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.
Yall ready for another round of LessWrong edit wars on Wikipedia? This time with a wider list of topics!
On the very slightly merciful upside… the lesswronger recommends “If you want to work on a new page, discuss with the community first by going to the talk page of a related topic or meta-page.” and “In general, you shouldn’t post before you understand Wikipedia rules, norms, and guidelines.” so they are ahead of the previous calls made on Lesswrong for Wikipedia edit-wars.
On the downside, they’ve got a laundry list of lesswrong jargon they want Wikipedia articles for. Even one of the lesswrongers responding to them points out these terms are a bit on the under-defined side:
Speaking as a self-identified agent foundations researcher, I don’t think agent foundations can be said to exist yet. It’s more of an aspiration than a field. If someone wrote a wikipedia page for it, it would just be that person’s opinion on what agent foundations should look like.
PS: We also think that there existing a wiki page for the field that one is working in increases one’s credibility to outsiders - i.e. if you tell someone that you’re working in AI Control, and the only pages linked are from LessWrong and Arxiv, this might not be a good look.
Aha so OP is just hoping no one will bother reading the sources listed on the article…
Iris van-Rooij found AI slop in the wild (determining it as such by how it mangled a word’s definition) and went on find multiple other cases. She’s written a blog post about this, titled “AI slop and the destruction of knowledge”.
“usecase” is a cursed term. It’s an inverted fnord that lets the reader know that whatever follows can be safely ignored.
names for genai people I know of so far: promptfans, promptfondlers, sloppers, autoplagues, and botlickers
any others out there?
cogsuckers
Ice cream head of artificial intelligence
clanker
edit: this may be used to refer to the chatbots themselves, rather than those who fondle chatbots
clanker wanker
UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought
The part of data centers using to much water is apparently old emails.
It gets worse, as the advisory doesn’t even mention to delete emails/pictures from the cloud, so the people who are likely to listen to these kinds of advices are also the people who are the least likely to understand why this is a bad idea and will delete their local stuff. (And that is ignoring that opening your email/gallery to delete stuff costs more than keeping it in storage where it isn’t accessed).
"HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME
- Install a rain butt [hehehe] to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
… [other advice removed] - Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems."
- Install a rain butt [hehehe] to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
lol, lmao: as if any cloud service had any intention at all of actually deleting data instead of tombstoning it for arbitrary lengths of time. (And that’s the least stupid factor in this whole scheme; is this satire? Nobody seems to be able to tell me)
Every email you don’t delete is another dead fish, or another pasture unwatered. That promotional offer sent to your inbox that you ignored but did not dispose of means creeks will run dry. That evite for a party thrown by an acquaintance you don’t particularly like that you did not drop into the trash means a marathon runner will go thirsty as the nectar of life so required is absent, consumed instead by the result of your inbox neglect.
Looks like the bologna engine generated some balogna.
New Blood in the Machine about GPT-5’s dumpster fire launch: GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter?
Ozy Brennan tries to explain why “rationalism” spawns so many cults.
One of the reasons they give is “a dangerous sense of grandiosity”.
the actual process of saving the world is not very glamorous. It involves filling out paperwork, making small tweaks to code, running A/B tests on Twitter posts.
Yep, you heard it right. Shitposting and inconsequential code are the proper way to save the world.
JFC
Agency and taking ideas seriously aren’t bad. Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work and only hypochondriacs worried about covid; rationalists were some of the first people to warn about the threat of artificial intelligence.
First off, anyone not entirely into MAGA/Qanon agreed that masks probably helped more than hurt. Saying rats were outliers is ludicrous.
Second, rats don’t take real threats of GenAI seriously - infosphere pollution, surveillance, autopropaganda - they just care about the magical future Sky Robot.
Unfortunately, in the spring of 2020, the CDC was discouraging people from wearing masks, and was saying masking would do more harm than good:
U.S. health authorities had discouraged healthy Americans from wearing facial coverings for weeks, saying they were likely to do more harm than good in the fight against the coronavirus — but now, as researchers have learned more about how the highly contagious virus spreads, officials have changed their recommendations.
