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.)
OT: just got a job interview and wanted to pass the good vibes on!
Noice!
Girls think the “eu” in “eugenics” means EW. Don’t get the ick, girls! It literally means good.
So if you’re not into eugenics, that means you must be into dysgenics. Dissing your own genes! OMG girl what
… how is this man still able to post from inside the locker he should be stuffed in 24/7
Seeing Yarvin mansplain eugenics really does make one wonder how he doesn’t just get suckerpunched whenever he says anything at someone in public.
Not beating the sexism allegations.
sounds like he’s posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school
So, he’s essentially Drake if he got into AI doom
The eigenrobot thread he’s responding to is characteristically bizarre and gross. You’d think eigenrobot being anti-eugenics is a good thing but he still finds a way to make it suspect. (He believes being unable to make babies is worse than death?)
I think he means “mass sterilisation of a population” Vs “mass murder of the same population”, which is genocide either way, and then he would opt for the faster method.
Or something. Feels extra creepy discussing which genocide is better with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Re: extra creepy: and also with people their people in power.
I mean I guess you can argue that straight up murder has a certain honesty to it? At the same time that is mainly good because it makes it harder to justify what’s happening compared to anti-miscegenation laws or restricting people to an open-air prison for a few generations. And we can see how that’s working out in the current political climate.
A new LLM plays pokemon has started, with o3 this time. It plays moderately faster, and the twitch display UI is a little bit cleaner, so it is less tedious to watch. But in terms of actual ability, so far o3 has made many of the exact same errors as Claude and Gemini including: completely making things up/seeing things that aren’t on the screen (items in Virdian Forest), confused attempts at navigation (it went back and forth on whether the exit to Virdian Forest was in the NE or NW corner), repeating mistakes to itself (both the items and the navigation issues I mentioned), confusing details from other generations of Pokemon (Nidoran learns double kick at level 12 in Fire Red and Leaf Green, but not the original Blue/Yellow), and it has signs of being prone to going on completely batshit tangents (it briefly started getting derailed about sneaking through the tree in Virdian Forest… i.e. moving through completely impassable tiles).
I don’t know how anyone can watch any of the attempts at LLMs playing Pokemon and think (viable) LLM agents are just around the corner… well actually I do know: hopium, cope, cognitive bias, and deliberate deception. The whole LLM playing Pokemon thing is turning into less of a test of LLMs and more entertainment and advertising of the models, and the scaffold are extensive enough and different enough from each other that they really aren’t showing the models’ raw capabilities (which are even worse than I complained about) or comparing them meaningfully.
I like how all of the currently running attempts have been equipped with automatic navigation assistance, i.e. a pathfinding algorithm from the 60s. And that’s the only part of the whole thing that actually works.
I wouldn’t say even that part works so well, given how Mt. Moon is such a major challenge even with all the features like that.
The actual pathfinding algorithm (which is surely just A* search or similar) works just fine; the problem is the LLM which uses it.
Im sure this is fine https://infosec.exchange/@paco/114509218709929701
"Paco Hope #resist @paco@infosec.exchange
OMG. #Microsoft #Copilot bypasses #Sharepoint #security so you don’t have to!
“CoPilot gets privileged access to SharePoint so it can index documents, but unlike the regular search feature, it doesn’t know about or respect any of the access controls you might have set up. You can get CoPilot to just dump out the contents of sensitive documents that it can see, with the bonus feature* that your access won’t show up in audit logs.”
The S in CoPilot stands for Security! https://pivotnine.com/the-crux/archive/remembering-f00fs-of-old/"
I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:
It doesn’t even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isn’t plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldn’t do.
New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them
Reminds me something F.D. Signifier said on a music podcast.
Progressives are losing the cultural war in a lot of ways, but they’ll always need us because we’re the ones pushing the boundaries on art, and it turns out, no matter how ghoulish people want to act, everyone has genuine love of fucking awesome art. The true loss condition is being captured by the tools of the master.
Rekindled a desire to maybe try my own blog ^^.
I think beyond “Keeping up appearances” it’s also the stereotype of fascists—and by extension LLM lovers—having trouble (or pretending to) distinguishing signifying and signified.
this is ridiculously good
In a world that chases status, be prestigious
I’ll keep that in mind…
Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:
Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear he’s a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feed’s just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.
It’s not healthy for me to have my biases confirmed like this.
But it lets you adjust your priors so pleasantly!
It also means you can update your priors about your own
biasespredictive instincts being good, allowing you to be more confident in literally everything you’ve ever believed or thought about for half a second. Superpredictors unite!
this one is a joke, i think. he is definitely on the fashy bullshit though
@BlueMonday1984 lol @ “I try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way”
Also why do you even put a React Dev on that task 🤡“I try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way
You could show me this without any context whatsoever and my first thought would’ve been “did a React dev say that”
:(
Not advocating violence, but Achewood did demonstrate one possible set of reactions to discovering a Microsoft designer at large in public.
Hey look, it’s this meme for the n-th time
I don’t get it, how is every one of the most touted people in the AI space among the least credible people in the industry.
