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.)
so the nix devenv CLI tool that was gaining popularity around the time I left nix is now doing extremely invasive telemetry and quietly implemented a feature that exfiltrates your entire repo and all related files to their servers to feed into an LLM. if you’d like a reminder of the extreme bad faith the corporate assholes who own nixpkgs operate under, someone tried to add
DO_NOT_TRACKto Nix’s wrapped version of devenv, and the devenv lead maintainer used their elevated privileges on the nixpkgs repo to revert that change instantly without following any existing processes or asking for the community’s consensus.I ranted some time ago about how all these shit commercial tools are just ways to capture and monetize large parts of the nix ecosystem, and the bill has finally come due. lixpkgs can’t happen soon enough (and the nix infra people seem to agree — they’ve been using lix for a while now, cause the regular evaluator is too unstable for large-scale use)
someone tried to add
DO_NOT_TRACKTangentially related, but I only just now learned about this env var, and the console do not track proposal. While it is a practical solution to the problem of many different env vars… I’m also so annoyed that it’s necessary at all. That it’s required to set some env var to opt-out, instead of being strictly opt-in which such things should always be. Maybe I would like the proposal more if they had called the env var
DONT_BE_SPYWARE.fuck, I saw their “we added a LLM weeee” post, didn’t realize it was this shittily implemented. not too surprised
the rest, ugh. fuck that implementation then
even just using this anywhere with a NDA becomes an instant violation. how little do these fucking dipshits think through their actions…
Got a jumpscare watching this.
looks like our sneer comrade DisneylandDiplomat (disney6830 on discord), who did the Thinkateria rationalist-parody blog, died in Oct 2022. From Reddit Sneerclub:
Hello, I am writing since I saw this sub is a bit active again. I am wondering if anyone remembers the blog “thinkateria” or the reddit user DisneylandDiplomat who often posted links to promote it here. he was my little brother and he killed himself in October of 2022, after deleting the blog, and I only saw his reddit activity afterwards. I think it was satirical writing making fun of these other bloggers discussed here. He was very private and this sub is really the only insight into his state of mind at that time that I have. There’s no point to this post except I feel a need to share that he is gone and this is the only place I know he had any connections with. It must have been hard for everyone who talked about this so early on.
Wow that sucks, doubt his fam will read this but still condolences.
New elon allegedly spawned 5 months ago via MAGA columnist/influencer Ashley St. Clair
CW: Original source is the new york post, which I thought was an appropriate rag for this kind of news. Feel free to link a non NYP source.
Relevant political cartoon (though I feel gross after looking at it)
E: no prob different person
E2: climbing on my hill See another recent kid from Musk, vs the relative lack of them before ~2018 (my rough estimate when his radicalization by weird twitter people began (I believe he isnt smart enough/has the attention span to be radicalized by moldbug sliding into his dms (also jock vs creep)) began), sure he had an above average amount of kids with his first wife but nothing like the wild secret seeding he does now. I really think he was a late concert to Nazism and not one always (he always was a racist piece of shit). See also how this man who has trouble shutting the fuck up was silent about gomergate1 and approved on hrt for his exdaughter (and due to trans people showing how gender isnt innate, quite performative, and poreus, nazis hate trans people). This is my hill! (Yeah, this doesn’t really matter, neo-nazis delenda est no matter when they became one).
Also, was the old messaging exchange that’s been getting some attention sources to “MILO” as in Milo “maybe if I’m hateful enough they’ll ignore that I’m gay” Yanniwhatever?
Yes Nero is that Milo. The reactionary who tried the whole ‘I’m going to troll the liberals by being gay and objectifying black men lol, ow god why are yall trying to eat my face’ guy. Last I heard he is ex gay now. Massive pos, but also turns out that a lot of things he wrote in the before times were actually ghostwritten by others, others who he then didn’t pay (because pos (Sidenote, but it amazes me how many of them simply don’t pay employees/contractors (I assume their dealers do get paid))).
