Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      the replies I can see in the archive are already a fucking disaster

      roko spewed the most nonsensical, fash-coded disapproval you could imagine:

      the map should reflect the territory, not the feelings

      that’s right roko, uh, maps don’t care about your feelings?

      oh god I clicked through to the rest of roko’s comments in that thread and it’s even worse, cw transphobia for anyone who peeks their head in

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        I don’t want to hear that I’m irrational from Roko of all people haha.

        Dude sure spends a lot of energy on trans people and immigrants and wokeness for someone who thinks that climate change doesn’t matter because “by 2100 we will probably have disassembled Earth long with the rest of the solar system, and climate change will seem very quaint.”

        Also is his flirting with white supremacy new, or has he always been that fascist of a weirdo?

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Also is his flirting with white supremacy new, or has he always been that fascist of a weirdo?

          he’s always come off as deeply fascist to me, though it’s possible he’s gone even more mask-off with the white supremacy. I feel that roko’s personal style of saying the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard and claiming it’s brilliant has influenced the e/acc crowd a lot too, so maybe there’s some cross-pollination of ideas there.

          “by 2100 we will probably have disassembled Earth long with the rest of the solar system, and climate change will seem very quaint.”

          yes, roko, it’s pretty fucking obvious that climate change will seem quaint by 2100

          if it doesn’t fucking kill us way before then. that’s what makes it a fucking threat, roko, did your big ol mediocre brain miss that?

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    NSFW, as NSAB, I know that anti-environmentalists shout a lot about ‘what about china china should go green first!’ while not knowing china is in fact doing a lot to try and go green (at least on the co2 energy front, I’m not asking here to go point out all the bad things china does to fuck up the environment). I see ‘we should develop AI before china does so’ be a big pro AI argument, so here is my question. Is china even working on massive A(G)I like the people claim?

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Typing from phone, please excuse lack of citations. Academic output in various parts of ML research have increasingly come from China and Chinese researchers over the past decade. There’s multiple inputs to this - funding, how strong a specific school/research centre is, etc, but it’s been ramping up. Pretty sure part of this is one of the fuel sources in keeping the pro-hegemonist US argument popular and going lately (also part of where the “we should before they do” comes from I guess)

      I’ve seen some mentions of recent legislation direction about LLM usage but I’m not fully up to scratch on what it is, haven’t had the time to read up

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Thanks I was not aware, so they are doing things regarding the research at least. So the “concern” isn’t totally made up. Which is what I wanted to know. As Architeuthis mentioned the legislation is against false info and against going against the party (which seem to be what you could expect).

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I am overall very uninformed about the chinese thechnological day-to-day, but here’s two interesting facts:

      They set some pretty draconian rules early on about where the buck stops if your LLM starts spewing false information or (god forbid) goes against party orthodoxy so I’m assuming if independent research is happening It doesn’t appear much in the form of public endpoints that anyone might use.

      A few weeks ago I saw a report about chinese medical researchers trying use AI agents(?) to set up a virtual hospital in order to maybe eventually have some sort of a virtual patient entity that a medical student could work with somehow, and look how many thousands of virtual patients our handful of virtual doctors are healing daily, isn’t it awesome folks. Other than the rampant startupiness of it all, what struck me was that they said they had chatgpt-3.5 set up up the doctor/patient/nurse agents, i.e. they used the free version.

      So, who knows? If they are all-in in AGI behind the scenes they don’t seem to be making a big fuss about it.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Thanks, you and froztbytes reply answered my questions on if they were doing it and also a bit on how seriously they are all taking it.

  • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    LessWrong doesn’t let you download if your user agent isn’t a browser. Did y’all know about this?

    $ curl https://www.lesswrong.com
<html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>

    $ curl https://www.lesswrong.com -A "Mozilla"
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    In the spirit of the fondly-remembered “Cloud-to-Butt” plugin, I propose a new tool that transforms mentions of AI and LLMs to something else. But what shape should our word transformer take? While scatology is nice, I bed we can come up with something more clever than “ChatGPT-to-Poop”

    BTW, take 1d6 psychic damage when you realize that Cloud-to-Butt was released more than ten years ago

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      If this wasn’t Scott Adams I’d have assumed this was fetish content. Now I don’t know what to think.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        It told him he was very smart and correct so he had an hypnogasm yes.

