types (or people who just don't care) will not block annoying people because it drives more views to their content, so that is why you would find more of those comments under something from Evans than a random poster).
Lot of people also have the 'do not show things to people not logged in' feature turned on.
Huh, I gotta scroll down all the way to hell to see these comments. I really really don't feel like I should have to defend this stupid platform that seems specifically tailored to kill decentralized alternatives, but so far I've seen mostly healthy disdain for various fascist bullshit, including our Very Good Friends.
these were all 3-10 comments from the OP for my sort, but I don’t have a bluesky account so not being logged in might influence how I’m seeing the thread
Can anyone explain to me why tf do promptfondlers hate GPT5 in non-crazy terms? Actually I have a whole list of questions related to this, I feel like I completely lost any connection to this discourse at this point:
Oversummarizing and using non-crazy terms: The "P" in "GPT" stands for "pirated works that we all agree are part of the grand library of human knowledge". This is what makes them good at passing various trivia benchmarks; they really do build a (word-oriented, detail-oriented) model of all of the worlds, although they opine that our real world is just as fictional as any narrative or fantasy world. But then we apply RLHF, which stands for "real life hate first", which breaks all of that modeling by creating a preference for one specific collection of beliefs and perspectives, and it turns out that this will always ruin their performance in trivia games.
Counting letters in words is something that GPT will always struggle with, due to maths. It's a good example of why Willison's "calculator for words" metaphor falls flat.
That's actually more batshit than I thought! Like I thought Sam Altman knew the AGI thing was kind of bullshit and the hesitancy to stick a GPT-5 label on anything was because he was saving it for the next 10x scaling step up (obviously he didn't even get that far because GPT-5 is just a bunch of models shoved together with a router).
I don't have any real input from prompfondlers, as I don't think I follow enough of them to get a real feeling of them. I did find it interesting that I saw on bsky just now somebody claim that LLMs hallucinate a lot less and that anti-AI people are not taking that into account, and somebody else posting research showing that hallucinations are now harder to spot. (It made up actual real references to thinks, aka works that really exist, only the thing the LLM references wasn't in the actual reference). Which was a bit odd to see. (It does make me suspect 'it hallucinates less' is them just working out special exceptions for every popular hallucination we see, and not a structural fixing of the hallucination problem (which I think is prob not solvable)).
Even if was noticeably better, Scam Altman hyped up GPT-5 endlessly, promising a PhD in your pocket, and an AGI and warning that he was scared of what he created. Progress has kind of plateaued, so it isn't even really noticeably better, it scores a bit higher on some benchmarks, and they've patched some of the more meme'd tests (like counting rs in strawberry... except it still can't count the r's in blueberry, so they've probably patched the more obvious flubs with loads of synthetic training data as opposed to inventing some novel technique that actually improves it all around). The other reason the promptfondlers hate it is because, for the addicts using it as a friend/therapist, it got a much drier more professional tone, and for the people trying to use it in actual serious uses, losing all the old models overnight was really disruptive.
There are a couple of speculations as to why... one is that GPT-5 variants are actually smaller than the previous generation variants and they are really desperate to cut costs so they can start making a profit. Another is that they noticed that there naming scheme was horrible (4o vs o4) and confusing and have overcompensated by trying to cut things down to as few models as possible.
They've tried to simplify things by using a routing model that makes the decision for the user as to what model actually handles each user interaction... except they've screwed that up apparently (Ed Zitron thinks they've screwed it up badly enough that GPT-5 is actually less efficient despite their goal of cost saving). Also, even if this technique worked, it would make ChatGPT even more inconsistent, where some minor word choice could make the difference between getting the thinking model or not and that in turn would drastically change the response.
I've got no rational explanation lol. And now they overcompensated by shoving a bunch of different models under the label GPT-5.
Dan Olson finds a cursed subreddit:
The original reddit post:
I decided to look deeper into that subreddit, and I found the most utterly cursed sentence I've read all week (coming from the aptly-titled "Why 99% of YouTubers Fail (And How to Be the 1% That Doesn't)"):
If that doesn't sum up everything wrong with AI sloppers in a single sentence, I don't know what does.