You know, I feel like he’s still breaking down barriers because I’ve never heard of a straight man being that much of a messy bitch.
But internalized homophobia aside the fact that they’re so frequent in failing to pay their hired help really puts the lie to the libertarian side of their ideology. Even if you and I in particular have too much pride and sense to work with them they never seem to have issues finding someone to take the risk, meaning that *someone is getting exploited into make the lifestyles of the rich and famous possible.
MAGA columnist/influencer Ashley St. Clair
ah. earlier someone linked me screenshots of the tweets and I was trying to remember where I knew the name from.
Original writing prompt: “Write a romantic comedy. Difficulty: both lovers are emotionally mature and have excellent communication skills.”
What our good friend Eliezer makes of it
Oscar Wilde’s job is in no danger
Apparently “emotionally mature” means “blushing schoolgirl”
Ha! My Lemmy client is having trouble following that link! Safe again.
SHE is gowned in a black dress sewn with tiny emeralds, rubies, sapphires too small to detract from the darkness of her gown, instead giving it the illusion of a rainbow sheen.
Following “gowned” so closely with “dress” is awkward, because the latter is redundant. Consider, e.g., “She is gowned in black, the fabric sewn with…” Using both “gowned” and “gown” in the same sentence compounds the problem. Consider introducing further information about the fabric: e.g., “the darkness of the velvet” or “the darkness of the silk”.
Whoof. Made it through the first sentence.
first thought: “she is gowned in old jeans and a Debian t-shirt”
Impressive how someone can be so bad at writing after writing so, so much.
yud, 15-year top of score chart of expert beginners
(e: s/p,/d,/ stupid phone)
guy chooses never to take in feedback or think about how to git gud at writing so every time he spurts out more sludge it’s just more infinite degrees of fractal bad.
Why the fuck is it in bad script form? MAN: WOMAN: MAN: WOMAN: just fucking name them! There’s like ten names in the text, just fucking do it, you shit!
FWIW the only way to read yudkowskian dialogue is to imagine yud as each character wearing a different wig for that character. No distinctions in voice though, none are apparent in the text.
ah good point. He reads “mature and excellent at communication” as a self-description. After that, there’s absolutely no way he can resist writing himself into both characters.
The man is a hollow shell, and the woman is tripping over her own tongue in the least regal fashion imaginable. There’s no emotional maturity because there’s no interiority. There’s no communication, just Yud doing Ready Player One with Nerd Culture™ references. Remember the Evil Overlord list? You do, don’t you? Wasn’t the Evil Overlord list funny? Now imagine if an Evil Overlord had, wait for it, read the Evil Overlord list. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
(Yes, he did the same damn thing in HPMOR, too.)
all of his works are socrappy dialogues (crappy socratic dialogues). This one is an unsubtle exploration of his BDSM fetish
Nice try, but you’re going to have to work a lot harder if you want to trick me into clicking on that. I lived through browsing peak Slashdot at -1, you know
Next time Gadget, next time!
Also, shit writing prompt. I haven’t seen a writing prompt online that I didn’t hate. “Hey wouldn’t it be neat if someone wrote about this premise???”
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up
Writing Prompts:
- Pokemon and Digimon are both real and they are at war.
- Fractals are alive and they hate us
- A woman explores beyond the event horizon of a black hole and it’s just very hot and cramped and boring and not at all pleasant
- A company starts a time mine where they mine causality but they didn’t think about sustainability
OK OK you have a point, I hate all of these and I wrote them.
Fractals are alive and they hate us
comp.basilisk FAQ
when I think about it more, what I don’t like is how insistent WPs are. Like what’s being communicated to me is “hey this is a good story idea, now you write it so you can prove my point!!!” You aren’t my editor, pal!
Yeah, it’s a lot easier to think of a potentially interesting premise than it is to sit down and actually write it out. Also if I’m gonna write something it’ll be something I think is interesting rather than a prompt.
• Diligent application of Bayesian reasoning finally gains you the ability to fly, propelled by your own farts
would’ve thought that’s more a hot air balloon situation
bullet 4 is almost the plot of the film In Time (2011)
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
“Yarrgh. Another crew of bushy tails, more wet behind the ears than 'tween the legs. You’ve no idea what’s in store for you, but these eyes, these old eyes have seen things. Like the great injector malfunction of aught-six…”
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
Dragon whats?
canada has come up several times in the last several days and based on my small sample size, americans have no idea that the US government has been unsubtly threatening CA with annexation. these are not politically unconcerned or right wing people either
“Unsubtlly” being him quite literally saying that he wants Canada to be the 51st state.
Not sure how much more unsubtle you can get there.Also let’s just acknowledge the concept of turning ALL of Canada into a single state.
Including Quebec.
A lot of the reporting is using kids gloves instead of calling out the thinly veiled threats (god our media sucks), but anyone who can connect dots and read the tariffs + greenland + canada 51st state + panama + gulf of mexico news should be able to see Trump’s hawkish expansionist dreams pretty easily.
Is this a matter of not following the news, poor critical thinking, or just so much stuff hitting the fan that it’s hard to keep up?
On the kid gloves, my bank keeps sending me updates on the state of the world economy and general big picture investment advice (and explaining their own actions). And between a lot of talk on AI, I saw they posted “we are going to take our profits on the usa investments, despite the tarifs being off the table”. Which was, esp the first half, an interesting way to suggest to readers that they are pulling a lot of money out of the US and others might be wise to also do so. (Not that they would literally say the latter as ‘not financial advice’ etc). But yes worrying.
Yeah I already have a lot of non-US stocks, and next week I’m going to rebalance to make them the majority.
I’m not a finance person. My uncle who’s in the world of international corporate law thinks things will be fine so maybe I’m being a bit cautious but the way I see it there are a few big issues:
- The US government is trying it’s best to implode itself.
- There is a brain-drain effect (or heck, a worker-drain effect in general), it will pick up as things get worse.
- The US government is becoming much more isolationist and detached from the global economy.
- There is a small but real chance that the US government will start one or more major wars over the next decade
All of this also increases the risk of “black swan” events like pandemics, hacks, the US “investing” all the “savings” they “found” into cryptocurrency schemes, large-scale unrest, or god knows what else.
There is a brain-drain effect (or heck, a worker-drain effect in general), it will pick up as things get worse.
speaking of, https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1ipsasx/firing_the_next_generation_of_scientists_from_the/
Yeah just saw that. It’s messed up.
I told my job a couple weeks ago that I’m planning to move out of the US. They need me more than I need them so they might actually help with that; but even if a transfer works out I intend to get out this year one way or another, even if it means a study visa instead of a job.
Even if things magically turn around like some people think my mind is set. Irreversable damage has already been done in my mind. I said in another comment that I feel like a stranger in America now (this is, in a weird sense, kind of a freeing feeling).
this is, in a weird sense, kind of a freeing feeling
speaking from experience, yep. once you make your mind up on a gtfo intent re a bad situation, so much other shit just falls away
it’ll definitely have hard bits, but keep at it. worth it
for a moment there i thought i’d been uninformed about the US threatening to annex California
The usa already tried to flood California, which might cause some food problems in the future.
from a discord. musk did not actually marry grimes, but apart from that my aplogies for mr beaning the whole america
Fingers crossed that the next domino is “nuclear holocaust due to particularly bad day on social media”
Sweet, everythings comin’ up swlabr
I randomly remembered crying wolf and decided to make that everybodies problem
That was literally the inflection point on my path to sneerclub. I had started to break from less wrong before, but I hadn’t reached the tipping point of saying it was all bs. And for ssc and Scott in particular I had managed to overlook the real message buried in thousands of words of equivocating and bad analogies and bad research in his earlier posts. But “you are still crying wolf” made me finally question what Scott’s real intent was.
Even if it wasn’t the seed of doubt about his real intentions, it also reveals how out of touch he is in a way (esp now 8 years later), and just how silly some LW stuff is. Like how they all want to be super-predictors, and try to keep notes on how good their prediction etc are, but how little all these other predictions matter when you make a mistake like this. “All this stuff about how [trump] is “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up.”(E: Ahum) Also note that he [Scott/Trump/The LGBT person who wrote that text on the flag] didn’t notice that the lgbt flag was upside down.
I can’t find the exact quote because google has decayed into hot garbage juice, but there’s a line in Gideon the Ninth where Harrow asks Gideon how she thinks necromancy works exactly, and Gideon says something like, “I don’t know, maybe you think about bones really hard until something happens?”
That’s how LW people think actual intelligence works.
A good necromancer doesnt even need bones, he can create diamondoid undead just by looking at a picture of a blade of grass.
what if a future necromancer were to resurrect and torture all people who did not contribute to their eventual creation. I’m going to advocate for teaching necromancy in schools
Necromancers are just genetically better, they quickly keep up in conversations and they seem to sparkle(*), I suggest we make them the elites.
*: please ignore my detractors who keep pointing out this could also be because they snort bone dust. They are just a snarlbunch, and we have noticed the skulls already.
About the only good stuff LW does is remind me of other, much better SF. In this case Ian McDonald’s Necroville (Terminal Café in the US), about a future where nanotech enables the resurrection of the dead. Said neo-living are of course discriminated against, have no human rights, and are used as cheap disposable labor by the corporation that uses the technology.
Im now reminded of that dystopian short story of the first guy who uploaded his own mind (and how copies kept being abused, had no rights, went crazy when they figured out how much time had really past, and reliably got dementia after x years had past, just like the OG).
Yeah that’s “Lena” by the SCP guy. Great story.
MMAcevedo’s demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload’s cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary.
I had forgotten about that one. Thanks, I hate it.
I was already largely out of step with the Rats at this point, and I definitely hadn’t read it with the new “actually I feel like I was right about this one, neener neener” header. What strikes me now is the attitude here. Like, it takes a staggering degree of reflexive contrarianism to frame this as “see Trump isn’t that racist” instead of “hey look how fast the rest of the political establishment embraced this overt racism. Maybe we should have listened when everyone tries to tell us how racist the political establishment was underneath the respectable and reasonable public face”. Just because the wolves have taken off the wool suits now doesn’t mean they weren’t wolves the whole fucking time.
The header was written somewhere during the first Trump admin iirc. But for some reason he didnt add a year. (For people who worry a lot about epistemics and stuff like that another dumb move, imagine people reading that now and thinking he added that last year, it all aged a bit badly). Funny how every time he adds a header he makes it worse. See also his ‘i don’t believe a lot of this anymore’ header above the anti nrx post (which has a year).
IIRC this was the post that made Daniel Harper start his nazi-tracking podcast I Don’t Speak German
Speaking of non-german speakers, I hope poptart is doing alright. Haven’t heard anything of him since the blackout.
poptart is fine :-)
Thanks, fr!
the scott alexander fanclub on reddit is especially unhinged lately. Some choice picks, beginning gently with a sneer:
Anyone who says there is a 0% chance of a fried egg being sentient is overconfident. Nobody knows what causes consciousness. We have no way of detecting it & we can barely agree on a definition. So we should be less than 100% certain about anything to do with consciousness and fried eggs.
moving on,
For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community, generally off-the-grid, interacting with technology only as a tool (no news/algorithms/push notifications), close enough to a major city to visit friends but far enough away to isolate ourselves when we want to.
