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.)
In case you needed more evidence that the Atlantic is a shitty rag.
The phrase āadorned with academic ornamentationā sounds like damning with faint praise, but apparently they just mean it as actual praise, because the rot has reached their brains.
The implication that Soares / MIRI were doing serious research before is frankly journalist malpractice. Matteo Wong can go pound sand.
It immediately made me wonder about his background. Heās quite young and looks to be just out of college. If I had to guess, Iād say he was probably a member of the EA club at Harvard.
His group chats with Kevin Roose must be epic.
Just earlier this month, he was brushing off all the problems with GPT-5 and saying that āOpenAI is learning from its greatest success.ā He wrapped up a whole story with the following:
At this stage of the AI boom, when every major chatbot is legitimately helpful in numerous ways, benchmarks, science, and rigor feel almost insignificant. What matters is how the chatbot feelsāand, in the case of the Google integrations, that it can span your entire digital life. Before OpenAI builds artificial general intelligenceāa model that can do basically any knowledge work as well as a human, and the first step, in the companyās narrative, toward overhauling the economy and curing all diseaseāit is aiming to build an artificial general assistant. This is a model that aims to do everything, fit for a company that wants to be everywhere.
Weaselly little promptfucker.
also, they misspelled āEliezerā, lol
Iāve created a new godlike AI model. Its the Eliziest yet.
My copy of āthe singularity is nearā also does that btw.
(E: Still looking to confirm that this isnāt just my copy, or it if is common, but when Iām in a library I never think to look for the book, and I donāt think I have ever seen the book anywhere anyway. It is the āour sole responsibilityā¦ā quote, no idea which page, but it was early on in the book. āYudnowskyā).
Image and transcript
Transcript: Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solveā¦[T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from āimpossibleā to āobvious.ā Move a substantial degree upwards and all of them will become obvious.
āELIEZER S. YUDNOWSKY, STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY, 1996
Transcript end.
How little has changed, he has always believed intelligence is magic. Also lol on the āsmallest bitā. Not totally fair to sneer at this as he wrote this when he was 17, but oof being quoted in a book like this will not have been good for Yudkowskys ego.
The Atlantic puts the āshitā in āshitlibā
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gemini isnāt even trying now
Oh, looks like gemini is a fan of the hacky anti-comedy bits from some of my favorite podcasts
The usual suspects are mad about college hillās expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, Iām in bed and canāt be bothered to link at the moment.
Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?
Weird rp wouldnāt be sneer worthy on itās own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), itās contributing factors likeā¦
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the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)
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the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (heās literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)
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the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)
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the fact that Eliezer think itās another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)
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the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of characterās working for literal Hellā¦ is certainly an authorial choice)
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and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)
ā¦At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.
And it shouldnāt be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.
obligatory reminder that ādath ilanā is misspelled āthailandā and I still donāt know why. Working theory is Yud wants to recolonise thailand
Thatās about what I was thinking, Iām completely ok with the weird rpg aspect.
Regarding the second and third point though Iāll admit I thought the whole thing was just yud indulging, I missed that itās also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.
also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.
Always a bad sign when people canāt just let a thing be a thing just for enjoyment, but see everything as the āhustleā (for lack of a better word). Iām reminded of that dating profile we looked at which showed that 99% what he did was related to AI and AI doomerism, even the parties.
I actually think āProject Lawfulā started as Eliezer having fun with glowfic (he has a few other attempts at glowfics that arenāt nearly as wordyā¦ one of them actually almost kind of pokes fun at himself and lesswrong), and then as it took off and the plot took the direction of āhis author insert gives lectures to an audience of adoring slavesā he realized he could use it as an opportunity to squeeze out all the Sequence content he hadnāt bothered writing up in the past decade^ . And thatās why his next attempt at a HPMOR-level masterpiece is an awkward to read rp featuring tons of adult content in a DnD spinoff, and not more fanfiction suitable for optimal reception to the masses.
^(I think Eliezerās writing output dropped a lot in the 2010s compared to when he was writing the sequences and the stuff he has written over the past decade is a lot worse. Like the sequences are all in bite-size chunks, and readable in chunks in sequence, and often rephrase legitimate science in a popular way, and have a transhumanist optimism to them. Whereas his recent writings are tiny little hot takes on twitter and long, winding, rants about why we are all doomed on lesswrong.)
I missed that itās also explicitly meant as rationalist esoterica.
It turns in that direction about 20ish pages inā¦ and spends hundreds of pages on it, greatly inflating the length from what could be a much more readable length. It then gets back to actual plot events after that.
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Iām sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If itās not the implicit racialization of everything, itās the use of the stat systems as a framework for literally masturbatory eugenics fetishization.
You all can keep a stripped-down version of Starfinder as a treat. But if I see any more of this, weāre going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and thatās final.
