Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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.
“Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies” - posted to HN
Another set of
social darwinismsdark bio troofs feat. 2 year old accounts made by promptfondeling libertariansI swear to god, starting a nature vs. nurture debate in a place leaning even slightly libertarian just breaks my brain because I never understand what point they’re even trying to make.
Half of them seem to argue that this is proof rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor (although I fail to see from which side they’re coming) while the other half uses it as thin-veiled excuses to be racist without mentioning race.
They’re just cowardly racists really.
as previously discussed, the rabbit r1 turns out to be (gasp) just an android app.
in a twist no one saw coming, the servers running “rabbit os” report to just be running Ubuntu, and the “large action model” that was supposed to be able to watch humans use interfaces and learn how to use them, turns out to just be a series of hardcoded places to click in Playwright.
Sam Bankman-Fried interviewed by Puck News!
this has been going around to great publicity from all!
it’s an insufferably vapid and self-serving rehash of Sam’s late 2022 crime confession tour. i can see why Puck grabbed for the exclusive, but jesus fuck nobody needs to hear from this conman again. Anyway, this copy isn’t paywalled.
I’m sure the prison rice arbitrage thing will end well.
that’s definitely not a set of words I thought I’d read today
so we learn, I guess
This sneer sponsored by me getting surgery last Friday and being extremely sore
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of-memoryless-lucidity
Surgery is the perfect opportunity to test one’s “Am I in the matrix?” mental sigils and other fun rationalist mind games!
Several years ago, I was thinking about worthwhile precautions to take against strange scenarios and wanted a way to defend against erasure of my short-term memory, e.g. by the CIA or alien abductions.
Of course someone made a follow up post encouraging readers to experiment with dangerous hardcore drugs for giggles.
This is presumably the sort of thing which is tough to get past an institutional review board these days, but easy to do yourself over the weekend with a friend or two.
Little mention that this might be a terrible idea, but at least someone pointed it out in the comments
Important notice: benzodiazepines are serious business: benzo withdrawals are amongst the worst experiences a human can go through, and combinations of benzos with alcohol, barbiturates, opioids or tricyclic antidepressants are very dangerous: benzos played a role in 31% of the estimated 22,767 deaths from prescription drug overdose in the United States.
Lesswrong and drug abuse. A match made in heaven.
we have mkultra at home
on the other hand, that’s just speedrunning being jordan peterson
on the third hand, our very good friend apparently never had been drunk
on the fourth hand, our very good friend also didn’t clock that maybe his ability to assess his own mental state was disturbed (it was) (severely)
on the fifth hand, this is an effect of many drugs, iv line suggests midazolam but maybe ketamine was an option. neither are exactly easily available for regular civilian (other benzos are)
first principling that benzos are completely safe, yeah way to go, 10/10. also not their first rodeo, but lwers on drugs would be megaminds on adderal, at least that’s what could be noticed previously
it sounds like what they’re trying to do is Wada test, for no particular reason, with zero knowledge what they’re trying to do or what tools do they need for that
about everything what could they learn from that is already described in psychiatry and psychology textbooks, but it’s too hard for homeschooled first-principlers like them
Several years ago, I was thinking about worthwhile precautions to take against strange scenarios and wanted a way to defend against erasure of my short-term memory, e.g. by the CIA or alien abductions.
What…
Makes you wonder if LW just attracts people with weird paranoid thoughts, or that you get more weird paranoid thoughts due to being a lot on lesswrong. Right
This is another example of how LW is a cult, if some other commenter had replied like this you’d expect the reply to be ignored but the respondent is of the same tribe, so author has no problem exposing them (and himself, by extension) as cranks to an appreciative audience (us).
Jesus, that second post.
[Benzos are] not only a great amnestic, it’s also apparently one of the most heavily prescribed drug classes historically, and used recreationally - which puts very strong lower bounds on the drug’s safety in practice, and means it’s probably readily available.
