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!
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.
How do you deal with ADHD overload? Everyone knows that one: you PILE MORE SHIT ON TOP
https://pivot-to-ai.com - new site from Amy Castor and me, coming soon!
there’s nothing there yet, but we’re thinking just short posts about funny dumb AI bullshit. Web 3 Is Going Great, but it’s AI.
i assure you that we will absolutely pillage techtakes, but will have to write it in non-jargonised form for ordinary civilian sneers
BIG QUESTION: what’s a good WordPress theme? For a W3iGG style site with short posts and maybe occasional longer ones. Fuckin’ hate the current theme (WordPress 2023) because it requires the horrible Block Editor
How do you deal with ADHD overload? Everyone knows that one: you PILE MORE SHIT ON TOP
how dare you simulate my behavior to this degree of accuracy
but seriously I’m excited as fuck for this! I’ve been hoping you and Amy would take this on forever, and it’s finally happening!
how dare you simulate my behavior to this degree of accuracy
@AcausalRobotGod frantically taking notes
molly is delighted that people might stop telling her to
arguably we shoulda done it last year, but better late than never
I wouldn’t even call y’all late; public opinion towards AI is just starting to turn from optimism to mockery, so this feels like the perfect opportunity to normalize sneering in a way that’s easier for folks without context to consume than SneerClub or TechTakes.
when I write the blockchain stuff, it’s like, here’s one paragraph of the actual thing going on, and here’s another thousand words to make it comprehensible
So much yak shaving involved with blockchain.
Or any of this for that matter, I imagine you have already once answered the question of ‘how are you involved with twitter being bought by Musk’, ‘well in 1995, Scientology …’
Really appreciate you and Amy! o7
I just passed a bus stop ad (in Germany) of Perplexity AI that said you can ask it about the chances of Germany winning Euro2024.
So I guess it’s now a literal oracle or something?? What happened to the good-old “dog picking a food bowl” method of deciding championships.
I asked my phone charger about the chances of the same
didn’t get an answer I could bet with, tho :<
I guess that means AI is now on the same level as an octopus.
People are so, so, so bad at telling what’s a bot and what’s real. I know social media is swarming with bots, but if you’re interacting with somebody who’s saying anything more complicated than “P o o s i e I n B i o” it’s probably not a bot. A similar thing happens in online games, too, and it’s usually the excuse people use before harassing someone else
But damn the lengths people will go to to avoid admitting they were wrong. This comment chain just keeps going on with somebody who’s convinced
{origin="RU"}{faith="bad"}{election_manipulation="very yes"}must be real because something something microservices: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1dlg8ni/russian_bot_falls_prey_to_a_prompt_iniection/l9pbmrw/ It reads like something straight off /r/programming or the orange siteThen it comes full circle with people making joke responses on Twitter imitating the first post, and then other people taking those joke responses as proof that the first one must be real: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dimlyl/twitter_is_already_a_gpt_hellscape/l9691c8/
This account kind of kicked up some drama too, basically for the same reason (answering an LLM prompt), but it’s about mushroom ID instead: https://www.reddit.com/user/SeriousPerson9 I’ve seen people like this who use voice-to-text and run their train of thought through ChatGPT or something, like one person notorious on /r/gamedev. But people always assume it’s some advanced autonomous bot with stochastic post delays that mimic a human’s active hours when like, it’s usually just somebody copy/pasting prompts and responses.
Sorry if you contract any diseases from those links or comment chains
Yeah I thought this one looked very very made up and far too on the nose. I think it’s fine to label human-run spam/troll accounts as bots though.
Somewhat related I stumbled upon robots flirting with eachother the other day.
let’s just log off and leave internet to robots. it’s what what Zizek would have wanted (nsfw)
It’s like young-earth creationists who believe that dinosaur bones were installed as-is at the beginning of time time in order to test us, so their existence proves nothing about geology or evolution.
the first post (and some bits) was featured earlier in the stubsack, if you want to check some other parts
but holy hell that reddit thread
well count me as bamboozled then. stupider, pre-gpt version of this consists of robocalls that are really operated by people, but they don’t speak, they just choose one of several canned responses. why don’t they speak? because most of them are illegal immigrants and it would be obvious by accent
AHAHAHAHAAH they had fucking piddly little fans blowing. I hope that made the fire worse.
