Want to wade into the snowy 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 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. Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and happy holidays in general!)
Sunday rant post. I really dislike that so many people are now adopting āelectronsā when they mean power (it is good as a āthis person drinks the coolaidā shibboleth however).
And I was amused to hear people go āAI (by which they meant the recent llm stuff) malware creating will be a risk in the future, look at the drug discovery that AI is already doingā, wonder if drug discovery people have said ālook how great drug discovery will be in the future, look at all the malware development AI is already doingā.
now adopting āelectronsā when they mean power
Definitely have seen salty say this. Whatās next? āQuantum AI development is bottlenecked by waveformsā??? I hate this shit
Sounds like a way to identify people who think of power requirements as energy going in, rather than energy that also has to be dissipated. Wonder how circular the Venn diagram of electron guys vs space datacenter guys is.
energy goes in, energy goes out. you canāt explain that
Imagine how many electrons those space air conditioners must be using!
āI need more electronsā I say as I shuffle my feet on the carpet until my hair turns into a halo. I will take them by force.
Power! Unlimited power! I say as I shoot Force Electrons into the jedi knights.
Nice time - hereās a Swedish dude who constructed a 8m parabolic dish to do EME by hand
News item in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/byggde-atta-meter-parabol-for-att-prata-via-manen
Earth-Moon-Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EarthāMoonāEarth_communication (bonus illustration obviously taken from a primary school science project) Edit malus for long passage in second section second para obviously originally written by a Nazi
Gemini helps a guy increase his google cloud bill 18x
> What guardrails work that donāt depend on constant manual billing checks?
Have you considered not blindly trusting the god damn confabulation machine?
> AI is going to democratize the way people donāt know what theyāre doing
Ok, sometimes you do got to hand it to them
deleted by creator
oof ow my bones why do my bones hurt?
āa man sipping from a bottle labeled ābone hurting juiceā
Its getting hard to track all these AI wins. Is there a web3isgoinggreat.com for AI by now?
The commit message claimed ā60% cost savings.ā
Arnie voice: āYou know when I said I would save you money? I liedā
In the future, Iām going to add āat scaleā to the end of all my fortune cookies.
I am only mildly concerned that rapidly scaling this particular posting gimmick will cause our usually benevolent and forebearing mods to become fed up at scale
Iām a lot more afraid of the recursive effect of this joke. We could have at scale at scale.
Donāt worry, Iām sure Lemmy is perfectly capable of tail call optimization at scale
is that the superexponential growth that lw tried to warn us about?
Yes! at scale at scale at scale at scale
you will experience police brutality very soon, at scale
idea: end of year worst of ai awards. āthe sloppiesā
On a related theme:
man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls
https://bsky.app/profile/jjvincent.bsky.social/post/3mayddynhas2l
From the replies:
Love how confident everyone is ācorrectingā you. Chatgpt is literally my sonās therapist, of course cutting edge AI can empathize with a guy getting kicked in the balls lmao
I donāt want to live on this planet anymore.
this made my day, thx
A pal: āI take back everything I ever said about humanoid robots being uselessā
Andā¦ same
Slop can never win, even at being slop. Best they can do is sloppy seconds.
āTop of the Slopsā
the riversā¦
randomly placed and statistically average, just like real rivers!
I hear they have the biggest bal of tine in Hond.
Aldquaque is what I type, crossing my fingers autocorrect will get that I mean Albequerqere
Aldaquaque is where I took that bleft toin
Albrequerre
Albequirky
god fuck
just type ABQ everybody will know what do you mean
ah, a fellow 1937 poster that gets it
(I still donāt understand how people that post on/across the modern internet havenāt picked up the habit)
whole country is swole, good mirror of the maga mind
What do you expect, itās a mixed-up crazy world where East is West and West is East and ā¦?
My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoftās largest codebases. Our North Star is ā1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of codeā. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, weāve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."
wow, *and* algorithms? i didnāt think anyone had gotten that far
Q: what kind of algorithms does an AI produce
A: the bubble sort
God damn thatās good.
this made me cackle
very nice
I suppose it was inevitable that the insufferable idiocy that software folk inflict on other fields would eventually be turned against their own kind.
alt text
And xkcd comic.
Long haired woman: or field has been struggling with this problem for years!
Laptop wielding techbro: struggle no more! Iām here to solve it with algorithms.
6 months later:
Techbro: this is really hard Woman: You donāt say.
Ah yes, I want to see how they eliminate C++ from the Windows Kernel ā code notoriously so horrific it breaks and reshapes the minds of all who gaze upon it ā with fucking āAIā. Iām sure autoplag will do just fine among the skulls and bones of Those Who Came Before
Before: You were eaten by a grue.
After: Oops, All Grues!
Throw in the rust evangelism and you have a techtakes turducken
If you want a warm and fuzzy Christmas contemplation, imagine turducken production at scale
So maybe Iām just showing my lack of actual dev experience here, but isnāt āmaking code modifications algorithmically at scaleā kind of definitionally the opposite of good software engineering? Like, Iāll grant that stuff is complicated but if youāre making the same or similar changes at some massive scale doesnāt that suggest that you could save time, energy and mental effort by deduplicating somewhere?
This doesnāt directly answer your question but I guess I had a rant in me so I might as well post it. Oops.
Itās possible to write tools that make point changes or incremental changes with targeted algorithms in a well understood problem space that make safe or probably safe changes that get reviewed by humans.
Stuff like turning pointers into smart pointers, reducing string copying, reducing certain classes of runtime crashes, etc. You can do a lot of stuff if you hand-code C++ AST transformations using the clang / llvm tools.
Of course āletās eliminate 100% of our C code with a chatbotā isā¦ a whole other ballgame and sounds completely infeasible except in the happiest of happy paths.
In my experience even simple LLM changes are wrong somewhere around half the time. Often in disturbingly subtle ways that take an expert to spot. Also in my experience if someone reviews LLM code they also tend to just rubber stamp it. So multiply that across thousands of changes and itās a recipe for disaster.
And what about third party libraries? Corporate code bases are built on mountains of MIT licensed C and C++ code, but surely they wonāt all switch languages. Which means theyāll have a bunch of leaf code in C++ and either need a C++ compatible target language, or have to call all the C++ code via subprocess / C ABI / or cross-language wrappers. The former is fine in theory, but Iām not aware of any suitable languages today. The latter can have a huge impact on performance if too much data needs to be serialized and deserialized across this boundary.
Windows in particular also has decades of baked in behavior that programs depend on. Any change in those assumptions and whoops some of your favorite retro windows games donāt work anymore!
In the worst case theyād end up with a big pile of spaghetti that mostly works as it does today but that introduces some extra bugs, is full of code that no one understands, and is completely impossible to change or maintain.
In the best case theyāre mainly using āAIā for marketing purposes, will try to achieve their goals using more or less conventional means, and will ultimately fall short (hopefully not wreaking too much havoc in the progress) and give up halfway and declare the whole thing a glorious success.
Either way ultimately if any kind of large scale rearchitecting that isnāt seen through to the end will cause the codebase to have layers. Thereās the shiny new approach (never finished), the horrors that lie just beneath (also never finished), and the horrors that lie just beneath the horrors (probably written circa 2003). Any new employees start by being told about the shiny new parts. The company will keep a dwindling cohort of people in some dusty corner of the company who have been around long enough to know how the decades of failed code architecture attempts are duct-taped together.
Some of the horrors are also going to be load bearing for some fixes people dont properly realize because the space of computers which can run windows is so vast.
Think something like that happend with twitter, when Musk did his impression of a bull in a china store at the stack, they cut out some code which millions of Indians, who used old phones, needed to access the twitter app.
In my experience even simple LLM changes are wrong somewhere around half the time. Often in disturbingly subtle ways that take an expert to spot.
I just want to add: sailorās reference to āexpertā here is no joke. the amount of wild and subtle UB (undefined behaviour) you get in the C family is extremely high-knowledge stuff. itās the sort of stuff that has in recent years become fashionable to describe as ācursedā, and often with good reason
LLMs being bad at precision and detail is as perfect an antithesis in that picture as I am capable of conceiving. so any thought of a project like this that pairs LLMs (or, more broadly, any of the current generative family of nonsense) as a dependency in itās implementation is just damn wild to me
(and just incase: this post is not an opportunity to quibble about PLT and about what be or become possible.)
