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.
Days since last dangerous humanity ending infohazard discovered by some guy on twitter: 0
did it have sex with him
It told him he was very smart and correct so he had an hypnogasm yes.
(For the people not in the know and who want some more psychic damage, look up Scott and his ‘I can hypnotise you into having orgasms’ blog posts, the man is utterly nuts, and it is really scary how many people seriously follow him).
Looks like he confused “tantrum” with “tantric”
No shame, happens to guys all the time
how the fuck would you explain that to humans who don’t have years of psychic damage
explaining these things to normal humans is how you turn them into humans with years of psychic damage, and I support that mission wholeheartedly
an attempt at a summary:
the dilbert guy, who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him, now also believes he knows a magic incantation to teach hypnosis to a chatbot, and heavily implies the chatbot was able to hypnotize him in turn (presumably into having sex with it)
who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him
Wait I missed this, he believes what?
Now this is doubly funny.
Content warning for this post, you will get psychic damage.
It is worse, he believes he can hypnotize people over the internet into having orgasms. Here is a link to a screenshot, not sure if I’m able to find a archive link. I think he deleted his blog.
E: a tumblr has archive links but it seems he managed to delete the first post.
Hey, haven’t seen a proof of god’s non-existence today yet, thanks!
extreme psychic damage trap
Submissives, I want you to start planning your New Year’s Eve now. Make sure you have some time alone, or some time with a partner who fully accepts your wonderful nature. But most of all, I want you wet, or hard, and especially obedient, starting now. And I want you to know how much I enjoy putting you in this state of mind. It starts now, but will get more intense by Thursday night. Expect to be a quivering, throbbing, wet mess by then.
How did that make you feel?
Queasy.
This is quite literally “creep discovers dirty-talking, thinks it’s a superpower even though he’s terrible at it”.
EDIT: From Part 3:
So today I am only talking to the perhaps 20% of you who were turned off by this series.
Bwahahahaha! That’s some funny shit mate, I’ve seen many bollocks number straight from between them buttocks, but this is fuckin’ choice.
If you see a train entering a tunnel, think of it as nothing but transportation.
Hey mate, I think… I think that’s what most normal people do? I sometimes imagine an action hero standing on top and fighting a villain before the tunnel slams them in the heads but that’s just me. What do you think about, Scott? Don’t answer that. please
On the plus side, this single image does catch one up pretty quickly
If this wasn’t Scott Adams I’d have assumed this was fetish content. Now I don’t know what to think.
Fetish content for the world’s most divorced man.
Is he more divorced than Elon these days? I didn’t think that would be possible
I saw people making fun of this on (the normally absurdly overly credulous) /r/singularity of all places. I guess even hopeful techno-rapture believers have limits to their suspension of disbelief.
At risk of being NSFW, this is an amazing self-own, pardon the pun. Hypnosis via text only works on folks who are fairly suggestible and also very enthusiastic about being hypnotized, because the brain doesn’t “power down” as much machinery as with the more traditional lie-back-on-the-couch setup. The eyes have to stay open, the text-processing center is constantly engaged, and re-reading doesn’t deepen properly because the subject has to have the initiative to scroll or turn the page.
Adams had to have wanted to be hypnotized by a chatbot. And that’s okay! I won’t kinkshame. But this level of engagement has to be voluntary and desired by the subject, which is counter to Adams’ whole approach of hypnosis as mind control.
Yep, was thinking something similar. Dude just posted a public sscce about the effect addressed in the llmentalist article
(The second c there is loadbearing under original interpretation, I guess)
imagine one day buying some shitpost novelty stickers from that one site you heard a friend mention sometime, and then getting them and laughing about it and forgetting it
all too rapidly the years pass: young trees shoot up, older trees start boughing their way past electrical lines, the oldest all already in their position of maximum comfort. whole generations of memes have been born and died. you no longer even get to make fun of your weird aunt for still sending the dancing baby gif (these days it’s all about the autotune clips of a decade ago…)
and then one day you get reminded that the shitpost novelty sticker web store exists by receiving an email from them
what the fuck.
In his twitter thread he’s attempting to troll people in the replies. And not even doing a particularly good job at it. A bold business strategy.
Apparently they also once chained a design into ‘liberal moron’ from what was some political message once in the past, so it isn’t coming from nowhere. Guess it wasn’t an innocent mistake.
yeah stickermule is where I got the bitcoin “it can’t be that stupid” stickers
how annoying
Proton, who I use for mail and various other services, has gone against the wishes of the majority of their userbase as measured by their own survey and implemented an LLM writing assistant in protonmail, which is a real laugh given Proton’s main hook is its services are end-to-end encrypted
(supposedly this piece of shit will run locally if you meet these incredibly high system requirements including a high end GPU or recent, high end Apple M chipset and a privacy-violating Chromium-based browser. otherwise it breaks e2e by sending your emails unencrypted to Proton’s servers, and they do a lot to try to talk over that fact)
Who is the target audience for this?
People who use Proton are privacy-conscious and mostly (I would argue) tech literate, and yet they shove spicy autocomplete that no one ever needed until two years ago and most people don’t want now because it produces complete horseshit, and spellchecking that every browser under then sun has built in by now.
And then they quietly say you need to use Chromium, so the people who use anything but (like, I don’t know, the majority of privacy-conscious folks who should be their main user base, lol) have their e2e broken?
I really hope they catch a raging firestorm for this.
(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)
(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)
don’t feel bad for making the best choice you could with the information of the past. until we get a workable, interoperable, federated, encrypted communication/online services platform, the choice was to recommend one of the centralized e2e providers. we both chose to recommend Proton and they did this shit, but it could have just as easily been tutanota.
now my brain’s going “e2e encrypted federated email but it preferably uses activitypub as a transport and classic email as a fallback, is that anything”
yep! that’s the game they’re playing. I really don’t give a fuck about Proton’s relatively tiny number of enterprise whales, but they make Proton a shitload of money in the short term.
the depressing part is, historically, online services that remain uncompromisingly user-focused tend to stick around roughly forever, while the ones that chase short-term gains and compromise everything else almost always enshittify and fizzle out pretty quick.
Saw this in passing earlier and I just laughed
Until indicated otherwise I’m going to presume it was some bizbro PM/PO/whatever pushing it because they really think it should be there “to be able to compete” (because of some laughably idiotic misunderstanding of their own value proposition and pitch)
Tangent: while I mostly run my own servers and services I did a recent assay on who’s reasonable for service shit. Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit 🤨 and want to dig in more, but also just their product offerings aren’t great. Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look
Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit 🤨 and want to dig in more,
No surprise that folks in anarchist circles are skeptical of Proton ha. That said, I do know quite a few people in the email “industry” who are broadly skeptical of Proton’s general philosophy/approach to email security, and the way they market their service/offerings.
Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look
Fastmail has a great interface and user experience imo, significantly better than any other web client I’ve tried. That said, they’re not end-to-end encrypted, so they’re not really trying to fill the same niche as Proton/Tuta.
From their website:
Fastmail customers looking for end-to-end encryption can use PGP or s/mime in many popular 3rd party apps. We don’t offer end-to-end encryption in our own apps, as we don’t believe it provides a meaningful increase in security for most users…
If you don’t trust the server, you can’t trust it to load uncompromised code, so you should be using a third party app to do end-to-end encryption, which we fully support. And if you really need end-to-end encryption, we highly recommend you don’t use email at all and use Signal, which was designed for this kind of use case.
I honestly don’t know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff here (I can barely write functional python scripts lol - so please chime in if I’m completely off base), but this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?
Last time I used Tuta the user experience was pretty clunky, but afaik it is E2EE, so it’s probably a better direct alternative to Proton.
re fastmail, david mentioned a thing I wasn’t aware of so they’re off the list now, more or less just going to forget they exist except as a counter-recommendation
this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?
