Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 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.)
Sneer inspired by a thread on the preferred Tumblr aggregator subreddit.
Rationalists found out that human behavior didn't match their ideological model, then rather than abandon their model or change their ideology decided to replace humanity with AIs designed to behave the way they think humans should, just as soon as they can figure out a way to do that without them destroying all life in the universe.
That thread gives me hope. A decade ago, a random internet discussion in which rationalist came up would probably mention "quirky Harry Potter fanfiction" with mixed reviews, whereas all the top comments on that thread are calling out the alt-right pipeline and the racism.
I have no hope. The guy who introduced me to LessWrong included what I later realised was a race science pitch. Yudkowsky was pushing this shit in 2007. This sucker just realised a coupla decades late.
david heinemeier hanson of the ruby on rails fame decided to post a white supremacist screed with a side of transphobia because now he doesn't need to pretend anything anymore. it's not surprising, he was heading this way for a while, but seeing the naked apology of fascism is still shocking for me.
any reasonable open source project he participates in should immediately cut ties with the fucker. (i'm not holding my breath waiting, though.)
Urgh, I couldn't even get through the whole article, it's too disgusting. What a surprise that yet another "no politics at work"-guy turns out to support fascism!
just yesterday I saw this toot and now I know why
(I mean, they probably should’ve bounced the guy a decade ago, but definitely even more time for it now)
@mawhrin just casually pitching “great replacement theory” there. What a little Nazi
@mawhrin @BlueMonday1984 Important to note:-
This is the #omarchy Linux distro architect in chief.
That's what you're aligning yourself with, even unintentionally, if one chooses to use it.
I use Windows, not Linux. I think you're confusing me with someone else.
For the record, if you see participants in the thread (and the author of the post) tagged just pretend it isn't there. Mastodon models its notification feature after email To: and Cc:
it was a general statement. (you got tagged because you boosted it, not because it was a direct reply to you.)
I was in London last week and I can confirm it still has the Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and streets. The Tube is as shite and loud and warm and tight as ever. I even got called a cunt once. Had a blast. On a scale of Bordeaux to Beans on Toast I rank it 9/10 Britishness
@mawhrin @BlueMonday1984 bad news, he's just financed a coup of Rubygems…
(well, shopify did. he's on the board. so, looks like, best guess.)
(edit: fixed wrong company name.)
@fishidwardrobe @mawhrin @BlueMonday1984 Do you mean shopify? https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
@koantig @mawhrin @BlueMonday1984 bugger, yes, editing.
Regarding occasional sneer target Lawrence Krauss and his co-conspirators:
https://bsky.app/profile/nateo.bsky.social/post/3lyuzaaj76s2o
Huh, I wonder who this Krauss guy is, haven't heard of him.
*open wikipedia*
*entire subsection titled "Allegations of sexual misconduct"*
*close wikipedia*
::: spoiler image description Screenshot of Lawrence Krauss's Wikipedia article, showing a section called "Controversies" with subheadings "Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein" followed by "Allegations of sexual misconduct". Text at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Krauss#Controversies :::
Always so many coincidences.
"As a scientist..." please stop giving the world more reasons to stuff nerds in lockers.
All of those people, Krauss, Dawkins, Harris (okay that one might've been unsalvageable from the start, I'm really not sure) are such a great reminder that you can be however smart/educated you want, the moment you believe you're the smartest boi and stop learning and critically approaching your own output you get sucked into the black hole of your asshole, never to return.
Like if I had a nickel. It's hubris every time. All of those people need just a single good friend that, from time to time, would tell them "man, what you said was really fucking stupid just now" and they'd be saved.
Clout is a proxy of power and power just absolutely rots your fucking brain. Every time a Guy emerges, becomes popular, clearly thinks "haha, but I am different, power will not rot MY brain", five years later boom, he's drinking with Jordan Benzo Peterson. Even Joe Fucking Rogan used to be significantly more lucid before someone gave him ten bazillion dollars for a podcast and he suffered severe clout poisoning.
Starting things off with a newsletter by Jared White that caught my attention: Why “Normies” Hate Programmers and the End of the Playful Hacker Trope, which directly discusses how the public perception of programmers has changed for the worse, and how best to rehabilitate it.
Adding my own two cents, the rise of gen-AI has definitely played a role here - I'm gonna quote Baldur Bjarnason directly here, since he said it better than I could:
This is an interesting crystallization that parallels a lot of thoughts I've been having, and it's particularly hopeful that it seeks to discard the "hacker" moniker and instead specifically describe the subjects as programmers. Looking back, I was only becoming terminally online circa 1997, and back then it seemed like there was an across-the-spectrum effort to reclaim the term "hacker" into a positive connotation after the federal prosecutions of the early 90s. People from aspirant-executive types like Paul Graham to dirty hippies like RMS were insistent that being a "hacker" was a good thing, maybe the best possible thing. This was, of course, a dead letter as soon as Facebook set up at "One Hacker Way" in Menlo Park, but I'd say it's definitely for the best to finally put a solid tombstone on top of that cultural impulse.
As well, because my understanding of the defining activity of the positive-good "hacker" is that it's all too close to Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things," and I think Jared White would probably agree with me. Paul Graham was willing to embrace the term because he was used to the interactive development style of Lisp environments, but the mainstream tools have only fitfully evolved in that direction at best. When "hacking," the "hacker" makes a series of short, small iterations with a mostly nebulous goal in mind, and the bulk of the effort may actually be what's invested in the minimum viable product. The self-conception inherits from geek culture a slumped posture of almost permanent insufficiency, perhaps hiding a Straussian victimhood complex to justify maintaining one's own otherness.
In mentioning Jobs, the piece gestures towards the important cultural distinction that I still think is underexamined. If we're going to reclaim and rehabilitate even homeopathic amounts of Jobs' reputation, the thesis we're trying to get at is that his conception of computers as human tools is directly at odds with the AI promoters' (and, more broadly, most cloud vendors') conception of computers as separate entities. The development of generative AI is only loosely connected with the sanitized smiley-face conception of "hacking." The sheer amount of resources and time spent on training foreclose the possibility of a rapid development loop, and you're still not guaranteed viable output at the end. Your "hacks" can devolve into a complete mess, and at eye-watering expense.
I went and skimmed Graham's Hackers and Painters again to see if I could find any choice quotes along these lines, since he spends that entire essay overdosing on the virtuosity of the "hacker." And hoo boy:
You think Graham will ever realize that we're culminating a generation of his precious "hackers" who ultimately failed at all this?
re: last line: no, he never will admit or concede to a single damn thing, and that's why every time I remember this article exists I have to reread dabblers & blowhards one more time purely for defensive catharsis
I don't even know the degree to which that's the fault of the old hackers, though. I think we need to acknowledge the degree to which a CS degree became a good default like an MBA before it, only instead of "business" it was pitched as a ticket to a well-paying job in "computer". I would argue that a large number of those graduates were never going to be particularly interested in the craft of programming beyond what was absolutely necessary to pull a paycheck.
Interesting, I'd go rhetorically more in this direction: A hack is not a solution, it's the temporary fix (or.. break?) until you get around to doing it properly. On the axis where hacks are on one end and solutions on the other, genAI shit is beyond the hack. It's not even a temporary fix, its less, functionally and culturally.
A hack can also just be a clever way to use a system in a way it wasnt designed.
Say you put a Ring doorbell on a drone as a perimeter defense thing? A hack. See also the woman who makes bad robots.
It also can be a certain playfulness with tech. Which is why hacker is dead. It cannot survive contact with capitalist forces.
AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.
Not the only. Former USSR and Eastern Europe as well, and it's way worse there. Typically, SWE would earn about several TIMES more than your college-educated person. This leads to programmers being obnoxious libertarian nazi fucktards.
Hackers is dead. (Apologies to punk)
Id say that for one reason alone, when Musk claimed grok was from the guide nobody really turned on him.
