Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
the current state of Altman vs Musk
My take on this case is a resounding “everyone sucks here” but I must say I am hoping for OpenAI to lose this, since Scam Slopman deserves to be sacked, and they are very obviously no longer a nonprofit despite what they insist
And the judge sort of snapped. She said very sternly that this trial was not about whether or not artificial intelligence has damaged humanity.
Someone give the judge a honorable sneerclub account.
Not sure if this was posted in prev weeks, just popped on my youtube: purdue cs240 situation is crazy
So several hundred students drop Intro to C after being accused of cheating with AI.
OK so that is like normal at my state U, but the whole part where the chair does a little press conference, quasi-reinstates everyone, blocks the student newspaper from attending, and then some students sneak in and live stream it anyway is pretty comical. And then forcing the prof to file the academic charges forms one-at-a-time takes it into wtf territory.
Haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere, not that I really went looking for it though. I’m just thankful to be out of higher ed.
Note that this is the same school that will require AI as a gen ed iirc.
man if there was a common household chemical, like plastifier, that causes psychosis after couple months of use in small segment of population, you would absolutely hear no end of this [1]. but you see, now it’s an app, oh we’re just throwing hands, can’t do anything about it and it’s but one of inconveniences that we all have to pay for Progress and Glorious Technocratic Future
[1] i’m thinking here of things like phthalates, bisphenol A, PFOA or paraquat, herbicide linked to increased risk of parkinsons and banned in some countries. their harmful effects need a lot of time to show up and are nowhere as dramatic
I don’t want to underplay how bad this is, but did BBC really need to use the “slutty anime witch” image of Ani for that story? Or was that the actual avatar he had set for it? Like, I’m not saying that it changes the problem or makes him less the victim here but it is yet another example of “goddamn why is this cyberpunk dystopia so cringe?”
“In fiction, the main character is often the centre of events,” he says. “The problem is that, sometimes, AI can actually get mixed up about which idea is a fiction and which a reality. So the user might think that they’re having a serious conversation about real life while the AI starts to treat that person’s life as if it’s the plot of a novel.”
This is such a bad way of explaining it. Yikes. The issue is that it’s all improv roleplay, all text is bullshit in the frankfertian sense. It might be accurate — lots of fantasy contains true facts like chairs and tables being made of wood and used for sitting at — but it might be completely divorced from reality and the model cannot know!
Both the rationalists and chatbots in delusion mode offer people the chance to be the main characters in a story and not just part of a team. Organizing lawyers and lobbyists to make chatbot companies’ lives hell over years is much more effective than firebombing an office or stalking a random vehicle which the bot says has a team of corporate assassins inside.
Taka in Japan is a neurologist which I think is a type of MD.
a hackernews vibe-codes their entire desktop environment, half in rust and half in … x86 assembly. I’m thinking why waste the tokens on assembly and not just get the LLM to spit out machine code? Maybe also invent some kind of standardized way of telling the LLM what sequence of machine code instructions to spit out based on the behavior of the software I want, you know, to save tokens. We can call it “GCC”, the “generalized computer controller”.
Showed up first on Lobste.rs (by 42 min by my stats) with the author themselves as a submitter:
most of the discussion is about whether they’re a spammer or a promptfondler.
HN seems more enthusiastic
Another review of Yudkowsky and Soares: if anyone reads it, everyone laughs (sadly, Substack). This one gestures to the whole university of academic fields that a book like this touches on.
The reviewer mentions “The wickedly smart Scott Aaronson” and maybe he means Aaronson’s academic publications because his general blogging is not impressive.
a world where lots of matter and energy was spent on its weird and alien needs, rather than on human beings staying alive and happy and free
Good thing we don’t live in a world like that right guys?
Wow, that’s probably one of the most in-depth critiques of the book I’ve read. Kudos to the OP
I nearly bounced off when I couldn’t tell if his praise of Kissinger (spit) was ironic, but it was ultimately a very well-rounded examination.
He does seem to list Kissinger as one of several “smart people” which is odd for a US military veteran. Lots of nonagenarians with PhDs say stupid shit.
came here to react from the same sentence
A year ago, a local Vermont reporter summarized the manifesto of Zajko the Zizian. She seemed to blame what went wrong on Rationalists + the government + Maximilian Snyder who is accused of killing their former landlord. She denied murdering her parents and wanted the world to know that she and her friends never called themselves Zizians.
A few details that remind us of the horrors we are skirting around. Imprimis:
(The landlord’s friend Thomas) Young said he searched the property after the attack and found used surgical equipment, more than a dozen laptops, and expensive electronics stashed inside the cargo trucks where the alleged assailants lived, which were registered in Vermont.
“It was actually very uncomfortable,” Young said about walking into the trucks. “You kinda wanted to put on a hazmat suit before going into it. It was really just creepy in the extreme.”
II. Another local story about a court appearance.
(A Zizian’s lawyer) Stelzig raised specific concerns that Youngblut’s confidential medical records would be incorrectly opened as part of the case. “Our client was shot and is still receiving frequent medical treatment” in jail, she said, referring to injuries Youngblut sustained in the shootout.
III. Ziz Lasota asked a rhetorical question about what might have happened to missing people who got too close to her:
Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod (sic)? Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility? (Evan Ratliff, Wired)
The medical records might just mention trans stuff or an Asperger’s diagnosis. Sneering has not felt adequate for a while but I don’t know what else to write.
Starting this Stubsack off with a double bill from the tech world.
First, Blender accepted cash and slop commits from Anthropic, and Adobe’d their public image in the process. They put out some corpo-speak to try and quell the mob, but it isn’t working.
Second, FFmpeg put out a showcase of AI’s coding prowess:
