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.
Dear ~
SneerclubTechTakes, will you be my ‘Friend’? :)AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name (404 media, archive)
AI Companion Device Releases Diss Track Against ‘Friend’ (404 media, archive, diss track on twitter)
Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.
“It’s real! Premium domains are expensive, but it’s worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true.
[…]
“People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing,” Schiffmann said.
there’s an entire type of startup guy embodied by Schiffmann, and I can’t be the only one who’s met this type more than once
The company advertises the device as “always listening” when connected to bluetooth. “When connected via bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”
presented without comment
We have given your friend free will
Wow that was easier than expected, we can’t get philosophers to agree what that would even mean but it’s done folks
Enough money to blow it all on a domain name. Not enough money to port their chatbot-app from iPhone to Android, or pay someone to resolve customer issues. (twitter.com, xcancel.com)
people just don’t get consumer, I said, as the unfulfilled refund requests continued to rack up
Also doxxing them when giving their refund.
Forget the diss track person, I’ve tracked down the true origin of Friend:
the ad alone should be a thread it’s the most insane thing I’ve seen in years
the yt comments are brutal btw definitely check them out
The yt comments are indeed delightful
Was the pitch what if A24 made commercials?
MidsommAir
I like how the advertisement’s URL opens with a fucking O_Q like even its unsettled by this shit
It’s like how can we make a depressing tamagotchi?
Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.
This hast the same vibe as a trailer for shows like Black Mirror. I actually feel sad for the people they’re targeting with this, holy shit.
unsettling.
Indeed.
Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesn’t it?
At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)
At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)
I expect history to repeat itself quite soon - where previously using the term “artificial intelligence” got you looked at as a wild-eyed dreamer, now, using that term’s likely getting you looked at as an asshole techbro, and your research deemed a willing attempt to hurt others.
asshole or scammer or grifter. so many possibilities
This does suck for all the non-LLM ML stuff that has actual usage. (Even if a percentage of that was also snake oil, or had dubious success rates).
Ehh, if you’re calling your ML stuff AI then that’s on you (and you’re probably not technically serious about what you’re doing anyway). Other people are pointing out that AI isn’t a term that many compsci/software people would use, and neither the article (or afaict the study) or my experience suggest that ML has the same negative association as AI.
AI has been and always will be the term for making the computer play a game against you. A search tree with some prunning is not ML, but if you use it to implement a chess bot then it is AI in the game sense.
If you’re not doing video games then the term is essentially meaningless
In other news, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 got sent a viewpoint article with the title “Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?”.
I will give MAIHT3K credit for managing to get through that shit, because what the actual fuck.
Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can’t they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software
wait wait wait wait this it not substack of some deranged fash techbro ghoul like balaji srinivasan, that’s JAMA, are you sure these are actual MDs and not three techbros in a stolen labcoat
one of them - first author - has three fluff pieces on genai in similar tone to their name, the other two, it seems to me, didn’t wrote a thing about ai earlier
then again scott siskind exists, but this is not something that i’d expect even from him
JAMA article’s not in scihub, anyone got a copy?
anything newer than 2022? won’t be on scihub, because scihub got in a court case in india, that they hope they can win and secure reasonably stable place where they can operate from
tho it seems to me that the entire article is that three screens of text
that’s fuckin grim.
I had a simple question: how to rescue a Windows hard disk to a new SSD?
The answer is ddrescue from a Linux USB stick, but the Windows user wasn’t comfortable at the command line.
But if you Google it, you get:
- insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.
- AI slop.
Eventually I just did it myself with ddrescue. But I got a first-hand experience of how fucking unusable search is now.
Oh, and Google is now showing AI slop answers at the top of searches in the UK.
For people from the future:
I’m a fan of Clonezilla, which is a debian-derived live distro designed specifically to clone partitions as well as whole disks. If you’re comfortable with how Linux represents devices, it’s as close as you can get to training-wheels-included imaging for free.
BIG WARNING: Be sure to write down the BitLocker key before you begin, or else it’ll be a bad time!
insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.
I had a windows problem once, so was looking through all that looking for an answer and saw somebody go ‘I need to save my data, which is very important, so how do I fix this problem’ and then they got a reply with ‘follow these steps with step X making sure they would delete their data’. And this was before the whole era of AI slop so I fear how much worse it has gotten now.
@dgerard What kind of HD? I have at least 4, incl. 2 x 500GB, 1 x 1TB, that are not “seen” anymore by the system… as if the head was “locked” somehow…
The original is a 1TB mechanical hard disk, the new one is a 2TB SSD. I just copied the disk image with ddrescue and it works (and took 2 hours). Next step: expand the partition to 2TB with gparted.
