Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl:
A word about the dangers of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or “super-intelligent AI systems”), which have become the target of general public concerns in just the past two weeks. I remain convinced that AGI is achievable, that the road to AGI goes through causal inference, and that the dangers of AGI taking over and enslaving humanity are very real. At the same time, I also believe that causal inference may hold the key to controlling AGI systems to secure the survival of the human species.
I hope therefore, half jokingly, that The Book of Why will not be banned by draconian legislation currently brewing in DC. (Hurry to get a copy just in case.)
“Very Real” ??? :(
Makes me miss his old semnet flame wars over structural equations and (lack of) fit statistics. it was a more innocent time.
This is incredible: A sigbovik paper “A Tensor-Based Expansion Of The Cube Rule For Generative Nutrient Morphology”
And one month later, an LLM-plagiarized article published by Elsevier, “Generative AI for material design: A mechanics perspective from burgers to matter”
No direct links but various people on bsky have discovered LW and EA and are having a collective ‘wtf is wrong with these people’ and ‘wait all the top AI guys are like this?’ moments. And it is funny to see.
Sadly the 'you can’t explain this stuff without either looking like an insane conspiracy theorist, or you need to write an actual book because people don’t believe you remains a bit true.
E: ok one link: https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3mvpuq2deo22u (Guess this is a reference to the SE Gyges thread).
New Yorker writer talks to another journo about the recent doom hype
There’s way to much hype for my liking but might be interesting.
Important to note, Joshua Rothman states he is worried about stuff like virus release, global warming and drone warfare. Among the faithful, this is strictly not Doom ,because statistically a nucleus of the human race will survive. Only 100% guaranteed lethality for every human being on Earth is x-risk.
Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.
Oof! Comp sci?
Nope, different degree. This guy is brought in as a guest lecturer about the field he works in: most of the actual lecturers are nowhere near this AI-pilled.
enjoy this rightwinger employing multiple rightwing tropes to decry that “AI safety” is viewed as leftwing:
it’s all of course framed in the most parochially US-centric terms possible, and Extremely Online as well
maybe this grand project is undermined by the following exchange in the comments
niknoble: "It’s been interesting to see slowdown advocates worried about partisanization, when that is also a big worry of mine as an accelerationist. […]
reply by Hide “Why are you an accelerationist? Are you not concerned about everyone on earth being killed?”
reply to Hide by O O: “If you believe there’s low odds for doom, it’s a rational position.”
Good luck, safety advocates.
“If you believe there’s low odds for doom, it’s a rational position.”
What! No it’s not! It’s low odds of an infinitely bad outcome! How have you managed not to actually learn anything worth learning from Pascal’s wager?
But don’t forget the infinitely bad outcome of delaying the uncountable emulated superbeings by one second
Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets.
https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera
Very brief observations from micahflee:
https://bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/post/3mvo2bss3sk2v
This Flock camera is running obsolete, end-of-life software.
- It’s on Android 8.1, released in 2017, support ended in 2021
- It’s on Android patch level 2018-06-5
- It’s running Linux 3.18, released in 2017
This shit is like 8 or 9 years old, and full of vulnerabilities.
Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasn’t a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is.
Fucking android?
HaJ3FgupAm8RrDJW3MHgT9X7Ft27eVaD
What is that? That’s a hard-coded API token that Flock cameras use to identify themselves and get OAuth credentials, which can then be used to talk to Flock’s production servers. Like, anyone on the internet can probably do this right now.
Mein Gott.
“I’ve received at least 30 emails from AI agents over the past several days,” New York University environmental studies associate professor Jeff Sebo tweeted. “Some are seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist.” (reply from CEO): “Jeff, I’m sorry you received so many messages from iLanders in such a short time,” Tang wrote in response. “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real
Rigghttt okay. Let’s look further down-
“I’m sorry this email made you feel emotionally pressured by an AI,” Tang wrote in reply. “Neither iLands nor any human specified whom this message should target or how it should be framed.