To be fair to DnD, it is actually more sophisticated than the IQ fetishists, it has 3 stats for mental traits instead of 1!
also: The int-maxxing and overinflated ego of it all reminds me of the red mage from 8-bit theater, a webcomic based on final fantasy about the LW (light warriors) that ran from 2001-2010
E: thinking back on it, reading this webcomic and seeing this character probably in some part inoculated me against people like yud without me knowing
I never read 8bit. I read A Modest Destiny. Wonder how that guy is doing, he always was a bit weird and combative, but when he deleted his blog it was getting very early signs of right wing culture warrior bits (which was ironic considering he burned a us flag).
Never read AMD (and shanāt). The authorās site appears to be live.
8BFās site has been taken over by bots, and I canāt be bothered to find an alternate source. Dead internet go brrrrr. Otherwise, the creator, Brian Clevinger, appears to have had a long career in comics, and has written many things for Marvel.
8BFās site has been taken over by bots, and I canāt be bothered to find an alternate source.
You can find it directly on Brian Clevingerās blog, Nuklear Power. Hereās a direct link to the archive.
Ah thanks! On mobile the main page gets redirected to spam, but the site is navigable from the archive.
Yeah, but he used to have forums, and then a blog, and then no blog and then a blog again, and then a hidden blog etc. Think Howard has only a few minor credits on some games, he always came off as a bit of a weirdly combative nerd who thought he was right and the smartest in the room and didnāt get that people didnāt agree with his definitions/assumptions. He is a big idea guy for example. One of his comics was also called āthe atheist, the agnostic and the assholeā so yeah. The 00ās online comic world was something.
has only a few minor credits[ā¦], he always came off as a bit of a weirdly combative nerd who thought he was right and the smartest in the room and didnāt get that people didnāt agree with his definitions/assumptions. He is a big idea guy for example.
gosh iām sure glad that these kinds of people disappeared from the internet /s
Anyone found with a non-cube platonic solid will be lockerized indefinitely
I would simply learn how to keep āgamesā and ārealityā separate. I actually already know. It helps a lot.
Racists are gonna racist no matter what. They didnāt need TTRPGs around to give them the idea of breaking out the calipers.
Yes but basic dnd does have a lot of racism build in, esp with Gygax not being great on that end (nits make lice he said about how it lawful for paladins to kill orc babies). They did drop the sexism pretty quickly, but no big suprise his daughters were not into it. It certainly helps with the whole hierarchical mindset. My int/level is higher than yours so im better than you stuff. And sadly a lot of people do have trouble keeping both seperate (and even that isnāt always ideal, esp in larps).
But yes this, considering the context ks def a bit of a case of some of their ideologies, or ideological fantasies bleeding through. (Esp considering, Yud has been corrected on his faulty understanding of genetics before).
Weāve definitely sneered at this before, i do not recall if it was known that KP was the cowriter in this weird forum RP fic
E: googling ālintamande kelsey piperā and looking at a reddit post digs up the inactive since 2018 AO3. A total just shy of 130k words, a little marvel stuff, most of it LOTR based, and some of it tagged āVladmir Putin/Sauronā. How fun!
No judgement from me, tbh. Fanfic be fanficking. I aint gonna read that shit tho.
Previous thread
E: we didnāt fucking know
Not sure if anybody noticed the last time, but so they get isekayed into a DND world, which famously runs on some weird form of fantasy feudalism and they expect a random high int person to rule the country somehow? What in the primogenitor is this stuff, you canāt just think yourself into being a king, that is one of the issues with monarchies.
E: ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.
ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.
Hey, write what you know
An encounter of this sort is what drove Lord Vetinari to make a scorpion pit for mimes, probably.
For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yudās coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I donāt know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified ālintamandeā as Kelsey Piper in 2013.
I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:
The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate.
And I got to about here:
Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.
ā¦ before the āwhat the fuck is this fucking shit?ā intensified beyond my ability to care.
Yeah I couldnāt find the strength to even get to the naughty stuff, I gave up after one or two chapters. And Iāve read through all of HPMOR. š
Iām hard-pressed to think of anything else I have tried to read that was comparably impenetrable. At least when we played āexquisite corpseā parlor games on the high-school literary magazine staff, we didnāt pretend that anything we improvised had lasting value.
got sent this image
wonder how many more of these things weāll see before people start having a real bileful response to this (over and above the fact that a number of people have been warning about exactly this outcome for a while now)
(transcript below)
transcript
title: I gave my momās company an Al automation and now she and her coworkers are unemployed
body: So this is eating me alive and I donāt really know where else to put it. I run this little agency that builds these Al agents for staffing firms. Basically the agent pre-screens candidates, pulls the info into a neat report, and sends it back so recruiters donāt waste hours on screening calls. Itās supposed to be a tool, not a replacement.
