Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.
I rewrote the ad so they can lean into their marketing strategy.
Hard book have hard word and make head hurt, AI make book easy! More book read for you. No hard word. This good idea!
I want to make a zoolander riff but my brain just isn’t cooperating, so instead pretend I did (just like these people pretend their product is worth something)
Hahah lol, that was pretty good.
ah yes, the Simple English wiki filter but wrong
the part of me that sometimes spends an hour just choosing the right words for the couple of paragraphs I’m writing is fucking screaming
…
there is a screaming noise that comes from me while I write
thanks magibook!
can’t wait for this shit to show up in usage among people who have english as an additional language at different level of fluency to their primaries. totally don’t see it causing a cascade clusterfuck in communication and comprehension.
there’s already a strain of this out there, with a lot of english-non-first students using LLMs to “make their work sound more polished”. similar as the strain using it for CVs etc
ran across a great thread on fedi a while back, will see if I can find it
I can’t even
It’s good that they’re offsetting their advantages in the marketplace of money by actively crippling themselves in the marketplace of ideas.
Two tweets and I can tell you at least 5 substacks he subscribes to
PrimalPoly was a sort of semi regular of the old sneerclub, so I can tell you a lot more than that.
Fr? What’s his deal?
I have such sights to show you And more
About half of evopsychgoogle’s tweets are also about him and his wife.
He and his wife (also a piece of work) have a very strange poly relationship btw, it seems to be more a constant dominance struggle than a loving poly relationship.
And you know how a lot of these people when faced with the slightest pushback turn further and further right. 2013
90% of the weird evo psych women on their period things you ever heard about, also him. (And while I don’t get the American fascination with strippers/strip clubs, I do get it is an important macho man culture thing for American men to do things with/around strip clubs so cudos for him that he managed to trick the university into sponsoring his visits).
long term Evolutionary Psychology race scientists
also hang out in Effective Altruism, of course
I think there’s a bug with your post button, it sent the same message twice
both him and his wife are quite the pieces of work
he’s also figured here a couple of times too
Couldn’t find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:
does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?
it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says “okay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasn’t a guy or a girl”
Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture? And didn’t The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?
(It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)
Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture?
I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We don’t even blog!)). So I doubt it.
Hey! I blog!
Seldom more than a couple paras tho.
Sorry, if you can read a blog post in less than 30 minutes it is a Rationalist footnote. ;)
the Culture humans accepted being subsumed into a Mind after 400 years, so Yudkowsky disapproves. He also dislikes The Minds.
holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesn’t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because they’re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yud’s nonsense ever will be
so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:
They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I don’t quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism we’re talking about).
yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. it’s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yud’s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.
there’s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always don’t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just aren’t bored enough yet.
yud omits this (probably, I’m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isn’t gonna end your existence (they don’t do murder, and there’s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient being’s mind) but they’re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.
Subliming
Somebody in the comments points this out and he gets annoyed with this as some sort of literary device to not do the hard transhumanist work or something.
Which is odd, as subliming is fine as if this wasn’t there humans minds and mind minds could do a singularity style intelligence explosion afterwards you couldn’t describe things because of the singularity style event. And Banks wrote science fiction which is always about humans, and not ‘the period after beings become so powerful we cannot really tell what is going on anymore as the increase of intelligence has reached infinity’
Subliming sidesteps this problem because it wants to be interesting fiction, and not weird gobbledygook of incomprehensible alien minds. Yud basically forgets that The Culture is science fiction written for real human beings who live now.
But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.
It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldn’t really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).
(I’m also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you don’t die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).
Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.
What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? It’s the one HN likes best too. It’s probably the only one I’ve not re-read. Maybe it’s how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture he’s coerced to infiltrate.
Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.
i would think they didn’t read it carefully, and/or until the end, and don’t realise that ultimately it’s gurgeh’s revulsion at azad’s societal rules, and him fully embracing the culture’s values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.
Obvsly you’ve read the novel more than I have considering your nick… I might have to give it another go.
OTOH I’d rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.
tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona – i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)
@gerikson I second Use of Weapons, but I also like Excession and the Hydrogen Sonata, where the Culture has to do some self-reflection.
I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he can’t rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)
edit it’s been ages since I’ve read this books so I’ve been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get
On an episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast released on April 29, 2022, the artist Grimes said that Surface Detail of the Culture series is the greatest science fiction book ever written.
🤮
@gerikson Veppers was *totally* a vicious parody of Elon Musk. (Iain despised billionaires—in American political terms he was an unabashed communist.)
select the Banks extract, pass through wc:
1677select the yud…emanation, do same:
13442at this stage it’s likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.
entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.
There’s a metal ballad in there, I swear.
other album track titles:
- cascading infinity
- which mirror is me? [am I? - interlude]
- the quintillionth heartbreak
- lies of being
Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?
Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.
Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.
don’t mention skull sizes for 5 minutes challenge
It’s so cute (euphemism for concerning) how their image of the average trans woman is a white computer science rationalist poster and not, like, a South American sex worker or something.
Why didn’t evolution give females big heads if it would make them all geniuses? Another anecdote. My sister has a big head. She was valedictorian in high school I think. She hit her head one day in middle school during gym class by running into a wall. She also fell off a bike and hit her head in high school. I have never hit my head and I think the main reason is that my arms are strong enough to catch myself. So maybe the big headed women would-be-ancestors fell and hit their heads.[1]
Classics of Reason
Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).
Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.
the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: “communities” managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data
We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.
if this were running you would be unlikely to know about it. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it’s trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result
Off Topic: Politcs
spoiler
Best of luck to our folks in the UK, enjoy the Tory tears!
I doubt any of you are following Dutch politics. But it is day 3 of the new (far right) cabinet, and day 1 and 2 were already a clown show. I think today they are going on ‘vacation’ (summer recess), so nothing will be done. “Lekker gewerkt jongens”
Sounds like a real “Dog caught the car” situation. Do you think they’ll be able to cause much permanent damage to the institutions before they get turfed out?
Sadly I think they will do quite a lot of damage, but most of it is by just not solving any issues which are issues currently (and pretending non-issues, like immigration, are huge problems). They don’t really seem competent enough yet to do real damage. (yeah, I’m including Wilders, who has been a politician all his life in this list). But a lot of damage has already been done. A lot of racists feel like they are allowed to be racist again for example. (a similar thing you heard coming from France, with the current rise of Le P, people going ‘ah soon we are going to bash the gays again’).
Oddly our cabinet has always been mostly rightwing basically (at least the past 14 years), so it is really weird to see the far right pretend like the left has had any power.
A lot of the dumb plans also cannot be done because of the EU. So a lot of people who voted for the current parties (like the radicalized bougie farmers) will be hurt a lot, so it will get worse later after they can’t get jack shit done. (Which, as always with protofascists, will be purely blamed on others).
‘ah soon we are going to bash the gays again’
I hate how so many people are genuine assholes at heart.
It goes to show how important it is to put fascists in lockers.
https://matduggan.com/a-eulogy-for-devops/
Possibly interesting blog post about what the idea of “devops” promised, and how it failed to deliver. With any luck, the “getting back to basics” thing will actually happen, instead of people imagining they are google and building nightmares out of kubernetes.
When my local civilians get drawn into the conflict
via Little Bubby Child
I could hear this while reading it ahaha
Right?!
Being far from home at the moment, I really appreciate Bubby’s mountain vibes. Feels like a trip to Granny’s house.
I remember I used to watch this guy’s videos, and the icon for the image viewer in serenity was pepe the frog. And he also admitted to browsing 4chan. And he changed his twitter link to x.com before even twitter changed it. Also it was kinda weird that he had some private discord channels whose contents he was very secretive of. Now that he’s making a nonprofit with github’s former CEO, there is absolutely zero barriers to the exact same bullshit from all the companies he complains about.
Ehhhh. This is the identical PR they ended up accepting: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648
I have feels about the implied “the author behaves like a shithead because he’s ESL” but eh. If it works.
yeah, pretending that this is just a misunderstanding of the language is a bit disingenuous, but i’m not going to argue with the results.
this:
well this fucken sucks. I was rooting for the dude and his projects.
ah fuck I didn’t know Ladybird had those people involved (was only aware of project existence and reasons), fuck :<
Every day I become more convinced that this acct is an elaborate psyop being run by Yann LeCun to discredit doomers. Nobody could be this gullible IRL, right?
Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.
im doing my part
I went to the study, and that’s the global market size for all sex toys annually, and just eyeballing another chart, butt plugs might be 10% of that. So butt plugs are around $3 or $4 Billion. On the bright side, unlike AI safety, butt plugs actually serve a function.
Meatloaf didn’t anticipate the budgetary implications of enlisting us all in the Armies of the Night. Thus, humanity was ill-prepared when Skynet attacked…
I’ve sat and had beer with someone (who’s worked in the space but not LLMs) who read the Bitter Lesson and got real into the idea of humans “just being universal function approximators” and had wholesale bought into the idea that we should throw everything we possibly can into this shit, no resource cost or requirement is too high or too uncertain, that it would definitely be the right thing to so
so I can tell you without no uncertainty that there are definitely people who buy into it
I poked the conversation gently, to see how far the conviction went. it was pretty comprehensively bought-in. was a somewhat surprising experience tbh
How did they respond to the counterargument that humans are simply… built different?
that was the response. and this is a person with exposure to (and their own undertakings in) creative works
it was a pretty wild conversation tbh
Amazing.
I also remember another time people did the 'let two AI’s (no idea what time it was at the time, certainly not an LLM, some other ML technique) talk to each other, but in a actual production setting (E:I was wrong on the setting, see the article for better info->), the Facebook/Meta one (First link I could find on google, didn’t read it, just a way to find out more for people who never heard about it). But then it started to produce gibberish/‘their own language’. Of course this was also a sign of it ‘waking up’.
And I note again that in the LLM experiment, the ‘AGI’s’ are still keeping perfectly fine to the bounds of the experiment, even if they do or do not directly reference the researcher. They still play into the fiction, as talking to the researcher about the other AI is part of the fiction. It would be more interesting if they did something unexpected than regurgitate video game ingame notes.
static dot dot dot emergency dot dot dot shutdown
lol
‘multiple realities’
Come on, I have written similar things while roleplaying as an AI. The first is useful when you need a quick break to go to the toilet, and the second is a good excuse because you made a mistake a real fictional AI couldn’t make.
E: also funny that they worry about the shoggoth behind the friendly face and then get freaked out when the AI’s talk in normal science fiction fluff to each other, and it doesn’t become incoherently weird. (like the example above).
deleted by creator
Dan Luu’s “A discussion of discussions on AI bias”, about techbros trying to gaslight the rest of the world into thinking ML models don’t have problems
Another example which doesn’t make a good viral news story is my not being able to put my Vietnamese name in the title of my blog and have my blog indexed by Google outside of Vietnamese-language Google — I tried that when I started my blog and it caused my blog to immediately stop showing up in Google searches unless you were in Vietnam. It’s just assumed that the default is that people want English language search results and, presumably, someone created a heuristic that would trigger if you have two characters with Vietnamese diacritics on a page that would effectively mark the page as too Asian and therefore not of interest to anyone in the world except in one country.
the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real
I run into this exact problem so often with music: it’s extremely fucking annoying to convince search engines or other kinds of things that, yes, I do in fact want that turkish/finnish/russian/brazilian/thai/irish/…… result set from this english query, and there’s just almost zero affordance for it
they segment things into de facto silos and if you don’t already happen to have some way in which to pull on a string to lead the way there (or can input the desired query in the applicable language and spelling) you’ll have a bitch of a time. check a couple of those items from my entries on the music thread a while back for references to test with
god damn those recasting images
it will never not be hilarious how pathetic this technology/approach is
me talking to someone after describing a dumb and horrible LW thing:
i feel like i’m describing a livejournal fanfic cult, which i guess i am
one of the worse things about LW is that even just explaining their beliefs to uninvolved people makes you look like a complete weirdo
I’ve (irl) met a “part-time” LW reader and tried to have a conversation about some of the shit, and … same experience
just utterly had no ability to even receive the information about the longstanding sexual abuse or statements of yud being a charisma-for-nerds grifter
(had an earlier conversation with ‘em some many months prior calling out many of issues in coiner world after they’d gone laser-eyes having read the bitcoin paper, and they eventually got their head out of their ass, so…. I’m hopeful it’s not all lost yet)
as a former member of multiple livejournal fanfic circlejerks, I am so sad that LW didn’t join the rest of LJ in (1) getting off or (2) being mean on fandom_wank, and instead decided to create the torment nexus.
i expect dreamwidth took one look and Denise got out the flamethrower
hahaha no failfandomanon is extremely at Dreamwidth, but I think the wankiest people mostly moved to other places in recent years.
Well the FFVII house was kinda like a rationalist grouphouse…
wait. You’re telling me a poly nest based on FF7 fandom exist(s/ed)? And I wasn’t part of it?!?!?!
that’s a big oof for me dawg
Cloudflare making the bet there’s money in offering AI-scraping protection:
we finally posted Diz’s LLM logic puzzle post to Pivot to AI! Let’s see if this draws flocks of excited new users to awful.systems … we’re doing Ray Kurzweil tomorrow, lol.
There was a warcraft 3 pro who played build orders created by Chat-GPT and it was fascinating the degree to which it was able to perfectly imitate the form of the kind of thing you’d find on liquidpedia or some other guide but simultaneously make nonsensical errors that betrayed that it had no awareness. Like, telling you to build a unit of a different race or build without meeting prerequisites.
lol, amazing. and I recall this was one of the areas where people fairly successfully (iirc?) applied GAs to synthesising strategy and build order
(think it was for Starcraft 2 not WC3, but domains very similar)
I’ve definitely seen some impressive machine learning-based outcomes (definitely fucking up the technical details here) but there’s a world of difference between a system trained to play StarCraft and a system trained to predict the next bit of text.
oh absolutely - part of what’s entertaining is that the dipshits don’t even seem to realize that (or don’t admit it?)
Personally haven’t seen a headline about Ol’ Billy Boy ever since word got around that he was a diamond medallion member of the lolita express airlines. William Gatorade thinks AI’s got what climate craves, i.e. waste heat.
Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.
Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
i think that openai also wanted to solve their problems with fusion, but they got a step further, they made a startup for this. not normal nuclear power plant hot rock machine, no, they want tech that is perpetually Just A Decade Away. it makes some perverse sense if your funding is dependent on misguided hype only
fusion research is just thinnest disguise for thermonuclear weapons research, especially the inertial confinement fusion variety
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
Ugh, so many people are working the “AI will solve X problem” mill. I don’t need nor want AI to be there increasing output.
Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.
dunno about rockets, but antenna thingy works only because you can simulate performance of antenna very reliably, precisely and quickly. This data was fed back, random small changes were made, things that were an improvement passed to the next iteration. Not sure how this approach is called but none of it is LLM
“genetic algorithm” - something I hadn’t previously seen branded as “AI”, but I guess I’m not surprised
GAs went out of the limelight before the rest of the beaus of current “AI” branding came to be, suspect that might be part of it
(Another suspicion is that it’s because they’re…fairly observable, ito operation? So it’s far less easily claimable that one of these has gained sentience, or all the other dumb bullshit that the cluster has spun in recent years)
yeah that’s it, forgot a word for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
that ST5 antenna looks like a low-poly two turn helical antenna, but how it looks like will be a function of design requirements
Why is he carrying books and DVDs on a baking sheet?
He has a smart oven with AI and wants to feed it data?
FEED ME,
SEYMOURBILLY!
One is by David Brooks, so it’s guaranteed to be half baked?
never really seen ludicity blog before, now that i read up ten posts on so in a single sitting i lowkey want to fuck off to live in a cabin in the woods
the sheer wastefulness of it all, bubbleness of its economics, piling technical debt, institutional stupidity, and the man also feels off in a way that i can’t put my finger on (maybe just by association)
ludic be like: this industry makes no sense and causes untold suffering, but if you emit right vibes you can get by and make a pile of cash. Let me help you make a bank off those rubes
Well, there is no ethical work under capitalism.
Also he clearly has good intentions when it comes to what jobs he seeks.
what i mean, he comes off as a benevolent grifter and i think it’s sleazy
I’ve noticed something similar with a lot of folks on the younger side in tech, although I haven’t had the headspace to dig into it. the thing I noticed is a lot of folks still willing to go into this dysfunctional shit getting highly paid because of knowing how bad things are elsewhere. afaict it’s not quite so much fygm as “just” trying to hoarde in the wake of 2+ decades of multiple world once-in-a-lifetime economic clusterfuck, as well as in the face of the total existential disaster that exists otherwise
(this is the impression I get in a wider sense. I’m not sure if it’s right, or applicable particularly here)
(there’s also a form of that which is quite strong in USA-based folks, but I don’t think ludic hails from the states)