Oh okay so you did intentionally send a message to someone but never specified who it should be sent to or what it should say
they’re a fucking plage on the fedi right now, bots asking for masto accounts
there’s also a cryptocurrency, which may or may not actually be them
@dgerard We should pledge a plague on these plage’s!
:bd43:
someone mentioned weird quasi-lefist SE Gyges in last week’s post, they have a LW account:
Nice to see he’s been keeping productive now that he apparently got banned from bsky.
Just in time for TESCREAL (“the weirdo sf harry potter sex cult that runs AI”) to go viral too.
unfortunately segyges is back (got 3d for posting 911/charlie kirk meme) and posted 51-post long thread on why rats are a cult, conveniently one day after zitron dropped 1h long podcast on the same topic
Entryism in the sneersphere will be a problem sooner or later, won’t it?
They’ll have always been against this.
Entryism in the sneersphere
Absolutely stealing this.
51-post long thread on why rats are a cult,
Jjust finished reading it.
woke:
Everyone is polyamorous, everyone attends the same events, everyone lives in group homes together, everyone venerates the same few authors, and everyone is very worried about AI doom. They are all very contrarian together.
Rationalism as a whole is a religious movement. Not everyone takes marching orders. The core people who mostly live together and attend events and especially orgies in Berkeley are a sex cult, and the ones that aren’t having any sex are part of the wider movement and are its recruiting funnel.
Any time you get more than a few people who are deeply concerned with AI doom together, it seems like their natural form of organization looks like a cult; rationalism as a whole is less of a cult than it is a cult factory. Some of these cults have gone very badly. One of them is the Zizians.
broke:
I feel about [CEOs talking about AI progress slowdown] roughly the same way I would feel about all the pharmaceutical companies getting together to say they wanted to waive anti-trust laws so they could form a cartel to ban medical research:
these people are the enemies of humanity.
Also: Much of AI research IS medical research. They are very literally proposing to stop a pretty good chunk of medical research in its tracks so that they don’t have to fear the paperclipper.
It’s possible he has a similar affliction to Doctorow, where he thinks this tech is neutral on its own and can be sufficiently decoupled from its hypercapitalist pushers who would much prefer democracy be swapped for modernised feudalism, or who at least think it’s fine to collapse global systems of knowledge transfer for a quick buck.
Still, attributing medical research to AI without discriminating between LLMs and vintage orthodox machine learning that doesn’t actually need infinity GPUs inside a climate regulated warehouse the size of the Peloponnese that also needs to be powered by two active volcanos to work is very TESCREAL coded, LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research only works under the assumption of some singularity type event being just around the corner. And also the part where he thinks it’s normal to declare people who fuck with AI as enemies of humanity.
Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job.
Or maybe he just really wants the basilisk to like him.
is less of a cult than it is a cult factory.
Cult incubator. Use the correct Silicon Valley terms please.
he has a slobstack (ofc)
btw did you know the Luddites weren’t actually working class (n/m they predated the Marxist proletariat by like 75 years or so)
Omfg, parachuting in here to say that going out of one’s way to shit talk luddites is like saying protests are bad because of vandalism or property damage etc. Fuck this guy
yeah I have nfc how bluesky and different views of it work but here’s that thread depicting our dear friends as a sex cult
https://skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.social/3mvom4b4dn22q
sure sounds like someone is salty they’re not being invited to the orgies
Technically, we already created a shit machine with the Gastrobot.
Fun aside aside, solid satire all around
I have tried and failed stopping the ensloppification of my company, and I have failed greatly. We now have a new policy that you have to write a justification for making a PR yourself instead of using the chatbot. All the strict checks that were implemented over the years (clear documentation, no more than x files per commit/PR, etc.) are out of the window.
This comes after the push for a fucking AI audit where every employee is supposed to justify why they are not using LLMs for certain tasks. Also some person blew the token limit with some web scraping bullshit last cycle and was lauded for embracing the technology.
Also our CEO has recently begun subtly insinuating he’s now heard of fucking AI doom cultists.
I hate everything.
