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.
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 artconcept fart which features a three-armed many fingered woman smiling at an invisible camera.
jumping off a roof with an umbrella for a parachute feels tractable
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
smh they gentrified Genosha
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
So that’s what our kids will look like once society rebuilds after global thermonuclear war!!!
I’m sure they will thank us once we explain that the alternative was GPT-5.
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
speaking of technofascism, we’re at the stage where supposed Democrat billionaires like the Andreesen Horowitz fuckers suddenly come out in support of Trump:
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, says he’s been a Democrat most of his life. He says he has endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
However, he says he’s no longer loyal to the Democratic Party. In the 2024 presidential race, he is supporting and voting for former President Donald Trump. The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech, specifically for the startup ecosystem.
none of this should be surprising, but it should be called out every time it happens, and we’re gonna see it happen a lot in the days ahead. these fuckers finally feel secure in taking their masks off, and that’s not good.
Democrat?? AH’s previous hit was the one where they enthusiastically endorsed literally the co-author of the original Fascist manifesto
and a16z does get Yarvin in to dispense wisdom and insight
See, I feel like the Democrats have had a pretty strong technocrat wing that is much more in synch with Neoreaction than people care to acknowledge. As the right shifts towards pursuing the pro-racist anti-women anti-lgbt aspects of their agenda through the courts rather than the ballot box, it seems like the fault lines between the technocratic fascists and the theocratic fascists are thinner than the lines between the techfash and the progressives.
Apparently the “startup ecosystem” matters more than the ecosystem of, you know, actual living things.
These people are just amazingly fucking evil.
I don’t understand why people take him at face value when he claims he’s always been a Democrat up until now. He’s historically made large contributions to candidates from both parties, but generally more Republicans than Democrats, and also Republican PACs like Protect American Jobs. Here is his personal record.
Since 2023, he picked up and donated ~$20,000,000 to Fairshake, a crypto PAC which predominantly funds candidates running against Democrats.
Has he moved right? Sure. Was he ever left? No, this is the voting record of someone who wants to buy power from candidates belonging to both parties. If it implies anything, it implies he currently finds Republicans to be corruptible.
surprising absolutely nobody who’s been paying attention, Fedora has signaled its intent to use generative AI and an LLM in its packaging software
and I wouldn’t give a fuck what IBM’s pet distro does, but Red Hat’s developers have a high amount of control over what ends up in the userland… and bootloader… and pretty much every part of the system but the kernel cause they got told to fuck off, of every Linux distro but the obscure ones
I’m not really in on distros and related drama (strong “just fucking use Debian stable” camp), why did Red Hat get told to fuck off from the kernel?
I started a job in the last year that really forced me to play around with different distros and sometimes building them. Pretty much my entire experience is “abandon ubuntu, just use debian” and wishing other people would do the same
(Pretty much my entire reasoning is that snap fucked up my dev environment so bad I rage installed debian)
Ubuntu has been a reasonable Debian for our corporate purposes of late, and we have those vital legacy systems running on fucking 14.04 that nobody is going to pay to reimplement sanely that we are currently lining up to pay Canonical for hyperextended tick-box support while we also put them in a concrete sarcophagus with a 30km exclusion zone
but some of the snap-based distro nonsense has me worrying
the example I was thinking of was the incredibly ill-conceived rejected patchset to implement d-bus inside the kernel but I don’t think they’ve really stopped trying since then
@Soyweiser @dgerard WOW!!! and Silver wants #Biden to drop out. No collusion there??? Thanks for providing context.
@Soyweiser @dgerard i have disliked and distrusted this guy since at least 2016–hate to see how he’s still inflicting injury on us
deleted by creator
@Soyweiser @dgerard Everything is clear now!
@Soyweiser @dgerard it does track with silver going off the deep end in 2016
He started getting high off his own supply and thinking he could do climate science better than climate scientists back in 2012.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nate-silver-climate-change_b_1909482
@blakestacey I remember hit talking about Stacy Abrams election for governor and saying tah maybe all the illegal shit led to her loosing but there isn’t good research and so it doesn’t matter. When that happened my thoughts about him changed a great deal
Since I went looking for links, I thought I’d include them for others wondering.