I realize that these are going to have been utter fucking idiots to start with, but
no air channeling, no structures heatsinks, wide-open roof that could cause further air movement, mismatched fan sizes, extremely insufficient extractors
-15/10, would watch it burn again
Not sure where I got the link to this video from, could very well be from this place, but look ‘Gamers’ made an NFT game without blockchain and cryptocurrencies! And it will potentially lead to other Gamers being scammed! Innovation!
akshually, the tokens are perfectly fungible, my stickernana is totally indistinguishable from the million other stickernanas out there. Not that it matters for the purpose of useless speculative trades.
Shit you are right, I should have said an NFT game without the NFTs. I stand corrected! Also would have been funnier.
just remembering this perfect video about ironic-not-ironic fascism
Perplexity pulling a semi ouroboros. For effect, y’see? It’s not a completely consistent feature of the design or anything. That’s just crazy talk.
also in techtakes
Tom Murphy VII’s new LLM typesetting system, as submitted to SIGBOVIK. I watched this 20 minute video all through, and given my usual time to kill for video is 30 seconds you should take that as the recommendation it is.
The scales have fallen from my eyes How could've blindness struck me so LLM's for sure bring more than lies They can conjure more than mere woe All of us now, may we heed the sign Of all text that will come to aligni love you tom seven
Watched this without sound, as I had opened the tab and wasn’t paying attention, but did you really just suggest a video where they are drinking out of a clearly empty cup? I closed it in disgust.
There’s a bit in the beginning where he talks about how actors handling and drinking from obviously weightless empty cups ruins suspension of disbelief, so I’m assuming it’s a callback.
Yes, I was making a joke, as somebody who also gets unreasonably annoyed by those things. I felt seen.
oww god owwww official MS experimental LLM feature for Excel ow ow owwwwwwwww
I’m glad they finally got around to productizing the month name inference engine
From the creators of “we turned your date formatting into a math equation, and now many of your research papers have substantially faulty data”, we bring you…
Not a big sneer, but I was checking my spam box for badly filtered spam and saw a guy basically emailing me 'hey you made some contributions to open source, these are now worth money (in cryptocoins, so no real money), you should claim them, and if you are nice you could give me a finders fee. And eurgh im so tired of these people. (thankfully he provided enough personal info so I could block him on various social medias).
NYT opinion piece title: Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative? (archive.org)
lmao, what alternatives could possibly exist? have you thought about it, like, at all? no? oh…
(also, pet peeve, maybe bordering on pedantry, but why would you even frame this as singular alternative? The alternative doesn’t exist, but there are actually many alternatives that have fewer flaws).
You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.
Lucky souls haven’t found sneerclub yet.
But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us…
rational_economist.webp
There are actually some decent quotes critical of EA (though the author doesn’t actually engage with them at all):
The problem is that “E.A. grew up in an environment that doesn’t have much feedback from reality,” Wenar told me.
Wenar referred me to Kate Barron-Alicante, another skeptic, who runs Capital J Collective, a consultancy on social-change financial strategies, and used to work for Oxfam, the anti-poverty charity, and also has a background in wealth management. She said effective altruism strikes her as “neo-colonial” in the sense that it puts the donors squarely in charge, with recipients required to report to them frequently on the metrics they demand. She said E.A. donors don’t reflect on how the way they made their fortunes in the first place might contribute to the problems they observe.
the economist in each of us
get it out get it out get it out
Effective Altruism Is Flawed. Here’s Why It’s Bad News for Joe Biden.
Eating live fire ants is flawed. But what’s the alternative?
Oh my god there is literally nothing the effective altruists do that can’t be done better by people who aren’t in a cult
didn’t the comments say “tax the hell out of them” before they were closed
But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us…
Funny how the wannabe LW Rationalists don’t seem read that much Rationalism, as Scott has already mentioned that our views on economists (that they are all looking for the Rational Economic Human Unit) is not up to date and not how economists think anymore. (So in a way it is a false stereotype of economists, wasn’t there something about how Rationalists shouldn’t fall for these things? ;) ).
