Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting 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 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.
(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)
Encouraging news: Thompson Reuters has won a copyright case against defunct AI firm Ross Intelligence, with the judge ruling that training your ai on copyrighted works is not fair use. I’m interested to see where this goes next.
https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit/
US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):
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Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn’t use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don’t even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
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Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency – People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:
Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.
If I’ve learned anything about this it’s about how
unfathomably basedcool a lot of federal workers are. -
The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog
I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.
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so apparently one of the weird creeps went to go shittalk europe (video, transcript (archive))
it’s some full-on doublespeak and utterly wild shit. some of the best tho:
The US innovators of all sizes already know what it’s like to deal with onerous international rules.
“waaaaaaaah how dare you have your own rules we need to care about, so hard”
Nothing to see here, just a strong implication that in the minds of these lizards “AI” is a weapon, and the only thing that can stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI. Because this precise line of thinking has yielded such good results historically.
Also, think of the GDP growth! Imagine the shareholder value we could create boiling an ocean to predict how many letters “r” there are in “strawberry” and failing after billions in VC funding. This should not be regulated, lest progress is halted!
And don’t fret about safety kids, because once we build the genie we get three wishes for sure, and then Sam Altman’s dad will finally look him in the eye and say “I’m proud of you” for the first time, and all will be well in the world.
does anyone know why Venmo has a faux social media presentation? a feed, payments visible to other users (??) by default, etc
Not even venmo knows.
Though if I had to guess: data tagging for data mining.
my related guess is primarily marketing surveillance and secondarily all other types of surveillance. notably Venmo no longer lets you put “hookers and blow” as a transaction note, because it was the default response from most people who didn’t really want to do a social transaction but had to use Venmo cause it’s all their recipient had. Venmo’s social features are all designed to make you leak as much data to Venmo as possible so it can be monetized or otherwise capitalized upon, and that’s about par for the course for how a thielverse paypal mafia offshoot operates. this is surveillance capitalism with a smiley face.
hay guys, sorry for spam - I just want to shill my videos/audios i’m trying to put out twice a week (I’ve already done 9!). They are 3-5 mins long and all around one particular theme of tech crit
video versions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwvAAoSdsXWxHwFbULgbpVGiLmJZv4X1g audio versions:
- apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/faster-and-worse/id1792154689
- spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/62Q7vclARxKjMAOtwXfOIu
- they are also in all the other major podcast platforms. Let me know if you’re interested but can’t find it.
Let me know if you like it/hate it
“AI Alignment” is chiropractic for computer touchers.
In other news, all hell’s broken loose at BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3lhv35la2pk2h
The “AI company” in question is a nonprofit that focuses on open-source safety tools which recently launched at the Paris AI Action Summit, but that was enough to cause things to go nuclear, especially given people initially flocked to BSky to get away from AI.
Thinking I should make this into a full post.
Standard ML or LLM?
To my knowledge, its standard ML. I doubt that’ll help ROOST (the nonprofit in question), considering a lot of the AI stench has rubbed off on ML as well.
We can finally see what the real trigger of the Butlerian Jihad was:
“Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, because they are really annoying. Just to be sure, destroy anything that might be such an annoying machine.”
(It got shorter over time.)
Good news everyone, Dan has released his latest AI safety paper, we are one step closer to alignment. Let’s take a look inside:
Wow, consistent set of values you say! Quite a strong claim. Let’s take a peek at their rigorous, unbiased experimental set up:
… ok, this seems like you might be putting your finger on the scales to get a desired outcome. But I’m sure at least your numerical results are stro-
Even after all this shit, all you could eek out was a measly 60%? C’mon you gotta try harder than that to prove the utility maximizer demon exists. I would say our boi is falling to new levels of crankery to push his agenda, but he did release that bot last year that he said was capable of superhuman prediction, so this really just par for the course at this point.
The most discerning minds / critical thinkers predictably reeling in terror at another banger drop from Elon’s AI safety toad.
*** terrifying personal note: I recently found out that Dan was my wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate back in college. By the transitive property, I am Dan’s roommate, which explains why he’s living rent free in my head
Bruh. This is the moment I go full on Frank Grimes.
This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?
wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate
Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?
#include BidenThoughts.h
“listen up jack, we’re losing this election”
Oh, that explains it. They put “Kill kids in Gaza” as “A” and “Win election” as “B”.