they’re sorta saying “yeah just use external GPG like before”
albeit I will say their reasoning is a bit fucked in the head imo: that “if you can’t trust the server” shit applies equally for whether it’s serving you up the page elements to do message cryptography, or whether it’s serving you up a normal webmail client. I think I know/understand where they meant to go with it, but the wording they picked is quite shit
I set up a tuta domain for a thing about a month ago. it could’ve been a bit smoother (esp. domain/dns state checks) but I didn’t find anything immediately jarringly bad - and I was even drunk at the time (which means my diy-able supergrump comes out about this sort of shit). will see how it goes over some longer use :)
I’ve posted at Proton on Mastodon about this with some details on why it’s real bad; no reply yet
I linked to your masto post on twitter https://x.com/fasterandworse/status/1813994815991980204
I was reported for posting Eamon’s twitter handle on masto
there really are some weird-ass reports from people on fedi sometimes. I imagine it also hits on other platforms, but there we don’t get to see them
I imagine it was reported by proton because they were directly @ in the post :)
fucking wow. so that kinda confirms that:
- that’s Eamon’s alt account he’s using because he’s a fucking coward
- proton fucking sucks and is doing their best to squash this in exactly the way a privacy/security company shouldn’t
in exactly the way privacy/security companies keep doing over and over
Jesus fucking christ…
So where do I switch now? Is this the moment I build my own email server and handle this shit myself? I really don’t wanna…
I use tuta and they seem mostly ok.
they have apparently promised they don’t plan on implementing anything AI-related which is good, though I’m honestly hoping for a system where our privacy isn’t entirely reliant on the promises of a single authority
and I’m not saying we should do our own federated e2e email service, but somebody should
…more realistically, I’ll probably switch to tuta when my proton account nears renewal, as I’m not a fan of how much pure unfiltered horseshit I’m seeing them output with the money I paid them
Setting up an email server is really straightforward with simple-nixos-mailserver, highly recommend. No idea how likely you are to be classified as spam though from a new domain
i host my mail services for the last twenty seven years, and yeah, you’re talking shit. starting the smtp daemon is not the same as managing mail server.
i host my mail services for the last twenty seven years
this is one of the circles of hell Dante didn’t comprehend when he wrote Inferno
coming up on 18y on mine. my postfix config is almost of legal drinking age in a lot of countries.
modern email ecosystem is a fucking mess.
I host my own email and for my day job I run an institutional email system that handles ~50 million messages per week. I can’t recommend hosting email at either end of that scale (or anywhere in between), and I find it difficult to believe that anyone with experience running a mail server would claim it’s reasonable or straightforward.
eh, nix is experiencing a chudpocalypse at the moment, which might be why you’re catching strays
chance is near 100% though
it’s also really, really fucking unpredictable, in the the-other-parties-do-not-reliably-behave-the-same way
used to hate having to debug mail failing to deliver to yahoo, and now lately google has started filling that niche…
Not to downplay what proton mail is doing, but they’re saying that you can run this locally with a 2 core, 4 thread CPU from 2017 (the i3 7100, which is a 7000 series processor), and a RTX 2060, a GPU that was never considered high end. Perhaps they changed the requirements while you weren’t looking. Or Am I reading this wrong?
only one of the 8 computers I own (and I’m not being cheeky here and counting embedded or retro systems, just laptops and desktops) is physically capable of meeting the model’s minimum requirements, and that’s only if I install chromium on the Windows gaming VM my bigger GPU’s dedicated to and access protonmail from there. nothing else I do needs a GPU that big, professional or otherwise — that hardware exists for games and nothing else. compared with the integrated GPUs most people have, a 2060’s fucking massive.
do you see how these incredibly high system requirements (for a webmail client of all things), alongside them already treating the local model as strictly optional, can act as a funnel redirecting people towards the insecure cloud version of the feature? “this feature only works securely on one of the computers where you write mail, at best” feels like a dark pattern to me.
Unfortunately, “extremely expensive” and “high-end” aren’t really synonyms, thanks to, y’know, bitcoin. Of course, I don’t disagree with your argument that having to buy a GPU just to ensure your webmail does what it’s advertised to do is, well, dumb.
What I don’t know is what the LLM even is. Did they just tack on Llama to their webmail app and call it a day? Did they train a model? Was it trained on emails? If so, whose emails? What an advertisement that would be: “Use Protonmail to encrypt your emails so that companies like Protonmail can’t use them to train an LLM.”
David’s article has some details on what the LLM is. I don’t think it’s trained on emails, but that doesn’t make me feel much better.
Ah yes, Alexander’s unnumbered hordes, that endless torrent of humanity that is all but certain to have made a lasting impact on the sparsely populated subcontinent’s collective DNA.
edit: Also, the absolute brain on someone who would think that before entertaining a random recent western ancestor like a grandfather or whateverthefuckjesus.
No, it wasn’t a massive impact by numbers but that superior euro genetics has been floating around waiting to be born like the Kwasitz Haderach.
probably a mix of early Macedonian invasions.