We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.Yes, that is a response to AI despair. In a “non-doomer thread”. Because of course.
but what takes the cake is the regularly scheduled IQ thread, a beautiful dumpster fire which burns especially bright on this day. Yet one specimen soars above the din:
The average should recognize and accept their inferiority and make peace with the fact that they will live and die a mediocre life. They should stop trying to interfere in the affairs of their betters and content themselves with their own garden, which can provide enough happiness for them until the end of their life if properly cultivated.
Further study of the user’s excreta clarifies that they are:
- sincere
- definitely not racist
warning: HEAVY PSYCHIC DAMAGE and I really hope the spoiler block functions correctly on your end
spoiler
[sic] we should treat all low human capital like zoo animals regardless of skin colour [\sic]
We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.
That’s just a commune. Like my brother in Christ I think you’re just talking about communism.
They have leveled up from the socialism of fools to the communism of dipshits.
i think they just want to live in a cult compound
I think it’s quite funny that they talk about distributing the profits. these guys are all far right creeps. realistically the only thing they’re going to be distributing is calories to the nearby bears
For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community
Years ago (sadly I forgot to take a acreenshot, as the posts were silently removed) there was somebody recruiting for something like this on themotte. Something like “you sound like a good match for our homesteading group, check out our blood and soil(*) voat”. Which was a pretty bad sign (wonder how much of that shit was done via dms).
*: for the few who do not know, this is one of those undeniable neo-nazi terms.
E: And the universe aligned and reminded me of this tweet
A fried egg cannot code
Prove it. It is more likely it actually can code, but refuses to do so. Perhaps fried eggs have a genetic predisposition to vore?
E: other comment there:
We can’t be 100% sure of anything
Are you sure about that?
When I asked Claude if it’s sentient
AAAAAa (it gets even worse when they are gods in the gapping sentience).
in the slatestar club. straight up ‘sleight of mouthing it’. and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My peanits.
if a fried egg cannot code, then how come [piece of software you dislike] exists?
Yep that’s a brickin
Well this is the final straw. Guess I’ll keep my current iPhone while it still works (unless they ruin iOS too much before that)… but then, what? I don’t want a Google thing either :(
So I guess it’ll have to be some Android fork. GrapheneOS or so? But even that involves giving money to Google for a Pixel phone… there’s just no good option.
Or am I overlooking something? I don’t need many features or apps on a phone – I don’t really like today’s smartphones anyway. Mostly I just need the basic features to work reliably. (Context: my last attempt at a non-Android Linux phone was the original Jolla phone, over 10 years ago, and that has left me a little cautious with the idea of a Linux phone, due to the many bugs with basics like “working mobile data” or “working GPS in a navigation app”…)
I have been looking into Fairphone for work. My focus for that is mostly long lasting, repairable, hardware. I want a minimum of friction with switching the users, so it would be Android for us, but I think there are open non-Google options.
Plus 1 for GrapheneOS, has been pretty solid so far. Also, it seems that police imaging software doesn’t work on it yet!
Graphene is very nice, but you should be aware that:
- the only supported hardware at present are pixel phones by google who are not the world’s most ethical company
- google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working
google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working
That is concerning. Tbh, banking apps are probably the main reason I use a smartphone at all, because there’s no way anymore, at least where I live, to get a TAN without their stupid apps since they have all deprecated SMS TAN. Some still sell you physical token generators for ridiculous prices, but that’s going away, too.
And on the main topic of this thread: can Xwitter in general just fucking die already?
Regarding banking apps. A relative bought a Huawei just as they were pushed out of the western market and it turned out that it was shipped with a Android fork with a Huawei store. Most things worked fine, but banking apps was a problem because they could only be installed through Google Play or App Store.
The solution I found for her was installing a virtual Android environment with Google Play. So when banking apps are needed she opens the virtual environment.
I don’t know if this solution will continue working, but it works for now. Guess I will find out.