@ai_shame RT’d a good sneer in the wild recently:
Bonus: Eliezer, of all people, also sneered at the TESCREAL twat:
Harry Potter and the Surprisingly Good Take
Harry Potter and the Broken Clock
It’s the same story as has ever been. “Smart People”'s position on anything is often informed by their current economic relationship wrt to the things they care about. And maybe even Yud isn’t super happy about his profession being co-opted. What scraps will he have if his own delusions became true about GPT zombies replacing “authentic voices”?
No one is immune to seeing a better take when it’s their shit on the line, and no is immune from being in a bubble without stake.
I’ve read enough of the Yudster’s work to recognize that he is particularly vulnerable to being replaced by a small shell script that outputs a massive volume of text that says very little of substance, and what little there is is weirdly racist.
that’s a linkedin-level take
Somebody got all his books from libgen and it shows.
hey no shaming libgen, that shit exists for good reason
You are mistaken in my reasoning, I’m saying a person with a well paid university position (which gives him access to money and the university library, which I assume pays for access to their books/papers and doesn’t libgen or equivs them) should understand that a lot of training material is indeed not free. This being in addition to the university paying him for his own research, and him prob being pretty annoyed if he was replaced with an iSandberg bot and now was homeless. (This is in addition to what Yud said).
Turns out making papers about replacing the earth with fruit is something Anders-GPT can do perfectly well on its own.
which I assume pays for access to their books/papers and doesn’t libgen or equivs them
wrong assumption tbh. the open-access fight is happening because the publisher cartels are extortionate and access is extremely uneven. I (personally/directly) know more than a few people presently in academia who roll libgen on a daily basis because it is easier/quicker/the only option/the only actually working option for the things they need
it’s often easier to pirate the published version of your own paper than to access it by official means
Fair enough, my bad. No idea it had gotten that bad. But still, I wasn’t intending to rag on libgen, just his idea that these things (which also includes education) are free already.
if you want to get really mad, shibboleth “elsevier”. it’ll be a speedrun of learning some of the worst of what’s fucked atm
This new trend of describing the American right wing as weirdos sure is something, isn’t it? What used to be our little hobby has escaped containment, largely due to the surfacing of JD Vance and his backers during the RNC. As recently as last month, when NRx and Rationalist oddballs came up in a news item, the response of the average reader would be to shrug and dismiss them as a small minority of sweaty nerds and assume that “regular” Republican politicians wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Things have changed; now there’s many an NPR-loving granny googling “what is a yarvin” and getting wound up about it in her group chats.
We’ve all heard of the Overton Window, which according to Wikipedia is, “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” I therefore propose a new thing, the “Yarvin Window,” which we can define as “the range of insane policies that it is politically acceptable to ascribe to your ideological opponents.”
This is the price they pay for grabbing the wrong end of the poo stick.
What amazes me, as a sort of US politics watcher from the outside, just how badly the various republicans weirdos are reacting to this. Esp Vance, posting his dolphin fucker stuff in the middle of the jokestorm about him being into furniture. But not just him, the GOP going ‘don’t be racist about Harris’ and then all the racists doubling down on their racism, etc etc. The weird lashouts re weirdness. “how dare you call me weird! Grabs calipers I can see from your skull shape that you are …”
damn so he’s a posadist too on top of everything?
If I had a nickle for every time I’ve heard about dolphin sex I’d have four nickles. Which isn’t much, but also is kind of a lot.
The proud tradition of “no really, Trump isn’t that bad if you pretend he’s a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth”
Realistically, most EAs will vote for the white male over the non-white female anyway, but it’s on-brand for them to post a giant substack with reasons why.
After hate-reading the replies I spied Roko plus an an unironic Yarvinite what an absolute G E M
Dude posted to the EA forum as suggested and it went over like a lead balloon:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A6W5qm9gWyr3mikmS/the-ea-case-for-trump-2024
Kinda funny that they write thousand page essays with detailed reasons on why to vote for a person who can’t read more than two sentences without getting distracted by a ketchup bottle.
So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.
BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace “robot overlords” in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, “The Authoritarian Peril”:
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg
with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:
A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur’s Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.
isn’t that the Palantir business plan
ha ha, wow.
Yeah, simple as, innit?
with advanced near-perfect lie detection
how the fuck would that work mate, just give me a glimpse of your notes on how a legendarily useless and unworkable forensic technique would become “near-perfect” with GPUs.
Ya know, it’s funny that you point this out, it’s a thing about their style of argument that’s been nagging at me for a while.