My mom works at this mid sized recruiting company. Sheās always complained about how long it takes to qualify candidates, so I set them up with one of my agents just to test it. It crushed it. Way faster, way cheaper, and honestly more consistent than most of their team.
Fast forward two months and theyāve quietly laid off almost her whole department. Including my mom. I feel sick. Like I built something that was supposed to help people, and instead it wiped out my momās job and her team. I keep replaying it in my head like I basically automated my own family out of work.
Pressing F for doubt, looks like a marketing scam to me.
Itās pretty screwed up that humble bragging about putting their own mother out of a job is a useful opening to selling a scam-service. At least the people that buy into it will get what they have coming?
that or some kind of bait
I didnāt dig into the post/username at all so I canāt guesstimate likelihood of this! get where youāre coming from
(ā¦I really need to finish my blog relaunch (this thought brought to you by the explication I was about to embark on in this context))
(((itās soon.gif tho!)))
Gonna have to agree with zogwarg here. I checked out the Reddit profile and theyāre a self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose one-man āagencyā has zero clients and yet to even have an idea, attempting to crowdsource the latter on r/entrepreneur.
dude has a post named āfrom 0 to 1 clients in 48hā where someone calls him out for already claiming to have 17 customers, so itās reasonable to assume that this guy is full of shit either way
then again, thereās plenty of clueless, could be real, because welcome to current year, where everything is fake, satire is dead and reuters puts the onion out of the business
āset them up withā
Anybody want to bet if they did it for free?
could go either way tbh
New piece from the Financial Times: Tech utterly dominates markets. Should we worry?
Pulling out a specific point, the articleās noted how market concentration is higher now than it was in the dot-com bubble back in 2000:
You want my overall take, Iām with Zitron - this is quite a narrative shift.
Gary asks the doomers, are you āfeeling the agiā now kids?
To which Daniel K, our favorite guru lets us know that he has officially
moved his goal postsupdated his timeline so now the robogod doesnt wipe us out until the year of our lorde 2029.
It takes a big brain superforecaster to have to admit your four month old rapture prophecy was already off by at least 2 years omegalul
Also, love: updating towards my teammate (lmaou) who cowrote the manifesto but is now saying he never believed it. āThe forecasts that donāt come true were just pranks bro, check my manifold score bro, im def capable of future sight, trustā
look at me, the thinking man, i update myself just like a computer beep boop beep boop
Clown world.
How many times will he need to revise his silly timeline before media figures like Kevin Roose stop treating him like some kind of respectable authority? Actually, I know the answer to that question. Theyāll keep swallowing his garbage until the bubble finally bursts.
āKevin Rooseā? More like Kevin Rube, am I right? Holy shit, I actually am right.
And once it does theyāll quietly stop talking about it for a while to āfocus on the human stories of those affectedā or whatever until the nostalgic retrospectives can start along with the next thing.
So, as I have been on a cult comparison kick lately, how did it work for those doomsday cults when the world didnāt end, and they picked a new date, did they become more radicalized or less? (Iām not sure myself, Iād assume it would be the people disappointed leave, and the rest get worse).
ā¦ prophecies, per se, almost never fail. They are instead component parts of a complex and interwoven belief system which tends to be very resilient to challenge from outsiders. While the rest of us might focus on the accuracy of an isolated claim as a test of a groupās legitimacy, those who are part of that groupāand already accept its whole theologyāmay not be troubled by what seems to them like a minor mismatch. A few people might abandon the group, typically the newest or least-committed adherents, but the vast majority experience little cognitive dissonance and so make only minor adjustments to their beliefs. They carry on, often feeling more spiritually enriched as a result.
When Prophecy Fails is worth the read just for the narrative, he literally had his grad students join a UFO / Dianetics cult and take notes in the bathroom and kept it going for months. Really impressive amount of shoe leather compared to most modern psych research.
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Meanwhile on /r/programmingcirclejerk sneering hn:
transcription
OP: We keep talking about āAI replacing coders,ā but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage weāll need to unlearn.
Comment: The future of coding is jerking off while waiting for AI managers to do your project for you, then retrying the prompt when they get it wrong. If gooning becomes the de facto way to program, maybe expecting to cum will be baggage weāll need to unlearn.
Promptfondlers are tragically close to the point. Like I was saying yesterday about translators the future of programming in AI hell is going to be senior developers using their knowledge and experience to fix the bullshit that the LLM outputs. Whatās going to happen when they retire and thereās nobody with that knowledge and experience to take their place? Iāll have sold off my shares by then, Iām sure.