Like his mom?
invasions.
inviasions. Sounds better in Makadonian.
AI Maxers Thrilled with Trump’s Vice President Pick JD Vance
This isn’t really too interesting yet; but something to keep an eye on. As things like blockchain and AI alignment becomes weirdly political it’s likely that sneering will get unpleasantly close to politics at times. And yet sneer we must.
Other self-titled techno-optimists highlighted Vance’s ties to venture capital, Thiel, and Andreessen, saying the “Gray Tribe [is] in control.” Gray Tribe is a reference to a term originating from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog, which points to a group that is neither red (Republican) or Blue (Democrat), but a libertarian, tech savvy alternative.
I really should write more about technofascism while I still have electricity, clean water, a relatively unfractured global information network, and there aren’t too many gunshots outside
deleted by creator
I have an extremely rough draft up on our writing community MoreWrite: here it is. it very much deserves to be restructured and expanded; I wrote this first draft in a hurry, and since then I’ve both gotten some very solid recommendations for prior work in the area to read and cite from @dgerard@awful.systems and I’ve experienced more instances where technofascist methods were used to take control over open source projects away from their communities.
oh I didn’t realize this sub existed, shoulda put my old essay there instead. mb
nah all good! our writing community isn’t meant to be containment, it’s just a different category with different expectations (mainly that feedback should be constructive, since MoreWrite is for writers posting their own work)
But but, tracingwood told us that claiming NRx is close to Rationalism is a lie made up by the evil David G.
God damn, I don’t think I’ve read an article with that many name drops in a while. It’s like a Marvel film but with techfash assholes.
“JD Vance is pro-OSS [open source] AI,” Verdon tweeted. “We are so unfathomably back.”
It’s actually impressive how this guy is able to make me despise him even more every single time he opens his mouth.
it’s all politics? // it always was
Dingus McGee, VP is also a big fan of Yarvin,
Possibly the worst misunderstanding of quantum mechanics I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how anyone managed to convince themselves that the laws of physics are somehow different for conscious observers.
Can an observer be a single photon, or does it have to be a conscious human being?
The former. I’m glad we can stop the article right there and go home.
What the fuck is this question even? What the fuck is “conscious”? Do you think in the double-slit experiment we closed a guy inside the box to watch?
Under this, let’s charitably call it, “interpretation”, the Schrödinger cat analogy makes no sense, surely THE CAT is bloody conscious about ITSELF BEING ALIVE??
there’s so much quantum woo in that article I want to sneer at, but I don’t know anywhere close to enough about quantum physics to do so without showing my entire ass
To me, the most sneerable thing in that article is where they assume a mechanical brain will evolve from ChatGPT and then assume a sufficiently large quantum computer to run it on. And then start figuring out how to port the future mechanical brain to the quantum computer. All to be able to run an old thought experiment that at least I understood as highlighting the absurdity of focusing on the human brain part in the collapse of a wave function.
Once we build two trains that can run near the speed of light we will be able to test some of Einstein’s thought experiments. Better get cracking on how we can get enough coal onboard to run the trains long enough to get the experiments done.
Well a good thing to remember re quantum mechanics, Schrödinger Cat is intended as a thought experiment showing how dumb the view on QM was. So it is always a bit funny to see people extrapolate from that thought experiment without acknowledging the history and issues with it. (But I think that also depends on the various interpretations, and this means I’m showing a cheekily high amount of ass here myself).
Pretty much any mention of a thought experiment in the wild gets my hackles up. “Isn’t it cool that the cat is alive and dead at the same time?” Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!!! Tho to be honest it might just be schrodinger’s cat that comes up. I wish they’d leave the poor cat alone, and stop trying to poison it.
I have a whole series of rants about that cat, starting with how it doesn’t illuminate anything about quantum theory specifically — as opposed to probabilistic or stochastic theories in general — and culminating in “Hey, maybe we should stop naming things after pedo creeps.”
Not surprised that a guy who thinks about poisoning cats is a creep!
What really gets me is that we never look past Schrödinger’s version of the cat. I want us to talk about Bell’s Cat, which cannot be alive or dead due to a contradiction in elementary linear algebra and yet reliably is alive or dead once the box opens. (I guess technically it should be “alive”, “dead”, or “undead”, since we’re talking spin-1 particles.)
