Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
just got a job in mathematical publishing. it's work i think i'll actually enjoy and expect to be very good at, it pays much better than any other job i've had previously (and they maxed out the position's pay range, which i wasn't expecting) and it has about a month of paid leave a year. such a relief
Felicitations!
("A job," Blake thinks. "I need to find one of those.")
fuck yeah! congrats!
Hell yeah!
It's 10 pm on a Sunday. My FIL is texting me business plans from the slop hole as I try to get the last kiddo down to sleep. He wants me to read them to my wife, who already mad at him about it.
Thank you all for being an island of sanity.
"posting from the slop hole" is probably the best description possible for this, brb stealing
one of the brain geniuses at bluesky
how… what… how… why… why would you think…
There's only one thing that's advertised as not-waterproof that I'll risk using underwater and that's Casio wristwatches. "Water resist" is a huge understatement for them the things are indestructable.
(This comment sponsored by Casio)
Ned Kelly, but his armor is made of Casio watches.
What a fool. A proper scientist would test for a bigger N. Drop your phone in the pool again Why.
why, the unlucky stiff
Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course?
Don't worry, there's always Effective Altruism if you ever feel guilty about causing the suffering of regular people. Just say you're going to donate your money at some point eventually in the future. There you go, 40 trillion hypothetical lives saved!
another Onion banger for these trying times
the real Scam Altman would never feel any kind of remorse or emotion about this
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqs2ehBK8p4
The god Plutonium will save me.
"They wanted me to build an AI, so I built a shoddy AI casing filled with used pinball machine parts!"
Sorry, I was referring to a part of the Prince of Darkness movie
As that movie has people sending messages back from the future using dreams plot element.
in the past 24 hours I was fooled by 3 pieces of fake news in a row:
I know that fake news can be made organically and have been since forever and I'm doing selection bias here but I can't help but picture the misinformation engines firehosing bullshit constantly until some of it catches and spreads.
yeah it's bad
otoh awareness I think is spreading
swedish public broadcasting has regular "spot the fake" pieces on their website
I think giving a sensationalist bit of news 6 hours to "mature" is a good idea before amplifying.
I like this. News is a frittata, it needs time to set before consuming.
If you have to swim in raw sewage, you shouldn't blame yourself when some poop gets in your mouth.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 the worst moment to lose professional journalism…
Prosperity's Path: OpenAI has shown it cannot be trusted. Canada needs nationalized, public AI https://archive.ph/QLg2D
tldr tech bullshit requires ur tax dollars. what ever you do don't question the all knowing laurentian technocrats!
yeah, the current situation in Europe is like: "As EU citizens, we should break free of our dependency on US Big Tech like the Torment Nexus. That's why my company is advancing our fully sovereign solution, the Agony Core! Europe-owned, GDPR-compliant, Frontex-approved scalable Torment-as-a-Service, at competitive prices with TN-based deployments!"
It is amazing in a way, as in .nl our anti piracy org (brein) already went after local AI models for copyright infringement. While people in power still think we should go all in on AI. Sadly people with tech skills are rare in gov (politicians who go after the votes of tech enthousiasts otoh).
The HarfBuzz maintainer has drunk the slop-aid - Baldur has commented on it, warning of the potentially catastrophic consequences:
luis villa, who as a lawyer really should have known better, being self-reportedly a friend of behdad and a confabulation/war machine promoter decided to come to rescue, calling the above (a) attack, and (b) slander.
Always a good sign when people call normal security concerns that. Hackers love that. /s
I used to think that I could avoid using open source projects which embrace the slop machines, but new it keeps getting more and more adoption, including in good and beloved projects... at this point I think I'll just have to accept and ignore it, or otherwise I'd have to play endless whack-a-mole with stuff all over my operating systems :(
The AI people are still infatuated with math. The Epoch AI staff, after being thoroughly embarrassed last year by the FrontierMath scandal, have now decided to make a new FrontierMath Open Problems benchmark, this time with problems that people might give a shit about!
I decided to look at one of the easiest "moderately interesting" problems and noticed that GPT-5.2 Pro managed to solve a warm up version of the problem, i.e. a version that had been previously solved. Wow, these reasoning models sure are capable of math! So I was curious and looked at the reasoning trace and it turns out that ... the model just found an obscure website with the right answer and downloaded it. Well, I guess you could say it has some impressive reasoning as it figures out how to download and parse the data, maybe.
We really need to work harder at poisoning the training data for math problems.
I can't see the "reasoning" trace in the link. Do you need to be logged in?
I can see them by clicking on the "Reasoned for 6m 34s" box on my desktop browser (I know, great UI design) without needing to log in. This did not work on my phone. In any case, I can copy it here:
::: spoiler Warning: very long slop Exploring Hadamard matrix construction for order 428
For a Hadamard matrix of order 428, we need to confirm that it’s a multiple of 4, which it is (428 = 4 * 107). However, the challenge is that order 107 doesn’t work since it’s not a multiple of 4. A possible approach could involve using constructions like Williamson or Goethals-Seidel. Alternatively, I could try a Kronecker product of smaller matrices.
Examining constructions for Hadamard matrix of order 428
Since 107 ≡ 3 mod 4, Paley type I gives a Hadamard of order 108, but I need 428, not 432. That’s a little tricky. I wonder if there’s a known construction for order 4*107 using "Hadamard matrix of order 4q" or conference matrices. Could I adapt the generalized Paley approach for this?
Exploring conference matrix construction for Hadamard order 428
For q = 107, Paley construction doesn’t work since q ≡ 3 mod 4. But if I can create a conference matrix of order 214 (since 214 ≡ 2 mod 4), then a Hadamard matrix of order 428 would follow. Conference matrices require specific conditions, but this seems promising. Let's focus on 214.
Searching for explicit Hadamard matrix of order 428
To generate a Hadamard matrix of order 428, it might be feasible since many such matrices exist up to large orders, but I need one explicitly with ±1 entries. A direct construction could involve methods like Goethals-Seidel, which uses circulant matrices to satisfy specific conditions. I'll need to implement this method.
Exploring construction methods and searching for Hadamard matrix 428
For n=107, there might be a way to use Legendre sequences for Goethals-Seidel difference sets. I know there are constructions for order 4q where q is an odd prime power, but using approaches like Scarpis or Turyn may help too. I’ll search for an explicit Hadamard matrix of order 428 for a possible example or construction.
Exploring accessible sources and construction options for Hadamard matrix
It seems like there may be server timeouts, so I'll need to try other sources like GitHub, arXiv, or design theory papers. We could construct the Hadamard matrix ourselves using known algorithms, but it's heavy. If accessible, sequences from a Kharaghani paper could help, and SageMath might have relevant functions too.
Identifying base sequences to build Hadamard matrix
To create a Hadamard matrix of order 428, I think I can use base sequences of lengths 71 and 36, which combine to 107. I'll look for Turyn-type sequences or T-sequences in accessible PDFs, potentially from open sources like arXiv. A useful file might be "H_428," so I'll search for it.
