Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
Every day I become more convinced that this acct is an elaborate psyop being run by Yann Lecun to discredit doomers. Nobody could be this gullible irl right?
I’ve sat and had beer with someone (who’s worked in the space but not LLMs) who read the Bitter Lesson and got real into the idea of humans “just being universal function approximators” and had wholesale bought into the idea that we should throw everything we can possibly into this shit, no resource cost or requirement is too high or too uncertain, that it would definitely be the right thing to so
so I can tell you without no uncertainty that there are definitely people who buy into it
I poked the conversation gently, to see how far the conviction went. it was pretty comprehensively bought-in. was a somewhat surprising experience tbh
How did they respond to the counterargument that humans are simply… built different?
that was the response. and this is a person with exposure to (and their own undertakings in) creative works
it was a pretty wild conversation tbh
Amazing.
I also remember another time people did the 'let two AI’s (no idea what time it was at the time, certainly not an LLM, some other ML technique) talk to each other, but in a actual production setting (E:I was wrong on the setting, see the article for better info->), the Facebook/Meta one (First link I could find on google, didn’t read it, just a way to find out more for people who never heard about it). But then it started to produce gibberish/‘their own language’. Of course this was also a sign of it ‘waking up’.
And I note again that in the LLM experiment, the ‘AGI’s’ are still keeping perfectly fine to the bounds of the experiment, even if they do or do not directly reference the researcher. They still play into the fiction, as talking to the researcher about the other AI is part of the fiction. It would be more interesting if they did something unexpected than regurgitate video game ingame notes.
static dot dot dot emergency dot dot dot shutdown
lol
‘multiple realities’
Come on, I have written similar things while roleplaying as an AI. The first is useful when you need a quick break to go to the toilet, and the second is a good excuse because you made a mistake a real fictional AI couldn’t make.
E: also funny that they worry about the shoggoth behind the friendly face and then get freaked out when the AI’s talk in normal science fiction fluff to each other, and it doesn’t become incoherently weird. (like the example above).
Oh my god. The AI chatbots which were designed to mimic human writing are saying stuff exactly like the sci-fi stories I read online. They must be alive.
im doing my part
I went to the study, and that’s the global market size for all sex toys annually, and just eyeballing another chart, butt plugs might be 10% of that. So butt plugs are around $3 or $4 Billion. On the bright side, unlike AI safety, butt plugs actually serve a function.
Meatloaf didn’t anticipate the budgetary implications of enlisting us all in the Armies of the Night. Thus, humanity was ill-prepared when Skynet attacked…
Tweet ([Xcancel])(https://xcancel.com/edzitron/status/1809347763349647817) from Ed Zitron: “This report is damning. Goldman Sachs’s Head of Global Equity Research doesn’t believe that generative AI is capable of solving complex problems, and says the tech industry “is too complacent in its assumptions that costs will decline substantially””, more in the quote tweet.
Expect promptheads to dismiss this as being the ramblings of a “DEI hire” because they’re confused by the dual use of “equity” in their title.
Not just promptheads but the entire conspiratorial right is already way into not understanding how these functions and organizations work. There is a weird group of them who thinks that blackrock is a group of woke people (some of them are even saying it is ‘THEM’) behind everything. Because they confused a talk about ‘we need to tell organisations to focus more on diversity’ as a pro-diversity stance and not a ‘we need to make sure the companies we invest in don’t get sued, which causes a drop in share price’.
I’m sure they would find some way¹ to ruin it, but it would be fun if we could convince them to pass a law in some vice-signaling US state that bans private equity’s purchase of every vet and general contractor and empty house.
¹ Anti-semitism, probably.
https://matduggan.com/a-eulogy-for-devops/
Possibly interesting blog post about what the idea of “devops” promised, and how it failed to deliver. With any luck, the “getting back to basics” thing will actually happen, instead of people imagining they are google and building nightmares out of kubernetes.