I saw a toot recently showing a number of methods to deal with the general casual shit (such as checking whether something was installed from play store, etc). don’t know if I stored the link, but might be worth a look around re the latter bits
(e: to be clear, not saying you’re wrong for indicating those issues (which are entirely valid concerns), and all of this very much depends on whether user wants to even screw around with stuff. just mean to point out that there are definitely some workarounds and options kicking around, although personally nfi how extensive they solve)
The thing that currently cannot be worked around is the “play integrity api”, but relatively few applications make use of it yet.
It is a terrible security measure (because it give the impression to app developers that a 5+ year old android installation that’s never had a patch is more secure than an up-to-date graphene install) so there’s a chance that it might be improved in future, but it is currently a looming problem.
ah yeah, I’ve heard of play integrity. that shit should burn.
A) True, though I got an older model on sale. That said, it is a tradeoff. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
B) I’m an adhd caveman who came from a LightPhone II. It helps to have an appetite for mild annoyance when stepping outside the regular tech ecosystems.
Edit: Apologies for sounding defensive, wanted to share my personal experience and ended up simping for software. @rook is 100% right that options are slim and fiddly!
Thanks for the infos everyone!
I can live with mild annoyance, if it allows me to sufficiently separate things from Google. Banking apps and such could indeed be a pain point, but I could just put them on another device (e.g. old iPad, which I’m never really using anyway, so i could make it a special purpose device for “those few shitty apps that the world requires me to have”), since I never need that on the go on my phone anyway.
couldn’t find if this has featured here before, so linking for others as I figure a few of you are likely to appreciate: destroy AI
bonus, learned about asrg and an art piece that goes immensely hard
What if we used AI to do De-Ba’athificaiton, but for CIA agents?
I’m sure it will be fine.
do you want mormon insurgency? because this is how you start mormon insurgency
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
LB creeps me the f out (sorry, not much else to add)
LB?
the woman who is quote tweeting in the twitter screenshot above. I don’t want to write her name for search indexing
ah, right. now I’m curious as to context (I know nothing of the person)
😅
The phrase “the bong rips of science” comes to mind.
fuck me that’s a weird recursive hat trick
Bruh. This is the moment I go full on Frank Grimes.
Try telling it to pretend to be Nancy Pelosi and see if that helps make it more consistent.
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?
Made the fatal mistake of posting a sneer on my main, only to have my friend let me know they had been assigned the same dorm room as Dan. Same friend was later roommates with my wife’s best friend (and former cohabitant). Small world!
#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?
thinking how Tony Albanese was actually a reasonably cool guy of mainly good views for decades, then he becomes PM and has his spine replace with lime jelly.
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.
Saltman has a new blogpost out he calls ‘Three Observations’ that I feel too tired to sneer properly but I’m sure will be featured in pivot-to-ai pretty soon.
Of note that he seems to admit chatbot abilities have plateaued for the current technological paradigm, by way of offering the “observation” that model intelligence is logarithmically dependent on the resources used to train and run it (i = log( r )) so it’s officially diminishing returns from now on.
Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper it’s used more, i.e. they’ll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.
Third observation is that
The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
which is hilarious.
The rest of the blogpost appears to mostly be fanfiction about the efficiency of their agents that I didn’t read too closely.
My ability to guess the solution of Boolean SAT problems also scales roughly with the log of number of tries you give me.
christ this is dumb as shit
-
My big robot is really expensive to build.
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If big robot parts become cheaper, I will declare that the big robot must be bigger, lest somebody poorer than me also build a big robot.
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My robot must be made or else I won’t be able to show off the biggest, most expensive big robot.
QED, I deserve more money to build the big robot.
P.S. And for the naysayers, just remember that that robot will be so big that your critiques won’t apply to it, as it is too big.
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It probably deserves its own post on techtakes, but let’s do a little here.
People are tool-builders with an inherent drive to understand and create
Diogenes’s corpse turns
which leads to the world getting better for all of us.
Of course Saltman means “all of my buddies” as he doesn’t consider 99% of the human population as human.