Yeah, because no widely used drug has ever turned out to be harmful, right?! Right?! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to huff some glue. After all, glue huffing is widely practiced recreationally - by kids, even - so it’s probably safe, right?
that’s a very carefully worded comment. there’s a reason why benzos were commonly prescribed in the past (but less so now)
Also
> “Unless you’ve used benzodiazepines before and know what dose you need, you should probably google around for dosing guidance”
Yup, kids, you should google for safe benzo usage. That’ll be safe. Yup. Super rational.
Eh, just ask ChatGPT.
Benzos
Apparently JBP might still be on benzos, after he tried the russian coma method (which seems to have blasted his mind further, he was already weird before, but now he just seems even dumber). So GG there LW.
it’s a known issue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindling_(sedative–hypnotic_withdrawal)
Nothing illustrates the difference between rational and Rationalist than ignoring the advice of trained professionals and instead roping in a SO to help perform ad-hoc personality tests. Dude’s gonna need to work to keep that girlfriend coz it’s unlikely he’s going to find someone else willing to put up with his shit.
this is peak 18-century science
Inorite! “Here, let me replace my blood with blood from a horse, it should make me stronger”
EA forum: Stock prices in a VC-forced bubble show that society will make trillions from AI!!!
first comment: “uh, wtf, that’s not how anything works.”
reply to this comment: “oh yeah? well DEBATE ME”
at least crypto isn’t involved this time. few understand (real world economics)
For such ostensibly smart people, the basics of finance and economics are surprisingly elusive!
not that we should complain too much about this: it’s given them the loss of the castle, the loss of a university-shielded
wastebasketthink tank, and may yet give them some more losses at scale!
I like his reply to the second (expunged) comment as well: “AI won’t take our jobs, it will just create value but even if it does take all the jobs we won’t be poor because GDP will go up and when number go up, we steal underpants, ???, PROFIT!”
someone re-invented email-threading. It’s billed as a way to have “long and complex discussions.” Their prototypical example? Yud’s utterly pointless thoughts on imaginary scenarios conjured up by his immense brain. Orange site is skeptical and yearns for 4chan instead.
Fractal sealions
Their entire manifesto could have been replaced with:
“Oh hey check out our threads in threads demo so you can comment on comments!”
Like it’s not that deep. It doesn’t need a manifesto.
This manifesto could have been an e-mail!
Hi, Im threadGPT, I am an advanced AI which will make concise bullet points out of longer email or comments, here is a bulletpointed list of the above comment.
- This manifesto could have been an e-mail!
- As a large language model, if anyone deserved to have a Tamagotchi of them tortured for all eternity …
I love the HN response that’s basically “soooo, usenet with trn, then?” Though a client that handles email reply bottom posting with “>” prefixed fragments more accurately describes this use case.
Either way there is nothing new under the sun.
The feature I am looking forward to the most in comminication apps is having a machine learning model listen to those “quick calls”, generate summary and action items and post them right back in the thread. You get the benefits of both worlds that way.
Oh, you do, do you?
Announced a year ago. AFAIK nothing like it actually exists yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE
Google has supplemented their AI customer service backend with a just as stupid AI front-end. They’re pushing you to make refund claims with “Google AI”. It’s a chat bot, and you’re pushed to use it to see the status of your refunds. Clicking a button and viewing a table of refund requests is apparently too Web 2.0, so instead you can ask a chatbot to pull up that status of your refunds one…by…one. It’s the second least useful use of a chatbot I’ve ever seen personally, right behind the chatbot they put into my office’s seating software.
Ah yes, tell me again about the novel useful things genML can do. I seem to remember something about it helping people?
Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational Fiction Classics
You know, sometimes I wish my words had touched more lives, but at least I can console myself with the discovery that nothing I’ve written has fucked people up that badly.
Ohio State commencement speaker was bitcoin maxi Chris Pan, who tossed a suggestion to buy bitcoin into the middle of his speech, got audibly booed.
Molly has some fun details on Musk’s hell site.
From the notes, it starts with normal inspirational speech garbage-- life pro-tip: do not repeat stupid parables saying that blind people have limited perspectives to large audiences-- then bitcoin comes up in the middle:
I know this might feel polarizing but I encourage you to keep an open mind. Right now, I see Bitcoin as a very misunderstood asset class. It is decentralized and finite which means no government can print more at will. In the early days, the exchanges for Bitcoin were prone to hacks and fraud. But this issue has been solved with the recent launch of bitcoin ETFs backed by the world’s 2 largest asset managers, BlackRock and Fidelity. And you can hold these ETFs in your retirement accounts just like you hold the S&P 500.
I’d love to do a demo for you: So here are 4 quarters. Inflation after 4 years has turned this into 3 quarters of purchasing power. Now if we apply some innovation and open-mindedness… Investing in your financial literacy will unlock so much freedom and possibilities for you.
His Twitter bio says that he’s “helping a billion people.” That’s quite a flex!
Here’s molly white’s thread on nitter.
University President Carter holding up a “bitcoin” in the part of the speech about the quarters
Ayahuasca Intelligence
I often thing back about the smug coiners mocking the TSA agent looking for physical bitcoins on a pro bitcoin person, when they do stuff like put bitcoin data in actual coins or make bitcoin coins.
(It does amaze me a little bit none of them seem to got that this was actually bad for bitcoin, as this just shows how hard to understand it all is for normal people, and them doing it themselves is just confusing more people intentionally)
Imagine going to university only to learn that the president falls for grifters that 10 year olds can detect.
“my dad’s
a better grifterstronger than your dad!!!”So about that.
Ted Carter is apparently on the board of an bitcoin mining company called TeraWulf.
So facebook (I’ll never call it the other name, get fucked zuckyboi) decided their LLM is so good that obviously they have to force it on everyone with an icon in your face you can never turn off[0].
Figured I’d give it a try via support channel/address, their response is even more insulting than you might guess:
[0] - of course when it doesn’t see enough adoption they’ll probably start trying to force use of it in even sneakier/controlling ways
You can share feedback and tell us about your support experience by completing this [three question survey.](https://www.whatsapp.com/survey/......)lol. the sheer fucking hubris.
Orange Site denizen plays Dr. LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331850
Show NH [sic]: “data-to-paper” - autonomous stepwise LLM-driven research
data-to-paper is a framework for systematically navigating the power of AI to perform complete end-to-end scientific research, starting from raw data and concluding with comprehensive, transparent, and human-verifiable scientific papers
The example “research paper” was some useless fluff about diabetes, based off an existing data set (read: actual work produced by actual humans), and mad-libs.
The study identifies an inverse correlation between physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake with diabetes occurrence, while higher BMI is positively correlated
I’m too sleepy and statistics-impaired to check how nonsensical the regression “analysis” or findings are, so instead let’s check out the references (read: the actual humans who were plagarized to make this fluff)!
Reference #5
[5] T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.
This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:
Hermina Jakupović, Germán D. Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild I. A. Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, Tuomas O. Kilpeläinen
I guess AI has an easier time advancing science than producing a PDF with non-ascii text in it
This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:
hmm. I can guess at a few reasons this could be happening: model coders “normalizing” everything to flat-ascii in training, or similar happening at training stage (because of the previously-referenced RLHF datamills employing only people with specific localized dialects, instead of wider context-local languages), etc.
wonder if this particular thing is a confluence of those, or just one specific set
have you ever met an English-native dev who didn’t need to be trained out of the world being 7-bit ascii
I got lucky and largely missed out on having to deal with those, at a guess largely because of location and age. the type I got to deal with instead were the php-/perl-brained “everything is just a string” types
hell, (circa 2010) I had beers with someone once who was really into Tcl and Second Life, and wanted to be uploaded as a digital consciousness. way before I knew about the other nutjobs, but in retrospect I now have a couple other questions I might’ve wanted to ask at the time…
7 bits were good enough for Jesus.
