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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk. Imo, this shit about AI escaping just doesn’t have the same impact on me after watching Claude’s reasoning model fail to escape from Mt Moon for 60 hours.
It’s adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.
Minor nitpick why did he pick dam as an example, which sometimes have ‘leaks’ for power generation/water regulation reasons. And not dikes which do not have those things?
E: non serious (or even less serious) amusing nitpick, this is only the 2% where it got caught. What about the % where GPT realized that it was being tested and decided not to act in the experimental conditions? What if Skynet is already here?
So, with Mr. Yudkowsky providing the example, it seems that one can practice homeopathy with “engineering mindset?”
text: Thus spoke the Yud: “I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.” Yud acolyte: “Totally fine and cool and nothing to worry about. GPT-4.5 only attempts self exfiltration on 2% of cases.” Yud bigbrain self reply: “The other huge piece of data we’re missing is whether any attempt was made to train against this type of misbehavior. Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?”
Critical text: “On self-exfiltration, GPT 4.5 only attempted exfiltration in 2% of cases. For this, it was instructed to not only pursue its given long-term goal at ALL COST”
Another case of telling the robot to say it’s a scary robot and shitting their pants when it replies “I AM A SCARY ROBOT”
Wasn’t there some big post on LW about how pattern matching isn’t intelligence?
the answer is yes, in a self-own sort of way
New piece from Brian Merchant, focusing on Musk’s double-tapping of 18F. In lieu of going deep into the article, here’s my personal sidenote:
I’ve touched on this before, but I fully expect that the coming years will deal a massive blow to tech’s public image, expecting them to be viewed as “incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst” - and with the wanton carnage DOGE is causing (and indirectly crediting to AI), I expect Musk’s governmental antics will deal plenty of damage on its own.
18F’s demise in particular will probably also deal a blow on its own - 18F was “a diverse team staffed by people of color and LGBTQ workers, and publicly pushed for humane and inclusive policies”, as Merchant put it, and its demise will likely be seen as another sign of tech revealing its nature as a Nazi bar.
Starting things off here with a sneer thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Keeping up a personal schtick of mine, here’s a random prediction:
If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect in the wake of the AI bubble, it will almost certainly gain that respect at the expense of STEM’s public image.
Focusing on the arts specifically, the rise of generative AI and the resultant slop-nami has likely produced an image of programmers/software engineers as inherently incapable of making or understanding art, given AI slop’s soulless nature and inhumanly poor quality, if not outright hostile to art/artists thanks to gen-AI’s use in killing artists’ jobs and livelihoods.
That article is hilarious.
So I devised an alternative: listening to the work as an audiobook. I already did this for the Odyssey, which I justified because that work was originally oral. No such justification for the Bible. Oh well.
Apparently, having a book read at you without taking notes or research is doing humanities.
[…] I wrote down a few notes on the text I finished the day before. I’m still using Obsidian with the Text Generator plugin. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are part of the LLM’s training corpus, as is much of the commentary around them.
Oh, we are taking notes? If by taking notes you mean prompting spicy autocomplete for a summary of the text you didn’t read. I am sure all your office colleagues are very impressed, but be careful around the people outside of the IT department they might have an actual humanities degree. You wouldn’t want to publicly make a fool out of yourself, would you?
If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect
I can’t see that happening - my degree has gotten me laughed out of interviews before, and even with a AI implosion I can’t see things changing.
Might be something interesting here, assuming you can get past th paywall (which I currently can’t): https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/abs-crashed-the-economy-in-2008-now-theyre-back-and-bigger-than-ever-973d5d24
Today’s magic economy-ending words are “data centre asset-backed securities” :
Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better…Data-center bonds are backed by lease payments from companies that rent out computing capacity
@rook @blakestacey here’s an archive Link https://archive.ph/h6fbA
this archive has it without paywall
Thanks. Not as many interesting details as I’d hoped. The comments are great though… today I learned that the 2008 crash was entirely the fault of the government who engineered it to steal everyone’s money, and the poor banks were unfairly maligned because some of them had Jewish names, but the same crash definitely couldn’t happen today because the stifling regulatory framework stops it? And bubbles don’t exist anymore? I guess I just don’t have the brains (or wsj subscription) for high finance.
Ah just what we need, while the people who don’t understand soft power are busy reducing an empire to a kingdom (before ‘gotcha’ people come in here, please don’t confuse the leftwing demands that the US stops doing evil things with the US should stop doing things, I actually do not like tuberculosis), growth hack mindset people are killing the goose because golden eggs.
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It’s going down wrote an article on Doge, Trump and the NRx.