Biblically Accurate Gymnasts
@BlueMonday1984 The machines are finally starting to understand art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K7aY-_b9sk
Now this is the shit. This right here. The only usecase for genAI - massively uncanny shitposts meant for consumption at 3AM in a dark corner of YouTube while on vibes enhancing substances.
This is what god wouldn’t have wanted and therefore is what we must pursue.
vibes enhancing substances
fuck yes
the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: “communities” managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data
We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.
if this were running you would be unlikely to know about. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it’s trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result
Personally haven’t seen a headline about Ol’ Billy Boy ever since word got around that he was a diamond medallion member of the lolita express airlines. William Gatorade thinks AI’s got what climate craves, i.e. waste heat.
Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.
Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
i think that openai also wanted to solve their problems with fusion, but they got a step further, they made a startup for this. not normal nuclear power plant hot rock machine, no, they want tech that is perpetually Just A Decade Away. it makes some perverse sense if your funding is dependent on misguided hype only
Eh, there’s a chance that machine learning might help here… there’s some interesting stuff come out of that area of research, like radio antennae and rocket engines and so on, but I’d bet anything that a) no LLMs were involved and none ever will be, and b) “ai” only appears in marketing copy and funding pitches.
dunno about rockets, but antenna thingy works only because you can simulate performance of antenna very reliably, precisely and quickly. This data was fed back, random small changes were made, things that were an improvement passed to the next iteration. Not sure how this approach is called but none of it is LLM
“genetic algorithm” - something I hadn’t previously seen branded as “AI”, but I guess I’m not surprised
GAs went out of the limelight before the rest of the beaus of current “AI” branding came to be, suspect that might be part of it
(Another suspicion is that it’s because they’re…fairly observable, ito operation? So it’s far less easily claimable that one of these has gained sentience, or all the other dumb bullshit that the cluster has spun in recent years)
yeah that’s it, forgot a word for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
that ST5 antenna looks like a low-poly two turn helical antenna, but how it looks like will be a function of design requirements
fusion research is just thinnest disguise for thermonuclear weapons research, especially the inertial confinement fusion variety
Don’t know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?
Ugh, so many people are working the “AI will solve X problem” mill. I don’t need nor want AI to be there increasing output.
Why is he carrying books and DVDs on a baking sheet?
He has a smart oven with AI and wants to feed it data?
FEED ME,
SEYMOURBILLY!
One is by David Brooks, so it’s guaranteed to be half baked?
When my local civilians get drawn into the conflict
via Little Bubby Child
I could hear this while reading it ahaha
Right?!
Being far from home at the moment, I really appreciate Bubby’s mountain vibes. Feels like a trip to Granny’s house.
Cloudflare making the bet there’s money in offering AI-scraping protection:
Dan Hendrycks wants us all to know it’s imperative his AI bill is passed- after all, the cosmos are at stake here!
https://xcancel.com/DrTechlash/status/1805448100712267960#m
Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(
Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated “poetry”
Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn’t it? Burn it all down.
turns out there was a good reason they wanted to turf us, we just didn’t know it yet
Ex-evangelical spotted!
What is it about growing up in insular fundamentalist communities that drives peeps straight into the basilisk’s scaly embrace?
Theres a specific word for that phenomena I believe, I just can’t remember at the moment. It certainly is a thing with all the high control group cults, say ex-JW’s.
Crank magnetism?
Behold
Motion capture, but worse - brought to you by AI
(seriously, I saw random Youtubers do better shit than this eight years ago and that is not hyperbole)
wow, that side-by-side is so obviously bad i’m surprised it even got posted. usually AI bros try to at least hide the worst of the tech, or at the very least, say shit like “this is only the beginning!!”
also, was not expecting to click that link and see FUNKe. good nostalgia
it ignores her eyes THE WHOLE TIME!