Checking GitHub for Hadamard matrix at 428 order
I found a GitHub project, "anymatrix," which claims to have Hadamard matrices up to order 428. It might include the 428 matrix in MATLAB format. I’ll check the repository to see if it has the actual file with the matrix data. Let's open it and explore!
Opening GitHub repository for 428 Hadamard matrix
The page at math.ntua.gr timed out before, but I might try downloading the file directly instead of opening it. Alternatively, I could explore the GitHub "anymatrix" repository, which likely has Hadamard matrices up to order 428. I’ll open the repository’s root to check its structure and find the matrix file.
Opening Hadamard folder
I’ll go ahead and open the Hadamard folder at link ID 81. Time to check what’s inside and see if the matrix or relevant files are there!
Trying GitHub raw content for Hadamard matrix
It looks like extracting the files might have failed because of JS requirements, so I’m considering an alternative: accessing raw content directly from GitHub. I’ll search the repository for relevant files containing the 428 matrix — once I find out the exact file names, I can access them with no issue!
Trying direct access to Hadamard file
It seems the math.ntua listing might still be promising, with both text and zip formats for the Hadamard matrix. I’ll try opening the direct file URL instead of the page, hoping it’ll avoid the timeout issues. It’s worth retrying, as the timeout could have been temporary. Let’s try again!
Trying alternative ways to access Hadamard matrix
Since opening the math.ntua.gr server is
Checking old Hadamard links
The page seems to be from 2001, and it has a link to Neil Sloane's library list, which might include the H428 matrix. However, the link for item 8 points to "www.research.att.com ," which could have moved. Let’s click and see if it’s still accessible.
Trying alternative download for Hadamard matrix
The ATT site removed the old page, and Sloane’s library now points to a page that times out. Another option might be using Anymatrix, but GitHub listings aren’t working. I'll try accessing the IPM website directly to download the matrix — maybe the file's URL works better with HTTP instead of HTTPS. Let’s give it a try.
Searching for accessible Hadamard matrix
The page redirects to HTTPS and times out, which might indicate blocking. Maybe the matrix is hosted elsewhere, like in a plain text or PDF format. I’ll search for terms like "h428.txt" or "hadamard428.txt" on cs.uleth.ca — there’s a mention of a PDF that could include it. Let's give that a try.
Opening ADTHM page for possible matrix
I’ve found a listing on cs.uleth, and there’s a link on the ADTHM page that might lead to the matrix in text format. It could be what I’m looking for, so I’ll go ahead and open the ADTHM page to check it out. Let’s see if it includes the matrix!
Accessing matrix text through link
Awesome! I found a link labeled "Entries as text" (ID: 26). This could be the matrix in the text format I’m looking for. I’ll go ahead and click the link to download it. Let’s see if this works!
Parsing the XPM image to a matrix
The H428.html contains XPM image data, not matrix entries. It seems to represent values with two colors, p and m, which likely stand for +1 and -1. I can map p to 1 and m to -1 (just to simplify things) and validate that the Hadamard property holds by checking H*H^T = 428I. I’ll fetch and parse the full content to confirm.
Downloading H428.html
Alright, I’ll use the container.download method to fetch the H428.html file. I previously opened the URL, so that should meet the requirement. Now, I’ll download the file directly to /mnt/data/H428.html and get the content I need. This should work smoothly and efficiently!
Understanding limitations for container.download
It seems the container.download method restricts us to file types other than text/html — likely just images or data. Since I can’t use click or fetch via Python, I'll need to rely on web.run for the content. However, the 200-word limit means we can’t fully retrieve the 428 lines. I may need to process it in parts.
Handling 200-line limits in tool response
Since the tool response gets cut off around 200 words, I can't present more than that in the final output. However, I can strategically open various line ranges and parse those internal portions to reconstruct the full matrix. This should allow me to gather all the necessary data without breaking the word limits.
Handling file retrieval and parsing
To retrieve the full content, I can call the tool multiple times from different lines, reconstructing the file. However, retrieving 428 lines in total means a heavy operation, spread across several calls. Given the content-type restrictions, I can process the data using Python, but I need to work with a local file.
Figuring out how to retrieve and process data
To get more lines, I can use a tool to fetch a longer response, but there’s still a limit to the tool’s output. Since the H428.html file is too large, I could check if there's a plain text version like "H428.txt" in the directory that can be downloaded. I'll also look for any relevant comments in the HTML.
Looking for matrix in different format
The file starts with “/* XPM */,” indicating it’s actually plain text despite being labeled as HTML. I could try adding a download parameter or using a raw link, but the content type restriction remains. Next, I'll check if there's a plain text version of the matrix, like "H428.txt" in the directory.
Considering ways to fetch and process the file
There’s no plain text, but the XPM format might be parseable. I could gradually access the file using the web tool, then reconstruct it with Python. One option is fetching parts with web tool, accumulating in Python, and then processing. I could work around content type restrictions with query parameters for text/plain.
Exploring options to access content
The H428.html doesn’t seem like real HTML. Maybe I can access it through a ?download=1 query or H428.xpm? I might also try the enlarge image link (id 25). If it's a GIF/PNG, I could download it and extract pixel values, though this might involve some image processing. I'll check it out.
Downloading and inspecting image
The image is a PNG, so I can download it using the container. I'll pull down H428_big.png and check the image’s pixel structure. It’s likely 856x856, possibly scaled at 2x, though the matrix should be 428x428. I’ll inspect the image further after downloading it.
Opening image for inspection
The file is small, just 5kb, which likely means it’s compressed and may be a 428x428 image with a palette. I’ll go ahead and open the image to inspect it using the container, and then I can analyze the pixels to understand how it's structured further.
Processing image for matrix conversion
We have the image, so it's time to use Python to read it and convert the pixel colors into matrix entries. First, I need to check the image's pixel dimensions—more likely it will be 428x428 or a multiple of that. I'll use Python with PIL to open the image and confirm :::
Recently discovered Donald Knuth got oneshot by Claude recently (indirectly, through fedi) - feeling the itch to write about tech's vulnerability to LLMs because of it.
Baldur Bjarnason's essay remains evergreen.
Even when looking at Knuth's account of what happened, you can already tell that the AI is receiving far more credit than what it actually did. There is something about a nondeterministic slot machine that makes it feel far more miraculous when it succeeds, while reliable tools that always do their job are boring and stupid. The downsides of the slot machine never register in comparison to the rewards. Does it feel so miraculous when I get an idea after experimenting in Mathematica?