Like literally every time its a person whose name I recognize from something else they’ve done, that something else is something I hate.
In the collection of links of what Ive has done in recent years, there’s one to an article about a turntable redesign he worked on, and from that article:
The Sondek LP12 has always been entirely retrofittable and Linn has released 50 modular hardware upgrades to the machine, something that Ive said he appreciates. “I love the idea that after years of ownership you can enjoy a product that’s actually better than the one you bought years before,” said Ive.
I don’t know, should I laugh, or should I scream, that it’s Ive, of all people, saying that.
ED ZITRON
FROM THE TOP ROPE
OT: Welp. Think interview went well. Just waiting for them to check references (oh god) and I should know whats what by Monday.
Good luck! I’m rooting for you.
Some quality sneers in Extropic’s latest presentation about their thermodynamics hardware. My favorite part was the Founder’s mission slide “e/acc maximizes the watts per civilization while Extropic maximizes intelligence per watt”.
I’m not going to watch more than a few seconds but I enjoyed how awkward Beff Jezos is coming across.
is Extropic now claiming to have actually done anything?
Apparently they are going to ship their development kits sometime later this year. He still sounds confusing AF to me and my BS indicator is going off all the time. He also makes incorrect statements (around 9 minutes in) such as
Neural nets came from energy-based models
which makes 0 sense historically. According to Wikipedia, EBMs were first introduced in 2003.
Am I the only person not impressed by veo3? Yeah there are more details yada yada, but the details are still wrong.
The view of the garbage fractal isn’t improved by zooming deeper into the Bullshit-Mandlebrot Set.
I saw an ad for a local gin festival generated with veo3 and now I’ve sworn off gin
Sobering!
Holy hell all the examples I found made me seasick. I am apparently physically incapable of watching veo3 videos.
that is because you can both read and write. the average social media slobbyist does not care. clevage, beats, teeth and consumption…
let us talk about what the difference between animals and humans is. some say it is the art we create. and i wonder if birds have a lower quality output that let’s say taylor swift or jk rowling. have doubts. maybe we are not so fucking special and 99% of media we consume is trash? did you ever check out spotify…they’ve proven ppl love slob by faking companies for jazz labels. and deezer has proven comsumer over 30 dont even access any new music. humans love slob. and your incapability tells me you think you were consuming prime rib before while it was just another industry slob.
Hard disagree, as much as I loathe JK Rowling’s politcal ideas, and the at-times unecessary cruelty found in the HP novels, it still shaped a large part of the imaginary world of a generation. As beautiful as bird songs are (who the hell refers to birdsong as “output”), this simply cannot be compared.
Yes commercial for-profit shareholder-driven lackadaisical “art” is already an insult to life and creativity, but a fully-or-mostly automated slop machine is an infinitely worse one.
Even in the sloppiest of arts I have watched, the humanity still shines through, people still made choice, even subjected to crazy uninispired didacts from above, the hands that fashion books, movies, music, video-games, tv-shows still have—must have—room to bring a given vision together.
I think people DO care.
I don’t know exactly what you wanted to say, if you wanted to express despair, cynisism, nihilishm or something else, but I would encourage you not to give up hope with humanity, people aren’t that stupid, people aren’t that void of meaning.
this is painfull. you compare lovecraft to rowling…sorry…no. she didnt come up with a backstory for most characters. hell no.
Oh no! I wasted my time on Troll. Typical.
just because your arguments dont stick doesnt make no one a troll. you hallucinate “this simply cannot be compared.” and then overvalue humans again and again.
Even in the sloppiest of arts I have watched, the humanity still shines through,
No. again you declare something art without the proof what makes this art. It is not art if someone is able to play a beat on old cans. It is a profession or skill. And that is all I ever saw from jkrowling,dua lipa and all that other human slob. please provide an argument where the sloppy art happend and what made it art. “Made by humans” != art
Dua lipa on the other hand is absolute slob - it made the existing art worse. Not only do all songs sound the same, they are also not original. Yet the fanarmy will use exactly your way of reasoning. pathetic. Do dua lipa fans care? so far they obviously havent…it is all old products from the industry revamped with studio1 and a human with zero personality. People DO care, right?
Looks like shit and it’s mostly entirely static because anything with a little more movement would look like complete piss.
time amplifying the nonsense around saltman’s orb grift
features a helluva lot of words while at multiple points remaining entirely incurious about the claims it amplifies
Another critihype article from the BBC, with far too much credulousness at the idea behind supposed AI consciousness at the cost of covering the harms of AI as things stand, e.g. the privacy, environmental, data set bias problems:
Tried to read it, ended up glazing over after the first or second paragraph, so I’ll fire off a hot take and call it a day:
Artificial intelligence is a pseudoscience, and it should be treated as such.
Every AI winter, the label AI becomes unwanted and people go with other terms (expert systems, machine learning, etc.)… and I’ve come around to thinking this is a good thing, as it forces people to specify what it is they actually mean, instead of using a nebulous label with many science fiction connotations that lumps together decent approaches and paradigms with complete garbage and everything in between.
