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.
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
jumping off a roof with an umbrella for a parachute feels tractable
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
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
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>It blocks at least Wget and Curl, but works for other unusual UA strings like “Hello”.
As of 2023 this was because of a default AWS firewall rule: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gidrFxE5hdQWCrXxn/why-is-lesswrong-blocking-wget-and-curl-scrape?commentId=jzyz4sZ82bw2MgZNW
Speaking more generally, Wget’s recursive crawl can cause problems if run with inadequate rate limiting. e.g. here’s what wikipedia’s robots.txt says:
# # Sorry, wget in its recursive mode is a frequent problem. # Please read the man page and use it properly; there is a # --wait option you can use to set the delay between hits, # for instance. # User-agent: wget Disallow: /
Hey, good news for a change: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/the-workers-at-bethesda-game-studios-have-fully-unionized-163024914.html
Insert the Sickos meme
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.
Make it a sonnenrad
the NATO symbol represents bombing the Chinese data centres
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
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?
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?
i’ve been told he was like this at uni too, deeply racist and misogynist
Roko tries to signal loyalty to both Rationalism and the Far right and creates a dumb sentence.
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?
this might be missed by folks because previous stubstack, definitely re-up it in the new one!
comment from friend:
Slightly related: now I know when the AI crash is going to happen. Every bottomfeeder recruiter company on LinkedIn is suddenly pushing 2-month contract technical writer positions with AI companies with no product, no strategy, and no idea of how to proceed other than “CEO cashes out.” I suspect the idea is to get all of their documentation together so they can sell their bags of magic beans before the beginning of the holiday season.
sickos.jpg
I have asked if he can send me links to a few of these, I’ll see what I can do with 'em
Current flavor AI is certainly getting demystified a lot among enterprise people. Let’s dip our toes into using an LLM to make our hoard of internal documents more accessible, it’s supposed to actually be good at that, right? is slowly giving way to “What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?”
Maybe hot take, but I actually feel like the world doesn’t need strictly speaking more documentation tooling at all, LLM / RAG or otherwise.
Companies probably actually need to curate down their documents so that simpler thinks work, then it doesn’t cost ever increasing infrastructure to overcome the problems that previous investment actually literally caused.
Companies probably actually need to curate down their documents so that simpler thinks work, then it doesn’t cost ever increasing infrastructure to overcome the problems that previous investment actually literally caused
Definitely, but the current narrative is that you don’t need to do any of that, as long as you add three spoonfulls of AI into the mix you’ll be as good as.
Then you find out what you actually signed up for is to do all the manual preparation of building an on-premise search engine to query unstructured data, and you still might end up with a tool that’s only slightly better than trying to grep a bunch of pdfs at the same time.
What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch
I always saw it more as LMGTFYaaS.
RAG
The fuck’s a rag in an AI context
NSFW (including funny example, don't worry)
RAG is “Retrieval-Augmented Generation”. It’s a prompt-engineering technique where we run the prompt through a database query before giving it to the model as context. The results of the query are also included in the context.
In a certain simple and obvious sense, RAG has been part of search for a very long time, and the current innovation is merely using it alongside a hard prompt to a model.
My favorite example of RAG is Generative Agents. The idea is that the RAG query is sent to a database containing personalities, appointments, tasks, hopes, desires, etc. Concretely, here’s a synthetic trace of a RAG chat with Batman, who I like using as a test character because he is relatively two-dimensional. We ask a question, our RAG harness adds three relevant lines from a personality database, and the model generates a response.
> Batman, what's your favorite time of day? Batman thinks to themself: I am vengeance. I am the night. Batman thinks to themself: I strike from the shadows. Batman thinks to themself: I don't play favorites. I don't have preferences. Batman says: I like the night. The twilight. The shadows getting longer.It’s the technique of running a primary search against some other system, then feeding an LLM the top ~25 or so documents and asking it for the specific answer.
So you run a normal query but then run the results through an enshittifier to make sure nothing useful is actually returned to the user.
so, uh, you remember AskJeeves?
(alternative answer: the third buzzword in a row that’s supposed to make LLMs good, after multimodal and multiagent systems absolutely failed to do anything of note)
“What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?”
Our BI team is trying to implement some RAG via Microsoft Fabrics and Azure AI search because we need that for whatever reason, and they’ve burned through almost 10k for the first half of the running month already, either because it’s just super expensive or because it’s so terribly documented that they can’t get it to work and have to try again and again. Normal costs are somewhere around 2k for the whole month for traffic + servers + database and I haven’t got the foggiest what’s even going on there.
But someone from the C suite apparently wrote them a blank check because it’s AI …
Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu gather around a newly-opened barrel of vinegar.
Confucius tastes the vinegar and perceives bitterness.
The Buddha tastes the vinegar and perceives sourness.
Lao Tzu tastes the vinegar and perceives sweetness, and he says, “Fellas, I don’t know what this is but it sure as fuck isn’t vinegar. How much did you pay for it?”
That seems suspiciously soon, but my impression is based on nothing but vibes — a sense that companies are still buying in.
Ed Zitron says it’ll burn by end of the year, but he doesn’t list sources either so idk
We were asking around AI industry peons in March and they all guessed around three quarters too. I woulda put it at maybe two years myself, but I was surprised at so many people all arriving at around three quarters. OTOH, I would say that just in the past few months things are really obviously heading for a trauma.
Perhaps that’s part of why so many SV types are backing Trump. Grifting off Trump may be their fallback after the AI bubble collapses.
Put me down for “doesn’t think it will end.” Did crypto end?
crypto’s VC investment fell off a cliff after the crash, and that investment is what we were talking about there
hence their pivot to AI
Oh, OK. I think all the VC-adjacent people still really believe in crypto, if it helps. They probably also don’t believe in it, depending on the room. I think it will come back.
they’ve stopped putting fresh money in, but they believe fervently in the massive bags they’re holding
I’m severely backlogged on catching up to things but my (total and complete) guess would be something like: all the recent headlines about funding and commitments are almost certainly imprecise in localisation and duration - everyone that “got money” didn’t necessarily get “money” but instead commitments to funding, and “everyone” is a much smaller set of entities that don’t encompass a really wide gallery of entities
So for all the previously-extant promptfondlers/ model dilettantes/etc out there, the writing may indeed have been (and may still be) on the wall ito runway (“startup operating capital remaining available and viable to avoid death”)
Based on the kind of headlines seen (and presuming the above supposition for the sake of argument), and the kind of utterly milquetoast garbage all the interceding months have produced, I don’t think it’s likely that much of the promised money will make it through to this layer/lot either. But that’s entirely a guess at this stage (and I can think of some fairly hefty counter-argument examples that may contribute to countering, not least because of how many people/orgs wouldn’t want to be losing face to fucking this up)
I think there was a report saying that the most recent quarter still showed a massive infusion of VC cash into the space, but I’m not sure how much of that comes from the fact that a new money sink hasn’t yet started trending in the valley. It wouldn’t surprise me if the griftier founders were looking to cash out before the bubble properly bursts in order to avoid burning bridges with the investors they’ll need to get the next thing rolling.
yeah, i think this is a last gasp or a second-last gasp.
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.
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.
Dingus McGee, VP is also a big fan of Yarvin,
But but, tracingwood told us that claiming NRx is close to Rationalism is a lie made up by the evil David G.
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
it’s all politics? // it always was
We should neoligise “NASB” for our community as shorthand for “Not a sneer, but”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 good shit, I bet 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
Edit: Favorite suggestions so far:
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AI-to-Bob @sc_griffith
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AI-to-DFE (Dumpster Fire Elemental) @YourNetworkIsHaunted
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AI-to-Statistics (HN user bitwize - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40024452)
@o7___o7 @dgerard cloud-to-butt, you say? https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/111007434026223446
Haha that’s a fantastic trophy to have :D
That must have been a glorious day!
My candidates, in no particular order:
- crap
- bullshit
- bollocks
a guy named Bob
Hey, this could work…Bob is short and punchy, very butt-like!
AI->Bob
LLM->Robert
Specific Products->Random selection from (Bobby, Bobert, Robby, Boberino, Roberto, Bert, etc)
Colonizer Clippy
It’s difficult thinking of something better than butt, or even anything that isn’t butt-adjacent (poop sandwich is my goto)
My pitch would be something garbage related. Hot wet trash, maybe?
Garbage Juice?
Piss Juicebox (ok that is scatological, this is SO HARD)
Ok my real pitch is: something that can have agency, so that when the word substitution happens, you still have a parseable sentence, most of the time. Take “Garbage Ape” (from the heathcliff comics I guess), for example:
- “I am a Garbage Ape ethicist”
- “It’s Garbage Ape Welfare discussion week”
- “I prompted a Garbage Ape to generate these image”
- “I think Garbage Apes pose a serious existential threat”
- “We’re proud to announce our new Garbage Ape, Steve”
Though it’s hard to pick a thing that conjures the right image.
thinking “typewriter monkeys”, but maybe that’s too literal
Do Garbage Apes dream of electric slurp juice?
Followup pitch: Cvnty Regirock: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cunty-regirock-with-a-handbag
Dumpster Fire Elemental?
C:// Monkey?
NPNC (Nonplayer Noncharacter)
ooh, those first and last ones have potential!
Dumpster Fire Elemental is great. Could be shortened to just Dumpster Elemental. Then you could have DFE/DE for AGI/AI. But also just DFE in full for everything is good too.
The rest are good but I think a little too in the neighbourhood of AI for me- I want to forget about this substitution, then later encounter an article talking about how dumpster fire elementals are consuming more energy per day than all of europe and wonder what the hell is going on, before remembering I have the plugin installed. But that’s just my stupid opinion :)
DFE just made me think up Directed Finite Generata as a thing and now I am absolutely going to use it on some promptfondlers sometime to make them itch
ChatGPT-to-third world employee? Bit too long, we prob can find a non-offensive shorter word for that.
ChatGPT to Orphan Crushing Machine?
global southerner? edit: nah I don’t like it.
We could ask a LLM and see what they want us to call them. ;)
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