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.
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.
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?
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.
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”
So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.
BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace “robot overlords” in TESCREAL 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.
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 for 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 SEVEN DECADES AGO
isn’t that the Palantir business plan
ha ha, wow.
Yeah, simple as, innit?
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
Strange, they didn’t count the number of utils I get by voting for Kamala just to make these bastards mald
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?
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.
I like how the advertisement’s URL opens with a fucking O_Q like even its unsettled by this shit
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
“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
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)
Also doxxing them when giving their refund.
people just don’t get consumer, I said, as the unfulfilled refund requests continued to rack up
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
Forget the diss track person, I’ve tracked down the true origin of Friend:
It’s like how can we make a depressing tamagotchi?
unsettling.
Indeed.
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.
Meta: reddit sneerclub appears to be open again. Is this an authorized action or has Reddit scabbed it?
iter.next() yields https://awful.systems/post/2063781
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
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.
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.
Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community
https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m
OT: https://xcancel.com/bnuuyhopper/status/1816574082588246342#m
Note: reposted from last week’s Stubsack :)
It’s been 3 days, my hope that this is real is fading :(
Musk will always own that hilariously disturbing baby roleplay Twitter alt though
this is the first thing i see on lemmy this week and i think it’s already enough internet for me today, basilisk have mercy
also musk’s downfall probably started the moment he became buddies with thiel
even failed to kill him in his dumb vanity car purchase, i mean
The upshot of this is that if acausalrobotgod ever gives us a time machine, you just need to plant one tree on your way to killing hitler, and you solve so many problems.
Maybe there’s an easy way to prevent apartheid in South Africa entirely? That alone led to so many waste-of-oxygen white dudes, we could nip Musk in the bud and much more
I aim to displease!
Baldur Bjaranason coming in with a solid sneer aimed squarely at his own industry’s finest
For as much as they like to talk about building things and solving problems the software industry doesn’t seem to put a lot of effort into building things well or solving their own problems.
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
Band I like accidentally purchases a poster design from a probable AI grifter. Here’s their apology/acknowledgement post:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C98X_6huBOJ
The poster in question:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C95H8MQuVI6
I do not blame the band. I blame the AI person for being shit and passing off AI-generated shit as his own.
first taste of apple intelligence and it’s about as good as you could expect
but hey, an apple product has acknowledged swearing - progress!
Does TP0 have an point he’s trying to push with this thread? It’s disingenuous enough that it feels like there’s an agenda, but at the same time what could the point even be? Fuck cancer patients?
oh man i’d forgotten St Rev, a favourite minor nrx from the mid-2010s
I’d never heard of him. His latest tweet is complaining about the left wing slant on his thread and he says that you can’t “get away from the culture war I guess”. Yet every fifth post below is a rage post about libs and lefties.
It’s like how all topics are either the cishet white standard quo or “political.” Raging about libs and lefties is standard quo and telling a dimwit they are a dimwit is “culture war.”
christ and it’s always the fucking bad-faith bullshit arguments. I bet if you pulled another dimension to the same fucking numbers there you’d instantly find some Rather Interesting correlations with income brackets, and if you pulled a dimension for care/spend class you’d find Another interesting correlation
I wish these people just fucking wouldn’t, gah
that’s just “poors don’t deserve healthcare” what else
otoh aren’t they going against their benefactors (old rich ghouls)?
Okay first of all what the fuck is a TP0? I swear you guys just make those people up and they’re lazier and lazier written each time.
Second, what’s the point here? Like, is either of the tweets making a point? Cause it just sounds like someone discovered why universal healthcare is a good idea? The fact that spending is so unequal is quite literally the entire point in favour of having universal insurance?
Also
1% is responsible for 24% of medical expenses
Now do how much of the population gets 24% of the income :)
TP0 is the OSI connection-mode transport layer protocol’s transport protocol class 0 duh.
Transport Protocol Class 0 (TP0), the simplest OSI transport protocol, performs segmentation and reassembly functions. TP0 requires connection-oriented network service.
I thought it meant “thread poster zero” because I never really understood the order in which one reads tweets and replies, so when I saw “TP0”, three frames later I already deduced an entire vocabulary of terms to designate each persona in a twitter screenshot
from the top down with either dfs or bfs depending on how you found the thread to spread, or from the inside out (by clicking through QTs until you get to the root). because twitter totally made browsing this shit easy.
what’s hard.
Cremieux used to post to Reddit as user Tr***yPornO (with the slur instead of the asterisks). Nobody here wanted to call him that, so it was rapidly abbreviated TPO or TP0. He posted the same breathtaking racist shit with low quality cites that didn’t check out as he has since. He also told all manner of inconsistent lies about who he was.
Speaking of breathtaking racism with low quality cites, does anyone remember ebola chan? He was my favorite because he was a reactionary with 4chan temperament, so he’d mald when pushed instead of spewing out word salad.
At least he wears his kink proudly, not many rightwing weirdoes would just admit they’re really into that.
I wouldn’t be too quick to conclude it’s that - I’ve seen a number of these creeps wear/handle-pick slurs as a trying-to-be-funny pejorative
Oh I’m sure he’s trying to be edgy, but in that case there’s nothing that would trigger him more than what I’ve said :>
Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat’s been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:
Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.
“Dear healthy people: don’t let the sickly suck away all your money”
I mean, you know what the point is.
It’s eugenics. It’s always eugenics.
Leukemia patients are always over-represented in their data because the it’s soooooo much easier to use the calipers on people with no hair.
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.
@ai_shame RT’d a good sneer in the wild recently:
Bonus: Eliezer, of all people, also sneered at the TESCREAL twat:
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
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
it’s often easier to pirate the published version of your own paper than to access it by official means
that’s a linkedin-level take
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.
