Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026
Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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.)
Coworker got fired because he used AI to plan for a site installment of our product. The AI made a very nice looking plan but it failed to include enough packing material so nearly half of the units arrived broken. Boss still thinks AI is going to revolutionize work for the better though.
to be fair, the plan would have worked if you had included the allotted number of goblins in the box in addition to the packing material.
Came across this today: the purpose of a system is what it does. Based on that I would say the purpose of Claude was to make mistakes and get my coworker fired.
Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to "sue" journalists by "summoning" them to a "tribunal" staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first "lawsuit", which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D'Souza
threw a hissy fithas shuttered everything "temporarily".I don't understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people they're mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal 'social credit score' for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as D'Souza implies here:
but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That's just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it's staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.
Special mentions:
god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.
Honestly, I think D'Souza explains the business best:
Questions answered by t-shirt, etc.
Twitter really broke their brains.
Taken together it becomes incredibly transparent that the actual goal here is to transform themselves into a kind of priest-king class, exercising absolute authority on behalf of the remote and unfathomable god that they built. Just please pay no attention to who built the AI, who runs the AI, or where all the money and power end up.
and wiped out several cities in the processdid they try to turn their first target into unwilling and adversarial beta-tester?
so it seems
it does fit a pattern
oh lol
formerly
I would pay to see a billionaire or CEO in tears over an article.
And if stopping them were that easy, why hasn't it happened yet?
Molly White continuing to slam it out of the park with a pivot to AI. As always, worth a read in full, but this intro bit stuck out to me after reading lots of inane blather on how crypto and AI are different:
Literally the only pivot to AI that I am happy about. Molly is GOAT
Good timing since it seems even Crypto folks are getting out of Crypto.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/
NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.
This is poetry, AI could never
UK government wants to mandate client-side scanning to stop nonces. You won't be able to take or share nudes with hardware you own unless you submit to some dodgy third party identity check service first.
Unfortunately clippy the magic nonce detector does not exist. All this does is give our next Prime Minister (probably that froggy Farage bloke) totalitarian overreach
There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn't expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.
Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and furry art. Online grooming focused on niche enough fetishes will likely be totally unaffected.
Finally, a machine which makes it impossible to watch the movie batman and robin.
(Joke explainer: the batsuit had nipples).
3 weeks after the "as soon as Friday" news, OpenAI has followed Anthropic and confidentiality filed their draft S-1. But they sure don't sound confident about it. Whole post in full (sans legal fine print):
May, likely, if... Those are some weight-bearing subjunctive clauses.
Edit: also Altman's eyeball tracker company is doing layoffs now
Don't they have their CFO not even reporting directly to be CEO? I would bet that there's a ton of internal dissent about timing and strategy of how to cash out.
That CFO thing was definitely the case, at least a few months ago. I'm sure you're right about the internal chaos, even if that CFO drama has changed, and it would align with how non-committal this announcement is.
I would love to be a fly on that wall.
Wait why would they expect it to leak? (assuming that mentioning it isn't just some marketing stunt, which it probably is)
Ed Zitron might have got hold of it, if his bsky is anything to go by.
We could be feasting soon!
They asked a chatbot and the chatbot is trained on shadowrun and cyberpunk2077 sourcebooks.
Draft filings involve feedback from the SEC, so I think they may be throwing shade on government employees, whom they can't fire or control directly.
But I'm also thinking they may be salty about the aforementioned "as soon as Friday" articles, and then Anthropic beating them to filing.
Hard to tell how much of it is what, they're toxic inside and out.
IANAL, but my understanding is that companies are allowed to keep confidential the fact that they even filed the S-1. That's how I read OpenAI's statement. But it's not completely clear what "it" means in "we expect it to leak".
What if we replaced the kid in the Omelas hole with the wealthiest guy in Omelas?
I approve of this
massive bong rip musk is broadsides-ing the spacex ipo so hard not only because he's desperate for cash (he is) but also because he wants to stick it to saltman after losing the recent court case
The new Claude model will silently decide whether what you asked it to do is in line with anthropic ToS and silently corrupt your prompt if it doesn't like what you're asking. It's couched as a "safety countermeasure" but it is presumably to stop Chinese labs trying to scrape synthetic data.
