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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt 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 āeuā in āeugenicsā means EW. Donāt get the ick, girls! It literally means good.
So if youāre not into eugenics, that means you must be into dysgenics. Dissing your own genes! OMG girl what
ā¦ 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 doesnāt just get suckerpunched whenever he says anything at someone in public.
Not beating the sexism allegations.
sounds like heās posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school
So, heās essentially Drake if he got into AI doom
The eigenrobot thread heās responding to is characteristically bizarre and gross. Youād 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 āmass sterilisation of a populationā Vs āmass murder of the same populationā, 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 whatās happening compared to anti-miscegenation laws or restricting people to an open-air prison for a few generations. And we can see how thatās 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 arenāt 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 Forestā¦ i.e. moving through completely impassable tiles).
I donāt know how anyone can watch any of the attempts at LLMs playing Pokemon and think (viable) LLM agents are just around the cornerā¦ 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 arenāt showing the modelsā 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 thatās the only part of the whole thing that actually works.
I wouldnāt 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 donāt have to!
āCoPilot gets privileged access to SharePoint so it can index documents, but unlike the regular search feature, it doesnāt 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 wonāt show up in audit logs.ā
The S in CoPilot stands for Security! https://pivotnine.com/the-crux/archive/remembering-f00fs-of-old/"
Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:
Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear heās a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feedās just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.
Itās 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 youāve 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 @ āI try not to let [performance] considerations get in the wayā
Also why do you even put a React Dev on that task š¤”āI try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way
You could show me this without any context whatsoever and my first thought wouldāve been ādid a React dev say thatā
:(
Not advocating violence, but Achewood did demonstrate one possible set of reactions to discovering a Microsoft designer at large in public.
I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:
It doesnāt even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isnāt plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldnāt 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 theyāll always need us because weāre 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 āKeeping up appearancesā itās also the stereotype of fascistsāand by extension LLM loversāhaving trouble (or pretending to) distinguishing signifying and signified.
this is ridiculously good
In a world that chases status, be prestigious
Iāll keep that in mindā¦
I donāt 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 theyāve done, that something else is something I hate.
In the collection of links of what Ive has done in recent years, thereās 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. āI love the idea that after years of ownership you can enjoy a product thatās actually better than the one you bought years before,ā said Ive.
I donāt know, should I laugh, or should I scream, that itās Ive, of all people, saying that.
ED ZITRON
FROM THE TOP ROPE
Hey look, itās this meme for the n-th time
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! Iām rooting for you.
Some quality sneers in Extropicās latest presentation about their thermodynamics hardware. My favorite part was the Founderās mission slide āe/acc maximizes the watts per civilization while Extropic maximizes intelligence per wattā.
Iām 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.
Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:
time amplifying the nonsense around saltmanās orb grift
features a helluva lot of words while at multiple points remaining entirely incurious about the claims it amplifies
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 isnāt improved by zooming deeper into the Bullshit-Mandlebrot Set.
I saw an ad for a local gin festival generated with veo3 and now Iāve 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 consumptionā¦
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 letās 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 spotifyā¦theyāve 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 Rowlingās 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 āoutputā), this simply cannot be compared.
Yes commercial for-profit shareholder-driven lackadaisical āartā 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 haveāmust haveāroom to bring a given vision together.
I think people DO care.
I donāt 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 arenāt that stupid, people arenāt that void of meaning.
this is painfull. you compare lovecraft to rowlingā¦sorryā¦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 āthis simply cannot be compared.ā 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. āMade by humansā != 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 haventā¦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 itās mostly entirely static because anything with a little more movement would look like complete piss.
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 Iāll 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.)ā¦ and Iāve 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.
Iām gonna be polite, but your position is deeply sneerworthy; I donāt really respect folks who donāt 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 āblindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism.ā ā¦ āWe associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesnāt mean they go together in general, for example in animals.ā
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 wonāt be able to resist believing that the AI has feelings and empathy, which could lead to new dangers. āIt will mean that we trust these things more, share more data with them and be more open to persuasion.ā But the greater risk from the illusion of consciousness is a āmoral corrosionā, he says. āIt 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 livesā ā 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 itās 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, Iāll 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 itās 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.
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 āan illusory object of studyā is a standard that helps define pseudoscience in this context. Consider UFOlogy, for example. It arguably āstudiesā things that do exist ā weather balloons, the planet Venus, etc. Pseudoarchaeology āstudiesā actual inscriptions and actual big piles of rocks. Wheat gluten and seed oils do have physical reality. Itās the explanations put forth which are unscientific, while attempting to appeal to the status of science. The āresearchā now sold under the Artificial Intelligence banner has become like Intelligent Design āresearchā: 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 donāt know what you donāt know. Without that, itās 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! Theyāve 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 āAIā will be on the bad side of it.
ā¦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.
you seem to have invented a definition of pseudoscience on the fly
itās not pseudoscience unless itās from the āliterally studying ghostsā region of crankery, otherwise itās just sparklingā¦ actually I donāt know what your point is with all this