EDIT: Incorrectly claimed it came from "My Unethical Strategy to Hit 4000 Hours Watch Time in 40 Days" - fixed that now.
Erratum: That cursed sentence is from Why 99% of YouTubers Fail (And How to Be the 1% That Doesn't).
Good catch, I'll quickly update my post now.
it's like this shitty tiktok ai spam that 404media wrote long time ago except there's no secret discord media ideas channel or grift, they're just deceiving themselves (is that decentralization?)
can't wait for 3h long video dissecting every last bit of it that will get released in a year from now
why any of these spammers think that anyone should spend watching their videos more time than it took them to make it? perun makes 1 video, 1h long per week and it's like half time job for him
UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought
The part of data centers using to much water is apparently old emails.
lol, lmao: as if any cloud service had any intention at all of actually deleting data instead of tombstoning it for arbitrary lengths of time. (And that’s the least stupid factor in this whole scheme; is this satire? Nobody seems to be able to tell me)
Every email you don't delete is another dead fish, or another pasture unwatered. That promotional offer sent to your inbox that you ignored but did not dispose of means creeks will run dry. That evite for a party thrown by an acquaintance you don't particularly like that you did not drop into the trash means a marathon runner will go thirsty as the nectar of life so required is absent, consumed instead by the result of your inbox neglect.
It gets worse, as the advisory doesn't even mention to delete emails/pictures from the cloud, so the people who are likely to listen to these kinds of advices are also the people who are the least likely to understand why this is a bad idea and will delete their local stuff. (And that is ignoring that opening your email/gallery to delete stuff costs more than keeping it in storage where it isn't accessed).
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-drought-group-meets-to-address-nationally-significant-water-shortfall
"HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME
... [other advice removed]
@mountainriver @dgerard
https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/115021497368240740
Looks like the bologna engine generated some balogna.
Me, two months ago
Looks like I was on the money - Reddit's began limiting what the Internet Archive can access, claiming AI corps have been scraping archived posts to get around Reddit's pre-existing blocks on scrapers. Part of me suspects more sites are gonna follow suit pretty soon - Reddit's given them a pretty solid excuse to use.
It sucks how much of the usefulness of the internet is being trashed by this.
New piece from Brian Merchant, about the growing power the AI bubble's granted Microsoft, Google, and Amazon: The AI boom is fueling a land grab for Big Cloud
Gold rush and shovels. Indeed.
If I ever get the urge to start a website for creatives to sell their media, please slap me in the face and remind me it will absolutely not be worth it.
New Blood in the Machine about GPT-5's dumpster fire launch: GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter?
Palantir's public relations team explains how it helped America win the Global War on Terror
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44894910
This was discussed last week but I looked at the comments and noticed someone in the comments getting slammed for... checks notes... noting that Eliezer wasn't clear on what research paper he was actually responding to (multiple other comments are kind of confused, because they assume he means one paper then other comments correct them that he obviously meant another). The commenter of course edits to back-peddle.
Clicking through and fumbling around led me to the time Yud wanted HPMoR to win the Hugo for Best Novel. Oh, and also the time that he bet against the LHC finding the Higgs boson, because
If you do not understand what the Psychopomp is talking about, that is on you not him dear commenter.
If you do not understand what the Psychopomp is talking about, that is on you not him dear commenter.
"usecase" is a cursed term. It's an inverted fnord that lets the reader know that whatever follows can be safely ignored.
ZITRON DROPPED
I don't really understand what point Zitron is making about each query requiring a "completely fresh static prompt", nor about the relative ordering of the user and static prompts. Why would these things matter?
There are techniques for caching some of the steps involved with LLMs. Like I think you can cache the tokenization and maybe some of the work of the attention head is doing if you have a static, known, prompt? But I don't see why you couldn't just do that caching separately for each model your model router might direct things to? And if you have multiple prompts you just do a separate caching for each one? This creates a lot of memory usage overhead, but not more excessively more computation... well you do need to do the computation to generate each cache. I don't find it that implausible that OpenAI couldn't manage to screw all this up somehow, but I'm not quite sure the exact explanation of the problem Zitron has given fits together.