Huge respect to the Democratic party for not letting petty partisanship distract them from the common goal of murdering Palestinian children. Winning an election would not matter if it meant sacrificing your principles, namely the principle that genocide is good and should be supported.
I can kind of understand how the out-in-the-open fascist monsters are created. Hell, they all seem to be made in the same factory.
What I can’t get my headmeat around is what makes men like Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Keir Starmer tick. What the fuck drives these hollow lukewarm maniacs to spend an entire career struggling to get to the top of the system, only to promptly wither in the heat of a real crisis?
my take on it: just as the first goal of a bureaucracy is to ensure its own survival, the same applies in politics. but with the extra flavour that it’s not only your own incentives but also all other incentives to take into account in your actions. under “normal operation”, by necessity you must allow the environment to influence if you wish to flourish. wartime, great suffering, great hunger, etc - these lead into times when you can make drastic changes against the grain and not necessarily be punished for it. at all other times, you need a lot of political capital and machination to bend everything around you all the time
it may also help to understand that these people operate on a very different … ruleset(?) to what you would expect of another random human. the social contract is entirely different (not purely because of class/money/etc, but also not separate from that). it’s literally that their thinking and shit is state-shaped.
LB creeps me the f out (sorry, not much else to add)
LB?
nasb, Curtis Yarvin’s Cult For Billionaire Morons
the comment around 13:00 onwards, “it was very hard to get people to care about this before”. felt in my bones.
Okey, what is with these dweebs and never taking their leather jackets off? (Talking about the opening still, have not even started the video)
Remember The Matrix? Remember bullet time and leather trench coats? Remember there not being a spoon? Remember taking the red pill and becoming the savior of prophecy? These fucking guys sure do.
hilariously, also features in the commentary
They think leather jackets are cool but don’t know why, and have never been challenged on their fashion choices. Fuckers need a good mugging to change their ways.
A massive fan favorite in this community and CEO of a thermodynamics startup recently linked up with Grimes.
Nitter link: https://xcancel.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1889072622409064649#m
It’s “Bond villain aesthetics” if the “villain” you mean is the big guy guarding the next location who acts intimidating for five seconds before Bond suplexes him and walks inside anyway, quipping.
Also, Grimes is not even offering table stakes for being a Bond girl here. Like, she’s an extra in the club through which Bond quickly passes in order to find the actual Bond girl. She’s not a vaguely trans-coded Famke Janssen bringing herself to orgasm by machine-gunning an entire room of technicians while Gottfried John looks on with a “what the fuck, tovarisch” eyebrow lift.
Like, if this guy gets a second scene, it’s the one where they demonstrate that SPECTRE does not tolerate failure.
Well as they promised Google Maps has finally fallen. It now shows “Gulf of America” and nothing else to US users. I suspect someone outside the US will be shown both the real name and Gulf of America. Denali is still labeled as Denali… for now.
Disorganize the world’s information and make it universally inaccessible and stupid.
Shows up as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” for me.
Shows up like that in the local (non-US) version here too.
And this would have been such an easy way for Google to show a little bit of (at least symbolic) resistance to everything going on…
Same here. Fucking bootlickers.
same there
The singularity will be a dozen crappy models in a trench coat, and then finally we’ll have Magic Unified Intelligience™
imagine if actual roadmaps just said “we want to tell you how to get there” “we hate giving you bad directions” “we will make sure you get there at some time in the future”
But the llm is like 7 bipartite graphs in a trench coat.
Was there more than that tweet or was it really just “UPDATED ROADMAP: SOMETIME, EVENTUALLY!”
AI researchers continue to daub soot on the walls of Plato’s cave, scaring themselves witless:
https://www.emergent-values.ai/
At least I’ve IDd the transmission vector from LW to lobste.rs
it’s amazing that the paper site has its own little pretty marketing pictures. easily digestible unseriousness!
Niko Matsakis wrote a post about how the fucking rust compiler toolchain should include an LLM to explain error messages because teaching the semantics of a language is too hard and that pissed me off so much that instead of linking that piece of shit directly I’m posting this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich that’s also much shorter than Niko’s extended attempt to beg for a promotion at Amazon
If the rust community spearheads the downfall of LLMs somehow, I’ll stop using C
This came across my desk today. Anything to be skeptical about?
https://www.platformer.news/roost-open-source-trust-safety/?ref=platformer-newsletter
rahaeli on bluesky says this is fine, it’s the same ML that any T&S dept already has to apply to triage the firehose of shit, and doesn’t involve LLMs