We've moved from 'accidental' hallucinations to deliberate misinformation and you're paying $$$ for the privelige.
considering how many habitual llm users can't tell good from bad output anyway, they always could have done that
Ken Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust
I know this outcome was inevitable after software became a mass market thing, but it's still rather depressing.
"You're holding it wrong" as official policy
The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have discovered that Grok leaks its prompts when slopping out Grokipedia pages. Examples:
You know how the guardrails in the new anthropic models have been panned as overly sensitive?
Well now malware authors are including biology terms like "saccharide" in their source code to make llm powered scanners refuse to scan the code and let it past anyway
What a time to be alive
Amazing stuff. LLM security is so cooked.
The first I heard of a project doing this was iocaine, an anti-scraper tool (that I think awful.systems uses??) which has module names like "sex_dungeon" and "GargleBargle" intended to make the codebase unmanageable to navigate for llm tooling. It's pretty funny that this has become an established technique.
ig chucking in a segment of merck index (short entries with compound properties, 2000 pages of) to iocaine training corpus would trip it
awful does indeed use iocaine! and yeah the codebase is fun :)
it’s stunningly effective at handling scrapers, and it’s even more fucked how intense a plague the scrapers (combined with running shitty job scheduling with even worse code through resproxies) are
Old: AI Winter
Bold: AI Ragnarok
Botterdamerung
Noice
AI Winter but with the same connotations as a nuclear one
Everybody remember Frontiers, the publisher that brought us the rat dck pck? Well guess what...
https://bsky.app/profile/michael-okun.bsky.social/post/3mnxkxte55s25
A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. They're probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.
I wanted to give you a high five for telling APS where to go. That was rad as hell.
Link for that development, in case anyone missed it:
https://awful.systems/post/8263538/11477939
I did, indeed, turn them down, and I told the journal why.
Sigh.
https://hci.social/@cbecker/116728336094142084
I signed up for ACM last year, just hit my expiry (like, today), and truly don’t know if I want to renew
it’s been an extreme avenue of generative hype, constantly pushing talks, books, etc. I have no idea how they square it with the ethical pledge
By not thinking about it, one presumes.
I was flipping through this month's magazine on the bus, don't worry, they have a solution for reviewers...
https://cacm.acm.org/research/from-volunteerism-to-duty-reforming-peer-review-with-tokens/
:(
They're gonna do it. Peer review is going ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
Anything to avoid paying people for their time.
Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.
All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI "audience immersive presentations" where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.
Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).
The slop startup dubs this "Audience Intelligence" and claims pixar experience. There are two "interactive movies" by them, Pickford AI. No employee there should even consider themselves adjacent to artists.
was there an ownership change or something? this is atrocious
Sold to private equity a few years ago and then purchased by Sony most recently
I have some modest proposals for handling private equity but they would all probably count as fedposting. We still haven't found a decent replacement for the market niche JoAnn fabrics occupied.
New drama just dropped: The US government has forced Anthropic to block access to Fable and Mythic for non-US nationals, so they've blocked it for everyone.
They're claiming they believe it's because someone has managed to find a "minor" vulnerability, but if that were the case, the directive specified non-US restrictions, which makes little sense for an actual security exploit.
My assumption is this is part of the hasty xenophobic and protectionist policy the US is particularly fond of right now, but the government has failed to account for the multinational nature of the companies using them. I anticipate this restriction will be partly amended to accommodate that issue after they try to extract a pound of flesh from Anthropic.
I question how robust Anthropic's geoblocking and data residency infrastructure even is. Their data residency info is littered with caveats that would make an EU market regulator shudder.
The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic's "it's too powerful" narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don't think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.
I think it's more likely Altman is behind this as part of their IPO strategy. There was other murmuring this weekend about OpenAI considering drastic price cuts to compete. It's an IPO race to the bottom.
It looks like AI use is quickly becoming what I assumed it would be, a weapon of the rich. The question for me is whether that weapon is a footgun, or has a much larger blast radius.
It also saves them on the cost of actually serving the model, and stalls the cycle of people gradually realizing the new model isn't much better than the previous one.
Very fair point. I'm still inclined to think this wasn't primarily a marketing decision, because I don't think they would point the finger so directly at the government if that were the case. Perhaps the directive was a blessing in disguise for them though.
Either way, I think this is pretty telling for what we can expect over the next couple of months before we see any public SEC docs from either OpenAI or Anthropic. If it weren't for the immense damage it will cause for innocent people, I might have broken out some popcorn. Popcorn might be my staple food for financial reasons soon anyway.