        (For the people not in the know and who want some more psychic damage, look up Scott and his ‘I can hypnotise you into having orgasms’ blog posts, the man is utterly nuts, and it is really scary how many people seriously follow him).

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Looks like he confused “tantrum” with “tantric”

          No shame, happens to guys all the time

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        explaining these things to normal humans is how you turn them into humans with years of psychic damage, and I support that mission wholeheartedly

        an attempt at a summary:

        the dilbert guy, who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him, now also believes he knows a magic incantation to teach hypnosis to a chatbot, and heavily implies the chatbot was able to hypnotize him in turn (presumably into having sex with it)

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him

          Wait I missed this, he believes what?

          Now this is doubly funny.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Content warning for this post, you will get psychic damage.

            It is worse, he believes he can hypnotize people over the internet into having orgasms. Here is a link to a screenshot, not sure if I’m able to find a archive link. I think he deleted his blog.

            E: a tumblr has archive links but it seems he managed to delete the first post.

            • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              Hey, haven’t seen a proof of god’s non-existence today yet, thanks!

              extreme psychic damage trap

              Submissives, I want you to start planning your New Year’s Eve now. Make sure you have some time alone, or some time with a partner who fully accepts your wonderful nature. But most of all, I want you wet, or hard, and especially obedient, starting now. And I want you to know how much I enjoy putting you in this state of mind. It starts now, but will get more intense by Thursday night. Expect to be a quivering, throbbing, wet mess by then.

              How did that make you feel?

              Queasy.

              This is quite literally “creep discovers dirty-talking, thinks it’s a superpower even though he’s terrible at it”.

              EDIT: From Part 3:

              So today I am only talking to the perhaps 20% of you who were turned off by this series.

              Bwahahahaha! That’s some funny shit mate, I’ve seen many bollocks number straight from between them buttocks, but this is fuckin’ choice.

              If you see a train entering a tunnel, think of it as nothing but transportation.

              Hey mate, I think… I think that’s what most normal people do? I sometimes imagine an action hero standing on top and fighting a villain before the tunnel slams them in the heads but that’s just me. What do you think about, Scott? Don’t answer that. please

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I saw people making fun of this on (the normally absurdly overly credulous) /r/singularity of all places. I guess even hopeful techno-rapture believers have limits to their suspension of disbelief.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      At risk of being NSFW, this is an amazing self-own, pardon the pun. Hypnosis via text only works on folks who are fairly suggestible and also very enthusiastic about being hypnotized, because the brain doesn’t “power down” as much machinery as with the more traditional lie-back-on-the-couch setup. The eyes have to stay open, the text-processing center is constantly engaged, and re-reading doesn’t deepen properly because the subject has to have the initiative to scroll or turn the page.

      Adams had to have wanted to be hypnotized by a chatbot. And that’s okay! I won’t kinkshame. But this level of engagement has to be voluntary and desired by the subject, which is counter to Adams’ whole approach of hypnosis as mind control.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Yep, was thinking something similar. Dude just posted a public sscce about the effect addressed in the llmentalist article

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    We should neoligise “NASB” for our community as shorthand for “Not a sneer, but”

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    “Learning Nate Silver works for Peter Thiel is one of those things that would have shocked me in 2016 and made me wonder why I hadn’t already been assuming it in 2024.” He now works for the betting market polymarket (using cryptocurrencies of course).

    xcancel, twitter

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      New existential threat developed, we go all in on AGI economically, turns out to not be possible and then the world collapses due to infrastructure rot. I’ll email Yud.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        In the vein of collapsing infrastructure, my condolences to anyone dealing with aftermath of Crowdstrike’s big ol fucky wucky. If I were a bad person looking for entertainment, I would seed a conspiracy theory about how today’s cockup is really the result of Rationalist sleeper agents launching a guerilla struggle to strangle the basilisk in its crib.

        Question for the experts: do you all suppose this will drive a new cycle of hype around thin clients and network booting?

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Question for the experts: do you all suppose this will drive a new cycle of hype around thin clients and network booting?