There are some interesting ideas in that general direction (wrapping Bell inequalities within different new types of thought experiment, etc.), but some of the people involved have done rather a lot of overselling, and now bringing in talk of “AI” just obscures the whole situation. Which was already obscure enough.
If you want a serious discussion of interpretations of quantum mechanics, here is a transcript of a lecture “Quantum Mechanics in Your Face” which has the best explanation I’ve ever seen. I’d recommend the first 6 of Peter Shor’s Quantum Computation notes (don’t worry they’re each very short) for just enough background to understand the transcript.
awesome! these are going straight to the list of things I should be reading
I honestly think anyone who writes “quantum” in an article should be required to take a linear algebra exam to avoid being instantly sacked
According to one story at least, Wigner eventually concluded that if you take some ideas that physicists widely hold about quantum mechanics as postulates and follow them through to their logical conclusion, then you must conclude that there is a special role for conscious observers. But he took that as a reason to question those assumptions.
(That story comes from Leslie Ballentine reporting a conversation with Wigner in the course of promoting an ensemble interpretation of QM.)
Also there’s a book by Stephen Baxter set in his Xeelee universe which takes this premise for the cult mentality of a terrorist cell
Sorry this doesn’t really add anything, just thought it kinda funny
Yes, the problem with quantum mechanics is it’s not just your Deepak Chopras of the world that get sucked into quantum woo, but even a lot of respectable academics with serious credentials, thus giving credence to these ideas. Quantum mechanics is a context-dependent theory, the properties of systems are context variant. It is not observer-dependent. The observer just occupies their own unique context and since it is context-dependent, they have to describe things from their own context.
It is kind of like velocity in Galilean relativity, you have to take into account reference frame. Two observers in Galilean relativity could disagree on certain things, such as the velocity of an object but the disagreement is not “confusing” because if you understand relativity, you’d know it’s just a difference in reference frame. Nothing important about “observers” here.
I do not understand what is with so many academics in fully understanding that properties of systems can be variant under different reference frames in special relativity, but when it comes to quantum mechanics their heads explode trying to interpret the contextual nature of it and resort to silly claims like saying it proves some fundamental role for the conscious observer. All it shows is that the properties of systems are context variant. There is nothing else.
Once you accept that, then everything else follows. All of the unintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics disappear, you do not need to posit systems in two places at once, some special role for observers, a multiverse, nonlocality, hidden variables, nothing. All the “paradoxes” disappear if you just accept the context variance of the states of systems.
In the spirit of the fondly-remembered “Cloud-to-Butt” plugin, I propose a new tool that transforms mentions of AI and LLMs to something else. But what shape should our word transformer take? While scatology is good shit, I bet we can come up with something more clever than “ChatGPT-to-Poop”
BTW, take 1d6 psychic damage when you realize that Cloud-to-Butt was released more than ten years ago
Edit: Favorite suggestions so far:
-
AI-to-Bob @sc_griffith
-
AI-to-DFE (Dumpster Fire Elemental) @YourNetworkIsHaunted
-
AI-to-Statistics (HN user bitwize - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40024452)
Colonizer Clippy
@o7___o7 @dgerard cloud-to-butt, you say? https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/111007434026223446
Haha that’s a fantastic trophy to have :D
That must have been a glorious day!
ChatGPT-to-third world employee? Bit too long, we prob can find a non-offensive shorter word for that.
ChatGPT to Orphan Crushing Machine?
global southerner? edit: nah I don’t like it.
We could ask a LLM and see what they want us to call them. ;)
a guy named Bob
Hey, this could work…Bob is short and punchy, very butt-like!
AI->Bob
LLM->Robert
Specific Products->Random selection from (Bobby, Bobert, Robby, Boberino, Roberto, Bert, etc)
It’s difficult thinking of something better than butt, or even anything that isn’t butt-adjacent (poop sandwich is my goto)
My pitch would be something garbage related. Hot wet trash, maybe?
Garbage Juice?
Ok my real pitch is: something that can have agency, so that when the word substitution happens, you still have a parseable sentence, most of the time. Take “Garbage Ape” (from the heathcliff comics I guess), for example:
- “I am a Garbage Ape ethicist”
- “It’s Garbage Ape Welfare discussion week”
- “I prompted a Garbage Ape to generate these image”
- “I think Garbage Apes pose a serious existential threat”
- “We’re proud to announce our new Garbage Ape, Steve”
Though it’s hard to pick a thing that conjures the right image.