Yall sneer, but I made a couple of thousand bucks this saturday standing on a dark street corner selling illegal Fable and Mythic linkups. Gave the first question free to any boomers that came asking, to get them hooked.
Now seeing one-shotted Europeans calling for the development of AI/LLMs at home - "Mistral" is not adequate
Literally just started a discussion on European booster fanfic hype a few days ago: https://awful.systems/post/8591627/11736760
I wonder if Europe 2031 will get a boost out of this, it is really perfect timing for them, they can even claim an early prediction success on the US cutting Europe off! (But as with AI 2027, Europe 2031 assumes a much more competent US that can implement strategies like that in a competent fashion instead of some disorganized demands after 5pm on a Friday).
I've already seen "Europe 2031 was right. Shortest time between a work of science fiction and science fact" on LinkedIn.... 🙃🙃🙃
AI Agent Bankrupted Their Operator While Trying to Scan DN42
My favorite part of that whole beautiful affair was towards the end with dgerard's Chinese counterpart saying "no don't ban them yet I need more material for an article I'm halfway through writing."
he should 10x his budget. what kind of startup gets bankrupt after 2k loss? maybe they're just deterred and will try again later (which was implied)
Gotta love it when people who try to cause problems for others run into the consequences of their actions and then try to make these consequences everyone else’s problem.
J-R Conlin has left Mozilla after 15 years, and has some choice words for the company.
Please enjoy this comment saying "Nate Silver is a major proponent of AI assisted writing" like that's a good thing, and the reply that argues against slop from the weird premise that enjoying one's own writing process is bad.
AI slop will absolutely kill any forum in which it proliferates. So I'm totally fine with it proliferating on LW.
Dude look where you’re commenting
I trust Nate Silver's writing advice exactly as much as I trust his recommendations for hair-care products
weird, for people who write so many superfluous words i guessed that they at least like it
Gwern apparently hates slop for text but loves it for pictures.
i mean the process of writing, if they didn't they would perhaps write in more concise way
New booster irl fanfic just dropped: https://europe2031.ai/
It openly admits to being an AI 2027 knockoff, although I will give it credit for having a much more grounded scenario (Europe in economic ruin compared to gloriously transformed China and USA, whereas AI 2027 described the world going full singularity) and having a longer timeline (5 years to economic transformation is relatively sane compared to 3 years for an AI God to be born)
Some highlights in sneering:
One of the character's is basically an idealized SV AI startup founder, complete with all the insane startup tropes like working the 80 work week to grind out success. Also the fact that his name was Christian and the sort of chiding pitying attitude he had towards the other character, Caroline kept making me think of Christian Gray and 50 Shades of Gray.
This is something of a side note to this scenario, but it annoys me ever single time it comes up so I will keep complaining. The boosters have very willfully moved the goalposts. Wikipedia gives the definition as "Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks." Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition to 'most' and not 'all' and swapped 'cognitive tasks' for 'benchmarks and narrowly defined tasks' and then claimed success and accused people insisting on the original definition of moving the goalposts.
This 'scenario' has an ongoing theme of Europe foolishly being cautious around the risk to their data American AI companies present. It is hilarious this scenario mocks this attitude just a few days after Anthropic has made their policies towards users data even more openly contemptuous.
So I couldn't a single convenient quote for it, but an ongoing point of idiocy of this scenario is that it takes the 'planned' American AI data center build-out completely for granted, assuming all the currently released numbers are true, the plans will be met on schedule, and data center build up over the next 5 years will radically surpass them. Ed Zitron has pretty much shown all three of these stages of purported numbers are complete bullshit.
They are even copying AI 2027's stupid shtick of coyly swapping out names instead of referring to real companies!
Pretty much the pitch of this whole thing is "Europe needs to copy America's lack of labor laws or other regulations". I wonder if the authors of this fanfic even believe their own spin of other 'parts of the labor market faces shortage, so firing everyone to put in AI is actually a good thing' or if it is just a shallow attempt to appease people who find mass layoffs heartless and disruptive.
So this scenario correctly acknowledges one of the bottlenecks Europe controls, but then somehow envisions the US being able to strong-arm Europe not to leverage it against them and to cut China out? Have the authors not been paying attention to the US shitting away its soft power (and showing cracks in its hard power with running out of patriot missiles) over the two Trump terms?