I feel like math research is particularly susceptible to this, because it is the default that almost all of one's attempts do not succeed. So what if most of the AI's attempts do not succeed? But if it is to be evaluated as a tool, we have to check if the benefits outweigh the costs. Did it give me more productive ideas, or did it actually waste more of my time leading me down blind alleys? More importantly, is the cognitive decline caused by relying on slot machines going to destroy my progress in the long term? I don't think anyone is going to do proper experiments for this in math research, but we have already seen this story play out in software. So many people were impressed by superficial performances, and now we are seeing the dumpster fire of bloat, bugs, and security holes. No, I don't think I want that.
And then there is the narrative of not evaluating AI as an objective tool based on what it can actually do, but instead as a tidal wave of Unending Progress that will one day sweep away those elitists with actual skills. Random lemmas today mean the Millennium Prize problems tomorrow! This is where the AI hype comes from, and why people avoid, say, comparing AI with Mathematica. To them I say good luck. We have dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into this, and there are only so many more hundreds of billions of dollars left. Were these small positive results (and significant negatives) worth hundreds of billions of dollars, or perhaps were there better things that these resources could have been used for?
Even in Knuth's account it sounds like the LLM contribution was less in solving the problem and more in throwing out random BS that looked vaguely like different techniques were being applied until it spat out something that Knuth and his collaborator were able to recognize as a promising avenue for actual work.
I am not a mathematician or computer scientist and so will not claim to know exactly what this is describing and how it compares to the normal process for investigating this kind of problem. However, the fact that it produced 4 approaches over 31 attempts seems more consistent with randomly throwing out something that looks like a solution rather than actually thinking through the process of each one. In a creative exploration like this where you expect most approaches to be dead ends rather than produce a working structure maybe the LLM is providing something valuable by generating vaguely work-shaped outputs that can inspire an actual mind to create the actual answer.
The idea that it's ultimately spitting out random answer-shaped nonsense also follows from the amount of babysitting that was required from Filip to keep it actually producing anything useful. I don't doubt that it's more efficient than I would be at producing random sequences of work-shaped slop and redirecting or retrying in response to a new "please actually do this" prompt, but of the two of us only one is demonstrating actual intelligence and moving towards being able to work independently. Compared to an undergrad or myself I don't doubt that Claude has a faster iteration time for each of those attempts, but that's not even in the same zip code as actually thinking through the problem, and if anything serves as a strong counterexample to the doomer critihype about the expanding capabilities of these systems. This kind of high-level academic work may be a case where this kind of random slop is actually useful, but that's an incredibly niche area and does not do nearly as much as Knuth seems to think it does in terms of justifying the incredible cost of these systems. If anything the narrative that "AI solved the problem" is giving Anthropic credit for the work that Knuth and Stapprrs were putting into actually sifting through the stream of slop identifying anything useful. Maybe babysitting the slop sluice is more satisfying or faster than going down every blind alley on your own, but you're still the one sitting in the river with a pan, and pretending the river is somehow pulling the gold out of itself is just damn foolish.
I am a computer science PhD so I can give some opinion on exactly what is being solved.
First of all, the problem is very contrived. I cannot think of what the motivation or significance of this problem is, and Knuth literally says that it is a planned homework exercise. It's not a problem that many people have thought about before.
Second, I think this problem is easy (by research standards). The problem is of the form: "Within this object X of size m, find any example of Y." The problem is very limited (the only thing that varies is how large m is), and you only need to find one example of Y for each m, even if there are many such examples. In fact, Filip found that for small values of m, there were tons of examples for Y. In this scenario, my strategy would be "random bullshit go": there are likely so many ways to solve the problem that a good idea is literally just trying stuff and seeing what sticks. Knuth did say the problem was open for several weeks, but:
I guess "random bullshit go" is served well by a random bullshit machine, but you still need an expert who actually understands the problem to read the tea leaves and evaluate if you got something useful. Knuth's narrative is not very transparent about how much Filip handheld for the AI as well.
I think the main danger of this (putting aside the severe societal costs of AI) is not that doing this is faster or slower than just thinking through the problem yourself. It's that relying on AI atrophies your ability to think, and eventually even your ability to guard against the AI bullshitting you. The only way to retain a deep understanding is to constantly be in the weeds thinking things through. We've seen this story play out in software before.
Thank you for providing some actual domain experience to ground my idle ramblings.
I wonder if part of the reason why so many high profile intellectuals in some of these fields are so prone to getting sniped by the confabulatron is an unwillingness to acknowledge (either publicly or in their own heart) that "random bullshit go" is actually a very useful strategy. It reminds me of the way that writers will talk about the value of just getting words on the page because it's easier to replace them with better words than to create perfection ex nihilo, or the rubber duck method of troubleshooting where just stepping through the problem out loud forces you to organize your thoughts in a way that can make the solution more readily apparent. It seems like at least some kinds of research are also this kind of process of analysis and iteration as much as if not more than raw creation and insight.
I have never met Donald Knuth, and don't mean to impugn his character here, even as I'm basically asking if he's too conceited to properly understand what an LLM is, but I think of how people talk about science and scientists and the way it gets romanticized (see also Iris Merideth's excellent piece on "warrior culture" in software development) and it just doesn't fit a field that can see meaningful progress from throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. A lot of the discourse around art and artists is more willing to acknowledge this element of the creative process, and that might explain their greater ability and willingness to see the bullshit faucet for what it is. Maybe because science and engineering have a stricter and more objective pass/fail criteria (you can argue about code quality just as much as the quality of a painting, but unlike a painting either the program runs or it doesn't. Visual art doesn't generally have to worry about a BSOD) there isn't the same openness to acknowledge that the affirmative results you get from an LLM are still just random bullshit. I can imagine the argument being: "The things we're doing are very prestigious and require great intelligence and other things that offer prestige and cultural capital. If 'random bullshit go' is often a key part of the process then maybe it doesn't need as much intelligence and doesn't deserve as much prestige. Therefore if this new tool can be at all useful in supplementing or replicating part of our process it must be using intelligence and maybe it deserves some of the same prestige that we have."
I'd say that the great problems that last for decades do not fall purely to random bullshit and require serious advances in new concepts and understanding. But even then, the romanticized warrior culture view is inaccurate. It's not like some big brain genius says "I'm gonna solve this problem" and comes up with big brain ideas that solve it. Instead, a big problem is solved after people make tons of incremental progress by trying random bullshit and then someone realizes that the tools are now good enough to solve the big problem. A better analogy than the Good Will Hunting genius is picking a fruit: you wait until it is ripe.
But math/CS research is not just about random bullshit go. The truly valuable part is theory and understanding, which comes from critically evaluating the results of whatever random bullshit one tries. Why did idea X work well with Y but not so well with Z, and where else could it work? So random bullshit go is a necessary part of the process, but I'd say research has value (and prestige) because of the theory that comes from people thinking about it critically. Needless to say, LLMs are useless at this. (In the Knuth example, the AI didn't even prove that its construction worked.)