Not sure which sub a heartwarming story of Nazis shooting their own dicks off goes under, but: Nina Power of Compact gets called a nazi. Sues for defamation. In discovery, produces extensive facts not just supporting Nazi ideas but calling herself a Nazi. Loses so hard she just declared bankruptcy.
there has been no media coverage of this, but hoo boy does there need to be
there are some phenomenal whoppers just in the opening paragraphs of that article, holy shit
this is gonna make great piecemeal reading today!
discovery as humiliation conga line of “fairy alien nazi racism is totally my bag baby”
“fairy alien nazi”? What kind of a multiclass is this
hahahaha happy garbage day everybody
The logs also show Ms Power claiming that “the social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy races”, and that “black and white were alien races and very different”.
wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on
one day I’ll find a way to shoehorn in our experience with a Waldorf School into a sneer.
In summary, fairy-themed fascism can be tied back into the whole Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, esoteric Hitlerism shtick. You most commonly get ambushed with it when dealing with fallen hippies, but it is diffusing into the wider online right via weird 4chan things.
This is one of those David Icke things where you’re not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if they’re some kind of code or euphemism.
the answer is “both”
If you always bet on “everything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black people”, you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.
having unfortunately known several David Icke fans: it’s always veiled antisemitism, and the veil gradually disappears the more you let them talk
e: yes, the area I live in is teeming with various flavors of conspiracy nut, why do you ask
I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like
“ah ah but he wrote books - that surely can’t be the works of a person frothing in racism!” is something I’ve heard from a surprising number of people I’ve met
if racism made people illiterate every facebook group and every youtube comment section would look completely different
causally slipped “by the way fairies are real”
wait, what? What sort of context? Multiple people? FFS TELL
so I think I must just have one of those faces cause it’s been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and it’s usually a weird show of trust? and it’s always something like “you know, I just think fairies must be real, like they’ve got to be out there? you know?”
and in all cases I’ve gone “…oh that’s cool” and mentally earmarked that person as “do not trust with heavy machinery”
just remembered someone i met decades ago going on and on about spiritualism and ESP and just happened to drop in their own massive racism, there’s definitely a type
The crystals to anti-vaxx to full-blown fascism pipeline is real and I have more than a few cousins deep in that KKK hole. Hate to be a science brodude, but all the spiritualism stuff can be a gullibility magnet for those prone to self radicalisation (the bad type)
i mean, i have a friend who is literally a UFO religion believer, but they’re decent and politically good and trustworthy and present as normal-English, so
see occasionally you meet a UFO person and they’re normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit. in effect, their UFO hobby is essentially a modified radio/birdwatching hobby that’s hopefully driving them to learn more about the world around them
but much more often you meet a UFO person and hear the absolute worst thing you’ve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldn’t discuss lizard people with them.
you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit
you know, I don’t know if I’ve actually run into this kind of conversation. I don’t think I have. or if I almost did, I fairly likely applied a conversation logic-shortcircuit way before it got there (because of ambient red flag count). but fuck me, if I don’t know exactly the kind of person you’re referring to… :|
also
without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up
ZA has many problems (and oh christ could I wax lyrical), but thank fuck I do not live in fucking eaglecountry
it’s a whole fucked-up 'ole dynamic when you need to “watch your back” in the most very literal sense because you didn’t eat some bozo’s shit :|
:<
yeah i have one of those faces too (tall, blue eyes, Danish cheekbones), disconcerting number of nazis who wanted me to be in with them
I get the club invite most times I speak afrikaans in pretoria
in australia the club invite is just a way of saying “hi” to your fellow white person
I’ve never had the full on “let’s be nazis together” invite but I’ve had several people launch unprompted into “now that it’s just us white folks we can talk for real” mode. internally they must have been like “I see white skin, we are clear for takeoff, 54321”
funnily enough it hasn’t happened since I became visibly trans
ja that can happen/s here too
presumably your bones comprehend all the non-weather reasons that .au is such a popular za expat destination
see also all the TERFs yesterday loudly coming out in support of Power and her Nazi revelation
the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway, or perhaps just walking over to the other side of the same room
the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway,
It is funny how mad TERFs get when you mention they are saying the same things as neo-nazis, and then a few days later another TERF who is also a natzi is revealed again.
