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. Also, happy 4th July in advance…I guess.)
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:
Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it’s giving them a moderate advantage
That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery (“nuts”, “shove your concern up your ass”) and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects
Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists
But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is “like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw”
Whatever
New blogpost from Iris Meredith: Vulgar, horny and threatening, a how-to guide on opposing the tech industry
HPE buys Juniper. Fuck.
The extreme hypercentralisation really does suck :|
This is golden: https://soundcloud.com/ericwbailey/rfc-2119
Comic Book Guy energy
God I remember having to cite RFC at other vendors when I worked in support and it was never not a pain in the ass to try and find the right line that described the appropriate feature. And then when I was done I knew I sounded like this even as I hit send anyway.
Stop killing games has hit the orange site. Of course, someone is very distressed by the fact that democratic processes exist.
As bad as things are on the Nazi Bar called
TwitterX, you can still find some real gems
New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:
You want my opinion, Zitron’s on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.
For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:
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On one front, they’re gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires’ bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires’ attempts to destroy labour once and for all.
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On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.
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On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, “literally cannot tell good from bad”.
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the model-based screening (which we’ve occasionally remarked on here before) has become enough of a thing that it’s hitting news
Micro-sneer, inspired by this article on Swedish public service broadcasting
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/anna-bjorklund-folk-uppfattar-barn-som-valdigt-jobbiga
The background is that the center-RIGHT gov of Sweden is gonna put up an investigation (“utredning”) into why people aren’t getting (the RIGHT kind of) kids. Nothing new there, simply the same culture war fretting already percolating in the anglosphere.
Finland already has an investigation ongoing, and the spokesperson there raises the point that one societal change that’s happened in the last 25 years is… social media.
Wouldn’t it be delicious if it could be proved that Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok are the reasons people don’t get into relationships and have kids? Eat that, Elon!
Can’t they just re-release Kris I befolkningsfrågan? Tried and tested solutions like full employment policies, cheap houses, more support and money for parents.
Or is kids not all that important if it means having to improve conditions for ordinary people?
Scandinavian fathers and sons are famously not close.
Could be court shows / Maury Povich type shows / murder shows.
Watch enough of those and you’re not going to want to have anything to do with humans.
I have 3 kids, 1 bio and 2 bonus, and man it’s a lot of work. (youngest is technically an adult but de facto…)
I also feel there’s insane pressure nowadays not just to have a kid but to have the perfect kid - great childhood, great education - and if you miss just one PTA meeting you’re branded for life
Dr. Abeba Birhane got an AI True Believertm email recently, and shared it on Bluesky:
You want my opinion, I fully support acausal robot deicide, and think AI rights advocates can go fuck themselves.
Don’t make me tap the sign:
no gods, no kings
Unfortunately, I like my sanity and don’t want to delve far enough into the concept of “awarenaut” to form an opinion, so we’re just going to enact a default-deny policy on all that as well
Aella popped up on doomscroll - https://youtu.be/r7WL6kaTJnw
E: oh man the comments are great
E2:
1:08:02 There’s a lot of discussions among the rationalist community about the uneven distribution of IQ and its correlation with race. Why is this a topic that people fixate on if they’re also convinced that this ultra intelligence an AGI that’s like smarter than every human on the planet why are these marginal differences so important to people?
Highlights from the comments: @wjpmitchell3 writes,
Actual psychology researcher: the problem with IQ is A) We don’t really know what it’s measuring, B.) We don’t really know how it’s useful, C.) We don’t really know how context-specific it is, D.) When people make arguments about IQ, it’s often couched around prejudiced ulterior motives. No one actually cares about IQ; they care about what it’s a proxy measure of and we don’t have good evidence yet to say “This is a reliable and broadly-encompassing representation of intelligence.” or whatever else, so if you are trying to use IQ differences to say that there are race differences in intelligence, you have no grounds. The best you can say is there are race differences in this proxy measure that we’re still trying to understand. It’s dangerous to use an unreliable and possibly inaccurate representation of a phenomena to make policy changes or inform decisions around race. The evidence threshold has to be extremely high because we’re entering sensitive ethical spaces, which is something that rationalist don’t do well in because their utilitarian calculus has difficulty capturing the intangibles.
@arnoldkotlyarevsky383 says,
Nothing wrong with being self educated but she comes across as being not as far along as you would want someone to be in their self-education before being given a platform.
@User123456767 observes,
You can kind of tell she grew up as a Calvinist because she still seems to think she’s part of the elect she’s just replaced an actual big G God with some sort of AI God.
@jaredsarnie3712 begins,
I feel like so much of what she says boils down to finding bizarre hypothetical situations where child sexual abuse is morally acceptable.
And from @Fruuuuuuuuuck:
Doomscroll gooner arc
One thing I have wondered about. The rats always have that graphic of the IQ of Einstein vs the village idiot being almost imperceptible vs the IQ of the super robo god. If that’s the case, why the hell do we only want our best and brightest doing “alignment research”? The village idiot should be almost just as good!
Alright that’s it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing (note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don’t open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)
https://bsky.app/profile/pixeldoesthings.bsky.social/post/3lswcbtkwec2t
Alright that’s it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing
Fansubs are openly doing it for the love of the anime, so chances are they’d avoid AI slop like the plague (though the CHUDs would be okay with ChatGPT subs if it meant avoiding The Woketm)
(note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don’t open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)
Good thing I’m a fucking NEET, then
Actually burst a blood vessel last weekend raging. Gary Marcus was bragging about his prediction record in 2024 being flawless
Gary continuing to have the largest ego in the world. Stay tuned for his upcoming book “I am God” when 2027 comes around and we are all still alive. Imo some of these are kind of vague and I wouldn’t argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance, but my God the LW crew fucking lost their minds. Habryka wrote a goddamn essay about how Gary was a fucking moron and is a threat to humanity for underplaying the awesome power of super-duper intelligence and a worse forecaster than the big brain rationalist. To be clear Habryka’s objections are overall- extremely fucking nitpicking totally missing the point dogshit in my pov (feel free to judge for yourself)
https://xcancel.com/ohabryka/status/1939017731799687518#m
But what really made me want to drive a drill to the brain was the LW brigade rallying around the claim that AI companies are profitable. Are these people straight up smoking crack? OAI and Anthropic do not make a profit full stop. In fact they are setting billions of VC money on fire?! (strangely, some LWers in the comments seemed genuinely surprised that this was the case when shown the data, just how unaware are these people?) Oliver tires and fails to do Olympic level mental gymnastics by saying TSMC and NVDIA are making money, so therefore AI is extremely profitable. In the same way I presume gambling is extremely profitable for degenerates like me because the casino letting me play is making money. I rank the people of LW as minimally truth seeking and big dumb out of 10. Also weird fun little fact, in Daniel K’s predictions from 2022, he said by 2023 AI companies would be so incredibly profitable that they would be easily recuperating their training cost. So I guess monopoly money that you can’t see in any earnings report is the official party line now?
Gary Marcus has been a solid source of sneer material and debunking of LLM hype, but yeah, you’re right. Gary Marcus has been taking victory laps over a bar set so so low by promptfarmers and promptfondlers. Also, side note, his negativity towards LLM hype shouldn’t be misinterpreted as general skepticism towards all AI… in particular Gary Marcus is pretty optimistic about neurosymbolic hybrid approaches, it’s just his predictions and hypothesizing are pretty reasonable and grounded relative to the sheer insanity of LLM hypsters.
Also, new possible source of sneers in the near future: Gary Marcus has made a lesswrong account and started directly engaging with them: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q2PdrjowtXkYQ5whW/the-best-simple-argument-for-pausing-ai
Predicting in advance: Gary Marcus will be dragged down by lesswrong, not lesswrong dragged up towards sanity. He’ll start to use lesswrong lingo and terminology and using P(some event) based on numbers pulled out of his ass. Maybe he’ll even start to be “charitable” to meet their norms and avoid down votes (I hope not, his snark and contempt are both enjoyable and deserved, but I’m not optimistic based on how the skeptics and critics within lesswrong itself learn to temper and moderate their criticism within the site). Lesswrong will moderately upvote his posts when he is sufficiently deferential to their norms and window of acceptable ideas, but won’t actually learn much from him.
gross. You’d think the guy running the site directly insulting him would make him realize maybe lw simply aint it
I wouldn’t argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance
Oh, I would.
I’ve seen people say stuff like “you can’t disagree the models have rapidly advanced” and I’m just like yes I can, here: no they didn’t. If you’re claiming they advanced in any way please show me a metric by which you’re judging it. Are they cheaper? Are they more efficient? Are they able to actually do anything? I want data, I want a chart, I want a proper experiment where the model didn’t have access to the test data when it was being trained and I want that published in a reputable venue. If the advances are so substantial you should be able to give me like five papers that contain this stuff. Absent that I cannot help but think that the claim here is “it vibes better”.
If they’re an AGI believer then the bar is even higher, since in their dictionary an advancement would mean the models getting closer to AGI, at which point I’d be fucked to see the metric by which they describe the distance of their current favourite model to AGI. They can’t even properly define the latter in computer-scientific terms, only vibes.
I advocate for a strict approach, like physicist dismissing any claim containing “quantum” but no maths, I will immediately dismiss any AI claims if you can’t describe the metric you used to evaluate the model and isolate the changes between the old and new version to evaluate their efficacy. You know, the bog-standard shit you always put in any CS systems Experimental section.
To be clear, I strongly disagree with the claim. I haven’t seen any evidence that “reasoning” models actually address any of the core blocking issues- especially reliably working within a given set of constraints/being dependable enough to perform symbolic algorithms/or any serious solution to confabulations. I’m just not going to waste my time with curve pointers who want to die on the hill of NeW sCaLiNG pArAdIgM. They are just too deep in the kool-aid at this point.
It’s kind of a shame to have to downgrade Gary to “not wrong, but kind of a dick” here. Especially because his sneer game as shown at the end there is actually not half bad.
This titbit by Molly White about how whales have captured Polymarket’s “dispute resolution” mechanism had me chuckling
So, Zelenskyy is goth?
An interesting takedown of “superforecasting” from Ben Recht, a 3 part series on his substack where he accuses so called super forecasters of abusing scoring rewards over actually being precogs. First (and least technical) part linked below…
https://www.argmin.net/p/in-defense-of-defensive-forecasting
"The term Defensive Forecasting was coined by Vladimir Vovk, Akimichi Takemura, and Glenn Shafer in a brilliant 2005 paper, crystallizing a general view of decision making that dates back to Abraham Wald. Wald envisions decision making as a game. The two players are the decision maker and Nature, who are in a heated duel. The decision maker wants to choose actions that yield good outcomes no matter what the adversarial Nature chooses to do. Forecasting is a simplified version of this game, where the decisions made have no particular impact and the goal is simply to guess which move Nature will play. Importantly, the forecaster’s goal is not to never be wrong, but instead to be less wrong than everyone else.*
*Yes, I see what I did there."