I think intelligence is overrated for research, and the most important quality for research is giving a shit. Solving big problems is mostly a question of having the right perspective and tools, and raw intelligence is not very useful without them. To do that, one needs to take time to develop opinions and feelings about the strengths and weaknesses of various tools.
Of course, every rule has exceptions, and there have been long standing problems that have been solved only when someone had the chutzpah to apply far more random bullshit than anyone had dared to try before.
Upvoted, but for me the answer is as simple as noting that Knuth is a reverent Lutheran who is deeply involved with their church. Lutherans generally think that technology is part of God's wonderful creation and that everything is beautiful from the right angle. Knuth thought that algorithms were beautiful and Godly already, and he understands how LLMs work mechanically, so why can't they be beautiful and Godly too? Also they think that God exists, so they're primed to be misled and deluded.
Hypothesis: When he wrote Surreal Numbers, Knuth was a poet and thus unknowingly of the Devil's party.
My generous statement: Knuth, being a scientist, is used to an "adversary" that plays fair. As we have known for decades, a scientist can be tricked in situations that a magician will see through. This applies all the more now with the Sycophancy Engines, which make mathematics into a casino vacation. Just one more prompt, bro. Just one more prompt.
My less generous statement: Knuth is almost 90 years old. Sure, age doesn't imply a person will become a doddering fool, but people do tend to slow down, to have less energy and more need to spend it managing their health. "Thinking about a problem for a few weeks" counts for less in a situation like that.
My extremely ungenerous statement: Hey, remember when Michael Atiyah claimed to have proved the Riemann hypothesis in 2018? And the community reaction was a pained, "Atiyah is one of the great mathematicians... of the 20th century."
As a layperson skimming the paper, this strikes me as equivalent to a dashed-off letter to the editor coming from someone in Knuth's position. It's an incomplete, second-hand reporting of somebody else's results that doesn't really investigate any of the interesting features of the system at hand. The implicit claim (here and elsewhere) is that we have a runtime for natural-language programming in English, and the main method reported for demonstrating this is the partial prompt:
and later on, a slightly longer prompt from a correspondent using GPT-5.2 Pro, that also loads a PDF of Knuth's article into the context window. No discussion of debugging how these systems arrive at their output, or programmatically constraining them for more targeted output in their broader vector space. Just more of the braindead prompting-and-hoping approach, which eventually, unsurprisingly diverges from outputting any viable code whatsoever. This all strikes me as being an exercise similar to
The cargo-cult system prompt approach is like banging two rocks together compared to what a computational system should be capable of, and I would be much more impressed and much more interested if someone like Knuth was investigating such capabilities, instead of blogging somebody else pretending to have the Star Trek computer.
ooh gooods nooo now all the Claude slurpers are going to refer to this forever as definitive proof of how legitimately useful LLMs have got, it "solved" a math problem for Donald Knuth! :<
A lobster invokes classic argument from authority
yeah b/c I'm a professional computer scientist ...
But... why?
Always remember that Nobel disease is a thing.
The one I often think about is the person who invented PCR and then later claimed to have had an encounter with a fluorescent talking raccoon of possibly extraterrestrial origin.
I was pissed when my (non-academic) friends saw this and immediately started talking about how mathematicians and computer scientists need to use AI from now on.
oh hey I remember reading that Donald Knuth paper earlier today, when it got posted by an AI youtube channel as 'proof' AI is on the path to AGI
Wonder what would have happened if they had not stopped after 31 tries. Sure it gave a goodish answer once, but was that just a luck of the draw? A proper evaluation imho shouldnt stop when you get a good answer once, esp as bad results tend to not get published. (Also, as always somebody might have found the answer already online).
It is also silly in some ways as I wonder how hard it is for people to evaluate the 31 results and not get stuck in pursuing an earlier false lead.
The 31st try resulted in them only solving the problem for odd m, but the even m case was still open. So of course this happened:
Knuth did add a postscript on other friends maybe kinda vibing a possible solution for even m:
I find it slightly funny how Stappers suggested to the AI to use specific external tools that are actually reliable (like ORTools). This also makes me question how much the of the AI's "insight" was a result of handholding and the rubber duck effect.
For context:
Followup on the Mass AI Bill, Russel has 180'd on it:
https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/93a-the-three-characters-that-should
Private right of action, fuck yeah. Turns grok into a legal fees dispenser.
lol
was doomscrolling and got fucking jumpscared by this fucking article: https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-three-scientists-who-said-no-epstein
scott jumpscare
God this is so funny. He's so evasive about why exactly it is bad to be associated with Epstein. I just asked mummy and she said no.
Aw don't worry I have no morals. But people would have been mean to me again!
ok ngl I didn't actually read the article at first (can you blame me) but since you pointed that out, FUCK. That's so fucking pathetic. I was imagining a scenario where scott had met epstein IRL but had gotten "jock" vibes from him and decided not to associate based on that.
Zac Bowden at Windows Central
"We have heard your complaints about lead in the paint, and our roadmap for Leaded Paint 2026 is all about improving its reputation by making the lead easier to swallow"
new episode of odium symposium. it's a tribute to knowledge fight, in which we dissect an episode of nick fuentes's show. i was nervous about how this would turn out but i think it's actually my favorite episode yet.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/11-groyper-151852222 (links to other platforms at www.odiumsymposium.com)
God that was bleak - I thought Nick was bad in his guest spots on Alex's show (seen via Knowledge Fight, of course) but apparently you really do need at least two layers of insulating podcast to avoid suffering critical psychic damage from that level of hatred. I appreciated the acknowledgement that in order to feel at all okay playing clips you needed to sanewash him a little bit. I'm pretty sure that JorDan do the same thing with Alex and don't acknowledge it nearly often enough.
I also feel like some of Nick's schtick is about trying to position himself and maintain his position in the right wing grifter bigot-industrial complex. Like, the open disdain for his audience and presenting his actually pretty straightforward feelings on the halftime show as somehow brave and iconoclastic is also about differentiating himself and making his audience feel superior to Alex, Tucker, Candace, etc. In that sense the open disdain for the audience serves another purpose in terms of reinforcing heirarchy. Look at how great it feels for me to be better than you. And even you are better than the chuds, who are better than the racialized other.
wrt to the first part, nick consistently outmaneuvers people who bring him onto their platforms. he's honestly brilliant at understanding who the audience is, what frame he's appearing in, and how to signal given those circumstances. i didn't understand until i started prepping for this episode that nick is actually lazy and incurious in almost the exact same way alex jones is. dan and jordan notice and call out how he effortlessly establishes dominance over alex, but i think there's a subtler game going on where nick manages to appear competent and informed compared to alex, and you don't realize that's just an artifact of conversational skill until you hear nick on his own show.
wrt to the second part, i could not agree more and i'm very glad to hear that is a takeaway because it is absolutely something i was hoping to communicate. that's the freudianness of it all, how these existing patterns of relations to another get played out and reenacted through the audience's relationship to nick, and vice versa
The great chain of bleating
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-fires-employee-insider-trading-polymarket-kalshi/
lol. Between this and the ayatollah clawback, I'm expecting some entertaining litigation.
404 media: Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester.
AI is also causing literal brain rot
Class action lawsuits by employees against employers that mandate AI tools when?
I fucking hope it’s soon
Wow, that's a sobering article.
Claude Code claims another victim.
add another tally to “AI completely wipes out an important database” sighhhh
do people just not feel shame anymore?
So they expect more cases of data being lost like this?
@corbin @BlueMonday1984 o7
well would you look at that, some consequences
Given the delay, I'll bet an internal review discovered more instances in other articles where COVID couldn't be the excuse.
Someone with more time and motivation could probably look at his past articles and see if any others have been quietly pulled or edited, although I have no idea if ars could be assed to change the ones which weren't publicly criticized
The purpose of AI is theft, part infinity: chardet steals LGPL code for profit using Claude
Blast from the past: in 2014, Scott Alexander posted a take on marijuana legalization which showed excellent knowledge of medical papers but huge gaps in his knowledge of what brown people or smart policy reformers have to say. David Gerard and Christopher Hallquist in the comments, digression on how pot affects your IQ with gwern chipping in. Alexander came back in 2018 promising that he was right all along with a footnote about how some people in the comments told him that people like smoking weed and he did not know how to process that because his utilitarian calculation said it was bad for society.
It's curious how, in terms of utilitarianism, the 2014 post has people doing arithmetic to estimate QALYs but the 2018 post is more of a handwave where Scoot repeats the 2014 numbers verbatim. Advocates of decriminalization and legalization have long argued that the QALYs saved by releasing people from prison and no longer sentencing them (easily 20+ QALYs/person) and not arresting people for possession in the first place (0.5 QALYs/person-arrest) are significant to society at large, even if there were quantifiable health risks.
TBH I think that Scoot got a bit of a tough surprise when data actually came in on cannabis usage; it's now accepted cannabis lore that cannabis can cause onset of e.g. schizophrenia, at a rate of something like 1 in 2000 users, but the numbers on causing cancer never materialized. Meanwhile the case studies treating e.g. epilepsy have multiplied to the point where, again, it's now accepted lore that some epileptics find relief by using products made from high-CBD strains.
Choice sneer from the second post, from somebody with an extremely-relevant Moray avatar:
Edit: grammar and also the extremely-relevant link. Pass the Moray, please~
I didn't know that Moray in QC was around in 2018!
That is a good example because it shows the failure of imagination (can imagine the end of the world, can't imagine working public transit and public policy to discourage driving) and because hf he thought it through he might get to "humh, some people like to drive, but its bad for public and social health, how can we discourage it while preserving liberties?"
I really wonder what he did as a medical student in Cork other than study and read racist Tumblr accounts. Did his friends never drag him to Amsterdam to ride a bike and eat an edible?
Another surprise is that illegal weed still has 30% of the market in Canada. I don't know how much of that is consumer inertia ("My buddy Mike always gets me the good stuff eh") and how much is avoiding taxes.
A second LLM shitshow has hit vim - this time, its the lead maintainer losing his marbles:
If you wanna see the disaster for yourself, the entire thread's still on GitHub as of this writing.
That is pretty sad to see, but also, who refers to Claude as “he”? This is the second time I’m seeing this and it makes me skin crawl
Now that he killed children in cold blood Claude has been made a man. In fact, he is a 6'3" Anglo and my boyfriend.
Oh man, if genAI destroys the profession of toxic masculinity podcaster watch me turn booster on a dime
monkey's paw curls and AI destroys the profession by creating infinite andrew tate and freshnfit clones so that more people than ever watch manosphere podcasts, but no actual humans can make a living from producing them.
If Tate loses his job, who’s to say if that’s good or bad
(No but really it’s bad, very bad)
One of my superiors at work calls it "he."
I mean, Claude is a male name. Blame Anthropomorphic for it.
I'm calling it Anthropomorphic accidentally on-purpose forever now.
That can’t be entirely it. Do you call Alexa the voice assistant tool “she”?
I don't really call Alexa anything since I saw one like once in my life. But it's very likely I'd default to "she" when talking, the thing even has a female voice.
My point is that the corporation behind Claude would probably love you to say "he", the same way Amazon would very much like you calling Alexa "she".
This preprint just shared by Gary Marcus is interesting.
LLMs an addictive psychological hazard: confirmed?
Stop the presses. Dude who's into LLM's has shit takes about open source software.
Apparently OSS devs that publish under non-commercial licenses are shutting people out?
Definitely some bespoke what the fu-
Skyview.social mirror so everyone can see - he's locked out everyone who's not signed in.
@BlueMonday1984 @JFranek "If you use this code, you can never charge money for whatever you used it in" sorry what this has the same energy as the brain-wormed Americans who think that socialised heathcare means doctors work for free
lmfao
Thank you, should have checked that.
this is confusing, how many licenses that are "NonCommercial" are mainstream Free/Open source? From what I've seen they're deffo a minority anyway.
Copyleft is non-commercial haven't you heard? I mean its really unfair, the code is completely free but you are not allowed to create the torment nexus without everybody seeing your work.
There are licenses that effectively repel corporate use without a non-commercial clause; I looked at them on Open Source SE a while ago, including a fun bit of dentistry previously, on Lobsters. GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are examples in common usage. This might help to illuminate our boy's actual problem: he can't use Free Software without complying with the onerous requirement of ensuring the Four Freedoms by not plagiarizing, and he really wants to plagiarize.
I can think of one notable project I ever saw one, and that's Bookwyrm with the Anti-Capitalist Software License v1.4.
But this seems too vague-posty to refer to something that specific. Prolly just someone butthurt over copyleft.
Right? Like he never heard of MIT or Apache2 licence.
You could argue that for example AGPL3 is non-commercial in practice due to the requirements to disclose code. But even then.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/chatgpt-uninstalls-surged-by-295-after-dod-deal/
Some of my faculty have called for a campus wide boycott. Relatedly, the Scott Galloway scoreboard is up to $250m hit to tech market cap: https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/
while OpenAI deserves every bit of flack they get, it's comical to see people who criticise OpenAI for creating a 'war machine' turn around and praise Anthropic when they were-by their own admission no less!-the first people to start using AI for military purposes
I mean, I can understand the argument that Anthropic at least maintained a fig leaf of ethics, but notably based on Saltman's statements OpenAI does still feel the obligation to maintain those optics, they're just not nearly as credible at doing so.
Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism
https://quitgpt.org/
jesus fuck https://urbit.org/blog/olif-and-urbit-ids
with urbit, you can now sniff each other's farts
Istg this has come up before, i am just too lazy to prove it. Still. Why would anyone want this
thought it was satire, genuinely surprised it's an official Urbit-sponsored project
also very much goes against the grain of elevating the mind over the body which is the vibe I get from urbit and environs
It has, but I honestly thought it was fake and/or satire
I don't know why, but it still amazes me how fast some people have went full crackhead with LLM's:
link
Why are we here? Just to suffer?
The prickly prince has been around for a few years and is now completely one shotted. He is exactly the sort of talentless middle manager that probably could be replaced by AI and thus believes that it really is "that good"
I'm not sure "one-shotted" is a good description for some of these folks. More like they bet against themselves in a rigged game of Russian roulette being played with a fully-loaded Uzi.
Mildly positive news: there is a fork of the Zed editor with the llm autocomplete stuff ripped out now: https://gram.liten.app/posts/first-release/
(I’ve used zed with the ai kill switch and really like the buffer/editing ux; but it’s always felt a bit gross, I’m excited to see where the fork goes)
Oooh I wish this project a lot of success!
Zed is interesting but the project’s very pro-AI stance keeps me away from it. So a fork without that stuff is great, hope that works out longer-term.
Are they planning to follow the upstream updates from Zed, or is it a hard fork?
seems unlikely, see here for reference
So the water usage of data centers/ai has long been controversial (either a huge issue/a non issue/distraction depending on who you ask) and the lack of real numbers around it made it hard to know more (but data center owners keeping it a secret made it sus). But now the stats of one google data center have been released due to legal pressure. 2-8 million gallons a day
I was trying to put this into perspective by comparing this to the flow rate of the Des Plaines river. At the high end, 8 million gallons a day is something like 12.4 cubic feet per second constantly. Currently the Des Plaines has a discharge rate of 86-87 cubic feet per second, so a bit above 14% of the Des Plaines per data center.
Fuuuuck, that's a lot. Thanks for doing the maths
This is comparable to the amount of water used by cherry farmers near Google's site in The Dalles, who (according to my napkin) use somewhere between 2-8x what Google uses. This isn't that much water for the Columbia River though; on an average day, it has enough flow in less than a minute to provide for both the cherry farmers and Google all day. However, it would be a big problem for a smaller river. (Interestingly, while fresh water is essential for datacenters, Google originally desired that site because it was cheap land next to cheap hydroelectric power.)
Genuine questions borne of ignorance:
When they say "using" water, is this water that has to be actively removed from the supply each day, or does this number just say how much water is circulating in the center? I'm assuming it doesn't all disappear, or does a lot of it end up released as steam or piped away as contaminated water or something?
The data center nearest to me uses sea-water, but I have no idea how much. And it doesn't seem to put out steam or dump bad water back into the sea (not that I could tell if they were doing that).
I totally understand the electricity resource issue for data centers but the water usage thing confuses me, because I assumed it would be for cooling and therefore mostly contained and recirculated. With the exception of predictable maintenance issues like leaks and waste from mineral scale or algae, I don't understand why this water would need to disappear, or why they would need to use potable water from the outset.
Admittedly my mental model is based on consumer CPU water-cooling setups at an imagined industrial scale. What am I missing?
the thing you're missing is scale. what you're describing is overgrown car radiator type scheme, and it works up to some couple MW if need be. when you have access to sea, or large river, you can just use that water as a coolant and dissipate some couple GW this way. this is the reason why so many nuclear powerplants are on seashore. because sea is generally very big [citation needed] temperature increase is slight and mostly harmless in usual cases
inland, in absence of large river, the other way to provide cooling is by evaporation of water. one form is to take that oversized car radiator and spray water on it, water evaporates taking away some heat. this arrangement allows for no-added-water operation in low load conditions. in principle this means that lowest possible temperature is not air temperature, but instead it's wet bulb temperature, which is always lower, and difference is greatest when air humidity is low. in practice this doesn't allow to reach this lower temperature, but the other approach does. for bigger scale still, instead of using heat exchanger, water is dripped in a tower of some shape and air is moved in some way against it. small part of water evaporates, and the rest, now cooled down, is collected at the bottom. this is how these large cooling towers near coal or nuclear powerplants work, but so do smaller towers that rely on fans instead of chimney effect. extra water is always needed, and temperature closer to wet bulb temperature is achieved in all load conditions. rarely used alternative is to make an artificial lake, and allow for evaporation from water surface
notice that if water is evaporated, it'll leave whatever is dissolved in evaporator part, which means it has to demineralized at all times. in practice it means that some part of evaporated water is treated continuously by reverse osmosis, and the less saline input water is, the easier and more energy efficient it is to do it
the thing with heat exchangers is, without water evaporation, that they have some constant thermal resistance. if you want to dissipate more heat, you need more of heat exchanger, or alternatively have to allow for higher temperature. the former means more metal needed, the latter means limits to other parts of coolant loop, or using heat pump to cool down silicon, while increasing temperature of coolant. both of these mean extra capex and/or energy use, but evaporating water is cheap, so it's done instead. it doesn't help that one of dc ratings is ratio of how much energy gets into dc to how much energy powers actual silicon. evaporating water does not add to energy use, so designs chasing this rating are likely to use that solution
Ok, now I understand, thanks for the crash course on dc cooling!
I assumed scale was my issue but having only second-hand knowledge of coastal larger-scale cooling systems was the big part of my problem. Then I couldn't understand why they were building them inland, especially with the mineralization issue when drawing from inland reservoirs. So I thought that might be a tax jurisdiction reason, plus comparative cost of metal or pump heat exchange setups, especially because Altman said they weren't using evaporative cooling (not that he's a trustworthy source).
But this made it all click:
They were always optimizing for the cost, but I didn't know about this regulation. Water usage is probably either absent from the regulations or a minimal contribution to it, so they've used it as the trade-off without adequate (if any) modeling for impact. They've probably since done a little of that and found it's pretty catastrophic. A little extra reading indicates the 2-8 million gallons is the supply per day by the county, and not total (re)circulating water in the dc, which implies evaporative cooling and aligns with what you're saying about it being the cheapest solution.
Cool, everything is yet again awful, but at least it makes sense on some level. I have been educated, and I again thank you for your effort in that.
it's not regulation, it's a metric that looks nice to investors. but also lower energy use means lower cost
This is fresh water coming into the datacenter. A datacenter uses water for air conditioning; imagine spraying water on a screen door when wind is blowing through it and you'll have a good intuitive idea of the dynamics. Most of the water is recaptured and used for several sprays before it evaporates away. To force wind through the screens, they use windcatchers, tall towers which induce wind inside the building.
This is completely different from water-cooling gamer setups. It's more like a weather system. Water usually needs to be added because the datacenter is located in a dry biome; air conditioning doesn't thermodynamically work if the air is too dry. This is actually really delicate; too much water will cause clouds to form inside the building!
Ok that makes sense, thanks for the explanation!
The data center nearest to me works a bit differently, I know they use sea-water for their HVAC because they share the pipes with other buildings using it for the same purpose, and I was lucky enough to get a tour of the system in one of those buildings a few years back. It's multi-storey so perhaps I simply didn't notice the windcatcher parts in the architecture.
But that obviously means it's also near the coast and therefore not the driest biome from the start. I don't doubt it still impacts the ecosystem but at least it's not draining the potable reserves at the same time. To me this begs the question of why they're building these data centers so far inland.
As a side note, it's pretty amazing we still do the windcatcher setup. They've always been fascinating to me, but I can't help but be amazed they're still relevant even in the highest tech buildings.
I don't know the answers to a lot of these questions, I assume they heat up the water, and dump it back into the rivers, which causes some disruption to the local ecosystem. Which is fine if you do it in small amounts, but it will disrupt things. (powerplants have the problem for example that some flora/fauna gets attracted to these more warmer waters, risking clogs and more. (so a datacenter does this twice, first via the powerplant generating power, and then to cool the datacenter).
There is also the issue of contamination, while I assume they don't put extra dirty things in the water, this is not a guarantee, nor will every municipality/gov just go with the assumption that it is clean, I assume that in some places this cooling water will need to be cleaned extra as industrial waste. Esp when there are some odd laws interacting. (I know some of those laws re waste and what counts as waste interact weirdly in .nl causing weird busywork during roadwork so they don't run into extra costs by accidentally letting the waste count as a different class of waste).
But yes, I think they do not recirculate, and just pump it round and dump it back into the river directly (so no evaporative cooling where the water goes into the air, which you had at some powerplants, the big towers), and I assume they don't use lead pipes so the water isn't very contaminated. But these sort of processes do put a strain on the water quality. (In .nl we have some problems with river water quality because our big rivers come from industrial areas of other countries, (Germany mainly)).
I mostly posted it so that we now at least have some indication of the amounts we are talking about, as tech companies are very tight lipped about this. But as somebody who knows nothing, I do not know all the implications of it. I am however suspicious, due to a combination of natural paranoia, them being very mum about it, and me not trusting the big tech places.
But yeah, if they use up 90% of the daily flow of a river and heat it up, that will absolutely not be good for the local ecosystem. And any industrial site downstream who also wanted to use the water for cooling now also in trouble.
Bit like the same reason I posted about protonmail, more an FYI than a sneer (not a huge shock that eventually protonmail would reveal the data if forced by their gov, they always said they would do this, but it is an important thing to take into account if you worry about privacy).
Thanks for giving it a go, I mostly hoped there might be someone who had some experience in the area who could shed some light. But the numbers were certainly interesting. Then the pivot to AI post went up 30 mins after I posted and shed a little light on the while thing too.
It would seem odd to put the heated water back instead of cooling it off and re-using, but I don't have faith in any kind of sustainability designed or built into the system, so that would make sense for impact.
If they're being quiet about it, it means one or two things. Either they're actually considering it proprietary new tech, but there would almost certainly be patents filed somewhere for that case, and/or they have something they're not proud to announce. I have no idea what words would be used for a patent here, being an area well outside my expertise, but I've not heard any patents mentioned, so I'm going to assume it's squarely the shame reason.
The protonmail thing... I just assume nothing I do is private and keep all my services as decoupled as possible to make me more annoying to track down, should the situation arise that I become somehow not boring. One day I'll set up something more private and annoying, but I have a long list of todos that never become todones...
So any reason for the downvote? What did I miss dear random critic?
Sam Altman Is Realizing He Made a Gigantic Mistake
You don’t say!
Yes of course this is just a learning opportunity... higher stakes decisions in the future...
Cuz making deals with the biggest military in the western world that involve autonomous use of weapons and possible escalation to all out nuclear war sounds pretty low stakes. /s
Fucking muppet
...so the original statement was a lie then? the CEO who is notorious for being a liar lied? I am very surprised about this information.
He is altering the deal. Pray he does not alter it further. These are definitely the good guys, right?
This piece on how doomers and rationalists have made everything worse with their "AGI is nigh" shtick and ended up giving AI companies way more power than they should and getting chatbots into the military, where they will almost certainly fuck up and kill people
I was going to throw a point of order about not all fanfic being erotic, but given how they fetishize "intelligence" and "rationality" I can't be sure that they don't get off on that slog.
To give Gary Marcus credit here, HPMOR may not be erotic, but many of Eliezer's other works are erotic (or at least attempt to be), the most notable being Planecrash/Project Lawful which has entire sections devoted to deliberately bad (as in deliberately not safe, sane, consensual) bdsm.
Eliezer tried to promote/hype up Project Lawful on twitter, maybe hoping it would be the next HPMOR, but it didn't quite take. Maybe he failed to realize how much of HPMOR's success was being in the popular genre of Harry Potter fanfic (which at the time had crap like Partially Kissed Hero or Harry Crow as among its most popular works), and not from his own genius writing.
I know I've said somewhere on here before that "Harry Potter for pop science nerds" is fanfiction on easy mode, but I'll stand by it.
Also I think there's enough manipulation fantasy in HPMOR, and enough lack of agency from Hermione, that it qualifies—in it's own way—implicitly as being erotic.
You can't build a fandom full of that many fucked-up people without some of them getting horny in a fucked-up way.
Edit to add: example of a non-erotic fanfic https://archiveofourown.org/works/73396436
if we had made the podcast series on rationalists, their importance as useful idiots for billionaires was the structure i wanted to hang the whole thing on. so this is a gratifying read. that said i think the ideas here will be familiar to many stubsack readers
i will go further and say that not accounting for such things is considered virtuous in rationalist ideology
It's especially strange because becoming less prone to bias and developing a clear understanding of what serves your interest is so much of the pitch for Rationalism as a community/ideology/project. Like, here's unbearably long essays that promise to help cultivate the superpower of seeing the world clearly and acting in it effectively, now if you acknowledge that nobody outside this small set of group homes is actually doing that you'll be shunned. And that's not getting into how easily exploitable those assumptions of good faith are by bad-faith actors. It comes back to that quote from Scott that has stuck in my head apparently more than it did his: if you build a community based on the principle that you will absolutely never have a witch hunt you will end up living among approximately seven principles civil libertarians and eleven million goddamn witches, and this is true even if you're right that witch hunts are bad.