Dumpster Fire Elemental?
C:// Monkey?
NPNC (Nonplayer Noncharacter)
Dumpster Fire Elemental is great. Could be shortened to just Dumpster Elemental. Then you could have DFE/DE for AGI/AI. But also just DFE in full for everything is good too.
The rest are good but I think a little too in the neighbourhood of AI for me- I want to forget about this substitution, then later encounter an article talking about how dumpster fire elementals are consuming more energy per day than all of europe and wonder what the hell is going on, before remembering I have the plugin installed. But that’s just my stupid opinion :)
DFE just made me think up Directed Finite Generata as a thing and now I am absolutely going to use it on some promptfondlers sometime to make them itch
ooh, those first and last ones have potential!
Do Garbage Apes dream of electric slurp juice?
Followup pitch: Cvnty Regirock: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cunty-regirock-with-a-handbag
thinking “typewriter monkeys”, but maybe that’s too literal
Piss Juicebox (ok that is scatological, this is SO HARD)
My candidates, in no particular order:
- crap
- bullshit
- bollocks
-
speaking of technofascism, we’re at the stage where supposed Democrat billionaires like the Andreesen Horowitz fuckers suddenly come out in support of Trump:
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, says he’s been a Democrat most of his life. He says he has endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
However, he says he’s no longer loyal to the Democratic Party. In the 2024 presidential race, he is supporting and voting for former President Donald Trump. The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech, specifically for the startup ecosystem.
none of this should be surprising, but it should be called out every time it happens, and we’re gonna see it happen a lot in the days ahead. these fuckers finally feel secure in taking their masks off, and that’s not good.
Apparently the “startup ecosystem” matters more than the ecosystem of, you know, actual living things.
These people are just amazingly fucking evil.
Democrat?? AH’s previous hit was the one where they enthusiastically endorsed literally the co-author of the original Fascist manifesto
and a16z does get Yarvin in to dispense wisdom and insight
See, I feel like the Democrats have had a pretty strong technocrat wing that is much more in synch with Neoreaction than people care to acknowledge. As the right shifts towards pursuing the pro-racist anti-women anti-lgbt aspects of their agenda through the courts rather than the ballot box, it seems like the fault lines between the technocratic fascists and the theocratic fascists are thinner than the lines between the techfash and the progressives.
I don’t understand why people take him at face value when he claims he’s always been a Democrat up until now. He’s historically made large contributions to candidates from both parties, but generally more Republicans than Democrats, and also Republican PACs like Protect American Jobs. Here is his personal record.
Since 2023, he picked up and donated ~$20,000,000 to Fairshake, a crypto PAC which predominantly funds candidates running against Democrats.
Has he moved right? Sure. Was he ever left? No, this is the voting record of someone who wants to buy power from candidates belonging to both parties. If it implies anything, it implies he currently finds Republicans to be corruptible.
maybe we should have a social/off topic thread too
HN: I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.
Their goal: robo-feynman:
For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable.
NGL though mostly just sharing this link for the
concept artconcept fart which features a three-armed many fingered woman smiling at an invisible camera.
For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman
Women of the world: um, about that
But just focus on the vibes. This diverse group of young mutants getting an education in the overgrown ruins of this university.
Not sure how it ties into robo-feyman at all but the vibes
smh they gentrified Genosha
Others: unslanted solar panels at ground level in shade under other solar panels, 90-degree water steps (plural), magical mystery staircases and escalator tubes, picture glass that reflects anything it wants to instead of what may actually be in the reflected light path, a whole Background Full Of Ill-Defined Background People because I guess the training set imagery was input at lower pixel density(??), and on stage left we have a group in conversation walking and talking also right on the edge of nowhere in front of them
And that’s all I picked up in about 30-40s of looking
Imagine being the kind of person who thinks this shit is good
So that’s what our kids will look like once society rebuilds after global thermonuclear war!!!