There’s a pattern in the promptfondlers’ propaganda where they claim that they they’ve identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a “truth oracle” in the compsci sense of the word “oracle.” If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.
I guess that’s true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions with your infinite knowledge genie.
Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle; you just can’t get there from here, but try telling them that.
If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.
Damn bro, they’re gonna hate this Turing fellow once they learn he crushed their dreams OVER
SEVENEIGHT DECADES AGOEDIT: someone pointed out I suck at arithmetic
Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:
If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.
Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.
What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:
What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”
do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths
Wh… What? Does favouring seatbelts also induce millions of premature deaths, because of… because of what? What the actual fuck dude?
Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”
Jesus.
Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice
Where are your Bayesian priors now, asshole?
Siri, how can I unread a post?
Also look at this dude in the replies advocating for mask-off right-wing sexist / racist / fascist EA: https://x.com/diegocaleiro/status/1729715617945788773 … if you dare 😱
Someone posted this to /r/SneerClub and it got 150+ comments, didn’t realize you can still start threads there.
the number of people on /r/sneerclub who seem utterly unaware of the new digs is tragic.
looks like completely-ineffable just decided to start it up again
why?
i have no idea!
but still the founder and first mod
Two Sneer Clubs, both alike in dignity…
ah looks like he restarted r/badphilosophy at the same time
Tangent: I had assumed nitter was dead and buried by now, glad to see there are still some functioning mirrors. I’ve found it impossible to share threads without.
https://status.d420.de/ there’s a few nitters post-rebirth, all of them probably using a fleet of real accounts and anti-bot protection instead of the guest accounts that first-age nitter used.
Strange, they didn’t count the number of utils I get by voting for Kamala just to make these bastards mald
Rumor, but lol if true “A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets” Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.
https://nitter.poast.org/edzitron/status/1819591404873568715
Zitron’s sample size may be limited to his Twitter following, but its a bad sign for AI if bashing it gets you praise from both sides of the political aisle:
Bonus Tweet from Chris Alvino:
I was just thinking about this today. I had a thread go viral where I bashed AI, resulted in thousands of new followers, and I’ve had to block a bunch bc they turned out to be on the far right. Honestly amazing how bipartisan AI hate is. Never seen anything like it before 😂
Riffing on this fun subthread:
- Will AI invent the Philosopher’s Stone?
- Can AI duck the Zuck?
- WIll AI divide by zero?
- Can AI give you diarrhea?
- Will AI make “fetch” happen?
- Will AI have a second helping?
- Does AI unlock the secret to making the Moon happy again?
- Can AI stop eating after only one marshmallow?
You know, I feel like it’s only a matter of time before someone in the overlapping griftoverse tries their hand at immanentizing the eschaton by creating their own second coming - the MessAIah.
- Will AI die for our sins?
- Will AI break the Wheel?
- WIll AI serve the Antichrist?
- Will AI accept
acausal tradebribes from Freeman Dyson so that he was right after all?
Can AI give you diarrhea?
Already does make me nauseous, so…
soooooo, what you’re saying is that AI can cure constipation
use cases everywhere!
I’d much rather have a technology that allows some specific people to keep their shit inside, without spilling it for all of us to see. @TheBigYud
This orange thread is about San Francisco banning certain types of landlord rent collusion. I cannot possibly sneer better than the following in-thread comment explaining why this is worthwhile:
While I agree that the giant metal spikes we put on all the cars aren’t the exclusive reason that cars are lethal, I would hope we both agree that cars are less lethal when we don’t cover them in giant metal spikes.
more of a nsfw, a post on pointing and laughing at the fash. figured y’all may also enjoy reading it
Not read it yet, but I do enjoy that Harris Dr Who’ed Trump.
I missed that (largely because I try to avoid taking in horserace content), got a link?
No I mean the whole ‘aren’t they weird’ matches that dr who episode. Basically Who gets disappointed with the PM he is traveling with, and tells her ‘I will end your carreer with a few words’ and then whispers ‘doesn’t she look tired’ to one of her aides.
oh, I thought there was a literal equivalent kamala-phrase to the one at play here
unless you mean kamala team literally said “aren’t they weird”, in which case a’ight I agree
(again: fuck horserace content, got too few damn spoons for that. which is in part why I have no idea where the change in tide came from - just happy it’s present)
I meant the ‘aren’t they weird thing’ yes.