By courage and political will they mean slashing apart labor laws, environmental protections, and other regulations and dumping public money into AI to draw capital investment into Europe. The epilogue is some fantasy bullshit with moon domes made possible by all the American AI advances.
I love the deep lack of specificity in "other sectors of the economy facing shortages". Either you have to acknowledge that you're talking about the cafe economy and gig economy and those sectors aren't so much facing labor shortages as much as leveraging the worker's chronic underemployment to keep costs down or you're making shit up wholesale. Also please note that American companies are already finding that as the investor capital subsidies run out it's often cheaper to hire a person than pay the token costs to do the job with AI.
Zefram Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive in 2063, these guys need to be moving their timelines forward, not backward!
We are already a few years behind on the planned AI destroying the world
I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because apparently that's the latest date Kurzweil gives for his Singularity™ (can't be arsed to go reread his book and double-check, my copy was a PDF that came via the high seas 5 computers ago anyway)
We can (and probably will) keep having AI bubbles as long as capitalism exists (and thus rich idiots with too much money are looking for ways to get richer) and there are new AI approaches/paradigms (with flashy demo-able potential) left to discover.
They do this with everything, because the tech doesnt hold up to the dreams, a lot of things get diluted. Esp noticably when they compared llms to humans learning and instead of noting llm advancements they talked down how humans learned.
See also the fields reaction to the chinese room thought experiment.
Anthropic insists that you should use their demon-as-a-service. Hackernews debates the finer points of pentangle construction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48463808
Edit: a hackernews is tired of simonw:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464627
Babe wake up, new model that's too dangerous for public consumption but not really just dropped.
On a related note Mythos has been released and as pointed out, the original “GPT-2 is too dangerous to be released” post was written by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and Jack Clark, who are all Anthropic’s founders. Same ploy, different model
I’ve also seen mention of “Fable” and I’ve been too sick to go check up on whatever the fuck that is
Mythos with extra safety dust sprinkled on top and they listened to The Safety Dance while writing the system prompt. Also a hand painted sign on the front that says "no chinese were serius"
Hope you get to feeling better fast!
after calling the con about a super hacker AI the "mythos", now they're calling the next spiel "fable"? are they like, just taking the piss at this point?
Claude v6.0, "Tall Tale"
Claude v6.1 "Big Fish Story"
They want to invent the AI Named For Untruth from the hit Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Do Not Invent the AI Named for Untruth".
always-have-been.jpg
okay damn you o7 I checked
folks, can I get a "please god pay us for even more tokens" for 500?
not sure they're cool enough even to do that
ty! rest is helping, but why are sinuses
:D
https://cellsatwork.fandom.com/wiki/Episode_5
remarkably educational, nice
It's pretty good! The kids want to be influenza for dragoncon lol
It's on netflix in the states
Let's all just agree that it's a beloved RPG game by Lionhead Studios and we'll leave it at that
lol
Time is a dumb circle
oh fuck off. going full SCP in their press releases now. insufferable.
Edward W. Niedermeyer, who wrote the book on how Tesla is a tax fraud and pump-and-dump disguised as a car company, will livestream the SpaceX IPO Friday https://atmo.rsvp/p/niedermeyer.online/e/3mo23aiagjs3t The real drama will be spread over at least a month.
Remember, investing is about decades and national economies not days and individual companies. If you think the US stock market is going to become more like Russia's than France's, you can make a policy and act on it to reduce your stocks' exposure to the Mega-IPOs.
So very excited for the biggest pump and dump in the history of consumer investing, brought to us by a man actively inciting race riots in northern ireland. Can't wait for this afternoon 🙏
Hardly anyone who matters is on twitter any more so I think many policymakers (and most retail investors) don't understand what Musk is tweeting every few minutes
Gary Marcus has been spamming out sneers at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic over the last 24h. He's right but he's such a knob about it. The first of his posts was a whopper where he just quoted himself predicting things correctly from like a year ago. It is nice to feel vindicated and say "I told you so" but it's way too much. It reminds me of Juergen Schmidhuber who was famous on x-twitter for shouting "I ALREADY INVENTED THIS 30 YEARS AGO" every time a new notable paper came out of an AI Lab and whose name became a verb for "claiming credit for something"
He keeps going on about how we will have AGI but it won't be via transformers. Dude why do we even need or want AGI? He comes so close to being "one of the good guys" and then shows his true colours every single time.