I’m gonna be polite, but your position is deeply sneerworthy; I don’t really respect folks who don’t read. The article has quite a few quotes from neuroscientist Anil Seth (not to be confused with AI booster Anil Dash) who says that consciousness can be explained via neuroscience as a sort of post-hoc rationalizing hallucination akin to the multiple-drafts model; his POV helps deflate the AI hype. Quote:
There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious. Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as “blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism.” … “We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn’t mean they go together in general, for example in animals.”
At the end of the article, another quote explains that Seth is broadly aligned with us about the dangers:
In just a few years, we may well be living in a world populated by humanoid robots and deepfakes that seem conscious, according to Prof Seth. He worries that we won’t be able to resist believing that the AI has feelings and empathy, which could lead to new dangers. “It will mean that we trust these things more, share more data with them and be more open to persuasion.” But the greater risk from the illusion of consciousness is a “moral corrosion”, he says. “It will distort our moral priorities by making us devote more of our resources to caring for these systems at the expense of the real things in our lives” – meaning that we might have compassion for robots, but care less for other humans.
A pseudoscience has an illusory object of study. For example, parapsychology studies non-existent energy fields outside the Standard Model, and criminology asserts that not only do minds exist but some minds are criminal and some are not. Robotics/cybernetics/artificial intelligence studies control loops and systems with feedback, which do actually exist; further, the study of robots directly leads to improved safety in workplaces where robots can crush employees, so it’s a useful science even if it turns out to be ill-founded. I think that your complaint would be better directed at specific AGI position papers published by techbros, but that would require reading. Still, I’ll try to salvage your position:
Any field of study which presupposes that a mind is a discrete isolated event in spacetime is a pseudoscience. That is, fields oriented around neurology are scientific, but fields oriented around psychology are pseudoscientific. This position has no open evidence against it (because it’s definitional!) and aligns with the expectations of Seth and others. It is compatible with definitions of mind given by Dennett and Hofstadter. It immediately forecloses the possibility that a computer can think or feel like humans; at best, maybe a computer could slowly poorly emulate a connectome.
you seem to have invented a definition of pseudoscience on the fly
No, I think BlueMonday is being reasonable. The article has some quotes from scientists with actually relevant expertise, but it uncritically mixes them with LLM hype and speculation in a typical both sides sort of thing that gives lay readers the (false) impression that both sides are equal. This sort of journalism may appear balanced, but it ultimately has contributed to all kinds of controversies (from Global Warming to Intelligent Design to medical pseudoscience) where the viewpoints of cranks and uninformed busybodies and autodidacts of questionable ability and deliberate fraudsters get presented equally with actually educated and researched viewpoints.
Having now read the thing myself, I agree that the BBC is serving up criti-hype and false balance.
I am not sure that having “an illusory object of study” is a standard that helps define pseudoscience in this context. Consider UFOlogy, for example. It arguably “studies” things that do exist — weather balloons, the planet Venus, etc. Pseudoarchaeology “studies” actual inscriptions and actual big piles of rocks. Wheat gluten and seed oils do have physical reality. It’s the explanations put forth which are unscientific, while attempting to appeal to the status of science. The “research” now sold under the Artificial Intelligence banner has become like Intelligent Design “research”: Computers exist, just like bacterial flagella exist, but the claims about them are untethered.
Scientists and philosophers have spilled a tanker truck of ink about the question of how to demarcate science from non-science or define pseudoscience rigorously. But we can bypass all that, because the basic issue is in fact very simple. One of the most fundamental parts of living a scientific life is admitting that you don’t know what you don’t know. Without that, it’s well-nigh impossible to do the work. Meanwhile, the generative AI industry is built on doing exactly the opposite. By its very nature, it generates slop that sounds confident. It is, intrinsically and fundamentally, anti-science.
Now, on top of that, while being anti-science the AI industry also mimics the form of science. Look at all the shiny PDFs! They’ve got numbers in them and everything. Tables and plots and benchmarks! I think that any anti-science activity that steals the outward habits of science for its own purposes will qualify as pseudoscience, by any sensible definition of pseudoscience. In other words, wherever we draw the line or paint the gray area, modern “AI” will be on the bad side of it.
…fields oriented around neurology are scientific, but fields oriented around psychology are pseudoscientific.
When a good man gazes into the palantir and sees L Ron Hubbard looking back
To be fair I also believe psychology is by and large pseudoscience, but the answer to it is sociology, not the MRI gang.
There are parts of the field that have major problems, like the sorts of studies that get done on 20 student volunteers and then get turned into a pop psychology factoid that gets tossed around and over-generalized while the original study fails to replicate, but there are parts that are actually good science.
Incomplete sneer, ten-yard penalty. First down, plus coach has to go read Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being (Oakley & Halligan, 2017) to see what psychology thinks of itself once the evidence is rounded up in one place.
not sure Frontiers apologetics is it chief
Touting neuroscience as especially informed and scientific about minds is very brave.
it’s not pseudoscience unless it’s from the “literally studying ghosts” region of crankery, otherwise it’s just sparkling… actually I don’t know what your point is with all this
Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:
