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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. What a year, huh?)
Is Pee Stored in the Balls? Vibe Coding Science with OpenAIās Prism
https://bsky.app/profile/carlbergstrom.com/post/3mdgtf2e6vc2c
Chris Lintott (@chrislintott.bsky.socialā¬):
Weāre getting so many journal submissions from people who think āit kinda worksā is the standard to aim for.
Research Notes of the AAS in particular, which was set up to handle short, moderated contributions especially from students, is getting swamped. Often the authors clearly havenāt read what theyāve submitting, (Descriptions of figures that donāt exist or donāt show what they purport to)
Iām also getting wild swings in topic. A rejection of one paper will instantly generate a submission of another, usually on something quite different.
Many of these submissions are dense with equations and pseudo-technological language which makes it hard to give rapid, useful feedback. And when I do give feedback, often I get back whatever their LLM says.
Including the very LLM responses like āOh yes, I see that <thing that was fundamental to the argument> is wrong, Iāve removed it. Hereās something elseā
Research Notes is free to publish in and I think provides a very valuable service to the community. But I think weāre a month or two from being completely swamped.
Ow! My Balls
enjoy this glorious piece of LW lingo
Aumannās agreement is pragmatically wrong. For bounded levels of compute you canāt necessarily converge on the meta level of evidence convergence procedures.
no I donāt know what it means, and I donāt want it to be explained to me. Just let me bask in its inscrutibility.
The sad thing is I have some idea of what itās trying to say. One of the many weird habits of the Rationalists is that they fixate on a few obscure mathematical theorems and then come up with their own ideas of what these theorems really mean. Their interpretations may be only loosely inspired by the actual statements of the theorems, but it does feel real good when your ideas feel as solid as math.
One of these theorems is Aumannās agreement theorem. I donāt know what the actual theorem says, but the LW interpretation is that any two ārationalā people must eventually agree on every issue after enough discussion, whatever rational means. So if you disagree with any LW principles, you just havenāt read enough 20k word blog posts. Unfortunately, most people with ābounded levels of computeā aināt got the time, so they canāt necessarily converge on the meta level of, never mind, screw this, Iām not explaining this shit. I donāt want to figure this out anymore.
The Wikipedia article is cursed
@gerikson @lagrangeinterpolator
> but it does feel real good when your ideas feel as solid as math
Misread this as āmethā, perfect, no further questions
this sounds exactly like the sentence right before āthey have played us for absolute fools!ā in that meme.
oh man, itās Aumannās
Are you trying to say that you are not regularly thinking about the meta level of evidence convergence procedures?
Tbh, this is pretty convincing, I agree a lot more with parts of the LW space now. (Just look at the title, the content isnāt that interesting).
retains the same informational content after running through rot13
I gave the new ChatGPT Health access to 29 million steps and 6 million heartbeat measurements [āa decade of my Apple Watch dataā]. It drew questionable conclusions that changed each time I asked.
WaPo. Paywalled but I like how everything I need to know is already in the blurb above.
Archive link, but you can extrapolate the whole article from the blurb. Mostly. Itās actually slightly worse than the blurb suggests.
I think I installed the cursed Windows 11 update on my work machine, because after taking several tries to boot, my second monitor stopped working (detected, but showing a black screen).
Tried some different configurations, and could make only 0-1 screens work.
Uninstalled the update and everything worked correctly again.
Thanks for nothing Microslop.
I also had a computer not boot. Tried installing windows 11 but the iso does not include network card drivers and requires a second drive that has them. I just happened to have another but it malfunctioned. Was assured IT would fix it but it still doesnāt boot. :(
A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowskyās AI Risk Estimates (ie. āYud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions todayā)
that post got way funnier with Eliezerās recent twitter post about āEAs developing more complex opinions on AI other than itll kill everyone is a net negative and cancelled out all the good they ever didā
A religion is just a cult that survived its founder ā someone, at some point.
The AI craze might end up killing graphics card makers:
Zotac SKās message: ā(this) current situation threatens the very existence of (add-in-board partners) AIBs and distributors.ā
The current situation is so serious that it is worrisome for the future existence of graphics card manufacturers and distributors. They announced that memory supply will not be sufficient and that GPU supply will also be reduced.
Curiously, Zotac Korea has included lowly GeForce RTX 5060 SKUs in its short list of upcoming āstaggeringā price increases.
I wonder if the AI companies realize how many people will be really pissed off at them when so many tech-related things become expensive or even unavailable, and everyone will know that itās only because of useless AI data centers?
I am confident that Altman in particular has a poor-to-nonexistent grasp of second-order effects.
I mean you donāt have to grasp, know of, or care about the consequences when none of the consequences will touch you, and after the bubble pops and the company bankrupts catastrophically, you will remain comfortably a billionaire with several more billions in your aire than the ones you had when you started the bubble in the first place. Consequences are for the working class, capitalists fall upwards.
Cloudflare just announced in a blog post that they built:
a serverless, post-quantum Matrix homeserver.
itās a vibe-coded pile of slop where most of the functions are placeholders like
// TODO: check authorization.Full thread: https://tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761
And of all possible things to implement, they chose Matrix. lol and lmao.
The interesting thing in this case for me is how did anyone think it was a good idea to draw attention to their placeholder code with a blog post. Like how did they went all the way to vibe a full post without even cursorily glancing at the slop commits.
Iām convinced by now that at least mild forms of āAI psychosisā affect all chatbots users; after a period of time interacting with what Agenla Collier called āDr. Flattery the Always Wrong Robotā, people will hallucinate fully working projects without even trying to test whether it compiles.
just to note that reportedly the palantir employees are for whatever reason going through a massive āhans, are we the baddiesā moment, almost a whole year into the second trump administration.
as i wrote elsewhere, those people need to be subjected to actual social consequences of choosing to work with and for the u.s. concentration camp administration office.
this happens like clockwork
Itās so blindingly obvious that itās become obscure again so it bears pointing out, someone really went ahead and named a tech company after a fantasy torment nexus.
On a semi-adjacent note I came across an attorney who helped to establish and run the Department of Homeland Security (under Bush AND Trump 1)
He also wants you to know heās Jewish (so am I, and I know our history enough that Homeland Security always had āBlood and Soilā connotations you fucking shande)
I have family working there, who told me during the holidays, āCurrent leadership makes me uncomfortable, but money is goodā
Every impression I had of them completely shattered, cannot fathom that level out sell out exists in people I thought I knew.
As a bonus, their former partner was a former employee who became a whistleblower and has now gone full howard hughes
anyone who can get a job at palantir can get an equivalent paying job at a company thatās at least measurably less evil. what a lazy copout
On one hand as a poor grad student in the past, I could imagine working for a truly repugnant corp. but like if youāve already made millions from your stock options, wtf are you doing. Idk, i really thought theyād have some shame over it, but they said shit like āour customers really like our deliverablesā and i just fucking left with my wife
I have mixed feelings about this one: The Enclosure feedback loop (or how LLMs sabotage existing programming practices by privatizing a public good).
The author is right that stack overflow has basically shrivelled up and died, and that llm vendors are trying to replace it with private sources of data theyāll never freely share with the rest of us, but I donāt think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way āhigh quality dataā. The number of occasions when a chatbot-user actually introduces genuinely useful and novel information will be low, and the ability of chatbot companies to even detect that circumstance will be lower still. It isnāt enclosing valuable commons, it is squirting sealant around all the doors so the automated fart-huffing system and its audience canāt get any fresh air.
I donāt think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way āhigh quality dataā.
Yeah, Gas Town is being belabored to death, but it must be reiterated that I doubt the long-term value proposition of āKubernetes fan fictionā
I also didnāt find the argument very persuasive.
The LLM companies arenāt paying anythnig for content. Why should they stop scraping now?
Oh, they wonāt. Itās just that theyāve already killed the golden goose, and no-one is breeding new ones, and they need an awful lot of gold still.
Daniel Stenberg has written the cURL bug bountyās obituary, and discussed his plans for dealing with the slop-nami going forward.
Clodswarms
I spent the last few years working in a prototype testing role on an active cattle ranch (donāt ask) and this phenomenon reminds me of whatās left on the ground after the herd moves through on their way up the canyon
Starting this Stubsack off with the latest edition of Product Picnic, which goes into how LLMs have made good product design impossible, and how best to un-fuck the field.
still kinda low-key horrified at Xhitterās attempt to meme regime change in Iran into existence
https://blog.emojipedia.org/x-expected-to-update-its-iranian-flag-emoji-design/
Look, I fully support the right of the Iranian people to freely decide how to run their country. But assuming that protests that ultimately seem to have ended with over 30,000 dead protestors would succeed and that the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979 is pretty ghoulish.
the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979
No doubt there is very much real discontent in Iran, but as you note, the heavy involvement of Reza Pahlavi made me raise an eyebrow. Loudly currying favor with the current slate of corrupt/abusive/incompetent Anglosphere governments and media does not suggest judgment that would result in a government any more stable or democratic than the existing one.
And there is, of course, the question of what would become of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially when they saw and assisted in how Iraq played out after de-Baāathification. The media is still willing to indulge just-so stories about easy imposition of a Western-friendly government, when multiple waves of bloody insurgency have stalled that everywhere itās been tried. The near-total absence of news from Iraq in the mainstream American media for the last few years fascinates me.
Yeah itās very quiet now that the media (and Musk) isnāt getting the story they hoped for.
Edit again, I really really wish it hadnāt come to this.
itās quiet because thereās internet shutdown (19 days today) and iranians allowed to go on twitter only gaslight and emit the most disgusting propaganda youāve likely seen in a while
if you want to avoid that, you have to either catch iraqi gsm signal from across the border, or use smuggled starlink and hope that neither EW specialist or drone notices you
Also pretty rich how a government (and its plutocrat backers) currently engaged in a campaign of domestic state terror have any standing to whine about other governments
Iām pretty sure he got some tongue-bathing from rich connected overseas Iranians.
i donāt think that a washed out royal surrounded by iranian version of cubans from miami would be very consequential, however if you compare scale of political persecution between pahlavi and islamic republic eras, this makes savak look downright humanitarian, and i donāt think he would be able to make situation worse either. if my calculator and judgement of sources is correct, then 43k dead protesters mean that islamic republic in two days outdid past 100 years of political repression, twice.
also, islamic republic heavily exaggerated pahlaviās brutality in their propaganda, especially early on. for example in constitution thereās mention of ā60000 martyrsā but even their own revised estimates for 1979 casualties are over 20x lower
Yes, no doubt the Islamic Republic is run by bloody, murderous, dishonest bastards. My argument is that Western options for handling/imposing political will on the situation have always been limited, and are at a particularly low ebb at the moment. Change is coming to both places, but it sadly may not be change that results in greater stability.
Would be much easier if there was any kind of organised opposition within iran, but this is not the case and irgc know what theyāre doing