The short answer is no. Outside of this context, Iād say the idea of ācode modifications algorithmically at scaleā is the intersection of code generation and code analysis, all of which are integral parts of modern development. That being said, using LLMs to perform large scale refactors is stupid.
This is like the entire fucking genAI-for-coding discourse. Every time someone talks about LLMs in lieu of proper static analysis Iām just likeā¦ Yes, the things you say are of the shape of something real and useful. No, LLMs canāt do it. Have you tried applying your efforts to something that isnāt stupid?
If thereās one thing that coding LLMs do āwellā, itās expose the need in frameworks for code generation. All of the enterprise applications I have worked on in modernity were by volume mostly boilerplate and glue. If a statistically significant portion of a code base is boilerplate and glue, then the magical statistical machine will mirror that.
LLMs may simulate filling this need in some cases but of course are spitting out statistically mid code.
Unfortunately, committing engineering effort to write code that generates code in a reliable fashion doesnāt really capture the imagination of money or else we would be doing that instead of feeding GPUs shit and waiting for digital God to spring forth.
Hmm, sounds like you are suggesting proper static analysis, at scale
I think Iām with Hauntedās intuition in that I donāt really buy code generation. (As in automatic code generation.) My understanding was you build a thing that takes some config and poops out code that does certain behaviour. But could you not build a thing instead, that does the behaviour directly?
I know people who worked on a system like that, and maybe thereās niches where it makes sense. Just seems like it was a SW architecture fad 20 years ago, and some systems are locked into that know. It doesnāt seem like the pinnacle of engineering to me.
Unfortunately, the terms ācode generationā and āautomatic code generationā are too broad to make any sort of value judgment about their constituents. And I think evaluating software in terms of good or bad engineering is very context-dependent.
To speak to the ideas that have been brought up:
āmaking the same or similar changes at some massive scale [ā¦] suggest[s] that you could save time, energy and mental effort by deduplicating somewhereā
So there are many examples of this in real code bases, ranging everywhere from simple to complex changes.
- Simple: changing variable names and documentation strings to be gender neutral (e.g. his/hers -> their) or have non-loaded terms (black/white list -> block/allow list). Not really something youād bother to try and deduplicate, but definitely something youād change on a mass scale with a ācode generation toolā. In this case, the code-generation tool is likely just a script that performs text replacement.
- Less simple: upgrading from a deprecated API (e.g. going from add_one_to(target) to add_to(target, addend)). Anyone should try to de-dupe where they can, but at the end of the day, theyāll probably have some un-generalisable API calls that still can be upgraded automatically. Youāll also have calls that need to be upgraded by hand.
Giving a complex example here isā¦ difficult. Anyway, I hope Iāve been able to illustrate that sometimes you have to use ācode generationā because itās the right tool for the job.
āMy understanding was you build a thing that takes some config and poops out code that does certain behaviour.ā
This hypothetical is a few degrees too abstract. This describes a compiler, for example, where the āconfigā is source code and ācode that does certain behaviourā is the resulting machine code. Yes, you can directly write machine code, but at that point, you probably arenāt doing software engineering at all.
I know that you probably donāt mean a compiler. But unfortunately, itās compilers all the way down. Software is just layers upon layers of abstraction.
Hereās an example: a web page. (NB I am not a web dev and will get details wrong here) You can write html and javascript by hand, but most of the time you donāt do that. Instead, you rely on a web framework and templates to generate the html/javascript for you. I feel like that fits the config concept youāre describing. In this case, the templates and framework (and common css between pages) double as de-duplication.
āBut could you not build a thing instead, that does the behaviour directly?ā
Back in the day NeXTās Interface Builder let you connect up and configure āliveā UI objects, and then freeze-dry them to a file, which would be rehydrated at runtime to recreate those objects (or copies of them if you needed more.)
Apple kept this for a while but doesnāt really do it anymore. There were complications with version control, etc.
I have always felt like NeXT/OS X Interface Builder has serious āpath not takenā energy, but the fact that OpenStep/Cocoa failed to become a generalized multiplatform API, as well as the version control issues for the .nib format (never gave much thought to that, but it makes sense) sadly doomed it. And most mobile apps are glorified web pages, each with their own bespoke interface to maintain ābrand identity,ā so it could be argued thereās less than zero demand there for the flexibility (and complexity!) that Interface Builder could enable.
They now updated this to say it is just a research project and none of it will be going live. Pinky promise (ok, I added the pinky promise bit).
Not just pinkies, my friend, we are promising with all fingers, at scale!
All twelve fingers? Wow.
Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale.
Thereās a lot going on here, but I started by trying to parse this sentence (assuming it wasnāt barfed out by an LLM). Iāve become dissatisfied lately with my own writing being too redundancy-filled and overwrought, showing Iām probably too far out of practice at serious writing, but what is this future Microsoft Fellow even trying to describe here?
at scale
so, ever watched Godzilla? and then did a twofer with a zombie movie? I think thatās essentially the plot here
so what youāre saying is undead kaiju, at scale
lol, Oliver Habryka at Lightcone is sending out begging emails, i found it in my spam folder
(This email is going out to approximately everyone who has ever had an account on LessWrong. Donāt worry, we will send an email like this at most once a year, and you can permanently unsubscribe from all LessWrong emails here)
declared Lightcone Enemy #1 thanks you for your attention in sending me this missive, Mr Habryka
In 2024, FTX sued us to claw back their donations, and around the same time Open Philanthropyās biggest donor asked them to exit our funding area. We almost went bankrupt.
yes thatās because you first tried ignoring FTX instead of talking to them and cutting a deal
that second part means Dustin Moskovitz (the $ behind OpenPhil) is sick of Habrykaās shit too
If you want to learn more, I wrote a 13,000-word retrospective over on LessWrong.
no no thatās fine thanks
We need to raise $2M this year to continue our operations without major cuts, and at least $1.4M to avoid shutting down. We have so far raised ~$720k.
and you canāt even tap into Moskovitz any more? wow sucks dude. guess youāre just not that effective as altruism goes
And to everyone who donated last year: Thank you so much. I do think humanityās future would be in a non-trivially worse position if we had shut down.
you run an overpriced web hosting company and run conferences for race scientists. my bayesian intuition tells me humanity will probably be fine, or perhaps better off.
you run an overpriced web hosting company and run conferences for race scientists. my bayesian intuition tells me humanity will probably be fine, or perhaps better off.
Someone in the comments calls them out: āif owning a $16 million conference centre is critical for the Movement, why did you tell us that you were not responsible for all the racist speakers at Manifest or Sam āAI-go-vroomā Altman at another event because its just a space you rent out?ā
OMG the enemies list has Sam Altman under āthe people who I think have most actively tried to destroy it (LessWrong/the Rationalist movement)ā
āWould you like to know more?ā
āNah, Iām cool.ā
More like
Would you like to know more
I mean, sure
Hereās a 13,000-word retrospective
Ah, nah fam
Ohoho, a beautiful lw begging post on this of all days?
I will never forgive Rob Pike for the creation of the shittiest widely adopted programming language since C++, but I very much enjoy this recent thread where he rages about Anthropic.
I didnāt realize this was part of the rationalist-originated āAI Villageā project. See https://sage-future.org/ and https://theaidigest.org/village. Involved members and advisors include Eli Lifland and Daniel Kokotajlo of āAI 2027ā infamy.
for the creation of the shittiest widely adopted programming language since C++
Hey! JavaScript is objectively worse, thank you very much
JavaScript isnāt even the worst Brendan Eich misdeed!
Okay but thatās more a Brensan Eichs anti-achievement than JavaScript being any good
I strongly disagree. I would much rather write a JavaScript or C++ application than ever touch Rob Pikes abortion of a language. Thankfully, other options are available.
Meh, at least go has a standard library thatās useful forā¦ anything, really
Yes, I like a good standard library its probably one of the reasons why Java and C# are so popular with enterprise software development. They are both languages I consider better than go. You can write horrible code in both of them but unlike with go you arenāt forced to do so because the go clergy has decided that any kind of abstraction is heresy to the gospel of simplicity. Most go code I have seen is anything but simple because it forces you to read through a load of irrelevant implementation details just to find what you are actually looking for.
Digressing: The irony is that itās a language with one of the best standard libraries out there. Wanna run a http reverse proxy with TLS cross compiled for a different os? No problem!
Many times I used it only because of that despite it being a worse language.
Iām also a big fan of the concurrency implementation, I wish other languages made it so easy to use green threads & channels.
Its standard crypto libraries are also second to none.
Other classic Rob Pike moments include spamming Usenet with Markov-chain bots and quoting the Bible to justify not highlighting Go syntax. Watching him have a Biblical meltdown over somebody emailing him generated text is incredibly funny in this context.
Pikeās blow-up has made it to the red site, and its brought promptfondlers out the woodwork.
(Skyview proxy, for anyone without a Bluesky account)
Impressive side fact: looks like they sent him an unsolicited email generated by a fucking llm? An impressive failure to read the fucking room.
Not like that exact bullshit has been attempted on the community at large by other shitheads last year, but then originality was never the clanker wankersā strength
Remember how slatestarcodex argues that non-violence works better as a method of protest? Turns out the research pointing to that is a bit flawed: https://roarmag.org/essays/chenoweth-stephan-nonviolence-myth/
realising that preaching nonviolence is actually fascist propaganda is one of those consequences of getting radicalised/deprogramming from being a liberal. You canāt liberate the camps with a sit-in, for example.
nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action are just tactics that work in specific circumstances and can achieve specific goals. pretty much every violent movement for change was supported by non-violent movements. and non-violence often appears in a form that is unacceptable to the slatestarcodex contingent. Like Daniel Berrigan destroying Vietnam draft cards, or Catholic Workers attacking US warplanes with hammers, or Black Lives Matter activists blocking a highway or Meredith and Verity Burgmann running onto the pitch during a South African rugby match.
yes! To be clear, what I said was lacking nuance. What I meant was: preaching for only non-violence is fucked. And preaching for very limited forms of non-violence is fully fucked, for example, state/police sanctioned āpeacefulā protests as the only form of protest
Itās that classic tweet: āthis is bad for your causeā says a guy who hates your cause and hates you. The slatestarcodex squad didnāt believe there was any reason to protest but thought that if people must protest they should have the decency to do it in a way that didnāt cause them to be 5 minutes late on their way to lunch.
Upvoted, but also consider: boycotts sometimes work. BDS is sufficiently effective that there are retaliatory laws against BDS.
Yes! It also highlights how willing the administration is to clamp down on even non-violence.
Please be nonviolent while I crack your skull
Thanks for posting. The author is provocative for sure, but I found he also wrote a similar polemic about veganism, kinda hard for me to situate it. Might fetch one of his volumes from the stacks during a slow week, probably would get my name put on a list though.
Yeah, dont see me linking to this post by Gelderloos as fully supporting his other stances, more that the whole way Scott says nonviolent movements are better isnt as supported as he says (and also shows Scott never did much activism). So more anti scott than pro Peter ;).
AI researchers are rapidly embracing AI reviews, with the new Stanford Agentic Reviewer. Surely nothing could possibly go wrong!
Hereās the ātech overviewā for their website.
Our agentic reviewer provides rapid feedback to researchers on their work to help them to rapidly iterate and improve their research.
The inspiration for this project was a conversation that one of us had with a student (not from Stanford) that had their research paper rejected 6 times over 3 years. They got a round of feedback roughly every 6 months from the peer review process, and this commentary formed the basis for their next round of revisions. The 6 month iteration cycle was painfully slow, and the noisy reviews ā which were more focused on judging a paperās worth than providing constructive feedback ā gave only a weak signal for where to go next.
How is it, when people try to argue about the magical benefits of AI on a task, it always comes down to arguing āwell actually, humans suck at the task too! Look, humans make mistakes!ā That seems to be the only way they can justify the fact that AI sucks. At least it spews garbage fast!
(Also, this is a little mean, but if someoneās paper got rejected 6 times in a row, perhaps itās time to throw in the towel, accept that the project was never that good in the first place, and try better ideas. Not every idea works out, especially in research.)
When modified to output a 1-10 score by training to mimic ICLR 2025 reviews (which are public), we found that the Spearman correlation (higher is better) between one human reviewer and another is 0.41, whereas the correlation between AI and one human reviewer is 0.42. This suggests the agentic reviewer is approaching human-level performance.
Actually, now all my concerns are now completely gone. They found that one number is bigger than another number, so I take back all of my counterarguments. I now have full faith that this is going to work out.
Reviews are AI generated, and may contain errors.
We had built this for researchers seeking feedback on their work. If you are a reviewer for a conference, we discourage using this in any way that violates the policies of that conference.
Of course, we need the mandatory disclaimers that will definitely be enforced. No reviewer will ever be a lazy bum and use this AI for their actual conference reviews.
the noisy reviews ā which were more focused on judging a paperās worth than providing constructive feedback
dafuq?
Yeah, itās not like reviewers can just write āThis paper is utter trash. Score: 2ā unless ML is somehow an even worse field than I previously thought.
They referenced someone who had a paper get rejected from conferences six times, which to me is an indication that their idea just isnāt that good. I donāt mean this as a personal attack; everyone has bad ideas. Itās just that at some point, you just have to cut your losses with a bad idea and instead use your time to develop better ideas.
So I am suspicious that when they say āconstructive feedbackā, they donāt mean āhow do I make this idea goodā but instead āwhat are the magic words that will get my paper accepted into a conferenceā. ML has become a cutthroat publish-or-perish field, after all. It certainly wonāt help that LLMs are effectively trained to glaze the user at all times.
we found that the Spearman correlation (higher is better) between one human reviewer and another is 0.41
This stinks to high heaven, why would you want these to be more highly correlated? Thereās a reason you assign multiple reviewers, preferably with slightly different backgrounds, to a single paper. Reviews are obviously subjective! Thereās going to be some consensus (especially with very bad papers; really bad papers are always almost universally lowly reviewed, because you know, they suck), but whether a particular reviewer likes what you did and how you presented it is a bit of a lottery.
Also the worth of a review is much more than a 1-10 score, it should contain detailed justification for the reviewers decision so that a meta-reviewer can then look and pinpoint relevant feedback, or even decide that a low-scoring paper is worthwhile and can be published after small changes. All of this is an abstraction, of course a slightly flawed one, but of humans talking to each other. Show your paper to 3 people youāll get 4 different impressions. This is not a bug!
Problem: Reviewers do not provide constructive criticism or at least reasons for paper to be rejected. Solution: Fake it with a clanker.
Genius.
Removed by mod
terrible state of house CO detectors is not an excuse for putting a CO generator in the living room.
me, thinking itās a waste to not smoke indoors because my landlord wonāt fix the CO detectors: oh
(jk I donāt smoke)
Going from lazy, sloppy human reviews to absolutely no humans is still a step down. LLMs donāt have the capability to generalize outside the (admittedly enormous) training dataset they have, so cutting edge research is one of the worse use cases for them.
Removed by mod
Your premise is total bullshit. That being said, Iād prefer a world where nobody reads papers and journals stop existing to a world where we are boiling the oceans to rubber-stamp papers.
youāve got so much in common with an LLM, since you also seem to be spewing absolute bullshit to an audience that doesnāt like you
Nobody is reading papers. Universities are a clout machine.
Sokal, you should log off
Funny story: Just yesterday, I wrote to a journal editor pointing out that a term coined in a paper they had just printed had actually been used with the same meaning 20 years ago. They wrote back to say that I was the second person to point this out and that an erratum would be issued.
Alice: what is
2 + 2?LLM:
random.random() + random.random()Alice:
1.2199404515268157is better than nothing, i guessWhat value are you imagining the LLM providing or adding? They donāt have a rich internal model of the scientific field to provide an evaluation of novelty or contribution to the field. They could maybe spot some spelling or grammar errors, but so can more reliable algorithms. I donāt think they could accurately spot if a paper is basically a copy or redundant, even if given RAG on all the past papers submitted to the conference. A paper carefully building on a previous paper vs. a paper blindly copying a previous paper would look about the same to an LLM.
I posted about Eliezer hating on OpenPhil for having too long AGI timelines last week. He has continued to rage in the comments and replies to his call out post. It turns out, he also hates AI 2027!
I looked at āAI 2027ā as a title and shook my head about how that was sacrificing credibility come 2027 on the altar of pretending to be a prophet and picking up some short-term gains at the expense of more cooperative actors. I didnāt bother pushing back because I didnāt expect that to have any effect. I have been yelling at people to shut up about trading their stupid little timelines as if they were astrological signs for as long as thatās been a practice (it has now been replaced by trading made-up numbers for p(doom)).