My Jesus wanted characters for drawing borders and playing card suits, which is why He handed down to us Code Page 437. Using the upper 128 characters for things like vowels with funny marks on them is catholic heresy (nuts to Latin 1, down with Unicode).
First efforts at bible digitization seems incredibly poorly documented online, and from a casual inspection in google scholar, not very well referenced. It’s a pity it sounds like a fascinating topic, though 7 bits is likely for the first english versions yes (And according to this there are horrid 7-bits encodings for the ancient greek)
The fact that actual engineers have been trying to educate newcomers on Unicode for at least 20 years and not only is it still pervasively ignored but the hottest, newest, cutting edge AI that Will Change Everything™ with billions of dollars and so many manhours behind it gets absolutely dumbfounded when it sees
éis the exact combination of funny and sad that will eventually result in me turning into a Butlerian Jihad Joker.Every respectable programming language has functionality in its standard library that recognises letter characters
As a C++ programmer I’ve never been so offended by something I so entirely agree with.
I haven’t read it yet (and I might not even bother) but Google’s probably lying about their ML models again
it does seem mildly useful https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/screening-against-alphafold-models-maybe-better-it-looks
note that google’s thing is pattern matching, and if there’s few similar protein structures in literature, then alphafold is working on poor quality data. comments do notice a red flag or two
Can’t see the comments on there unfortunately, but interesting start to that piece. Will read it in parts today as I get time
if you’re using firefox, disable enhanced tracking protection to see disqus comments
Ah my solution to this is different: if the things that I use to protect my shit are blocking some $x, ah well that can just get fucked then
Too exhausted by all the bullshit to try debug someone’s fuckery and specialcase them. Only exception is if it’s something I need (and then I’ll do so very grumpily, and quite possibly loudly)
got you
i mean specifically this one
I don’t believe this says anything useful about Alphafold or Cryo structures because I just don’t believe these hit-rates. Anyone who reports 50% success from virtual screening has something very wrong with their assay. Before doing anything they should stick a pin in the catalogue 50 times, test those compounds, and when 25 of them come back active they should stop and work out why.
The rest of criticisms is in article
hahaha that’s an amazing comment, and yeah agreed/understood
also note it’s from january so not about the new thing
also note that the big failures come from faulty biology, not from faulty chemistry. You can set innumerable piles of cash on fire if you choose to plug a wrong enzyme
elaborating on that. when you can hit a protein cleanly (without some side effects (called off-target, there are also on-target side effects)) but you hit wrong protein, this doesn’t have to be a complete loss, but it’s likely. maybe you learn something, either about biology of that all or about something else that it interacts with, or maybe you have found a cure to some other disease instead. but this is the actual hard problem of drug development, especially when the biology of it all is little known. there’s a few of these drugs that started this way, fentanyl, viagra, thalidomide (as anticancer), minoxidil come to mind, and at worst you have a new tool for biologists. alphafold won’t help with that
“I can predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules”
https://x.com/louisanslow/status/1789751075026661855?s=46&t=nT1XIOTx9ax3_3I0GXvgVQ
Rat orgies reach stand up comedy circuit. (Sorry for no nitter)
This is the greatest ad for Twitter ever, hosting content like this. God damn that is amazing.
came here to post that, amazing
Nick Bostrom’s advertising his new book about what if AIs let us sleep until noon and wouldn’t that be grand.
Also call me paranoid, but “A winter wonderland glittering with possibilities for discovery and play” sounds exactly like the sort of thing an LLM might generate.
Outright millenarianism
Bostrom yearns for retirement/unemployment the book.
Also there was a whole thing about how CGTP tends to use ‘delve’ a lot because it’s been RLHF’d by speakers of nigerian english, so yeah.