Unrelated to programmers or hackers, Elons father (CW: racism) went fully mask off and claims Elon agrees with him. Which considering his promotion of the UK racists does not feel off the mark. (And he is spreading the dumb '[Africans] have an [average] IQ of 63' shit, and claims it is all genetic. Sure man, the average African needs help understanding the business end of a hammer. As I said before, guess I met the smartest Africans in the world then, as my university had a few smart exchange students from an African country. If you look at his statements it is even dumber than normal, as he says population, so that means either non-Black Africans are not included, showing just how much he thinks of himself as the other, or they are, and the Black African average is even lower).
the talking point about disparaging terms for AI users by choice "I came up with a racist-sounding term for AI users, so if you say 'clanker' you must be a racist" is so fucking stupid it's gotta be some sort of op
(esp when the made-up racist-sounding term turns out to have originated with Warren fucking Ellis)
i am extremely disappointed that awful systems users have fallen for it for a moment
Side note: The way I've seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. I've mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.
Same here, I've never actually seen the term "clanker" be used in reference to a person using the AI, but the AI itself. Which to me was analogous to going to an expensive bakery and accusing the bread of ripping you off instead of the baker (or whoever was setting prices, which wouldn't be the bread).
If there was any sort of op going on (which I don't think there is), I'd guess it would be from the AI doomers who want people to think of these things as things with enough self-awareness that something like "clanker" would actually insult them (but, again, probably not, IMO).
The truth is that we feel shame to a much greater degree than the other side, which makes it pretty easy to divide us on these annoying trivialities.
My personal hatred of tone policing is greater than my sense of shame, but I imagine that isnt something to expect for most.
Slightly related to the 'it is an op' thing, did you look at the history of the wikipedia page for clanker? There were 3 edits to the page before 1 June 2025.
Sabine Hossenfelder claims she finally got cancelled, kind of - Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy cut ties with Sabine Hossenfelder.
Supposedly the MCMP thought publicly shitting on a paper for clicks on your very popular youtube channel was antideontological. Link goes to reddit post in case you don't want to give her views.
The commentator who thinks that USD 120k / year is a poor income for someone with a PhD makes me sad. That is what you earn if you become a professor of physics at a research university or get a good postdoc, but she aged out of all of those jobs and was stuck on poorly paid short-term contracts. There are lots of well-paid things that someone with a PhD in physics can do if she is willing to network and work for it, but she chose "rogue intellectual."
A German term to look up is WissZeitVG but many academic jobs in many countries are only offered to people no more than x years after receiving their PhD (yep, this discriminates against women and the disabled and those with sick spouses or parents).
(sees YouTube video)
I ain't [watchin] all that
I'm happy for u tho
Or sorry that happened
Sorry but who the fuck is that? Not one of our common guests here, I need a primer on her
She's popped up once or twice, owing to how she got on a lot of normal people's feeds as a science influencer before she couldn't contain the crank any longer.
Angela Collier: Dyson spheres are a joke.
::: spoiler spoiler Turns out Dyson agreed. :::
thanks for linking this, was fun to watch
hadn't seen that saltman clip (been real busy running around pretty afk the last few weeks), but it's a work of art. despite grokking the dynamics, it continues to be astounding just how vast the gulf between fact and market vibes are
and as usual, Collier does a fantastic job ripping the whole idea a new one in a most comprehensive manner
Woke up to some hashtag spam this morning
which appears to be over of those evolutionary “transitional forms” between grifts.
The sad thing is the underlying point is almost sound (hoarding data puts you at risk of data breaches, and leaking sensitive data might be Very Bad Indeed) but it is wrapped up in so much overhyped nonsense it is barely visible. Naturally, the best and most obvious fix — don’t hoard all that shit in the first place — wasn’t suggested.
(it also appears to be a month-old story, but I guess there’s no reason for mastodon hashtag spammers to be current 🫤)
Is there already a word for "an industry which has removed itself from reality and will collapse when the public's suspension of disbelief fades away"?
Calling this just "a bubble" doesn't cut it anymore, they're just peddling sci-fi ideas now. (Metaverse was a bubble, and it was stupid as hell, but at least those headsets and the legless avatars existed.)
There are many such terms! Just look at the list of articles under "See Also" for "The Emperor's New Clothes". My favorite term, not listed there, is "coyote time": "A brief delay between an action and the consequences of that action that has no physical cause and exists only for comedic or gameplay purposes." Closely related is the fact that industries don't collapse when the public opinion shifts, but have a stickiness to them; the guy who documented that stickiness is often quoted as saying, "Market[s] can remain irrational a lot longer than you [and I] can remain solvent."
I happened to learn recently that that's probably not from Keynes:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/
I don't know if it quite applies here since all the money is openly flowing to nVidia in exchange for very real silicon, but I'm partial to "the bezzle" - referring to the duration of time between a con artist taking your money and you realizing the money is gone. Some cons will stretch the bezzle out as long as possible by lying and faking returns to try and get the victims to give them even more money, but despite how excited the victims may be about this period the money is in fact already gone.
I would actually contend that crypto and the metaverse both qualify as early precursors to the modern AI post-economic bubble. In both cases you had a (heavily politicized) story about technology attract investment money well in excess of anyone actually wanting the product. But crypto ran into a problem where the available products were fundamentally well-understood forms of financial fraud, significantly increasing the risk because of the inherent instability of that (even absent regulatory pressure the bezzle eventually runs out and everyone realizes that all the money in those 'returns' never existed). And the VR technology was embarrassingly unable to match the story that the pushers were trying to tell, to the point where the next question, whether anyone actually wanted this, never came up.
GenAI is somewhat unique in that the LLMs can do something impressive in mimicking the form of actual language or photography or whatever it was trained on. And on top of that, you can get impressively close to doing a lot of useful things with that, but not close enough to trust it. That's the part that limits genAI to being a neat party trick, generating bulk spam text that nobody was going to read anyways, and little more. The economics don't work out when you need to hire someone skilled enough to do the work to take just as much time double-checking the untrustworthy robot output, and once new investment capital stops subsidizing their operating costs I expect this to become obvious, though with a lot of human suffering in the debris. The challenge of "is this useful enough to justify paying its costs" is the actual stumbling block here. Older bubbles were either blatantly absurd (tulips, crypto) or overinvestment as people tried to get their slice of a pie that anyone with eyes could see was going to be huge (railroad, dotcom). The combination of purely synthetic demand with an actual product is something I can't think of other examples of, at this scale.
it's like there was an industry made entirely out of bullshit jobs
If there is, I haven't heard of it. To try and preemptively coin one, "artificial industry" ("AI" for short) would be pretty fitting - far as I can tell, no industry has unmoored itself from reality like this until the tech industry pulled it off via the AI bubble.
I genuinely forgot the metaverse existed until I read this.
It’s a financial security threat, you see
that's why you should keep your at-risk data on quantum ai blockchain!!~
linkedin thotleedir posts directly into your mailbox? gonna have to pour one out for you
an absolutely wild grab-bag of words. the more you know about each piece, the more surreal the sentence becomes. unintentional art!
At this point, I'm gonna chalk the refusal to stop hoarding up to ideology more than anything else. The tech industry clearly sees data not as information to be taken sparingly, used carefully, and deleted when necessary, but as Objective Reality Units^tm^ which are theirs to steal and theirs alone.
Getting pretty far afield here, but goddamn Matt Yglesias's new magazine sucks:
The case for affirmative action for conservatives
"If we cave in and give the right exactly what they want on this issue, they'll finally be nice to us! Sure, you might think based on the last 50,000 times we've tried this strategy that they'll just move the goalposts and demand further concessions, but then they'll totally look like hypocrites and we'll win the moral victory, which is what actually matters!"