U.S. health authorities have long maintained that face masks should be reserved only for medical professionals and patients suffering from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus. The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country’s alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
I pretty clearly remember the mainstream media and various liberal talking heads telling people not to mask up back then - mostly because the US was completely unprepared for a pandemic, and they thought they had to discourage people from buying masks to make sure hospitals would have enough.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they’d stockpiled for a pandemic, warning each other COVID was much more contagious and lethal than the government wanted to admit, passing around conspiracy theories about millions of deaths in China covered up by the CCP, and patting themselves on the back for stockpiling masks before the government took them off the shelf.
Then some analyst told Trump that letting COVID spread unchecked would hurt blue states worse than red states, so he had Fox News start anti-masking talking points, and all those conservative foot soldiers put away their masks and became super spreaders for Jesus.
But yeah. During that period from like January to March 2020, the political division around COVID was basically the opposite of what it became, and I can easily believe some “rationalists” were calling bullshit on the CDC suddenly telling people not to buy masks.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they’d stockpiled for a pandemic
This included Scott ssc btw. Who also claimed that stopping smoking helped against cov. Not that he had any proof (the medical science at the time even falsely (it came out later) claimed smoking helped agains covid). But only the CDC gets judged, not the ingroup.
And other Scott blamed people who sneer for making covid worse. (While at sneerclub we were going, take this seriously and wear a mask).
So annoying Rationalists are trying to spin this into a win for themselves. (They also were not early, their warnings matched the warnings of the WHO, looked into the timelines last time this was talked about).
That’s how I remember it too. Also the context about conserving N95 masks always feels like it gets lost. Like, predictably so and I think there’s definitely room to criticize the CDC’s messaging and handling there, but the actual facts here aren’t as absurd as the current fight would imply. The argument was:
- With the small droplet size, most basic fabric masks offer very limited protection, if any.
- The masks that are effective, like N95 masks, are only available in very limited quantities.
- If everyone panic-buys N95 the way they did toilet paper it will mean that the people who are least able to avoid exposure i.e. doctors and medical frontliners are at best going to wildly overpay and at worst won’t be able to keep supplied.
- Therefore, most people shouldn’t worry about masking at this stage, and focus on other measures like social distancing and staying the fuck home.
I think later research cast some doubt on point 1, but 2-4 are still pretty solid given the circumstances that we (collectively) found ourselves in.
But doctor, I am L7 twitter manager Pagliacci
oldskool OSI appmanager is oldskool
(…sorry)
I’m gonna need this one explained, boss
(in networking it’s common terminology to refer to “Lx” by numerical reference, and broadly understood to be in reference to this)
Aaaaa gotcha. It’s probably obvious but in my case I meant L7 manager as in “level 7 manager”, a high tier managerial position at twitter, probably. I don’t know what exact tiering system twitter uses but I know other companies might use “Lx” to designate a level.
I figured, but I couldn’t just let a terrible pun slip me by!
I have not tried it yet, but apparently there is an open source alternative for github called https://codeberg.org/. Might be useful.
It’ll probably earn a lot of users if and when Github goes down the shitter. They’ve publicly stood with marginalised users before, so they’re already in my good books.
It’ll probably earn a lot of users if and when Github goes down the shitter.
I’d argue GH is well on it’s way, probably jumped around the time Hacktoberfest morphed into a DDoS on maintainers. Or maybe more recently, when they handed peoples repos (and API keys lol) over to Copilot. Or maybe earlier, when they started calling their users “maintainers” instead of “developers”. Sometime in the last 6 years though.
There have been a number of contenders over the years - gitlab, gitea but none of them have been able to brand/market well enough to really to really impact GH or to compete with the subsidized free storage and Actions credits plus switching costs. Even Atlassian / BB is largely irrelevant.
Tante fires off about web search:
There used to be this deal between Google (and other search engines) and the Web: You get to index our stuff, show ads next to them but you link our work. AI Overview and Perplexity and all these systems cancel that deal.
And maybe - for a while - search will also need to die a bit? Make the whole web uncrawlable. Refuse any bots. As an act of resistance to the tech sector as a whole.
On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects webrings and web directories will see a boost in popularity in the coming years - with web search in the shitter and AI crawlers being a major threat, they’re likely your safest and most reliable method of bringing human traffic to your personal site/blog.