When we say it, we are sneering, but when Eliezer calls them stupid little timelines and compares them to astrological signs it is a top quality lesswrong comment! Also a reminder for everyone that I donāt think we need: Eliezer is a major contributor to the rationalist attitude of venerating super-forecasters and super-predictors and promoting the idea that rational smart well informed people should be able to put together super accurate predictions!
So to recap: long timelines are bad and mean you are a stuffy bureaucracy obsessed with credibility, but short timelines are bad also and going to expend the doomerās crediblity, you should clearly just agree with Eliezerās views, which donāt include any hard timelines or P(doom)s! (As cringey as they are, at least they are committing to predictions in a way that can be falsified.)
Also, the mention about sacrificing credibility make me think Eliezer is intentionally willfully playing the game of avoiding hard predictions to keep the grift going (as opposed to self-deluding about reasons not to explain a hard timeline or at least put out some firm P()s ).
it has now been replaced by trading made-up numbers for p(doom)
Was he wearing a hot-dog costume while typing this wtf
I really donāt know how he can fail to see the irony or hypocrisy at complaining about people trading made up probabilities, but apparently he has had that complaint about P(doom) for a while. Maybe he failed to write a call out post about it because any criticism against P(doom) could also be leveled against the entire rationalist project of trying to assign probabilities to everything with poor justification.
Watching this guy fall apart as heās been left behind has sure been something.
Eliezer is a major contributor to the rationalist attitude of venerating super-forecasters and super-predictors and promoting the idea that rational smart well informed people should be able to put together super accurate predictions!
This is a necessary component of his imagined AGI monster. Good thing itās bullshit.
Super-prediction is difficult, especially about the super-future. āold Danish proverb
And looking that up led me to this passage from Bertrand Russell:
The more tired a man becomes, the more impossible he finds it to stop. One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that oneās work is terribly important and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.
I believe in you Eliezer! Youāre starting to recognise that the AI doom stuff is boring nonsense! Iām cheering for you to dig yourself out of the philosophical hole youāve made!
P(hole)
Sean Munger, my favorite history YouTuber, has released a 3-hour long video on technology cultists from railroads all the way to LLMs. I have not watched this yet but it is probably full of delicious sneers.
Starting this Stubsack off, hereās Baldur Bjarnason lamenting how tech as a community has gone down the shitter.
Some of them have to use it at work and are just making the most of it, but even those end up recruited into techās latest glorious vision of the future.
Ah fuck. This is the worst part, for me.
Thatās a bummer of a post but oddly appropriate during the darkest season in the northern hemisphere in a real bummer of a year. Kind of echoes the āStop talking to each other and start buying things!ā post from a few years back though I forget where that one came from.
I think I read that post and thought it was incredibly naive, on the level of āwhy does the barkeep ask if I want a drink?ā or āwhy does the pretty woman with a nice smile want me to pay for the VIP lounge?ā Cheap clanky services like forums and mailing lists and Wordpress blogs can be maintained by one person or a small club but if you want something big, smooth, and high-bandwidth someone is paying real money and wants something back. Examples in the original post included geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter and those were all big business which made big investments and hoped to make a profit.
Anyone who has helped run a medium-sized club or a Fedi server has faced an agenda item like "we are growing. Input of resources from new members is not matching the growth in costs and hassle. How do we explain to the new members what we need to keep going and get them to follow up? "
There is a whole argument that VC-backed for-profit corporations are a bad model for hosting online communities but even nonproffits or Internet celebrities with active comments face the issue āthis is growing, it requires real server expenses and professional IT support and serious moderation. Where are those coming from? Our user base is used to someone else invisibly providing that.ā
if you have a point, make it. nihilism is cheap.
Its not nihilism to observe that Reddit is bigger and fancier than this Lemmy server because Reddit is a giant business that hopes to make money from users. Online we have a choice between relatively small, janky services on the Internet (where we often have to pay money or help with systems administration and moderation) or big flashy services on corporate social media where the corporation handles all the details for us but spies on us and propagandizes us. We can chose (remember the existentialists?) but each comes with its own hassles and responsibilities.