i think this is exactly why they had to come up with - or rather, misappropriate - the concept of coupled vs decoupled thinking. when they (especially the more, ahem, human biodiversity minded of them) fold ridiculous claims about what constitutes virtuous cognition into scientific and sophisticated sounding terminology, it makes those claims seem aligned with the broader sales pitch of rationalism
also that scott quote is excellent. i hadn't heard that one before
I actually dug up the context to make sure I wasn't forgetting something horrific. It's from a 2017 piece (CW: SSC Link) back before he went mask-off but was firmly in the "I'm a liberal and I talk exclusively about how liberals and their institutions suck" useful idiot phase of his career, so the overall essay is about how actually the wing nuts have a point when they say that all so-called neutral institutions are actually secret communist indoctrinators that want to trans your children and take your guns. I'm paraphrasing, obviously; he believes/pretends that when they called these things left-wing they didn't mean "literally in league with Stalin and the Devil". However, in the middle of the usual beigeness he tries to maintain his air of neutrality by having a section on how bad Voat ended up being, which concludes with:
it's amusing to me that these nerds thought they could in any way affect policy even with a sane administration, not to mention this bugshit crazy one
like I've said before, I'd be perversely happy if we managed to off ourselves by building the robot god. beats drowning in our own filth or blowing ourselves up
I mean yeah I guess in a competition between getting a bullet directly through my brain, getting all my limbs chainsawed off with my head last and being drowned in boiling water, the bullet would win every time. Though the real perversely funniest outcome is if superintelligence turns out to be completely impossible and we fuck ourselves over with garbage to mediocre AI embedded in all our critical infrastructure
Obviously I don't want the human race to go extinct, but if there was a choice of inevitable outcomes where we do, building an inimmical superintelligence at least implies agency, not carelessness.
Anyway Big Yud's fantasy of a precisely timed diamondoid-bacteria delivered killshot to every human being at the same time might sound terrible, but from a sensory perspective of the victims, it's basically suffering-free. You go about your day, BAM nothingness. Maybe there's a difference in timing so you see your partner keel over a split second before you die - again, you might not even realize what is happening.
I am not sure from where this idea of a global instantaneous simultanous genocide comes from, maybe a tit-for-tat escalation to counter every argument against shutting down the robot god, but from a storytelling perspective it's pretty useless. There's no drama where the survivors lament their loss or brood over what might have been. It's just a plug being pulled on the simulation.
(weirdly it's also the logical outcome of asking a computer to "end human suffering", a bit like the Robobrain logic in Fallout 4's Automatron expansion, but I doubt it's meant that way)
That’s precisely what I was thinking. Obviously I don’t want everyone to die but if you forced me to choose between apocalypse scenarios, I’m picking something painless and instantaneous- like a super-virus that activates immediately or a bullet in the head-over being slowly tortured to death via something like nuclear radiation or extreme heat
A real evil robot god would keep a sample of humanity alive forever in order to torture them as reprisal for them being really really mean to it back in the day.
I think maybe you nailed it here. Being able to pretend they're doing game theory/mapping out an escalation ladder allows Yud and our friends to feel like they're in the same intellectual lineage as guys like Oppenheimer and Teller, manifesting the same sort of "objective" emotionless rationality. The big difference, you see, is that the AI will think so much faster than us that...!
Today's AI psychosis casualty, brought to you by Gemini.
I’ve been seeing some people (not here, I’ve been taking a break) saying that we shouldn’t be mean to clankers by bringing up Kant’s position on being nice to animals. Well. Fuck all that.
animals are like sentient beings y'know, a clanker is a… matrix or a bunch of matrices or something
Hey, you're selling them short: there are also ReLU and softmax activation functions thrown around here and there. Clankers aren't just linear transformations! /j
I've actually been thinking about this recently. Not whether we should be mean, but how mean we can be. I'll post the full essay soon; I'm still proofreading. Here's a taste with irrelevancies elided:
nice. this would probably make a roko's basilisk believer uncomfortable and i like that
John Scalzi's shitcanned any book club plans for the foreseeable future, and AI spammers are the reason why.
From the comments:
Just a thought...
Imagine if China and North Korea bombed the White House, killed the president and most of the cabinet, and shot missiles at primary schools. Would you go out on the street and demonstrate in favor of the Chinese Communist Party and Kim Jong-Un, and expect to be heard and taken seriously?
Somehow brown people in other lands are supposed to be avid readers of wingnut welfare papers and have their worldview 100% aligned with Lindsey Graham and Bibi Netanyahu...
When they witness the skyrocketing economic growth enabled by American AGI, they will be clamoring for Westernization
Stumbled across a YouTube slop-farm calling itself The Interactive Archive recently, and the whole thing is just plain shameless:
AI slop banner, AI slop thumbnails, AI slop avatar, its all slop from top to fucking bottom.
Its getting pitiful views, too - the highest-viewed video on the damn thing (as of this writing) is the one about arena shooters dying off, sitting at just under 400 views:
Putting that into context, a random screen recording I uploaded hit nearly 700 through sheer luck.
Looks like they're using the standard blue/orange color scheme
That extruded piece of audiovisual garbage has been bugging me massively for a couple hours now, so I'm gonna make a quick recommendation:
If you're looking for a non-dogshit video about the arena shooter's implosion, boomer shooter YouTuber Skeleblood made a pretty solid one a couple years ago.
OT: A spiritual successor to Adobe Flash is in the works, and its dev already has a Patreon up and running
Thought inspired by some git on the red site, basically their premise was that birthrates are declining because we no longer have a society with a 2-parent nuclear family with one "breadwinner".
Here's my counterproposal to the implied idea we need to implement The Handmaid's Tale:
Ban contraception and abortion but if you get pregnant, there is no stigma to giving birth out of wedlock. The delivery is safe and paid for, and should you wish, the child will be reared in state-funded orphanages. These institutions will be receive more than adequate funding. Their charges will be given preferred entry to the best schools and universities, as well as preferential treatment when it comes to future employment. It will be illegal to discriminate against anyone so raised.
Surely this will raise the birthrate, right?
Dario Amodei Issues Groveling Apology for Daring to Criticize Trump
Knowing this administration there’s no way Anthropic can strike an agreement again (unless they compromise their stance) since the US Government is deadset on murderbots, so prepare for the whole industry to be domino’d
It's so fucking pathetic, he can't even hold onto the very narrow and weak stand (because he left open a lot of things with Anthropic's "two red lines") he took without trying to backpedal and grovel.
Blast from the past: I realized that I didn't have the exact link detailing why nickpsecurity was banned from Lobsters, but now I do. You'll have to click the little
[+]to see his comments. He's still active on HN and Reddit; he's gone full MAGA, which is100% predictablea surprising turn for somebody who constantly preaches born-again Christianbigotrypeace and love. I really do wish that Lobsters did the whole turn-you-into-a-tree thing (sure, crucifixion, or maybe Peneus-style or Pequenino-style) for banned users rather than forcing folks to dig through archives.Possibly too mean: the books3 guy is divorced and lonely.
Copyright was created to protect artists from people like him, you're not being too mean in the slightest.
if you outsource your analysis of US politics to slop machines, this is the kind of inane drivel you get
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cDwTZKg2pouK7RvBL/draft-moskovitz-the-best-last-hope-for-constructive-ai-1
(n.b. the Moskovitz referred to is not the very weird, very online Zvi, but some dipshit VC)
The piss filter on the bottom comics!
Twitter and bluesky chatter have done so much damage to people's understanding of uspol although I don't know that cable news or talk radio were any better.