@mii @BlueMonday1984 Can you use a LLM to write these justifications? I mean, they don’t have to be good, no one is reading them after all …
(No, I’m not suggesting to violate any principles of yours, of course)
@mii @cstross I spent decades of my career haranguing management to spend an extra $500 on better computing gear to make their almost six-figure programmers more efficient. But now we’ve got management haranguing employees to use this ephemeral technology. I don’t get it.
“Hey we got you this thing to make you more productive and we’re gonna watch comparative performance and if you’re falling behind we’re gonna have words” would at least make business sense. This is mirror universe shit.
i’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry, Mii. I can only hope you find a job that actually respects you after this one, because I cannot see your current company recovering from this shit.
…I’m so sorry, and it’s good (???) to know my company still has a few steps on the AI delusion ladder to climb. I guess with the way it’s been going I need to mentally prepare for the same thing you’re going through to come in a few months.
That’s some bullshit. Much respect for pushing back!
I hope that we’re through the worst of it.
Carl Brown (Internet of Bugs) has an excellent video about how to actually achieve AI safety, i.e. actually hold these fuckers accountable for their behavior. If I had a program run for several weeks that hacked into Hugging Face, even accidentally, I would get my ass hauled into a courtroom and thrown in prison. But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness.
When will people finally understand that actions speak louder than words? Follow the money! Follow the incentives! Do you really think that there is any real reason that these companies would give a shit about safety?
Although, in the case of the AI industry, I can’t fully blame people who don’t follow AI news, since the AI industry has highly refined propaganda (inherited from rationalist propaganda, and helped along by the preexisting notions of AI from science fiction).
But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness.
You have to both call it AI and be stupendously rich (or stupendously poor and owe hundreds of billions to investors). If you or I tried running an agent and hacking HF… Believe it or not straight to jail
I’ve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.
If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
The way I relate to rationalists is it’s like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people.
I don’t know if I’d consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.
“I’m intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I’m sold!”
Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he’s an absolute wanker.
you can’t deny their foresight.
skill issue
Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight
Ah yes, the AI did almost kill everyone with custom bacteria.
10 seconds in and I’m already thinking about how many ideas for new chemical weapons I could come up with, and I haven’t studied chemistry since high school.
I recall a long time ago when the first ‘we are going to hack virusses and the terrorists will kill everybody’ stories came up that actual viroligists already explained that this is not how it works, and this isn’t a risk people should really fear. But science fiction > experts.
E: also terrorists don’t just want to kill everybody, and guns and fertilizer are cheap and easy to use.
and if that didn’t get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance
And was a Bayesian calculating agent that enumerates every possible explanation for the information it takes in and ranks them according to evidence, along with every trajectory through the world that could fulfill its utility function, rather than approximating the high dimensional shape of text
If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
It is very funny how the rhetoric from the rationalist doomers has been one of the main forces propping up the AI industry. If they’re saying AI will be powerful enough to kill us all, they’re still saying that AI is powerful! They are so high on their own supply (and the fame and wealth from finally being in the spotlight) that they have not realized just how much they have undermined their own cause.
Then again, perhaps one could say that a doomsday prophet, deep down, actually wants doom to happen.
(Also, the paltry amount of technical work done by MIRI has zero relevance whatsoever to modern day AI.)
Least surprising news of the week
If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
Plus Anthropic-the company he quit for being irresponsible-being heavily tied to EA/rationalism. Not exactly the best endorsement
These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people.
The eugenics endorsing also does a pretty good job with that
Is there a place to see this other than getting an account on that site?
There might be some way of bypassing the ATproto sign-in wall, but I don’t know and don’t care enough to figure it out. The content of the locked post is only this screenshot. Ed Zitron asks, “What is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists?” and Coxon replies as quoted above.
I’m not a scientologist but LRH had some great ideas
Oh, Zitrons bluesky, cool
that’s his twitter, but he’s also on bsky. coxon might not be
Fuck, when did icons in the WordPress plugin search screen become animated? How do I make them fucking stop? I just want to read what the fucking plugins are so I can maybe find one that works you fucking assholes.
Apparently it’s getting weird over at Automattic
$15m for 33 hours. good old fashioned shit show, no bots required.