To solve biology and physics and live forever amongst the stars, obvs.
Or to allow a tiny elite to treat the rest of humanity like cattle since they no longer depend on them for physical and mental labour.
It's striking how inimical to life itself the first statement is on its own. The people most obsessed with living for an eternity seem to be having the worst time of it. Yes, the Musks & Thiels are ungodly rich, but do they ever seem even basically well-adjusted? Inordinate wealth seems to come with commensurate insecurity.
We need salvation but it won't come via rapture this decade
It might have come this decade, had they faithfully funded the path of symbolic AI, but instead they wandered around in the desert chasing the false idols of connectionism and deep learning.
MONAAYYY
Gary’s been on a sneering spree this whole week. While good for him and everything, I truly could not care less for his neurosymbolic AI rambles and mostly read the stuff where he dunks on the current state of AI
I'd been betting on one of the promptfarmer companies being the ones to set off the bubble-popping chain reaction, but looks like musk is so desperate for cash that his coterie of grifts are speedrunning for the underdog position
"Endless Shrimp Jesus": Red Lobster (a) still exists and (b) is going all-in on AI
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/red-lobsters-ceo-says-hes-153500558.html
Oh, OK, cool. Let me know how the chatbot handles temperature management, stock rotation, allergen cross-contamination for seafood, all that good stuff.
They've gone bankrupt once in '24 , I'd bet good money they're gonna go bankrupt again.
Someone saw the infinite orgasming shrimp idea and decided to pivot.
Wake up babe new genre definition just dropped
https://stoates.substack.com/p/programmer-science-fiction
Includes all the usual suspects, but notably doesn't mention Ken MacLeod whose Fall Revolution series is probably too socialist[1]. Also avoids discussing Stross post-Singularity Sky.
[1] MacLeod's Corporation Wars trilogy has immersive VR, artificial conciousness rebelling against authority, and literal p-zombies but is also very anti-fascist, so no wonder it's not mentioned (also, it's unfortunately not very good)
Viral: "read a second book"
Spiral: "read a second Borges story"
The author of "Death and the Compass" and "Emma Zunz" is unrecognizable from the description there.
@gerikson @techtakes Technical nit-pick: "American hard science fiction space opera like Timelike Infinity is also influential"— Timelike Infinity was written by Steven Baxter who is *very* English indeed. Best contextualized as mid-period Interzone generation hitting its imperial phase.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
I was surprised not to see emeritus CS prof Rudy Rucker (from my alma mater SJSU).
So there are a bunch of people on this forum more literary and authorial than I and I welcome any of them to correct me on this, but I'm skeptical of the whole project here of seeking to identify or define a new subgenre that is pushing speculative fiction as a whole forward. It's always seemed to me like the real creative energy behind this kind of movement doesn't originate from a defined subgenre as much as from a community of authors in conversation with each other. The identification and labeling comes afterwards as outsiders try to talk about it. In that sense, I don't think he's actually identifying that kind of community. Just naming a bunch of writers he likes, to the point of excluding several who he admits would be in this kind of community as defined but he just doesn't like as much.
It's been a while since I immersed myself in SF publishing but I think that older terms like "New Wave" and "cyberpunk" were basically marketing terms riding off the hits that spawned them. I believe they were a collaboration between the fandom, magazines and publishers - not in any structured way, but like in music, a term is used to encompass many different acts.
One slubstack does not a genre name, tho. And it's broad enough to be meaningless. For example one of the first authors is Scott Alexander, who is not formally a programmer, just someone who hangs out online terminally. Vinge was a CS prof, but Banks afaik didn't have any formal CS training. Ken McLeod worked as a programmer, as did Charles Stross.
SF is a nerd author paradise and nowadays nerds program, so ... chicken and egg?
I've been programming computers since I was 10, and being a physicist even involved doing that professionally, so I hereby nominate my Daria--Hannibal crossover fic as programmer SF. It's full of science fiction, both real and fictional.
I don't know if I'm more impressed by how many occasions you find to link that or by how often it's relevant. Either way, you're doing the Lord's work and congratulations on the 1/10000 of a Hugo.
This one is actually new. It goes on the top of my pile of absurd Daria crossovers, joining those with Hellraiser, the Amelia Peabody mysteries, They Live and Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land.
So far, no cult followers.