I like most of this article but
Instead, hundreds of couples gathered in a public space and sucked face. The women wore what we might call immodest clothing and the couples groped each other and kissed and kissed and kissed some more. For the police and the Turkish regime, this was an “irresolvable dilemma.” The police could not possibly turn violent against these smooching protesters. They would look brutal and, in some ways, silly. The public would surely sympathize with the kissing anti-authoritarians if force were deployed. Police are trained to respond to force, not non-violence. In this case, they slinked away and the protesters cheered and, in some cases, made out a little more.
did the law change
The townspeople didn’t engage the neo-nazi marchers with threats and force. Residents and local businesses instead pledged money for every mile the fascists walked in their journey to Hess’ burial site. They raised about $12,000 and gave the money to an organization dedicated to de-radicalizing young people trying to exit extremist groups. Protestors threw rainbow confetti on the neo-nazis as they passed the finish line of the marathon route the pro-democracy group had created as a way of mocking the little fascist walk. These adherents to a hideous political ideology were made into subjects of ridicule. They were made to be fools by folks who smartly refused to engage them the way they wanted to be engaged: With violence.
did they stop marching to the grave
idk the answer to the previous two questions but that he didn’t say is pretty sus
Pro-democracy activists have shown that far-right demonstrations of power have six core goals: To legitimize their views, strengthen their self-image as part of the downtrodden, unite their squabbling factions, attract new people to the movement, control media coverage, and feel powerful and heroic. All of these goals were met with the violent counter demonstrations in Charlottesville. It could not have turned out better for the fascists.
Charlottesville was an unmitigated disaster for the far right
In fact, movements with a mere 3.55 percent of the population actively supporting them have never failed, according to Pranksters vs. Autocrats, a comprehensive review of nonviolence and dilemma actions.
credulous
Smearing your opponent as weird and out of step with the American voter is as good a strategy as we’ve seen in the 21st century. Is it high minded and philosophical? No, it’s not. Are normies high minded and philosophical? No, they’re not. This is why Marxists have largely failed to gain power. They think too much.
the attack line comes from leftist podcasts
In fact, movements with a mere 3.55 percent of the population actively supporting them have never failed, according to Pranksters vs. Autocrats, a comprehensive review of nonviolence and dilemma actions.
Weird to see this argument come back. Last time I saw it ‘we only need to convince 10% of the population to fully believe in it, and science shows we will win all the time!’ it was being said by fascists a decade ago. Not sure if it makes sense, because there are true believers on the other side as well. Anyway, just wanted to mention how odd it is to see this argument be recycled after only seeing it on the far right a long time ago.
(I should say there’s a handful of places I don’t entirely agree with the writing/references, but I don’t think it kills the whole)
all their points about cville are pure post hoc speculation trash; this is way too close to the “but but violence is bad!”; laughing at the fash is good; beating up the fash while laughing is even better.
“it’s easier for me to laugh than to go punch a nazi” was what I picked up from that part of it. and yeah, punching nazis has a long proven history of effectiveness
google continuing on their crusade to force ads down everyone’s eyeballs
not that it’s surprising, just “good” to see this playing out exactly as predicted
a long AI sneer on gabi belle’s channel
the comments also have some bangers. a quick selection:
My mom used to transcribe calls for companies as work, but then her work implemented AI to transcribe the calls, leading to work calls having sentences in them such as: “Thanks for watching!” “This venue has the best beat” and putting in random websites that DONT EXIST into the calls, when the caller said nothing like that.
imagine this in financial or medical services
had a survey from my university about how staff feel about AI implementation for our university. One question that concerned me was “how do you feel about AI being used for grading?”
The issue with AI grading assignments is that students will most likely get the mindset that if the professor or TA doesn’t care enough to put in the effort to look at my work to give me feedback to do better, why the hell should I put in the effort and spend thousands to do this?
please come to our university, it costs 500k for a year and we pinky promise that the prof/TA won’t get more than 10% of it, your learning is our “top priority”
My friend and I entered an art contest a few months ago and she lost to very obvious ai “art”. She spent months on a self portrait oil painting that even when putting my bias aside was amazingly beautiful and definitely deserved to win. There was ai competing in the charcoal category with me too but luckily someone looked at competing pieces before the judges actually scored anything and bombarded the hosts of the competition to remove the piece and they did eventually. It’s incredibly frustrating especially considering part of the first place prize was a scholarship that my friend definitely deserves and needs, and the contest hosts were very hesitant to remove the ai “art”.
it’s weird how a chunk the art world continues being bad at handling fakes
For additional context, training ChatGPT-3 took enough energy to propel the titanic at full speed for 37 hours. Or around 920 tons of coal.
just absolutely mental
I’ve been under a rock with a bunch of life stuff so I only learned of this yesterday, and holy shit
those snapshots from the earnings call are wild
