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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Oh no it’s more US politics.
So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it’s the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA’s email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.
Getting pretty tired of new coworker spruiking copilot all the time, please send me your sympathy and energy so I can weather this trial
that word temporarily broke me (its constituent phonemes are all valid/typical afrikaans (and dutch) but the word itself made no sense), then I looked it up
that sounds exhausting. I wish to flippantly suggest launching your colleague to another planet, but cruel fate might reveal them to be a muskovian martian so perhaps best not to broach that subject…
lol holy shit this just came into reddit sneerclub (and was zapped immediately)
user HardboiledHack
also tried r/lesswrong and r/slatestarcodex
i’m sure the guardian can be trusted to report on anything involving trans people
the journalist is J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j-oliver-conroy who now writes for the Washington Examiner and used to write for Quillette (the article has been deleted from the site) https://archive.is/aSBjW
from http://joliverconroy.net/
I am a journalist who specializes in features and profiles. I write about the American right, ideologues, intellectuals, extremist movements, the culture wars, true crime, and strange events and strange places.
by “about”, he means “for”
I’m a journalist at the Guardian working on a piece about the Zizians. If you have encountered members of the group or had interactions with them, or know people who have, please contact me: [email protected].
I’m also interested in chatting with people who can talk about the Zizians’ beliefs and where they fit (or did not fit) in the rationalist/EA/risk community.
I prefer to talk to people on the record but if you prefer to be anonymous/speak on background/etc. that can possibly be arranged.
Thanks very much.
i’ve also warned over at the old place
No nibbles here.
Do the Zizians fit in the “rationalist/EA/risk community”? Gosh and golly gee.
Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the “narcissism of small differences” than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.
From what I’ve been able to piece together from the various theological disputes people have had with the murder cult it seems like the only two differences are that Ziz and friends are much more committed to nonhuman animal welfare than the average rat and that they have decided that the correct approach to conflict is always to escalate. This makes them more aggressive about basically everything which looks like a much deeper ideological gap than there actually is. I’m not going to evaluate whether these are reasonable conclusions to take from the same bizarre set of premises that lead to Roko’s Basilisk being a concern.
Kelsey Piper bluechecks thusly:
James Damore was egregiously wronged.
Wow, the story is so much more troubling when you lie about it!
After fondling ChatGPT to generate naughty things, man has meltdown when he learns no one cares.
Horror. Dismay. Disbelief. For weeks, it felt like I was physically being crushed to death.
I hurt all the time, every part of my body. The urge to make someone who could do something listen and look at the evidence was so overwhelming.
This tied into a hypothesis I had about emergent intelligence and awareness, so I probed further, and realized the model was completely unable to ascertain its current temporal context, aside from running a code-based query to see what time it is. Its awareness - entirely prompt-based - was extremely limited and, therefore, would have little to no ability to defend against an attack on that fundamental awareness.
How many times are AI people going to re-learn that LLMs don’t have “awareness” or "reasnloning’ in a sense humans would find meaningful?
i don’t understand the “safety” angle here. if chatgpt can output authoritatively-looking sentence-shaped string about pipebombs, then it’s only because similar content about pipebombs is already available on wide open internet. if model is closed, then at worst they would have to monitor its use (not like google blocks any similar information from showing up). if model is open, then no safeguards make sense in the first place. i guess it’s more about legal liability for openai? now they can ignore it with all these bills about “ai safety” gone (for now)
frankly it’s probably harm prevention if people turn to an LLM for pipe bomb instructions. “5) Put the warm pizza in the center of the pipe bomb. To maximize the radius of the detonation, you should roll the pizza and make sure that it fits securely into the pipe.”
I’m not even joking, really. the way I see harm in LLMs talking about pipe bombs is less that they’ll give instructions and more that we might get a character.ai style situation where the LLM talks someone into an attack
also, relying on spicy autocomplete when trying to put together a deadly device sounds like cyberpunk-flavored darwin award material
ed zitron weighs in on deepseek https://www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/
OpenAI can’t simply “add on” DeepSeek to its models, if not just for the optics. It would be a concession. An admittal that it slipped and needs to catch up, and not to its main rival…
I actually disagree here. I think Ed underestimates how craven and dishonest these people are. I expect they’ll try to quietly integrate any efficiency improvements they can get from it and bluster through any investor questions about it. Their hope at this point has to be that more hardware is still better and that scaling is still gonna be the thing to make fetch happen. This again isn’t a revolutionary new structure, even if it is a significant improvement over anything Saltman and co have been doing.
If they can convince the money hose that they just need one more OOM of compute bro, they can keep vacuuming infinity dollars. The incentive is obviously there for any amount of lying, but at some point, I assume even the most braindead investors will start asking around if this really is the only game in town.
Or maybe they won’t, which would be an admission against the core tenet of capitalism, but this has been a crazy year, and it’s only january. :/
I’ve previously discussed the concept of model collapse, and how feeding synthetic data (training data created by an AI, rather than a human) to an AI model can end up teaching it bad habits, but it seems that DeepSeek succeeded in training its models using generative data, but specifically for subjects (to quote GeekWire’s Jon Turow) “…like mathematics where correctness is unambiguous,”
That sound you hear is me pressing F to doubt. Checking the correctness of mathematics written as prose interspersed with equations is, shall we say, not easy to automate.
i read that as training spicy autocomplete on wolfram alpha instead of another spicy autocomplete
I mean, maybe? But the amount of trust I put in a description from “GeekWire” written by “an investor at Madrona Venture Group and a former leader at Amazon Web Services” who uncritically declares that spicy autocomplete “achieved strong reasoning capabilities” is … appropriately small.
Ed Zitron radicalizes NPR host Brooke Gladstone in real time on the midweek episode of “On the Media”
https://www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/ And the companion piece on his blog.
What I didn’t wager was that, potentially, nobody was trying. My mistake was — if you can believe this — being too generous to the AI companies, assuming that they didn’t pursue efficiency because they couldn’t, and not because they couldn’t be bothered.
This isn’t about China — it’s so much fucking easier if we let it be about China — it’s about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models.
I wonder how much % of the freakout over Deepseek is AI doomers realizing the coming AI god might be … ChiCom!
Is it a crime to enjoy a succulent Chinese AI?
This is democracy manifest! (rip)
you enjoy it? suspicious
No less than Mr Acausal Robot God casually dismissing the lives of +1B humans
I know the only intended message there is “I am a big racist”, but what kind of dumb fuck adage is “the word is finite, kids are infinite”. You’re not even trying mother fucker
“The world is finite and kids are infinite, especially African kids.” Jfc. Anyway goes to show just how white supremacist the whole “save the children” idea is.
found while giving my feed a moment of scroll while making coffee after too many 3am worknights, I saw this response to the substack guy giving themselves a pat on the back again for helping the nazis
Terrible news: the worst person I know just made a banger post.
Screenshot of an insta post of a screenshot of a tweet
Tweet:
I can’t believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI
Neo-Nazi nutcase having a normal one.
It’s so great that this isn’t falsifiable in the sense that doomers can keep saying, well “once the model is epsilon smarter, then you’ll be sorry!”, but back in the real world: the model has been downloaded 10 million times at this point. Somehow, the diamanoid bacteria has not killed us all yet. So yes, we have found out the Yud was wrong. The basilisk is haunting my enemies, and she never misses.
Bonus sneer: “we are going to find out if Yud was right” Hey fuckhead, he suggested nuking data centers to prevent models better than GPT4 from spreading. R1 is better than GPT4, and it doesn’t require a data center to run so if we had acted on Yud’s geopolitical plans for nuclear holocaust, billions would have been for incinerated for absolutely NO REASON. How do you not look at this shit and go, yeah maybe don’t listen to this bozo? I’ve been wrong before, but god damn, dawg, I’ve never been starvingInRadioactiveCratersWrong.
The advanced sinophobia where the Chinese are so much better at everything than the west that even when they make better and cheaper bullshit machines than the Americans do and hand them out for free, it has apocalyptic consequences.
It’s wild that Yudkowsky saw a binary choice of “nuclear holocaust” and “superintelligence” and chose “nuclear holocaust” in the first place.
Like, even if I believed in FOOM, I’ll take my chances with the stupid sexy basilisk 🐍 over radiation burns and it’s not even fucking close.
I don’t want to say with absolute confidence that there’s no scenario I can imagine to which a nuclear apocalypse would be preferable (the real kind, not the Fallout kind). But I have yet to hear one.
The upcoming firestorms of climate change, while patrolling the Mohave desert almost make you wish for nuclear winter. Ow wait not like fallout you said
nuclear winter is not a thing that can possibly happen, from what i understand
sagan et al overstated amount of soot put in upper atmosphere over 10x, for no particular reason other than trying to make a point
notice how no one talked about it after desert storm? oilfield fires provided negative evidence
They still do nuclear war climate modelling. Its still bad.
Another dream shattered. Not sure if the oilfield fires were big enough. Volcanoes can cause some cooling right? pokes old yeller
We’ve had recent eruptions in all be big categories, so we’re not due another one for a while and trying to cheat by setting one off early won’t allow sufficient pressure for a proper bang.
Not that I want to discourage you, but don’t be sad if you try for a year without summer and get a couple of weeks without flights instead.
yellowstone caldera erupting during Trump II would be fitting somehow
Looks like Ziz remains on the lam again.