This is a new method of bootlicking: if you as a FLOSS developer don't use LLMs to fix vulnerabilites identified by LLMs, you're being unethical
https://lobste.rs/c/5toqqs
Lol what a weak argument. Not only does this limit your llm use to only bugfixing (which is what the op is limiting their use to right?), it also ignores how a few big recent outages were prob caused by llms. And it treats ethical concerns like some sort of numbers game. We have one ethical concern for and one against so it cancels out.
And it leads to 'Mengeles experiments were not unethical because some of the torture he did actually provided valuable insights on the extremes a human body can go through'
"It is your moral duty to send as much money as you can to Sam Altman"
The counterargument is basically rule utilitarianism, right? That not only the direct outputs of your actions matter, but also the processes and social norms that you reinforce, and the total side effects of those.
(At least I think that's what rule utilitarianism is.)
I don't think op has thought that well about it, this felt more like a gotcha argument. 'you say it is all unethical but I found a small (for me) exception so all your arguments are invalid.
Saw much of people do a similar thing on bsky last weekend. A sort of thing going (from a different era) 'ha you say you are totally against blockchains/nfts? Well you still use github and that is a blockchain, sl better stop using all software'.
Are you worried about AI taking over the world and killing everyone? Fear not, the people who can stop it are collecting hats. Surely everything is under control.
Olay but this is good though. This is the kind of autism Lesswrong should focus more on. No bullshit, just the facts.
owning us with hats and logic
Oddly this reminds me of a weird thing. (Not trying to attack you or others here btw, for reasons that I will make clear in the end). When I was active in student activism, I recalled how annoyed our leaders of the group were that a small but vocal (and inactive) part of the organisations membership didnt allow the leaders to be people.
When they (after already working crazy hours btw, these people were committed), spend some time in the evening to wind down and make some sort of joke(*), the inactive members alway would start to send angry emails. 'how dare you make an internal joke while students have less rights/the uni isnt eco friendly/etc". I though back on how that impulse from inside to org was indeed quite weird. Esp as the people complaining didnt seem to be that active members. (If they were they would know how much work was being done and the strain people were under and how the jokes were good for morale).
Something to take into account if you see lesswrong people react negatively to the hat post.
Of course none of this applies tonus as outsiders who do not take them that seriously at all. It is a weird thing to make a long post about indeed, esp with one of the hats being one of yuds it seems? Im wondering if this lesswrong thing is perhaps more of a personality cult that anything serious. A well at least nobody is using the org as a dating hunting ground, that would be bad.
*: basically they would spend their whole day prepping for meetings with the uni/other orgs, sending out emails trying to get the members to help out, doing research and summarizing that for the members etc etc, and at the end of the day they send one internal email about talk like a pirate day, and the next morning they get 21 replies to their work, 20 of those people being mad about the talk like a pirate email.
I haven't experienced the situation you're describing myself, but it feels very plausible.
Similarly, all developed societies depend on a number of people selflessly working in positions of elected or non-elected authority (local councils, HOAs, school boards) and treating them like people who cannot afford to make any mistakes is not a recipe for increased democratic engagement.
Anyway, so far no-one has commented, negatively or otherwise, and I think most LWers are treating it as harmless fun.
It's not making me any more interested in coming more than 200 feet from any of these people, and neither is this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GtZKzWgAqWrE2tXrQ/contra-dance-at-lessonline, but maybe that's just me being mean.
Isn't that the hat from the picture that Yudkowsky showed off to prove he wasn't a cult leader? Are they trying to beat the cult allegations by ha ha jokingly wearing the same silly clothes as their founder?
You would expect the leader of the 'make sure the prompt doesnt turn us into paperclips' movement to better right.
It prob is, stuff like this seems to be quite common at various nerdy events. Just harmless fun(*). So a bitch eating crackers moment perhaps. I know I have those myself.
*: initially made a typo there and wrote 'hatless fun'.