I know someone who’s a practicing christian and has said they’ve seen angels
technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have … not pushed matters
I think the connection isn’t with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but aren’t people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.
If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), it’s only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.
the original recipe nazis were deep into occultism so maybe
Have to wonder what happened to her brain since the days when she had stuff published at the Guardian.
she had a piece in The Quietus in 2018, but by 2020 they had kicked a writer out for being pals with DC Miller, her co-plaintiff in this case
(just for confusion one of the Quietus guys is a different Luke Turner)
given some of the other things I’ve seen from the guardian, not sure that would’ve necessarily been a contraindicator
I mean they didn’t seem very fashy at first. The later ones (2018, when she was fashy on the down-low ) started to get TERFy but earlier (2010-2014) it was all "the police aren’t your friend” and stuff about government trying to restrict the right to protest, etc.
(I looked over her Guardian contributions after reading about the bankruptcy etc in this thread.)
I guess that is the same duration/timeline as the guardian downslope arc
The guardian is kind of irrelevant to what I was getting at.
ah yes, a good ole
we have scientifically ascertained that this is in fact that rare correct use case for the following emoji sequence: 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Wonder how the lawyers reacted when they got that treasure trove filled with stolen nazi gold during discovery.
Wonder how Power and Miller’s lawyers reacted, lol
I read the judgement quite carefully and it makes no reference at all to the discovery material. the only evidence it demonstrates awareness of is public or is testimony
They will certainly win a lot of drinks in any ‘who has had the dumbest clients’ contests.
‘And then we found the “I’m definitely a Nazi now lol” message’ is a great punchline for a dumbest client ever joke
some numbers on recent hypewave investments in here (via techmeme)
Last year, Tom Loverro, an investor at IVP, predicted a “mass extinction event” for start-ups and encouraged them to cut costs. Last week, he declared that era over and christened this time the “Great Reawakening,” encouraging companies to “pour gas” on growth, particularly around artificial intelligence
jesus fucking christ these people would love to call it the enlightenment or something, wouldn’t they?
“Sam Altman canceled the recession,” joked Siqi Chen, founder of the start-up Runway Financial
one day soon I’m going to get to my project of building up a graph database of every crank and issuer of batshit statements like these, so that in times to come I can easily follow up on ‘em and see how their shit aged. but all hail sammy, the saviour! no, forget about that musk fool, no-one ever liked him! sammy is where it’s at!
also @dgerard for your pillaging pleasure
Posted the Ray Kurzweil thing on Pivot To AI. Let’s see how many comments we get that won’t be posted.
YouTube recommended me this hot garbage where we judge humanities like it’s a STEM field. I want my time back or at least some quality sneers: https://youtu.be/v0eWDScWSXY?si=wgJ60AfT0YYn_4-M
Callard and Hanson, there is no way i’m watching a second of that
Considering the view counts a common thought. The amount of twitter followers vs yt subs vs actual views is funny. They even tried a tiktok.
And they are trying so hard. Andrew Tate! Hogwarts Legacy! Destiny (the streamer, not the game, betting on the wrong horse there folks) Slapping at the Oscars! Pandemics!
I’m so sick of “if only we had more humanities in education the elites wouldn’t be fucking up the world.” that has nothing to do with reality, it never has, it never will
i thought it was a part of prevention of future engineer disease cases
Yeah same, but hey my cs education had courses both on basic ethics and how to run businesses, so some attempts were made at least.
it ought to be named philosopher’s disease
if only king leopold had been exposed to the humanities bro 😞
traveling back in time and teaching the rulers of the british empire about a little thing called literature
It really is unwarranted self importance. t humanities major
Is law considered part of the humanities because lawyers have been fucking things up in society since at least the French revolution.