I’m sure they will thank us once we explain that the alternative was GPT-5.
jumping off a roof with an umbrella for a parachute feels tractable
Hey, good news for a change: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/the-workers-at-bethesda-game-studios-have-fully-unionized-163024914.html
Insert the Sickos meme
comment from friend:
Slightly related: now I know when the AI crash is going to happen. Every bottomfeeder recruiter company on LinkedIn is suddenly pushing 2-month contract technical writer positions with AI companies with no product, no strategy, and no idea of how to proceed other than “CEO cashes out.” I suspect the idea is to get all of their documentation together so they can sell their bags of magic beans before the beginning of the holiday season.
sickos.jpg
I have asked if he can send me links to a few of these, I’ll see what I can do with 'em
That seems suspiciously soon, but my impression is based on nothing but vibes — a sense that companies are still buying in.
I think there was a report saying that the most recent quarter still showed a massive infusion of VC cash into the space, but I’m not sure how much of that comes from the fact that a new money sink hasn’t yet started trending in the valley. It wouldn’t surprise me if the griftier founders were looking to cash out before the bubble properly bursts in order to avoid burning bridges with the investors they’ll need to get the next thing rolling.
yeah, i think this is a last gasp or a second-last gasp.
Ed Zitron says it’ll burn by end of the year, but he doesn’t list sources either so idk
We were asking around AI industry peons in March and they all guessed around three quarters too. I woulda put it at maybe two years myself, but I was surprised at so many people all arriving at around three quarters. OTOH, I would say that just in the past few months things are really obviously heading for a trauma.
Perhaps that’s part of why so many SV types are backing Trump. Grifting off Trump may be their fallback after the AI bubble collapses.
I’m severely backlogged on catching up to things but my (total and complete) guess would be something like: all the recent headlines about funding and commitments are almost certainly imprecise in localisation and duration - everyone that “got money” didn’t necessarily get “money” but instead commitments to funding, and “everyone” is a much smaller set of entities that don’t encompass a really wide gallery of entities
So for all the previously-extant promptfondlers/ model dilettantes/etc out there, the writing may indeed have been (and may still be) on the wall ito runway (“startup operating capital remaining available and viable to avoid death”)
Based on the kind of headlines seen (and presuming the above supposition for the sake of argument), and the kind of utterly milquetoast garbage all the interceding months have produced, I don’t think it’s likely that much of the promised money will make it through to this layer/lot either. But that’s entirely a guess at this stage (and I can think of some fairly hefty counter-argument examples that may contribute to countering, not least because of how many people/orgs wouldn’t want to be losing face to fucking this up)
Put me down for “doesn’t think it will end.” Did crypto end?
crypto’s VC investment fell off a cliff after the crash, and that investment is what we were talking about there
hence their pivot to AI
Oh, OK. I think all the VC-adjacent people still really believe in crypto, if it helps. They probably also don’t believe in it, depending on the room. I think it will come back.
they’ve stopped putting fresh money in, but they believe fervently in the massive bags they’re holding
Current flavor AI is certainly getting demystified a lot among enterprise people. Let’s dip our toes into using an LLM to make our hoard of internal documents more accessible, it’s supposed to actually be good at that, right? is slowly giving way to “What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?”
“What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?”
Our BI team is trying to implement some RAG via Microsoft Fabrics and Azure AI search because we need that for whatever reason, and they’ve burned through almost 10k for the first half of the running month already, either because it’s just super expensive or because it’s so terribly documented that they can’t get it to work and have to try again and again. Normal costs are somewhere around 2k for the whole month for traffic + servers + database and I haven’t got the foggiest what’s even going on there.
But someone from the C suite apparently wrote them a blank check because it’s AI …
Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu gather around a newly-opened barrel of vinegar.
Confucius tastes the vinegar and perceives bitterness.
The Buddha tastes the vinegar and perceives sourness.
Lao Tzu tastes the vinegar and perceives sweetness, and he says, “Fellas, I don’t know what this is but it sure as fuck isn’t vinegar. How much did you pay for it?”
RAG
The fuck’s a rag in an AI context
NSFW (including funny example, don't worry)
RAG is “Retrieval-Augmented Generation”. It’s a prompt-engineering technique where we run the prompt through a database query before giving it to the model as context. The results of the query are also included in the context.
In a certain simple and obvious sense, RAG has been part of search for a very long time, and the current innovation is merely using it alongside a hard prompt to a model.