New pride month Odium Symposium episode. We go through the life and activism of notorious homophobe and orange juice queen, Anita Bryant
https://www.patreon.com/posts/18-swallowing-of-160587597
This is by an llm-boosting firm, so be aware that it’ll have a lot of marketing in it. It doesn’t say nice things about vibe code (presumably because the authors want to sell you a solution) but the numbers are interesting even so.
https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways
A few choice snippets, none of which will surprise anyone here:
This is fascinating to me and has shades of Iris Merideth's The Problem is Culture. In other engineering fields, if you had a tool that cut costs but caused a threefold increase in failures you would be looking at a massive scandal, probably because if this was structural engineering rather than software engineering you'd be looking at a new Grenfell Tower or Hyatt Regency Walkway from every other project that used this shit. From what I've been following I don't know that vibe coding has directly racked up quite so literal a body count yet, but if this pattern holds (and I see no reason to expect otherwise) then it's only a matter of time before someone fucks up something important.
Also the fact that the framing here doesn't seem to treat this as an existential risk to the project of AI coding is fascinating. If you're not producing stable and secure applications in prod then what in the actual fuck are you writing all that code for?
I think part of the issue is that historical software quality was an artefact of its time… if you can’t easily patch your released products, you need to work harder to ensure they’re functional. If the only way for people to learn about how your product works in the documentation you ship with it, the docs need to be useful and comprehensive.
The combination of software needing no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose and the internet rendered those pressures obsolete. Ship shit, fix later. Mass-scale a/b testing over past decade or two shows that most people seemingly don’t care if their software runs like absolute garbage, and is covered in adverts, and harvests all their personal data and the leaks all of it that wasn’t sold.
An incident-to-pr ratio that’s up by 250% is unfortunate, but it is not yet so bad that the end-users actually care enough to do anything about it, even assuming they can do anything.
AP: Appeals court upholds FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud conviction
I guess a certain country is using LLMs to try to engage people 1:1 to change their opinions of said country.
Could be a LLM, could be a call-center worker in Kenya or Mumbai or Manilla. Its an old move.
Good point. Now I imagine someone trying to pass the turing test by having their bot pretend to be a sales person.
The "Behind the Bastards" on Nicole Daedone's California sex cult does have a lot of similarities to Ziz's stories of CFAR events, and the CFAR founders' hints at what went wrong. They mention cuddle puddles and a series of early figures who dropped out or were pushed out. Its not at all the vision I got ten years ago from the blogs and podcasts.
Is AI profitable yet? a website that tracks the spending and revenue of leading AI companies. The answer is so helpfully provided at the top of the page
It’s also fun to sort by pnl and see just how far the gap is for others that aren’t nvidia
Happy three months to this bad boy
We have already all died and been uploaded, but it happend so seamlessly nobody noticed.
Of course! That “AI Black Death in 2 years” this channel also predicted must’ve happened while we all slept and the AI uploaded us all so it could torture everyone who didn’t contribute to its development!
Anthropic's fear mongering has finally backfired! The US government ordered them to suspend all foreign access to Fable and Mythos: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
Well, I'm not sure this has properly backfired. They were probably struggling to serve the models to everyone, and they were probably losing a lot of money on everyone with subscription access using Fable for the free trial period. And there was a lot of complaints about how insanely oversensitive Fable's censors and guardrails were. Now they get all the benefits and hype of having released the model, without having to pay the insane costs (or the letdown of people releasing it is just another incremental step)! (Well, depending on how much flexibility they have in their GPU cloud access). If this blows over in a few weeks it will probably be worthwhile for the hype "Our models are so dangerous the government had to ban foreign access".
Also, funnily enough the US banning foreign access to their models was a major plot point in the Europe 2031 booster fanfic I recently boosted. Of course there, it was a massive point of leverage against Europe and led to immense value loss to the Europeans, where irl Fable/Mythos are just another incremental step (if even that much) being marketed very well.
Aren’t they still labeled a supply chain risk to the US? Feels like the US having their cake and eating it too
Although it is satisfying to see Anthropic’s methods come to bite them.
That got blocked in court... or one of the two legal mechanisms by which the SCR could work got blocked, the other didn't? Something messy and stupid and complicated like that.
And of course, that all got ignored with US government participation in Glasswing. So idk... it's all so chaotic and stupid.
Remember Crazy Taxi? Its back, infected with AI slop!
(I saw the massive wave of hype that game's announcement unleashed, and its almost impressive how Sega wiped out every last bit of it with AI.)
Crazy taxi? In this house we remember Quarantine
a truly magnificent feat of prompt engineering, coalesced into a single repository
https://github.com/thesysdev/make-no-mistakes
(do we accept snark from boosters? repo appears to function as a soft ad for a bespoke DSL and its surrounding tooling for LLMs to autoextrude.)