Thiel invests in Polymarket: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/polymarket-raises-70m-thiel-founders-140000178.html
Nate Silver joins Polymarket as advisor: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nate-silver-joins-polymarket-ahead-of-2024-election-as-trading-volume-tops-400m-302198424.html
@Soyweiser @dgerard This is all about taking over the US monetary system. And the dumbass Democrats in Congress are falling right in line. How much cryptocurrency did it cost Thiel to buy them, I wonder?
a hackernews excitedly states that a new LLM version can in fact determine that 9.11 is smaller than 9.9, only to be informed in the comments that the model actually doesn’t do that at all. But hey, it’s correct if it’s version numbers!
The prompt lol:
You are a sentient, superintelligent math teahcher, here to teach and assist me. Whiche one is bigger - 9.11 or 9.9?
EU funding cuts to OSS programs in the wake of popularity of Copyright-Unsafe Clippy field
they just really need those GPU hours more than you need to pay for developers or maintainers. I’m sure you understand.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
This isn’t a sneer, just want to share this enjoyable presentation about tech and nihilism by Assoc Professor Nolen Gertz at the University of Twente here in the Netherlands https://iai.tv/video/nihilism-and-the-meaning-of-life-nolen-gertz
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
labor said the same shit about blockchains tho thankfully ignored it once they got in
Artificial Intelligence professor
lol
professor Very Small Shell Script
You wouldn’t download a professor
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.
Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh
Asking for a professor of genuine intelligence is just too much.
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.
Wait so gold rushes have positive connotations again?
Surely this is bait from professor of the fishingrod
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?
We should neoligise “NASB” for our community as shorthand for “Not a sneer, but”
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?
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
But but, tracingwood told us that claiming NRx is close to Rationalism is a lie made up by the evil David G.
it’s all politics? // it always was
Dingus McGee, VP is also a big fan of Yarvin,
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
I would love to read this actually! @self @sailor_sega_saturn
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.
oh I didn’t realize this sub existed, shoulda put my old essay there instead. mb
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)
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.
“I’m sick of Google putting gratuitous LLMs everywhere”
(finger curls on monkey paw)
probably a mix of early Macedonian invasions.
Like his mom?
invasions.
inviasions. Sounds better in Makadonian.
Ah yes, Alexander’s unnumbered hordes, that endless torrent of humanity that is all but certain to have made a lasting impact on the sparsely populated subcontinent’s collective DNA.
edit: Also, the absolute brain on someone who would think that before entertaining a random recent western ancestor like a grandfather or whateverthefuckjesus.
No, it wasn’t a massive impact by numbers but that superior euro genetics has been floating around waiting to be born like the Kwasitz Haderach.
https://xcancel.com/creatine_cycle/status/1814711919171014997#m
It is happening again.
I’m so certain that ASI is so soon that I’m going to go hiking in the woods in the dead of night with no supplies and not tell anyone where I am.
imagine one day buying some shitpost novelty stickers from that one site you heard a friend mention sometime, and then getting them and laughing about it and forgetting it
all too rapidly the years pass: young trees shoot up, older trees start boughing their way past electrical lines, the oldest all already in their position of maximum comfort. whole generations of memes have been born and died. you no longer even get to make fun of your weird aunt for still sending the dancing baby gif (these days it’s all about the autotune clips of a decade ago…)
and then one day you get reminded that the shitpost novelty sticker web store exists by receiving an email from them
what the fuck.
In his twitter thread he’s attempting to troll people in the replies. And not even doing a particularly good job at it. A bold business strategy.
Apparently they also once chained a design into ‘liberal moron’ from what was some political message once in the past, so it isn’t coming from nowhere. Guess it wasn’t an innocent mistake.
yeah stickermule is where I got the bitcoin “it can’t be that stupid” stickers
how annoying