My favorite example of RAG is Generative Agents. The idea is that the RAG query is sent to a database containing personalities, appointments, tasks, hopes, desires, etc. Concretely, here’s a synthetic trace of a RAG chat with Batman, who I like using as a test character because he is relatively two-dimensional. We ask a question, our RAG harness adds three relevant lines from a personality database, and the model generates a response.
> Batman, what's your favorite time of day? Batman thinks to themself: I am vengeance. I am the night. Batman thinks to themself: I strike from the shadows. Batman thinks to themself: I don't play favorites. I don't have preferences. Batman says: I like the night. The twilight. The shadows getting longer.It’s the technique of running a primary search against some other system, then feeding an LLM the top ~25 or so documents and asking it for the specific answer.
So you run a normal query but then run the results through an enshittifier to make sure nothing useful is actually returned to the user.
so, uh, you remember AskJeeves?
(alternative answer: the third buzzword in a row that’s supposed to make LLMs good, after multimodal and multiagent systems absolutely failed to do anything of note)
What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch
I always saw it more as LMGTFYaaS.
Maybe hot take, but I actually feel like the world doesn’t need strictly speaking more documentation tooling at all, LLM / RAG or otherwise.
Companies probably actually need to curate down their documents so that simpler thinks work, then it doesn’t cost ever increasing infrastructure to overcome the problems that previous investment actually literally caused.
Companies probably actually need to curate down their documents so that simpler thinks work, then it doesn’t cost ever increasing infrastructure to overcome the problems that previous investment actually literally caused
Definitely, but the current narrative is that you don’t need to do any of that, as long as you add three spoonfulls of AI into the mix you’ll be as good as.
Then you find out what you actually signed up for is to do all the manual preparation of building an on-premise search engine to query unstructured data, and you still might end up with a tool that’s only slightly better than trying to grep a bunch of pdfs at the same time.
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Mumsnet becomes the latest company to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.
Why AI bros are scraping TERF Island’s Finest I’m not sure, but it’ll be fun to watch the two of them slapfight each other.
Since I went looking for links, I thought I’d include them for others wondering.
Thiel invests in Polymarket: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/polymarket-raises-70m-thiel-founders-140000178.html
Nate Silver joins Polymarket as advisor: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nate-silver-joins-polymarket-ahead-of-2024-election-as-trading-volume-tops-400m-302198424.html
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@Soyweiser @dgerard Everything is clear now!
@Soyweiser @dgerard WOW!!! and Silver wants #Biden to drop out. No collusion there??? Thanks for providing context.
@Soyweiser @dgerard it does track with silver going off the deep end in 2016
He started getting high off his own supply and thinking he could do climate science better than climate scientists back in 2012.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nate-silver-climate-change_b_1909482
@blakestacey I remember him talking about Stacy Abrams election for governor and saying yah maybe all the illegal shit led to her loosing but there isn’t good research and so it doesn’t matter. When that happened my thoughts about him changed a great deal
EU funding cuts to OSS programs in the wake of popularity of Copyright-Unsafe Clippy field
they just really need those GPU hours more than you need to pay for developers or maintainers. I’m sure you understand.
New existential threat developed, we go all in on AGI economically, turns out to not be possible and then the world collapses due to infrastructure rot. I’ll email Yud.
In the vein of collapsing infrastructure, my condolences to anyone dealing with aftermath of Crowdstrike’s big ol fucky wucky. If I were a bad person looking for entertainment, I would seed a conspiracy theory about how today’s cockup is really the result of Rationalist sleeper agents launching a guerilla struggle to strangle the basilisk in its crib.
Question for the experts: do you all suppose this will drive a new cycle of hype around thin clients and network booting?
Question for the experts: do you all suppose this will drive a new cycle of hype around thin clients and network booting?
I don’t think this alone would push towards that (any more than the last few years of “everything is a webapp!!!” have done), but I would love to see people try to hypewave this purely so we get rid of so much fucking fat js garbage
Make it even funnier, AGI launches and then gets taken down because the only maintainer of xzutils left and now every time the AGI tries to run ./killallhumans it segfaults to death.
Somebody installed a crypto miner so deep into the kernel of the AGI that the self modification of the AGI cannot touch it, and it just crawls to a halt. And the cryptocurrency itself is one of those flash in the pan meme currencies that long since went to ~zero.