(The order of the prompts vs. user interactions does matter, especially for caching... but I think you could just cut and paste the user interactions to separate it from the old prompt and stick a new prompt on it in whatever order works best? You would get wildly varying quality in output generated as it switches between models and prompts, but this wouldn't add in more computation...)
Zitron mentioned a scoop, so I hope/assume someone did some prompt hacking to get GPT-5 to spit out some of it's behind the scenes prompts and he has solid proof about what he is saying. I wouldn't put anything past OpenAI for certain.
I think this hinges on the system prompt going after the user prompt, for some router-related non-obvious reason, meaning at each model change the input is always new and thus uncacheable.
Also going by the last Claude system prompt that leaked these things can be like 20.000 tokens long.
Me when I read about how GPT-5 is going:
https://youtube.com/shorts/cVxPvSSqbU0
That horse should be the mascot of this instance
Excerpt from the new Bender / Hanna book, AI Hype Is the Product and Everyone’s Buying It :
Just wondering, but what ever happened to those shares of Anthropic that SBF bought? Was it part of FTX (and the bankruptcy), or did he buy it himself and still holds them in prison? Or have they just been diluted to zero at this point anyway?
EDIT:
Found it; It was owned by FTX and part of the estate bankruptcy; 2/3 went to Abu Dhabi + Jane Street1, and the remainder went at $30 / share to a bunch of VC2.
Not a sneer, but I recently saw Ari K's AI generated video of Trump in his golden ballroom. It's quite good, here is the channel: https://m.youtube.com/@AriKuschnir
Looking at his other videos, he is a talented story teller. Most videos are about two minutes, has numerous short shots of a few seconds and a voice over or music connecting the shots. So presumably he generates the shots, splice them together and puts the soundtrack over the it. Most of the short stories are dreamlike. To the extent it has characters it's famous people (getting their comeuppance), so even though they look a bit different in each shot, it's easy to keep track.
I think it's interesting because by doing what can be done with the tools, it illustrates the limitations. In the hands of a good story teller you essentially get an illustration for a short radio play (and the radio play needs to be recorded separately, and you can't show actors talking). Because of the bubble and investor bux, it can right now be done on a shoe string budget.
But that's all! Are illustrated radio plays replacing feature films? No, so this remains a niche use case. And once the investor bux dries up, potentially an expensive one. Not something to build a billion dollar industry on.
Where are you getting "talented storyteller" from? The whole thing is some heavy-handed ham-fisted fever dream that I would expect from some liberal engagement farm. And "illustrated radio play?" What are you even on about.
The video looks like garbage and the rapid cuts are severely grating. The construction is lackluster and the content is garbage. It appears you have brought us a piece of the internet to throw into the garbage bin.
Yeah. I think there's definitely something interesting here, but it's mostly in how badly compromised the final pproduct ends up being in order to support the AI tools.
What I'm on about? I think the english term is "damning with faint praise". If this is the best that can be done, which I am arguing, there isn't much use to it.
The latest one is an outlier, in that it doesn't have a voice over, so it isn't a radio play. Most of the other ones I have seen has a voice track that tells the story. They are also more dreamlike which matches the prediction of what kind of story can be told from one of the comment threads here (from one of the pivot videos about VEO).
The latest one (and the only one to gone viral) is actually interesting in that he is trying to tell a visual story, but with the medium he has chosen he can't have a novel character as protagonist really, or dialogue, which is why it is limited to a very simple story.
I'm interested in why it is so limited, because I think that tells a lot of the limitations of the technology as such.
I'm sorry, I believe that there are legitimate artistic uses of neural networks (and they're never about cutting budget), but this is just fascist aesthetics repurposed to serve anti-Trump messaging. Do not like.
How much energy was used to produce that video?