          I don’t think this alone would push towards that (any more than the last few years of “everything is a webapp!!!” have done), but I would love to see people try to hypewave this purely so we get rid of so much fucking fat js garbage

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Make it even funnier, AGI launches and then gets taken down because the only maintainer of xzutils left and now every time the AGI tries to run ./killallhumans it segfaults to death.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Somebody installed a crypto miner so deep into the kernel of the AGI that the self modification of the AGI cannot touch it, and it just crawls to a halt. And the cryptocurrency itself is one of those flash in the pan meme currencies that long since went to ~zero.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    AI Maxers Thrilled with Trump’s Vice President Pick JD Vance

    This isn’t really too interesting yet; but something to keep an eye on. As things like blockchain and AI alignment becomes weirdly political it’s likely that sneering will get unpleasantly close to politics at times. And yet sneer we must.

    Other self-titled techno-optimists highlighted Vance’s ties to venture capital, Thiel, and Andreessen, saying the “Gray Tribe [is] in control.” Gray Tribe is a reference to a term originating from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog, which points to a group that is neither red (Republican) or Blue (Democrat), but a libertarian, tech savvy alternative.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I really should write more about technofascism while I still have electricity, clean water, a relatively unfractured global information network, and there aren’t too many gunshots outside

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          I have an extremely rough draft up on our writing community MoreWrite: here it is. it very much deserves to be restructured and expanded; I wrote this first draft in a hurry, and since then I’ve both gotten some very solid recommendations for prior work in the area to read and cite from @[email protected] and I’ve experienced more instances where technofascist methods were used to take control over open source projects away from their communities.

            • self@awful.systemsEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              nah all good! our writing community isn’t meant to be containment, it’s just a different category with different expectations (mainly that feedback should be constructive, since MoreWrite is for writers posting their own work)

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      God damn, I don’t think I’ve read an article with that many name drops in a while. It’s like a Marvel film but with techfash assholes.

      “JD Vance is pro-OSS [open source] AI,” Verdon tweeted. “We are so unfathomably back.”

      It’s actually impressive how this guy is able to make me despise him even more every single time he opens his mouth.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      But but, tracingwood told us that claiming NRx is close to Rationalism is a lie made up by the evil David G.

  • jax@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    In the land down under, the ABC continues to feed us with golden tech takes: Australia might be snoozing through the AI ‘gold rush’

    “This is the largest gold rush in the history of capitalism and Australia is missing out,” said Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh, from the University of New South Wales.

    It’s even bigger than the actual gold rush! Buy your pans now folks!

    One option Professor Van Den Hengel suggests is building our own Large Language Model like OpenAI’s ChatGPT from the ground up, rather than being content to import the tech for decades to come.

    lol, but also please god no

    “The only way to have a say in what happens globally in this critical space is to be an active participant,” he said.

    mate, I think that ship might have already sailed

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      It’s my impression that Australia has also produced a disproportionate share of best takes on the subject. How come they are so far ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to dodging this grift?

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        I mean, that was definitely a thing when I was at school, only it was mostly about teaching undergrads graph search algorithms and the least math possible in order to understand backpropagation.

        As an aside, weird that we don’t hear much about genetic algorithms anymore, but it’s probably just me.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh

        Asking for a professor of genuine intelligence is just too much.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      As the saying goes, the only people who make money in a gold rush are the people selling shovels. I guess this bloke is one of the people selling shovels.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    HN: I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.

    Their goal: robo-feynman:

    For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable.

    NGL though mostly just sharing this link for the concept art concept fart which features a three-armed many fingered woman smiling at an invisible camera.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      So that’s what our kids will look like once society rebuilds after global thermonuclear war!!!

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Others: unslanted solar panels at ground level in shade under other solar panels, 90-degree water steps (plural), magical mystery staircases and escalator tubes, picture glass that reflects anything it wants to instead of what may actually be in the reflected light path, a whole Background Full Of Ill-Defined Background People because I guess the training set imagery was input at lower pixel density(??), and on stage left we have a group in conversation walking and talking also right on the edge of nowhere in front of them

      And that’s all I picked up in about 30-40s of looking

      Imagine being the kind of person who thinks this shit is good

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman

      Women of the world: um, about that

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      But just focus on the vibes. This diverse group of young mutants getting an education in the overgrown ruins of this university.

      Not sure how it ties into robo-feyman at all but the vibes