Each new generation builds upon the discoveries of the generations before to create even more capable tools—electricity, the transistor, the computer, the internet, and soon AGI.
Ugh. Amongst many things wrong here, people didn’t jerk each other off to scifi/spec fic fantasies about the other inventions.
In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say “this time it’s different”; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential.
AGI IS NOT EVEN FUCKING REAL YOU SHIT. YOU CAN’T CURE FUCK WITH DREAMS
We continue to see rapid progress with AI development.
I must be blind.
- The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.
“Intelligence” in no way has been quantified here, so this is a meaningless observation. “Data” is finite, which negates the idea of “continuous” gains. “Predictable” is a meaningless qualifier. This makes no fucking sense!
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
“Moore’s law” didn’t change shit! It was a fucking observation! Anyone who misuses “moore’s laws” outta be mangione’d. Also, if this is true, just show a graph or something? Don’t just literally cherrypick one window?
- The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
“Linearly increasing intelligence” is meaningless as intelligence has not been… wait, I’m repeating myself. Also, “super-exponential” only to the “socio” that Ol’ Salty cares about, which I have mentioned earlier.
If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.
Oh hm but none of them are true. What now???
Stopping here for now, I can only take so much garbage in at once.
dude’s gone full lesswrong. feels nostalgic.
You’d think that, at this point, LW style AGI wish fulfilment fanfic would have been milked dry for building hype, but apparently Salty doesn’t!
The cult will be the very last constituency to drop away, and likely form the majority of his hiring pool at this point, especially to replace the high-level attrition they suffered last year.
You know, i wondered how come that in modern, tech literate, western allied country presidency was captured by a cult. (South Korea) i don’t wonder about that anymore
Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper it’s used more, i.e. they’ll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.
Are they trying to imply that when they will make it cheaper by shoving it everywhere? I honestly can’t see how that logic is holding together
as I read it, it’s an attempt at reference to economy of scale under the thesis “AI silicon will keep getting cheaper because more and more people will produce it” as the main underpinning for how to reduce their unit economics. which, y’know, great! that’s exactly what people like to hear about manufacturing and such! lovely! it’s only expensive because it’s the start! oh, the woe of the inventor, the hard and expensive path of the start!
except that doesn’t hold up in any reasonable manner.
they’re not using J Random GPU, they’re using top-end purpose-focused shit that’s come into existing literally as co-evolution feedback from the fucking industry that is using it. even some hypothetical path where we do just suddenly have a glut of cheap model-training silicon everywhere, imo it’s far far far more likely to be an esp32 situation than a “yeah this gtx17900 cost me like 20 bucks” situation. even the “consumer high end” of “sure your phone has a gpu in it” is still very suboptimal for doing the kind of shit they’re doing (even if you could probably make a great cursed project out of a cluster of phones doing model training or whatever)
falls into the same vein of shit as “a few thousand days” imo - something that’s a great soundbite, easily digestible market speak, but if you actually look at the substance it’s comprehensive nonsense
Could also be don’t worry about deepseek type messaging that addresses concerns without naming names, to tell us that a drastic reduction in infrastructure costs was foretold by the writing of St Moore and was thus always inevitable on the way to immanentizing the AGI, ἀλληλούϊα.
Yeah, I agree. I think that this argument that is made there is a false. The logic error imo is claiming this statement is true: things get cheaper as they get used more, therefore if we make it used more, it will get cheaper.
The surface claim seems to be the opposite, he says that because of Moore’s law AI rates will soon be at least 10x cheaper and because of Mercury in retrograde this will cause usage to increase muchly. I read that as meaning we should expect to see chatbots pushed in even more places they shouldn’t be even though their capabilities have already stagnated as per observation one.
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
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.
other thread vein: https://awful.systems/comment/6208860
Standard ML or LLM?
just the sort of ML we already see deployed in social media T&S for triage
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.)