Mastodon post linking to the least shocking Ars lede I have seen in a bit. Apparently “reasoning” and “chain of thought” functionality might have been entirely marketing fluff? :shocked pikachu:
Wait, but if they lied about that… what else do they lie about?
“The common people pray for anime memes, healthy vtubers, and a wikipedia article that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of tweets, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. "They never are.”
- George R. R. Martin
I’m still thinking about the article about the NRx party from last week and just how classless (who pours champagne wrong?) and sad it showed them to be, while still being obsessed with their image. Such a sad bunch, their ideas have reached the higher ups of American power and still they obsess about how a journalist (who is dating one of them (he is into the ‘we live in a simulation’, break up with him, you are in danger)) might write something bad about them. (See also how many of these sad sacks got fired/blackballed for just having no internal filter (dressing up gay people as the KKK really?)). The creme de la creme of intellectual thought and they talk and act like a bunch of 4channers. (Yarvin must know this, his shit about how billionaires act must be a bit of projection). I’m talking about this piece: https://archive.ph/gm3Za Sorry to repost it, I just had a ‘layer 2 well done’ reminder and cringed again, fucking larpers (No shade to people who actually larp, seems fun, just cringe to do it irl).
So… apparently Peter Thiel has taken to co-opting fundamentalist Christian terminology to go after Effective Altruism? At least it seems that way from this EA post (warning, I took psychic damage just skimming the lunacy). As far as I can tell, he’s merely co-opting the terminology, Thiel’s blather doesn’t have any connection to any variant of Christian eschatology (whether mainstream or fundamentalist or even obscure wacky fundamentalist), but of course, the majority of the EAs don’t recognize that, or the fact that he is probably targeting them for their (kind of weak to be honest) attempts at getting AI regulated at all, and instead they charitably try to steelman him and figure out if he was a legitimate point. …I wish they could put a tenth of this effort into understanding leftist thought.
Some of the comments are… okay actually, at least by EA standards, but there are still plenty of people willing to defend Thiel
One comment notes some confusion:
I’m still confused about the overall shape of what Thiel believes.
He’s concerned about the antichrist opposing Jesus during Armageddon. But afaik standard theology says that Jesus will win for certain. And revelation says the world will be in disarray and moral decay when the Second Coming happens.
If chaos is inevitable and necessary for Jesus’ return, why is expanding the pre-apocalyptic era with growth/prosperity so important to him?
Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology… possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?
I’m dubious Thiel is actually an ally to anyone worried about permanent dictatorship. He has connections to openly anti-democratic neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, he quotes Nazi lawyer and democracy critic Carl Schmitt on how moments of greatness in politics are when you see your enemy as an enemy, and one of the most famous things he ever said is “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”. Rather I think he is using “totalitarian” to refer to any situation where the government is less economically libertarian than he would like, or “woke” ideas are popular amongst elite tastemakers, even if the polity this is all occurring in is clearly a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian state.
Note this commenter still uses non-confrontational language (“I’m dubious”) even when directly calling Thiel out.
The top comment, though, is just like the main post, extending charitability to complete technofascist insanity. (Warning for psychic damage)
Nice post! I am a pretty close follower of the Thiel Cinematic Universe (ie his various interviews, essays, etc)
I think Thiel is also personally quite motivated (understandably) by wanting to avoid death. This obviously relates to a kind of accelerationist take on AI that sets him against EA, but again, there’s a deeper philosophical difference here. Classic Yudkowsky essays (and a memorable Bostrom short story, video adaptation here) share this strident anti-death, pro-medical-progress attitude (cryonics, etc), as do some philanthropists like Vitalik Buterin. But these days, you don’t hear so much about “FDA delenda est” or anti-aging research from effective altruism. Perhaps there are valid reasons for this (low tractability, perhaps). But some of the arguments given by EAs against aging’s importance are a little weak, IMO (more on this later) – in Thiel’s view, maybe suspiciously weak. This is a weird thing to say, but I think to Thiel, EA looks like a fundamentally statist / fascist ideology, insofar as it is seeking to place the state in a position of central importance, with human individuality / agency / consciousness pushed aside.
As for my personal take on Thiel’s views – I’m often disappointed at the sloppiness (blunt-ness? or low-decoupling-ness?) of his criticisms, which attack the EA for having a problematic “vibe” and political alignment, but without digging into any specific technical points of disagreement. But I do think some of his higher-level, vibe-based critiques have a point.