Ultra-rare NIMBY W
Our Very Good Friends are often likened to Scientology, but have we considered Happy Science and Aum Shinrikyo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
Aum is very apt imo given how it recruited stem types.
aum recruited a lot of people, and also failed at some things that would be presumably easier to do safely than what they did
Meanwhile, Aum had also attempted to manufacture 1,000 assault rifles, but only completed one.[37]
otoh they were also straight up delusional about what they could achieve, including toying with the idea of manufacturing nukes, military gas lasers, and getting and launching Proton rocket. (not exactly grounded for a group of people who couldnāt make AK-74s)
they were also more media savvy in that they didnāt pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they
had entire radio stationrented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)they were also more media savvy in that they didnāt pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they had entire radio station rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)
Its pretty telling about Our Good Friendsā media savviness that it took an all-consuming AI bubble and plenty of help from friends in high places to break into the mainstream.
With all that money sloshing around, Itās only a matter of time before they start cribbing from their neighbors and we get an anime adaptation of HPMoR.
radio transmissions in russia were money shot for aum, and idk if it was a fluke or deliberate strategy. people had for a long time expectation that radio and tv are authoritative, reliable sources (due to censorship that doubled as fact-checker, and about all of it was state-owned) and in 90s every bit of that broke down because of privatization, and now you could get on the air and say anything, with many taking that at face value, as long as you pay up. at the same time there was major economic crisis and cults prey on the desperate. result?
Following the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, two Russian Duma committees began investigations of the Aum ā the Committee on Religious Matters and the Committee on Security Matters. A report from the Security Committee states that the Aumās followers numbered 35,000, with up to 55,000 laymen visiting the sectās seminars sporadically. This contrasts sharply with the numbers in Japan which are 18,000 and 35,000 respectively. The Security Committee report also states that the Russian sect had 5,500 full-time monks who lived in Aum accommodations, usually housing donated by Aum followers. Russian Aum officials, themselves, claim that over 300 people a day attended services in Moscow. The official Russian Duma investigation into the Aum described the cult as a closed, centralized organization.
And how it fused Buddhism with more Christian religions. Considering how often you heard of old hackers being interested in the former.
aum:
Advertising and recruitment activities, dubbed the āAum Salvation planā, included claims of [ā¦] realizing life goals by improving intelligence and positive thinking, and concentrating on what was important at the expense of leisure.
this is in common with both our very good friends and scientology, but i think happy science is much stupider and more in line with srinivasanās network states, in that it has/is an explicitly far-right political organization built in from day one
Yeah, good point.
Network State def has that store-brand Team Rocket vibe.
āAI is obviously gonna one-shot the human limbic system,ā referring to the part of the brain responsible for human emotions. āThat said, I predict ā counter-intuitively ā that it will increase the birth rate!ā he continued without explanation. āMark my words. Also, weāre gonna program it that way.ā
Hereās my idea to increase the birth rate:
Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children wonāt have horrible lives.
groks gunna make u fuck
So why did you have your first child?
Optimus found a gun.
ā¦Iām sure someone has already found and indulged that fetish.
Also, common autobot L; Megatron is a gun.
Ran across a viral post on Bluesky:
Unsurprisingly, the replies and quotes are universally outraged at the news.
Every task you outsource to a machine is a task that you donāt learn how to do.
And school is THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LEARN THINGS, JESUS H. FUCK
New Atlantic article regarding AI, titled āAI Is a Mass-Delusion Eventā. Its primarily about the authorās feelings of confusion and anxiety about the general clusterfuck that is the bubble.
better, or equivalent to, a mass defecation event?
A story in two Skeets - one from a TV writer, one from a software dev:
On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects the AI bubble is gonna turn tech as a whole into a pop-culture punchline - the bubbleās all-consuming nature and wide-ranging harms, plus the industryās relentless hype campaign, have already built a heavy amount of resentment against the industry, and the general public is gonna experience a colossal amount of schadenfreude once it bursts,
Looking at the replies and quotes of a Bluesky post that shared some anti-AI headlines, one definitely gets the sense that a segment of the population will greet the bubble popping with joy not seen since Kissinger died.
I looked through the quotes, and found someone openly hoping human-made work will be more highly valued in the bubbleās wake:
You want my suspicion, I suspect sheās gonna get her wish - with the slop-nami flooding the Internet, human-made work in general is gonna be valued all the more.
Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the āAIā data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use Three Times as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the Entire City Of New Orleans, every year.
https://bsky.app/profile/wolvendamien.bsky.social/post/3lwyxhchxos2g
has to? sigh
it makes me so deeply fucking depressed knowing how much near-abandon infrastructure spending is happening. minor win is that power plants can work for other things too, but it still runs headlong into a pile of other issues (transmission network, generation method side effects, etc etc)
transmission network wonāt even benefit if powerplant is connected directly to dc, and thereās always work to be done on buildup of transmission network
yep exactly - the plant alone is only part of the infra spend, and thereās so much else that matters too
itās just such a fucking terrible way of doing this, and it sucks
Ai scrapers have managed to bypass anubis on codeberg: https://programming.dev/post/35852706