THIS IS NOT A DRILL. I HAVE EVIDENCE YANN IS ENGAGING IN ACASUAL TRADE WITH THE ROBO GOD.
I’m not sure if they’re a decent person or not, but I liked this sneer on the orange site, in the context of this recent rant (previously, on Awful), describing a hypothetical executive-humbling mechanism. I agree with them; I’d read that fanfiction too.
https://xcancel.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1802894899022533034#m
The same pundits have been saying “deep learning is hitting a wall” for a DECADE. Why do they have ANY credibility left? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Year after year after year. Like all professional pundits, they pound their fist on the table and confidently declare AGI IS DEFINITELY FAR OFF and people breathe a sigh of relief. Because to admit that AGI might be soon is SCARY. Or it should be, because it represents MASSIVE uncertainty. AGI is our final invention. You have to acknowledge the world as we know it will end, for better or worse. Your 20 year plans up in smoke. Learning a language for no reason. Preparing for a career that won’t exist. Raising kids who might just… suddenly die. Because we invited aliens with superior technology we couldn’t control. Remember, many hopium addicts are just hoping that we become PETS. They point to Ian Banks’ Culture series as a good outcome… where, again, HUMANS ARE PETS. THIS IS THEIR GOOD OUTCOME. What’s funny, too, is that noted skeptics like Gary Marcus still think there’s a 35% chance of AGI in the next 12 years - that is still HIGH! (Side note: many skeptics are butthurt they wasted their career on the wrong ML paradigm.) Nobody wants to stare in the face the fact that 1) the average AI scientist thinks there is a 1 in 6 chance we’re all about to die, or that 2) most AGI company insiders now think AGI is 2-5 years away. It is insane that this isn’t the only thing on the news right now. So… we stay in our hopium dens, nitpicking The Latest Thing AI Still Can’t Do, missing forests from trees, underreacting to the clear-as-day exponential. Most insiders agree: the alien ships are now visible in the sky, and we don’t know if they’re going to cure cancer or exterminate us. Be brave. Stare AGI in the face.
This post almost made me crash my self-driving car.
humans are pets
Actually not what is happening in the books. I get where they are coming form but this requires redefining the word pet in such a way it is a useless word.
The Culture series really breaks the brains of people who can only think in hierarchies.
not a cult btw
Ah yes, AGI companies, the things that definitely exist
It’s mad that we have an actual existential crisis in climate change (temperature records broken across the world this year) but these cunts are driving themselves into a frenzy over something that is nowhere near as pressing or dangerous. Oh, people dying of heatstroke isn’t as glamorous? Fuck off
Remember, many hopium addicts are just hoping that we become PETS. They point to Ian Banks’ Culture series as a good outcome… where, again, HUMANS ARE PETS. THIS IS THEIR GOOD OUTCOME.
I am once again begging these e/acc fucking idiots to actually read and engage with the sci-fi books they keep citing
but who am I kidding? the only way you come up with a take as stupid as “humans are pets in the Culture” is if your only exposure to the books is having GPT summarize them
If you’ve been around the block like I have, you’ve seen reports about people joining cults to await spaceships, people preaching that the world is about to end &c. It’s a staple trope in old New Yorker cartoons, where a bearded dude walks around with a billboard saying “The End is nigh”.
The tech world is growing up, and a new internet-native generation has taken over. But everyone is still human, and the same pattern-matching that leads a 19th century Christian to discern when the world is going to end by reading Revelation will lead a 25 year old tech bro steeped in “rationalism” to decide that spicy autocomplete is the first stage of The End of the Human Race. The only difference is the inputs.
Sufficiently advanced prompts are indistinguishable from prayer
Found in the wilds^
Giganto brain AI safety ‘scientist’
If AIs are conscious right now, we are monsters. Nobody wants to think they’re monsters. Ergo: AIs are definitely not conscious.
Internet rando:
If furniture is conscious right now, we are monsters. Nobody wants to think they’re monsters. Ergo: Furniture is definitely not conscious.
Is it time for EAs to start worrying about Neopets welfare?
literally roko’s basilisk