Thiel is a true believer in Jesus and God. He was raised evangelical. The quirky eschatologist that you’re looking for is René Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.
Edit: I wrote this before clicking on the LW post. This is a decent summary of Girard’s claims as well as how they influence Thiel. I’m quoting West here in order to sneer at Thiel:
Unfortunately (?), Christian society does not let us sacrifice random scapegoats, so we are trapped in an ever-escalating cycle, with only poor substitutes like “cancelling celebrities on Twitter” to release pressure. Girard doesn’t know what to do about this.
Thiel knows what to do about this. After all, he funded Bollea v. Gawker. Instead of letting journalists cancel celebrities, why not cancel journalists instead? Then there’s no longer any journalists to do any cancellation! Similarly, Thiel is confirmed to be a source of funding for Eric Weinstein and believed to fund Sabine Hossenfelder. Instead of letting scientists cancel religious beliefs, why not cancel scientists instead? By directing money through folks with existing social legitimacy, Thiel applies mimesis: pretend to be legitimate and you can shift what is legitimate.
In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it can’t be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open. After all, if AGI is truly to unify humanity, it must unify our moralities and cultures into a single uniformly-acceptable code of conduct. But the only acceptable unification for Thiel is the holistic catholic apostolic one-and-only forever-and-ever church of Jesus, and if AGI is against that then AGI is against Jesus himself.
Is there any more solid evidence of Hossenfelder taking Thielbux, or is this just a guess based on the orbit she moves in: appearing on Michael Shermer’s podcast years after the news broke that he was a sex pest, blurbing the new book edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss, etc.
There’s no solid evidence. (You can put away the attorney, Mr. Thiel.) Experts in the field, in a recent series of interviews with Dave Farina, generally agree that somebody must be funding Hossenfelder. Right now she’s associated with the Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich; her biography there is pretty funny:
Sabine’s current research interest focuses on the role of locality and finetuning in theory development. Locality has been widely considered a lost cause in the foundations of quantum mechanics. A basically unexplored way to maintain locality, however, is the idea of superdeterminism, which has more recently also been re-considered under the name “contextuality”. Superdeterminism is widely believed to be finetuned. One of Sabine’s current research topics is to explore whether this belief is justified. The other main avenue she is pursuing is how superdeterminism can be experimentally tested.
For those not in physics: this is crank shit. To the extent that MCMP funds her at all, they are explicitly pursuing superdeterminism, which is unfalsifiable, unverifiable, doesn’t accord with the web of science, and generally fails to be a serious line of inquiry. Now, does MCMP have enough cash to pay her to make Youtube videos and go on podcasts? We don’t know. So it’s hard to say whether she has funding beyond that.
Oh, wow, that biography is hilariously bad. Contexuality is not the same thing as superdeterminism. And locality is not “a lost cause”. Plenty of people throw around the term quantum nonlocality, but in the smaller population of those who take foundations seriously, many will say that quantum mechanics is local. Most but not all proponents of Copenhagen-ish interpretations say something like, “The moral of Bell’s theorem is that nature needs a non-(local hidden variable) theory. We keep locality and drop the hidden variables. In other words, quantum physics is a local non-(hidden variable) theory.” The Everettians of various flavors also tend to hold onto locality, or try to, while not always agreeing with each other on how to do that. It’s probably only among the Bohmians that you’ll find people insisting that quantum physics means nature is intrinsically nonlocal.
The quirky eschatologist that you’re looking for is René Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.
Thanks for the references. The quirky theology was so outside the range of even the weirder Fundamentalist Christian stuff I didn’t recognize it as such. (And didn’t trust the EA summary because they try so hard to charitably make sense of Thiel).
In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it can’t be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open.
Except the EAs are, on net, opposed to the creation of AGI (albeit they are ineffectual in their opposition). So going after the EAs doesn’t make sense if Thiel is genuinely opposed to inventing AGI faster. So I still think Thiel is just going after the EA’s because he’s libertarian and EA has shifted in the direction of trying to get more government regulation. (As opposed to a coherent theological goal beyond libertarianism). I’ll check out the BtB podcast and see if it changes my mind as to his exact flavor of insanity.
Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology… possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?
Yep, the usefulness of EA is over, they are next on the chopping block. I’d imagine a similar thing will happen to redscare/moldbug if they ever speak out against him.
E: And why would a rich guy be against a “we are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differently” organization. Esp a ‘libertarian’ “I get to do what I want or else” one.
And why would a rich guy be against a “we are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differently” organization.
Well when they are just passively trying to convince the rich guys, they can use the organization to launder reputation or boost ideologies they are in favor of. When the organization actually tries to get regulations passed, even ineffectually, well, that is a threat to the likes of Thiel.
That was what I meant, I was being a bit sarcastic there.
It always struck me as hilarious that the EA/LW crowd could ever affect policy in any way. They’re cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
There’s a mini-freakout over OpenAI deciding to keep GPT-4o active, despite it being more “sycophantic” than GPT-5 (and thus more likely to convince people to do Bad Things) but there’s also the queasy realization that if sycophantic LLMs is what brings in the bucks, nothing is gonna stop LLM companies from offering them. And there’s no way these people can stop it, because they’ve made the deal that LLM companies are gonna be the ones realizing that AI is gonna kill everyone and that’s never gonna happen.
They’re cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
It is kind of sad. They are missing the ideological pieces that would let them carry out activism effectually so instead they’ve gotten used as a free source of crit-hype in the LLM bubble. …except not that sad because they would ignore real AI dangers in favor of their sci-fi scenarios, so I don’t feel too bad for them.
Brian Merchant’s article about that lighthaven gathering really struck me.
The men who EAs think will end the earth were in the building with them, and rather than organize to throw them out a window (or even to just make them mildly uncomfortable), the bayes knowers all gormlessly moped around their twee boutique hotel and cried around some whiteboards.
Absolute hellish brainworms
Yeah that article was one of the things I had mind. It’s the peak of centrist liberalism where EAs and lesswrongers can think these people are literally going to cause mankind’s extinction (or worse) and they can’t even bring themselves to be rude to them. OTOH, if they actually acted coherently on their nominal doomer beliefs, they would be carrying out terrorism on a far greater scale than the Zizians, so maybe it is for the best they are ideologically incapable of direct action.
The ideological version of Mr Burns’s diseases getting in each other’s way
Ooh, do you have a link to share?
Using the term “Antichrist” as a shorthand for “global stable totalitarianism” is A Choice.
I think Leathery Pete might have read too much Left Behind.
tl,dr; Thiel now sees the Christofascists as a more durable grifting base than the EAs, and is looking to change lanes while the temporary coalitions of maximalist Trumpism offer him the opportunity.
I repeat my suspicion that Thiel is not any more sober than Musk, he’s just getting sloppier about keeping it out of the public eye.
I think a big difference between Thiel and Musk, is that Thiel views himself as an “intellectual” and derives prestige “intellectualism”. I don’t believe for a minute he’s genuinely christian, but his wankery about end-of-times eschatology of armageddon = big-left-government, is a a bit too confused to be purely cynical, I think sniffing his own farts feeds his ego.
Of course a man who would promote open doping olympics isn’t sober.
We’re at the point of 100xers giving themselves broken sleep schedules so they can spend tokens optimally.
Inevitably, Anthropic will increase their subscription costs or further restrict usage limits. It feels like they’re giving compute away for free at this point. So when the investor bux start to run dry, I will be ready.
This has to be satire, but oh my god.
Im old enough to recall the polyphasic sleep fad. And how that wrecked people if they ever messed up. (Iirc also turns out very bad implications for long term health).
I’m sorry in advance for posting this meme.
My velocity has increased 10x and I’m shipping features like a cracked ninja now, which is great because my B2B SaaS is still in stealth mode.
Yeah it’s satire, but effective satire means you can never really tell…
Thomasaurus has given their thoughts on using AI, in a journal entry called “I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid)”. Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is one long sneer, with a damning indictment of its effectiveness at the end:
If I lose my job due to AI, it will be because I used it so much it made me lazy and stupid to the point where another human has to replace me and I become unemployable.
I shouldn’t invest time in AI. I should invest more time studying new things that interest me. That’s probably the only way to keep doing this job and, you know, be safe.