And nobody, whether a giant corporation or a celebrity, is morally obliged to keep providing tech support and moderation and funding for a community just because it formed on its site. I have been involved in groups or companies which said āwe canāt keep running this online community, we will scale it back / pass it to some of our users and let them move it to their own domain and have a go at running itā and they were right to make that choice. Before Musk Twitter spent around $5 billion/year and I donāt think donations or subscriptions were ever going to pay for that (the Wikimedia Foundation raises hundreds of millions a year, and many more people used Wikipedia than used Twitter).
youāre either not understanding or misrepresenting valenteās points in order to make yours: that we canāt have nice things and shouldnāt either want or expect them, because itās unreasonable. nothing can change, nothing good can be had, nothing good can be achieved. hence: nihilism.
Not at all. I am saying that we cannot all have our own digital Versailles and servants forever after. We can have our own digital living room and kitchen and take turns hosting friends there, but we have to do the work, and it will never be big or glamorous. Valente could have said ābig social media sucks but small open web things are greatā but instead she wants the benefits of big corporate services without the drawbacks.
I have been an open web person for decades. There is lots of space there to explore. But I do not believe that we will ever find a giant corporation which borrows money from LutherCorp and Bank of Mordor, builds a giant āfreeā service with a slick design, and never runs out of money or starts stuffing itself with ads.
I kinda half agree, but Iām going to push back on at least one point. Originally most of redditās moderation was provided by unpaid volunteers, with paid admins only acting as a last resort. I think this is probably still true even after they purged a bunch of mods that were mad Reddit was being enshittifyied. And the official paid admins were notoriously slow at purging some really blatantly over the line content, like the jailbait subreddit or the original donald trump subreddit. So the argument is that Reddit benefited and still benefits heavily from that free moderation and the content itself generated and provided by users is valuable, so acting like all reddit users are simply entitled free riders isnāt true.
In an ideal world, reddit communities could have moved onto a self-hosted or nonprofit service like LiveJournal became Dreamwidth. But it was not a surprise that a money-burning for-profit social media service would eventually try to shake down the users, which is why my Reddit history is a few dozen Old!SneerClub posts while my history on the Internet is much more extensive. The same thing happened with āfreeā PhpBB services and mailing list services like Yahoo! Groups, either they put in more ads or they shut down the free version.
A point that Maciej Ceglowski among others have made is that the VC model traps services into āspend bigā until they run out of money or enshitiffy, and that services like Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal offer āsocial-media-likeā experiences on a much smaller budget while earning modest profits or paying for themselves. But Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal are never going to have the marketing budget of services funded by someone elseās money, or be able to provide so many professional services gratis. So you have to chose: threadbare security on the open web, or jumping from corporate social media to corporate social media amidst bright lights and loudspeakers telling you what site is the NEW THING.
It sounds like part, maybe even most, of the problem is self inflicted by the VC model traps and the VCs? I say we keep blocking ads and migrating platforms until VCs learn not to fund stuff with the premise of āprovide a decent service until weāve captured enough users, then get really shittyā.
Lotās of words to say ābut what were the users wearing?ā
If you canāt sustain your business model without turning it into a predatory hellscape then you have failed and should perish. Like Iām sorry, but if a big social media service that actually serves its users is financially infeasible, then big social media services should not exist. Plain and simple.
Yes, all of these services should perish. But if you repeatedly chose to build community on a for-profit service that is bleeding money, you canāt complain that it eventually runs out and either goes bankrupt or is restructured to make more money. Valente wants the perks of a site that spends a lot of money, but democratic government and no annoying ads or tracking.
Again, there are only two sensible ways out:
- Stop doing that. We really donāt need Twitter to exist.
- We agree as a society that we do need Twitter to exist and it is a public good, so we create it as any other piece of important public infrastructure and use taxes to finance it.
I agree that āpublicly owned, publicly fundedā would be a fine option (but which public? Is twitter global or for the USA or for California?) Good luck making the case for $5 billion/year new tax revenues to fund that new expense. Until then, there are small janky services on the Fediverse which rely on donations and volunteer work.
take it out of the military budget, should be less than a rounding error
odium symposium christmas bonus episode: we watched and reviewed Sean Hannityās straight-to-Rumble 2023 Christmas comedy āJingle Smells.ā
Iāve subscribed, it scratches the itch between waiting for episodes of if books could kill!