@PMMeYourJerkyRecipes @BlueMonday1984
The guy from the Federalist *doesn’t* want more ideological diversity in academia, he wants *less*. But he’ll settle for more as an interim goal until he can purge the wrong-thinkers.
We have that already it’s called business school
OK. So, this next thing is pretty much completely out of the sneerosphere, but it pattern matches to what we’re used to looking at: a self-styled “science communicator” mansplaining a topic they only have a reductive understanding of: Hank Green gets called out for bad knitting video
archive
TIL Hank Green, the milquetoast BlueSky poster, also has some YouTube channel. How quaint.
I think every time I learn That Guy From BlueSky also has some other gig different from posting silly memes I lose some respect for them.
E.g. I thought Mark Cuban was just a dumb libertarian shitposter, but then it turned out he has a cuntillion dollars and also participated in a show unironically called "Shark Tank" that I still don't 100% believe was a real thing because by god
I figured he'd be a lot better known for his YouTube career than for his bsky posting. I see his stuff all the time in my recommendations, though his style isn't my cup of tea so I seldom watch any of them.
I haven't seen the YouTube recommendation page in so long I wouldn't know. Invidious my beloved <3
What's up with all the websites that tell me "you've reached the limit of free articles for the month" even though I've literally never entered that site before in my life. Stop gaslighting me you cunts.
Anyway, here's the archive
The limit is zero, that's all.
I disabled javascript and the popup went away
I mean if it gets too hot he could try the traditional fiber arts dodge for internet hate and fake his own death.
Some of our younger readers might not be fully inoculated against high-control language. Fortunately, cult analyst Amanda Montell is on Crash Course this week with a 45min lecture introducing the dynamics of cult linguistics. For example, describing Synanon attack therapy, Youtube comments, doomscrolling, and maybe a familiar watering hole or two:
Cultish and Magical Overthinking are top shelf.
If Yud and Soares are on a book tour I want them to go on hot ones
Forgive my stupidity, but I don't know what this means. Or it's referencing something I don't know.
All is forgiven. Hot Ones is an internet interview show. Its core premise is that the host and interviewee conduct their interview while eating increasingly spicier chicken wings. As with any interview platform, it's a common stop for public figures to hit up, especially on PR tours.
The show has a reputation for researching its guests well and asking insightful/deep questions. There's also an element to it where, for some guests, as they experience spicier wings, they are unable to keep up whatever facade or persona they usually keep up in interviews.
I wasn't making any profound commentary; I want to see Yud in pain while trying to explain alignment.
Thanks.
TBF I can't say I'm sold on the notion of watching Yudkowsky eat spicy wings while also arguing with someone.
It's only fair that his audience shouldn't be the only ones suffering when that happens.
it would be incredible if yud’s one of the types to lose his focus around sauce 3, would do a real kicker to the shine of his grift
YouTube interview show where the interviewee is fed hot-sauce coated chicken wings of escalating spiciness
As an aside, my personal tolerance is such that if I ever go on there, I'm going to end up bankrupting the fuckers
someday(tm) I’ll get around to looking into getting a season pack from the states to here (which possibly might be distinctly non-trivial, and if it is I’ll have bother trying to figure out the logistics of it, which ugh)
An example from a local Nashville institution:
https://www.400degreeshotchicken.com/s/order?item=77#14
I'd gladly help you out with it!
will keep the offer in mind when I have the spoons and round tuits for it :)
Well, I have had some of their hot sauces before and can confirm that they are not bad to pretty good, and are at a good gift sort of price point (if you live in the US).
Wolfram has a blog post about lambda calculus. As usual, there are no citations and the bibliography is for the wrong blog post and missing many important foundational papers. There are no new results in this blog post (and IMO barely anything interesting) and it's mostly accurate, so it's okay to share the pretty pictures with friends as long as the reader keeps in mind that the author is writing to glorify themselves and make drawings rather than to communicate the essential facts or conduct peer review. I will award partial credit for citing John Tromp's effort in defining these diagrams, although Wolfram ignores that Tromp and an entire community of online enthusiasts have been studying them for decades. But yeah, it's a Mathematica ad.
::: spoiler In which I am pedantic about computer science (but also where I'm putting most of my sneers too, including a punchline)
For example, Wolfram's wrong that every closed lambda term corresponds to a combinator; it's a reasonable assumption that turns out to not make sense upon closer inspection. It's okay, because I know that he was just quoting the same 1992 paper by Fokker that I cited when writing the esolangs page for closed lambda terms, which has the same incorrect claim verbatim as its first sentence. Also, credit to Wolfram for listing Fokker in the bibliography; this is one of the foundational papers that we'd expect to see. With that in mind, here's some differences between my article and his.
The name "Fokker" appears over a dozen times in my article and nowhere in Wolfram's article. Also, I love being citogenic and my article is the origin of the phrase "Fokker size". I think that this is a big miss on his part because he can't envision a future where somebody says something like "The Fokker metric space" or "enriched over Fokker size". I've already written "some closed lambda terms with small Fokker size" in the public domain and it's only a matter of time until Zipf's law wears it down to "some small Fokkers".
Also, while "Tromp" only appears once in my article, it appears next to somebody known only as "mtve" when they collaborated to produce what Wolfram calls a "size-7 lambda" known as Alpha. I love little results like these which aren't formally published and only exist on community wikis. Would have been pretty fascinating if Alpha were complete, wouldn't it Steve!? Would have merited a mention of progress in the community amongst small lambda terms, huh Steve!?
I also checked the BB Gauge for Binary Lambda Calculus (BLC), since it's one of the topics I already wrote up, and found that Wolfram's completely omitted Felgenhauer from the picture too, with that name in neither the text nor bibliography. Felgenhauer's made about as many constructions in BLC as Tromp; Felgenhauer 2014 constructs that Goodstein sequence, for example. Also, Wolfram didn't write that sequence, they sourced it from a living paper not in the bibliography, written by…Felgenhauer! So it's yet another case of Wolfram just handily choosing to omit a name from a decade-old result in the hopes that somebody will prefer his new presentation to the old one.
Finally, what's the point of all this? I think Wolfram writes these posts to advertise Mathematica (which is actually called Wolfram Mathematica and uses a programming language called Wolfram BuT DiD YoU KnOw) He also promotes his attempt at rewriting all of physics to have his logo upon it, and this blog post is a gateway to that project in the sense that Wolfram genuinely believes that staring at these chaotic geometries will reveal the equations of divine nature. Meanwhile I wrote my article in order to
win an IRC argument againstmake a reasonable presentation of an interesting phenomenon in computer science directly to Felgenhauer & Tromp, and while they don't fully agree with me, we together can't disagree with what's presented in the article. That's peer review, right?:::
Having followed PLT stuff online for more than a quarter century now, I can state with confidence that basically everyone writing about lambda calculus online is doing it to glorify themselves.
Haven’t read the source paper yet (apparently it came out two weeks ago, maybe it already got sneered?) but this might be fun: OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws.
Full of little gems like
I had assumed that the problem was solely technical, that the fundamental design of LLMs meant that they’d always generate bullshit, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the developers actively selected for bullshit generation.
It seems kinda obvious in retrospect… slick bullshit extrusion is very much what is selling “AI” to upper management.
Well, I'll give them the text equivalent of a "you tried" sticker for finally admitting their automatic bullshit machines produce (gasp) bullshit, but the main sneerable thing I see is the ISO Standard OpenAI Anthropomo-
every_tf2_class_laughing_at_once.wav
(Maximising lies extruded per ocean boiled was definitely what they were going for in hindsight, but it geniunely cracks me up to see them come out and just say it)
it's a shitty paper but even they couldn't avoid the point forever
New post from tante: The “Data” Narrative eats itself, using the latest Pivot to AI as a jumping off point to talk about synthetic data.
New edition of AI Killed My Job, giving a deep dive into how genAI has hurt artists. I'd like to bring particular attention to Meilssa's story, which is roughly halfway through, specifically the ending:
Many of our favorite people abuse meth and meth adjacent sustances. In the long term, this behavior visibly degrades dental health.
Therefore, it wont be long until we witness actual real life cases of smartmouth.
Have they ever discussed how much they take on average?
Creative applications for stimulants comes up pretty frequently in techie discussions of nootropics and "stacks" thereof.
This is about as techie as I go as far as internet communities haha.
The billionaires' dreams of defeating death with technology have been "realised" by Marvel, which is planning an AI-Powered^tm^ hologram of him at L.A. Comic Con.
To the shock of nobody, this act of exploitation through digital necromancy is being met with unfiltered disgust.
death will be defeated as long as it stands in the way of profits (man i fucking hate it there)
OT: Baldur Bjarnason's lamented how his webdev feed has turned to complete shit:
We need a word for when they make up a guy who doesn't exist and then get mad at him.
Pretty sure that's a strawman.
Since this is the solo version, strawmasturbating
Straw-onanism
Oooh that's good
I mean, I think the relevant difference is that rather than trying to argue against a weak opponent they're trying to validate their feelings of victimization, superiority, and/or outrage by imagining an appropriate foil.
It's a straw man that exists to be effectively venerated rather than torn down.
I think I might be missing some context here. Granted without context I'm pretty sure that strawman is still the right word.
it's kinda hilarious how close "steelmanning" (as practiced by some) already is to this, but probably not far enough to be usable for that purpose on its own
Had the same thought. -manning implies an ongoing conversation, rather than something to describe a lone weirdo spiraling about a fantasy.
I guess keeping in theme, "vibe replying"
I think "making up a guy to get mad at" is already an idiom as is.
You're not wrong!
Drilling down, it'd be nice if there needs to be a way to capture the level of intentionality involved.
Ben Shapiro starts out with malice afore thought when makes up a guy, because he has a propaganda quota to hit. That's a strawman.
A rationalist's guy is an emergent phenomenon that arises from their cultic milieu (sometimes). They run with that misaprehention because of "smartest boy syndrome" and then you can't tell em anything.
"Enjoy" this Rat fundamentally misunderstanding Banks:
https://www.boristhebrave.com/2025/09/14/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia/
JFC the comments on LW are even worse..
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia#comments
"Why didn't Iain take my neuroses into account??"
"please sir may I pleasure you sexually"
Yes, why didn't he take the neuroses of normal people into account. Normal people who spend 90% of their day worrying about the acausalrobotgod killing everybody.
Strikes me as they simply have never talked to normal people about immortality like that, even in a post scarcity world, lot of people simply don't feel like it would be worth their time to live forever in that.
Edit:
This isn't oppositional reading. This is an often discussed thing in the novels. So much so that the novels have counterarguments for a lot of the regular 'the culture is bad' arguments.
Anyway the article is so bad I wonder how well this person can read.
Edit part 2, can't let things go shouting electronic booo:
They mention that sociopaths either get a 24/7 drone on them to guard them if they do crimes (more a general criminal thing) or if they are more megalomanic sociopaths they get to run out their desires in a virtual world (Which I assume runs a lot like the modern game Rust, where a subset of the playerbase seems to love to make 14 year old boys cry, going from the yt vids I saw). If this isn't enough, they will need to convince a Mind to help them. Because all large machines in The Culture are intelligent. Good luck with that. Also The Culture is not something like the glitter belt of Revelation Space, where somebody can sign a contract to give away their voting rights or something. So the power of a sociopath is already limited.
They both have, and it doesn't matter. They have because any mind-equiv mind who goes mad gets destroyed (they literally need to take care of large group of humans or go mad, they have symbiotic relationship with humanity), or if they try to go foom they sublime, in the culture universe, sublimation is inevitable. (Therein also lies the real distopian part, considering sublimation is seen as so amazing that keeping a whole culture away from proven heaven seems like an angle to take, then the deathism also would be an argument, but more like that they let people die without going to heaven (but again, this is not subtext, culture not going poof is seen as very weird, only question is why a Yud-equiv mind doesn't come back to uplift the physical universe)).
Not subtext, but simply text. Often criticized in various ways. But also a lot of behavior outside of the norm is tolerated, see the lava boat ride (where the only person not tolerated is the one having a 'this is a simulation' break). Or the guy just building a cable system.
Not mentioned:
(This is also why humans are not pets).
But then they can't imagine a large population having, largely, some traits in common due to cultural mechanisms rather than genetic engineering, and conclude that this fiction contains elements because their narrative of the world needs it. Amazing.
I should know the answer to this because I re-read all the Culture novels last year, but I do think there's some genetic engineering in the Culture. There's the famous sex glands, of course (but maybe the neural net handles part of that too?) and then there's the asocial dude on the remote asteroid in Excession, who I believe was seen as a genetic throwback from the general population.
But it's beside the point, Banks probably included genetic engineering to make sure no-one got horrible diseases and could live to 500 years, not to breed a separate race of elites. And for that he can never be forgiven by these idiots.
Edit both HN and LW comments mention John C Wright, who I have never read and vaguely remembered being a Sad Puppy. He has some dreck where everything is libertarian. Banks was a socialist, but he was foremost a novelist. Faced with the need to create a future society, he naturally designed one with no disease, no material wants, and lots and lots of sex. Who wouldn't? Conservative yanks, that's who.
“let me be really brave and unique: let's imagine culture is how the azadians (or veppers, or the affront, or even the gfcf…) see them. let's ignore the basic fact that this misconception is the main reason why culture's opponents, ultimately, lose. i am very intelligent.”
oh, and let's entirely ignore “consider phlebas”…
probably offtop? bad tech killing people, no need for imaginary robots, just greed https://xcancel.com/hntrbrkmedia/status/1968661471056769252#m https://hntrbrk.com/dexcom/
Nah, its completely on-topic - "bad tech hurting people" has become a major theme of our current times, a bad glucose monitor hurting diabetics is completely expected
idk you could put nestle water draining activities there and it would fit the pattern
LLVM is having a discussion on how to handle vibe coders attacking the project, and its causing Discourse^tm^ on the red site.
Does anyone have a good definition or classic examples for the term mall ninja at the ready?
I first heard that term on this channel, and I feel like I should understand that phenomenon better.
I like that whoever wrote this initially had a wife in their fantasy life. The wife stops getting mentioned like two posts in. I want a full reboot of this series based on her life
Good news, now they're 40-50 and severely divorced!
Thank you for sharing this bit of internet deep lore. Now I just need to find the four hour youtube video of some ex-GI gun nut explaining in exhausting detail exactly how bullshit every detail of those stories is because whatever the fuck is going on there is fascinating.
this post extremely quickly goes many places I didn't come close to expecting
impressive.
clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs
aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho
It also comes from a mall cop (a very USA sort of concept) who was extremely afraid of getting shot at his job (more so than regular cops at the time) and who overreacted massively and wanted all kinds of weird gun attachments iirc. Sadly this paranoia is something that the US cops also suffer from now. Causing everybody to suffer.
E: wow I had misremembered how crazy the story was.
I feel that strip mall dojos where you were ostensibly taught some very mainstream belt-based martial art like karate or TKD (or straight up make-believe stuff like ninjutsu) but were essentially glorified daycare should figure somewhere in the history of the term.
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13981240/nvidia-california-college-of-the-arts-partnership
Clove cigarettes to be replaced with vapes.
I’m convinced the proliferation of AI art comes from a generation of digital inhalants.
Oh, I'm sure the artists enrolling at the CCA are gonna be so happy to hear they've been betrayed
Hot take: There is no "intersection" between these three, because the "emerging technologies" in question are a techno-fascist ideology designed to destroy art for profit
In fairness, not everything nVidia does is generative AI. I don't know if this particular initiative has anything to do with GenAI, but a lot of digital artists depend on their graphics cards' capabilities to create art that is very much human-derived.
Given how gen-AI has utterly consumed the tech industry over these past two years, I see very little reason to give the benefit of the doubt here.
Focusing on NVidia, they've made billions selling shovels in the AI gold rush (inflating their stock prices in the process), and have put billions more into money-burning AI startups to keep the bubble going. They have a vested interest in forcing AI onto everyone and everything they can.
Fresh of the press, only in german unfortunately: tagesschau
President of bavaria (and head of the extra fashy bavarian splinter party of the christian conservatives) wants to cut 10.000 public service jobs using AI.
All Söder does is spew bullshit and post bad tiktoks.
Hold on, we might just have found the first job LLMs actually can replace.
The racism machine does a racism: AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities
A nonprofit that serves teenagers complains about getting mugged by Salesforce. dang dons his shining armor and dashes forth to save the uwu smol bean megacorp from the peasant mob.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887
Slack CEO responded there that it was all a "billing mistake" and that they'll do better in the future and people are having none of it.
A rare orange site W, surprisingly heartwarming.
I really don't buy the "billing mistake" line - they've been doing the same thing to many other community-org slacks. I've seen with my own eyes the mail that was sent to the ZA tech slack
I’m a bit split on this one
on the one hand, the post as first posted had a lot of “victimised” language (“omg slack is extorting us”) and frankly that felt like bait - esp as many, many volunteer-type orgs that have had similar slack setups have been taking a hammer for months now (as I posted before, a local ZA tech setup was one, and more recently that big k8s one too). there’s enough precedent here that expecting slack to have behaved otherwise (even “honourably”) seems to me to have been almost foolish
on the other, slack 100% only took action once this did hit hype and enough eyeballs, and only reacted since it was an embarrassment
but…yeah. slack hasn’t been a good option for public use for literally years now :|
It sucks how much time in tech is spend on 'sorry this tool we recommend before suddenly is no longer free, or removed some options (either totally or into the paywall part) so now we will have to look for something else.
Seen it happen to simple csv editors for example.
Recently thought about how this one xkcd has probably done more recruiting for the rat community per unit effort spent making it than that 700k word salad.
Where are we on xkcd? I haven’t looked at it regularly for over a decade now. Nothing personally against the author or comic itself, I just completely deconverted from consuming nerd celebrity content at that point in the past.
I still read xkcd regularly and think it's pretty good. I don't think "we" as a community need to have a particular opinion of Randall Munroe or his work but personally I think he seems alright and I enjoy the things he makes.
Seems like a stretch to assume that comic does anything to recruit rationalists. If you're not already in the rat pipeline it's just a pretty good joke about probability and if you are, it's still a better example of Bayesian reasoning than whatever the rats pretend to do.
He kind of left his prime I think, the humor becoming alternatingly a bit too esoteric or a bit too obvious, and kind of stale in general. Nothing particularly objectionable about the author comes to mind otherwise.
maybe this just betrays that i don't know shit about fuck, but it feels like this xkcd would make more sense if the frequentist did the experiment more than once
I follow it on RSS, it's sometime's funny but not required reading.
I don't think you can blame the comic's author for people on HN and elsewhere passing around references to specific comics to make their points.
As to the specific one mentioned here, I don't remember reading it before.
edit to add sometimes it's obvious the entire joke is in the alt-text, like so: https://xkcd.com/3143/
I think it's important to remember that Bayes was a real guy and bayesian statistics is a real useful thing even though Those Guys made it their religion. And they don't really understand bayesian statistics anyway.
A second trashfire has hit the Ruby language - RubyGems was hit with a hostile takeover from Ruby Central, seemingly to squash an attempt at putting together an official governance policy.
Between that and DHH's fascist screed, its not been a good week for Ruby.
Wonder if, esp considering the DHH situations this is sort of a nazi bar style takeover. Where the people who don't want to make a fuss let in the nice but iffy people who then go mask off, and let the rest in. (The thing the far right accused the left of doing, in a bit of projections). But I know nothing about the politics of anybody involved, could also just be a regular hostile takeover.
(Doesn't feel like one just looking at the rubycentral bsky account for a second though. They do have an amazing spin on it. It was to protect against supply chain attacks (also a link to an email article of them, which just feels weird)).
We at least got to see a well-aimed sneer in response:
Another sneer on the subject: https://bsky.app/profile/tef.bsky.social/post/3lz7fdou4uk2y
"In case you're not sure who dhh is, he's a danish counterstrike player and race car owner who writes essays like "i am smarter than you" and "foreigners bad"
rich enough not to worry about consequences but at the very same time, still desperate for status, a man two friends short of a podcast"
Followup by somebody else:
"I posted here about him driving at Le Mans in 2024, and several people told me that he’s disliked and mocked as much in the motorsport community as he is in the tech community."
Got a pretty fitting post just up the thread:
"Two friends short of a podcast" is the single most powerful burn I've seen in quite some time.
ruby's had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the "rockstar dev" archetype literally became big directly because of ruby's popularity and perception at the time
I haven't been active in/near the ruby space for a number of years now so I can't speak to the modern details well at all, but I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that the various branches of it haven't really learned how to deal. I will say that I have seen some improvement over that period, but... yeah
I had to look it up, the ~~~Rails Conf~~~ Golden Gate Ruby Conf code like a porn star thing was 2009, I didn't hallucinate it. DHH has deleted those tweets.
I feel old now.
The what thing now??
This one's been making the rounds, so people have probably already seen it. But just in case...
Meta did a live "demo" of their
recordingnew AI.Doing my screaming into the void offtopic thing, but the Dutch parliament, consisting of the the liberal VVD all the far right (PVV, FVP, JA21) and half the extreme christian (but not far) right (SGP the reformed/protestants (*)) , and the conspiratorial partially far right farmers party (BBB) accepted a motion (also important to note that these are not that meaningful, nothing has changed legally) by the far right to declare antifa a terrorist organization.
Congrats to everybody here now being terrorists in the eyes of the Dutch gov. Ah the joys of living in an American colony.
*: Even less relevant to this sub, but perhaps interesting, did you know we have a so called bible belt in the Netherlands? See this wiki page and look at the voting results graph. (while there is no direct graph our second very christian party (The CU who often also votes with them (but didn't this time because they are not that extreme) also generally gets their votes from this area. What makes this downright weird is that these voters are basically from our rural areas, but on the line that historically splits between protestantism and catholicism. But all these votes are more from the protestant side. Some sociologists prob could/can have written some interesting papers on that. So it can't just be explained by pillarisation. Hope you enjoyed my random scream into the void which I tried to make somewhat interesting by talking about parts of our weird political situation.
(Bonus detail, the prot/cath split line is also the line of 'do they celebrate carnival really enthusiastically or not, for which the rule is, if you want a real party go to Maastricht (sorry link in Dutch), as it combines several styles of carnaval with its own thing (there are also some small dressup particularities, but as I don't know them specifically. Great fun if it is your thing (or so I have been told)). Anyway the further south the better (we have different names for the carnaval styles even, 'Bourgondisch carnaval' vs 'Rijnlands carnaval' for example))
There's an ACX guest post rehashing the history of Project Xanadu, an important example of historical vaporware that influenced computing primarily through opinions and memes. This particular take is focused on Great Men and isn't really up to the task of humanizing the participants, but they do put a good spotlight on the cults that affected some of those Great Men. They link to a 1995 article in Wired that tells the same story in a better way, including the "six months" joke. The orange site points out a key weakness that neither narrative quite gets around to admitting: Xanadu's micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd. My choice sneer is to examine a comment from one of the ACX regulars:
Ah yes, low enough to allow our heroic wiki-builders, wiki-citers, and wiki-correctors; and high enough to forbid their brutish wiki-pedants, wiki-lawyers, and wiki-deleters.
Disclaimer: I know Miller and Tribble from the capability-theory community. My language Monte is literally a Python-flavored version of Miller's E (WP, esolangs), which is itself a Java-flavored version of Tribble's Joule. I'm in the minority of a community split over the concept of agoric programming, where a program can expand to use additional resources on demand. To me, an agoric program is flexible about the resources allocated to it and designed to dynamically reconfigure itself; to Miller and others, an agoric program is run on a blockchain and uses micropayments to expand. Maybe more pointedly, to me a smart contract is what a vending machine proffers (see How to interpret a vending machine: smart contracts and contract law for more words); to them, a smart contract is how a social network or augmented/virtual reality allows its inhabitants to construct non-primitive objects.
The 17 rules also seem to have abuse build in. Documents need to be stored redundantly (without any mention of how many copies that means), and it has a system where people are billed for the data they store. Combine these and storing your data anywhere runs the risk of a malicious actor emptying your accounts. In a 'it costs ten bucks to store a file here' 'sorry we had to securely store ten copies of your file, 100 bucks please'. Weird sort of rules. Feels a lot like it never figured out what it wants to be a centralized or distributed system, a system where writers can make money, or they need to pay to use. And a lot of technical solutions for social problems.
It's nice to be reminded that the past was also crazy.
much of the lore of the early/earlier internet being built is also full of some extremely, extremely unhinged stuff. I've had some first-hand in-the-trenches accounts from people I've known active from the early-mid 90s to middle 00s and holy shit there are some batshit things happening in places. often think of it when I see the kinds of shit thiel/musk/etc are all up to (a lot of it boils down to "they're big mad that they have to even consider other people and can't just do whatever they like")
Mark Dery and Paulina Borsook nailed these fuckers square on in the '90s, but nobody reads books
What book is that?
Cyberselfish by Borsook, several books by Dery but particularly Escape Velocity
I’m down with reading books it’s just hard to select them without known reference recommendations
Gonna acquire the works of both, ty :D
largely not available digitally, though someone's putting together a Borsook reissue
it kept being funny to me that even while xanadu had already shown the problems with content control the entirety of the NFT craze just went on as if it was full greenfields novel problem
some of these people just really don't know their history very well, do they
on a total tangent:
while xanadu's commercial-aspiration history is intimately tied up in why it never got much further, I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we could've combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of "CA and cert chains, but for transcluded content", esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. not sure this would work ootb either, mind you, it's got its own set of vulnerabilities and problems that you'd need to work through (and ofc you can't solve social problems purely in the technical domain)
has there been any meaningful advancement or neat new research in agoric computing? haven't really looked into it in a while, and the various blockchain nonsense took so much air out of the room for so long I haven't had to spoons to look
(separately I know there's also been some developments in remote trusted compute, but afaict that's also still quite early days)
@froztbyte @corbin
> ... I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we could’ve combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of “CA and cert chains, but for transcluded content”, esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. ...
It's a noble idea and I'm sure it has its place but imho the biggest pitfall with any mechanism the ensure the origin/validity of content or info is that very few people will care. It is nice to have ofc
nah, one of the pillars to make something like it work is by making it zero-cost to implement, to use, and to verify - you advance things by raising the absolute minimum (for everyone) with as little effort cost for others to use
think of e.g. what LetsEncrypt did for https adoption, and signal (and a bit whatsapp when they followed) did for e2e encryption adoption
Enjoy this Rat pitch for a "pastor" who shall spread the gospel of Bayes to the unwashed masses:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/crEduvg2DwHPP74cw/pastor-selfie-an-attempt-to-evangelize-lesswrong-concepts-on
So this looks and sounds 100% AI generated, but
might be the first time AI slop made me laugh (not out loud, but still)
If this is truly the path, then Wimp Lo must be the most rational man in the universe
Check the guys profile. He took some random remark from Gwern indicating what looks to me like human interest, as some sort of commandment.
(The text is bolded etc in various places which I didn't reproduce)
Was reading some science fiction from the 90's and the AI/AGI said 'im an analog computer, just like you, im actually really bad at math.' And I wonder how much damage these one of these ideas (the other being there are computer types that can do more/different things. Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.
The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write), which now leads people who read enough science fiction to see the machine that can't count nor run doom and go 'this is what they predicted!'.
Not a sneer just a random thought.
The general idea among computer scientists is that analog TMs are not more powerful than digital TMs. The supposed advantage of an analog machine is that it can store real numbers that vary continuously while digital machines can only store discrete values, and a real number would require an infinite number of discrete values to simulate. However, each real number "stored" by an analog machine can only be measured up to a certain precision, due to noise, quantum effects, or just the fact that nothing is infinitely precise in real life. So, in any reasonable model of analog machines, a digital machine can simulate an analog value just fine by using enough precision.
There aren't many formal proofs that digital and analog are equivalent, since any such proof would depend on exactly how you model an analog machine. Here is one example.
Quantum computers are in fact (believed to be) more powerful than classical digital TMs in terms of efficiency, but the reasons for why they are more powerful are not easy to explain without a fair bit of math. This causes techbros to get some interesting ideas on what they think quantum computers are capable of. I've seen enough nonsense about quantum machine learning for a lifetime. Also, there is the issue of when practical quantum computers will be built.
Thanks. I know some complexity theory, but not enough. (Enough to know it wasn't gonna be my thing).
Importantly though, not crazily so. We know they can do factorisation quick, and we believe classical cannot. But we also believe they can't quickly solve NP-hard problems.
(In each instance, believe means it's not proven, but the implications of it being false would be so weird and surprising we think it's probably true and are trying to prove it so)
It's because of research in the mid-80s leading to Moravec's paradox — sensorimotor stuff takes more neurons than basic maths — and Sharp's 1983 international release of the PC-1401, the first modern pocket computer, along with everybody suddenly learning about Piaget's research with children. By the end of the 80s, AI research had accepted that the difficulty with basic arithmetic tasks must be in learning simple circuitry which expresses those tasks; actually performing the arithmetic is easy, but discovering a working circuit can't be done without some sort of process that reduces intermediate circuits, so the effort must also be recursive in the sense that there are meta-circuits which also express those tasks. This seemed to line up with how children learn arithmetic: a child first learns to add by counting piles, then by abstracting to symbols, then by internalizing addition tables, and finally by specializing some brain structures to intuitively make leaps of addition. But sometimes these steps result in wrong intuition, and so a human-like brain-like computer will also sometimes be wrong about arithmetic too.
As usual, this is unproblematic when applied to understanding humans or computation, but not a reasonable basis for designing a product. Who would pay for wrong arithmetic when they could pay for a Sharp or Casio instead?
Bonus: Everybody in the industry knew how many transistors were in Casio and Sharp's products. Moravec's paradox can be numerically estimated. Moore's law gives an estimate for how many transistors can be fit onto a chip. This is why so much sci-fi of the 80s and 90s suggests that we will have a robotics breakthrough around 2020. We didn't actually get the breakthrough IMO; Moravec's paradox is mostly about kinematics and moving a robot around in the world, and we are still using the same kinematic paradigms from the 80s. But this is why bros think that scaling is so important.
Could be, not sure the science fiction authors thought this much about it. (Or if the thing I was musing about is even real and not just a coincidence that I read a few works in which it is a thing). Certainly seems likely that this sort of science is where the idea came from.
Had totally forgotten the name of that (Being better at remembering random meme stuff but not names of concepts like this, or a lot of names in general is a curse, also a source of imposter syndrome). But I recall having read the wikipedia page of that before. (Moravec also was the guy who thought of bush robots, wonder if that idea survived the more recent developments of nanotechnology.
Rodney brooks wiki page on AI was amusing
this is one of those things that's, in a narrative sense, a great way to tell a story, while being completely untethered from fact/reality. and that's fine! stories have no obligation to be based in fact!
to put a very mild armchair analysis about it forward: it's playing on the definition of the conceptual "smart" computer, as it relates to human experience. there's been a couple of other things in recent history that I can think of that hit similar or related notes (M3GAN, the whole "omg the AI tricked us (and then the different species with a different neurotype and capability noticed it!)" arc in ST:DIS, the last few Mission Impossible films, etc). it's one of those ways in which art and stories tend to express "grappling with $x to make sense of it"
personally speaking, one of the ways about it that I find most jarring is when the fantastical vastly outweighs anything else purely for narrative reasons - so much so that it's a 4th-wallbreak for me ito what the story means to convey. I reflect on this somewhat regularly, as it's a rather cursed rabbithole that instances repeatedly: "is it my knowledge of this domain that's spoiling my enjoyment of this thing, or is the story simply badly written?" is the question that comes up, and it's surprisingly varied and complicated in its answering
on the whole I think it's often good/best to keep in mind that scifi is often an exploration and a pressure valve, but that it's also worth keeping an eye on how much it's a pressure valve. too much of the latter, and something(tm) is up
Ow yeah the way it used in this story also made sense but not in a computer science way. Just felt a bit how Gibson famously had never used a modem before he wrote his cyberpunk series.
@Soyweiser @techtakes You misremembered: Gibson wrote his early stories and Neuromancer on a typewriter, he didn't own a computer until he bought one with the royalties (an Apple IIc, which then freaked him out by making graunching noises at first—he had no idea it needed a floopy disk inserting).
Thanks! I should have looked up the whole quote, but I just made a quick reply I knew I had worded it badly and I had it wrong, but just didn't do anything about it. My bad.
AGI: I'm not a superintelligence, I'm you.
My im not a witch shirt ...
If you were to create a humanlike artificial intelligence (in the sense of a whole cognitive apparatus for learning, emotions, motivation etc etc; not in the sense of a chatbot), you would basically just create a guy. Worse: a baby, with the potential of becoming a guy. Generality requires tradeoffs in specificity and such. The smaller and more tightly circumscribable the types of things an intelligent system is supposed to handle are, the more right, fast, etc. the system can be. Wire a button to a bell and the bell's intelligence will accurately ring the bell when the button is pressed. Create a human child and your resulting intelligence has the full range from Gustav Fechner to someone who desperately wants to impress Elizier Yudkowski. It can potentially tackle any sort of problem, but none necessarily well.
That's why the "rationalist" fictions about Bayesian superintelligences miss the mark, too. A Bayesian intelligence will use the result of tempering prior information with new information. If they are right in their starting point, then it's not that impressive if they are right afterwards. If their priors are fucked, theyd conclude bullshit like a misinformed human would. Garbage in, garbage out
But yeah; AGI, ignoring that chatbots won't ever be that, would be just some guy.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 seems plausible tbh
Capabilities in the sense that they can compute problems that digital TMs cannot? No, they cannot Capabilities in the sense they'd be more efficient at computing some problems than digital TMs? Hard af to prove or disprove.
Yeah in the complexity theory sense. I think it was already proven that the ... shit sorry can't find the correct words... how analog number storage can have arbitrary precision (?? not sure if that is the correct way to describe it) provide no benefit over digital ones due to various factors. Sorry if it is vague, it has been a long time I ago I really learned about this stuff.
This isn't an idea that I've heard of until you mentioned it, so it likely hasn't got much purchase in the public consciousness. (Intuitively speaking, a computer which sucks at maths isn't a good computer, let alone AGI material.)
Yeah, I was also just wondering, as obv what I read is not really typical of the average public. Can't think of any place where this idea spread in non-written science fiction for example, with an exception being the predictions of C-3PO, who always seems to be wrong. But he is intended as a comedic sidekick. (him being wrong can also be seen as just the lack of value in calculating odds like that, esp in a universe with The Force).
But yes, not likely to be a big thing indeed.
OK I think this has gone a bit too far
Day #8 Hunger Strike, Protest Against Superintelligent AI
"When you were partying, I studied the blade."
“‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’ - wait, now I’m really hungry”
"I have a particular set of skills. Mostly 20,000-word blog posts."
NoEstuans interius
Ira vehementi.
Estuans interius
Ira vehementi.
Sephiroth!
E: Have a snickers you turn into a real Sephiroth when you are hungry.
Now I want to mod an item that reverts a boss fight to phase 1.
"Have a snickers, Malenia, you turn into a real Goddess of Rot when you're hungry"
That is pretty good tbh. Would also be funny as an undocumented feature in a game.
The highest possible attainment, to generate several popular memes about crazy cult member does something slightly odd to show his devotion, but isn't brave enough to do it outside his own home
::: spoiler disclaimer memes often contain mild inaccuracies :::
The way typical US educations (idk about other parts of the world) portray historical protests and activist movements has been disastrous to the ability of people to actually succeed in their activism. My cynical assumption is that is exactly as intended.
What do you mean by this?
So, to give the first example that comes to mind, in my education from Elementary School to High School, the (US) Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was taught with a lot of emphasis on passive nonviolent resistance, downplaying just how disruptive they had to make their protests to make them effective and completely ignoring armed movements like the Black Panthers. Martin Luther King Jr.'s interest and advocacy for socialism is ignored. The level of organization and careful planning by some of the organizations isn't properly explained. (For instance, Rosa Parks didn't just spontaneously decide to not move her seat one day, they planned it and picked her in order to advance a test case, but I don't think any of my school classes explained that until High School.) Some of the level of force the federal government had to bring in against the Southern States (i.e. Federal Marshals escorting Ruby Bridges) is properly explained, but the full scale is hard to visualize so. So the overall misleading impression someone could develop or subconsciously perceive is that rights were given to black people through democratic processes after they politely asked for them with just a touch of protests.
Someone taking the way their education presents the Civil Rights protests at face value without further study will miss the role of armed resistance, miss the level of organization and planning going on behind pivotal acts, and miss just how disruptive protests had to get to be effective. If you are a capital owner benefiting from the current status quo (or well paid middle class that perceives themselves as more aligned with the capital owners than other people that work for a living), then you have a class interest in keeping protests orderly and quiet and harmless and non-disruptive. It vents off frustration in a way that ultimately doesn't force any kind of change.
This hunger strike and other rationalist attempts at protesting AI advancement seems to suffer from this kind of mentality. They aren't organized on a large scale and they don't have coherent demands they agree on (which is partly a symptom of the fact that the thing they are trying to stop is so speculative and uncertain). Key leaders like Eliezer have come out strongly against any form of (non-state) violence. (Which is a good thing, because their fears are unfounded, but if I actually thought we were doomed with p=.98 I would certainly be contemplating vigilante violence.) (Also, note form the nuke the datacenter's comments, Eliezer is okay with state level violence.) Additionally, the rationalist often have financial and social ties to the very AI companies they are protesting, further weakening their ability to engage in effective activism.
That's interesting, because in Poland 95% of all history you are taught is "and then they grabbed guns because they were just so fed up with their* shit" and from modern history it's mostly anti-commumist worker movements that were all about general strikes and loud, disruptive protests.
*Russians', Germans', Austrians', king's, ...
So us Americans do get some of "grabbed guns and openly fought" in the history of our revolutionary war, but its taught in a way that doesn't link it to any modern movements that armed themselves. And the people most willing to lean into guns and revolutionary war imagery/iconography tend to be far right wing (and against movement for worker's rights or minorities' rights or such).
But he's getting so much attention.
Hmm, it’s still on the funny side of graph for me. I think it could go on for at least another week.
Depends if he's cheating or not, heh
I almost wanna use some reverse psychology to try and make him stop.
'hey im from sneerclub and we are loving this please dont stop this strike'
(I mean he clearly mentally prepped against arguments and even force (and billionaires), but not someone just making fun of him. Of course he prob doesn't know about any of these places and hasn't build us up to Boogeyman status, but imagine it worked)
Accidentally posted in an old thread:
This bullshit again
Math competitions need to start assigning problems that require counting the letters in fruit names.
Word problems referring to aliens from cartoons. "Bobbby on planet Glorxon has four Strawberies, which are similar to but distinct from earth strawberries, and Kleelax has seven..."
I also wonder if you could create context breaks, or if they've hit a point where that isn't as much of a factor. "A train leaves Athens, KY traveling at 45 mph. Another train leaves Paris, FL traveling at 50 mph. If the track is 500 miles long, how long is a train trip from Athens to Paris?
LLM's ability to fake solving word problems hinges on being able to crib the answer, so using aliens from cartoons (or automatically-generating random names for objects/characters) will prove highly effective until AI corps can get the answers into their training data.
As for context breaks, those will remain highly effective against LLMs pretty much forever - successfully working around a context break requires reasoning, which LLMs are categorically incapable of doing.
Constantly and subtly twiddling with questions (ideally through automatic means) should prove effective as well - Apple got "reasoning" text extruders to flounder and fail at simple logic puzzles through such a method.
Sorry, what is a "context break"?
Nice result, not too shocking after IMO performance. A friend of mind told me that this particular competition is highly time constrained for human competitors, i.e., questions aren’t impossibly difficult per se, but some are time sinks that you simply avoid to get points elsewhere. (5 hours on 12 Qs is tight…)
So when you are competing against a data center using a nuclear reactor vs 3 humans running on broccoli, the claims of superhuman performance definitely require an * attached to them.
Also accidentally posted in an old thread:
Hot take: If a text extruder’s winning gold medals at your contest, that’s not a sign the text extruder’s good at something, that’s a sign your contest is worthless for determining skill.
Pretty sure I've heard similar things about AI "art" vs artists as well.
hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?
what could possibly go wrong
Which is a thing that you only need to worry about if you use these types of agents.
Which in any case you can't, because
roko's basilisk but instead of simulating torture it's simulating mundane purchases. Broko's Grocerlist
You'll have to endlessly scroll Amazon and decide whether to buy the identical product from brand YDAKVKR or BNRTGRIV, reading ALL the fake reviews.
as I was ranting in dm earlier elsewhere, the part about this that especially fucks me off is how much of this is not just simply unnecessary but also strictly worse than what we already used to have!
~15yo ago the entire bloody internet was awash in APIs and accessible interactions! hell, it's the whole reason shit like Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT became a thing!
(and then after that ~everyone made fucking fences to wall their gardens because they want to Capture Users! to this day I still don't know if it could've gone any other way under how capitalism operates, but fuck it sucks.)
meanwhile so many people (both those who've come up Touching Computers, as well as casual users, in the last 10~15y or so (who I typically refer to as the Cloud Generation) typically don't even have a conception of doing it any other way but The Billable Platform Way. I have long suspected that this won't hold out (it's a truism that at some threshold people will start asking "wait why am I paying for this?") and I am heartened by seeing some indicators of this starting to happen, but...... fuck. there's been so much damage from years of this shit
I still stay hopeful for change (esp. because this current way can't hold), but I also grimace about what's coming in the near future (because I know that a fair number of these platforms will be cognizant of the same problem)
Especially considering that the whole "your AI will negotiate with theirs" speaks to the kind of algorithmic price discrimination that you see in Uber and the like, where the system is designed specifically to maximize how much you're willing and able to pay for a ride and minimize how much the driver is willing to accept for it. Hardcore techno libertarians want nothing more than to make it impossible for anyone to make meaningful informed choices about their lives that might prevent them from being taken advantage of by hardcore techno libertarians.
Unrelated to this specific topic but more cryptocurrency fails. This reminds me of hardware wallets which, on the wallet show information about the transaction. Which seems smart, so you can make sure the data from your perhaps compromised machine is correct. Only, the problem with these wallets was that they didn't understand smart contracts. So if you got a smart contract you could still get hacked this way, because the information on the hardware wallet didn't make sense (there were fixes for this, but think most people only really went in to fix this after the North Koreans made off with billions of fake coins).
Quick PSA for anyone who's still on LinkedIn: the site's stealing your data to train the slop machines
That reminds me I still need to wipe my reddit an twitter archives. Wonder if wiping it all in one go would cause more trouble for them, or if deleting it slowly (or overwriting with random words in the case of reddit) causes more changes in the datasets and messes with them more like that.
from when I last looked into this: twitter 100% has[0] (unstated) web API ratelimits for various subservices[1], but getting direct API creds became a "give us your actual phone number" thing even before felon took it over...
so I just decided to tombstone my account by making it private, updating bio, and never logging in again
not willing to give them what they want for API access. might at some point go write some web automation to recurringly click a delete button? idunno
[0] - ....well, 4 years ago, "had". probably maybe still does, on whatever parts of the haproxy or whatever config didn't get absolutely fucking destroyed in felon's mania to rebrand it to "x" overnight (a process which failed hilariously badly for weeks and I still think fondly of to laugh at)
[1] - when going through the "your interests" list (hidden deep in settings), if you unticked too many boxes too quickly you'd hit a webserver-enforced ratelimit on request limits and then half the webapp would get a bit fucky for an hour. ratelimit was something like 30/min with a 1/m type token-bucket refresh. quite the shitshow
Yeah, I figured I would need some web automation script for that, I have looked into them in the past, but never gotten far with it before something else was more important. Still silly that is needed and will hit the servers harder than an API would. Just strange priorities.
When I looked at 'your interests' in the past it was so incredibly wrong I resisted the urge to update it because I though 'sure if that is what you think is important to me fine'. Gotta make sure the basilisk can't simulate you ;).
Ratelimits would be the big worry, heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand. And the whole like system is broken anyway. If you remove enough of them by hand you get in the situation where tweets show in your list but they do not look like they were liked by that account. (I always had the suspicion the whole likes system, which people got mad over a lot is badly implemented anyway, and that explains the weirdness people saw, a thing this story seems to confirm).
I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that. (Not sure I can even find the list anymore anyway or at least a complete list, mine always stopped after 100 accounts or so, while I block a few more than that).
yeah, the various backend interactions tied to web controls are extremely low-count limited
you could probably do it by smacking together a userscript (or whatever the fuck is the these-days version of greasemonkey/tampermonkey/??? to use) with a moderately simple algorithm.. open a window, click execute, leave it going by itself for however long it takes to get through everything. it doesn't have to do everything in minutes
probably the feed compute stuff only has this computational expense incurred for any displayed feeds (pruning off calculating stuff for long-enough-inactive users is one of the cheapest easy gains in that type of content feed), so this might not matter much. don't have enough insight into real ops there to know one way or the other tho
I for one don't mind if my reddit crap poisons future LLMs.
I just don't want to be used and surveilled. Still need to get this shirt
Haha Standplaats moves fast.
New premium newsletter from Ed Zitron: Is There Any Real Money In Renting Out AI GPUs?
(Clever use of Betteridge's Law of Headlines there, I gotta say.)
So if I understood NVIDIA's "strategy" right, their usage of companies like Coreweave is drawing in money from other investors and private equity? Does this mean, that unlike many of the other companies in the current bubble, they aren't going to lose money on net, because they are actually luring in investment from other sources in companies like Coreweave (which is used to buy GPU and thus goes to them), whileleaving the debt/obligations in the hands of companies like Coreweave? If I'm following right this is still a long term losing strategy (assuming some form of AI bubble pop or deflation we are all at least reasonably sure of), but the expected result for NVIDIA is more of a massive drop in revenue as opposed to a total collapse of their company under a mountain of debt?
I was discussing the merits of utilitarianism, and one guy brings up longtermism as an example of how utilitarianism fails.
Fuck longtermists, and fuck their bizarro ethics for sullying the name of utilitarianism. I'm sick of that shit.