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)
Timnit Gebru on Twitter:
We received feedback from a grant application that included “While your impact metrics & thoughtful approach to addressing systemic issues in AI are impressive, some reviewers noted the inherent risks of navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players,”
navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players
stares into middle distance, hollow laugh
No need for xcancel, Gebru is on actually social media: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113160285088058319
Despite Soatak explicitely warning users that posting his latest rant[1] to the more popular tech aggregators would lead to loss of karma and/or public ridicule, someone did just that on lobsters and provoked this mask-slippage[2]. (comment is in three paras, which I will subcomment on below)
Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasn’t been for at least a decade. As far as I can tell, it’s a meme that is exclusively kept alive by our detractors.
This is the Rationalist version of the village worthy complaining that everyone keeps bringing up that one time he fucked a goat.
Also, “this sure looks like a religion to me” can be - and is - argued about any human social activity. I’m quite happy to see rationality in the company of, say, feminism and climate change.
Sure, “religion” is on a sliding scale, but Big Yud-flavored Rationality ticks more of the boxes on the “Religion or not” checklist than feminism or climate change. In fact, treating the latter as a religion is often a way to denigrate them, and never used in good faith.
Finally, of course, it is very much not just rationalists who believe that AI represents an existential risk. We just got there twenty years early.
Citation very much needed, bub.
[1] https://soatok.blog/2024/09/18/the-continued-trajectory-of-idiocy-in-the-tech-industry/
[2] link and username witheld to protect the guilty. Suffice to say that They Are On My List.
nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk
But you should, yall created an idea which some people do take seriously and it is causing them mental harm. In fact, Yud took it so seriously in a way that shows that he either beliefs in potential acausal blackmail himself, or that enough people in the community believe it that the idea would cause harm.
A community he created to help people think better. Which now has a mental minefield somewhere but because they want to look sane to outsiders now people don’t talk about it. (And also pretend that now mentally exploded people don’t exist). This is bad.
I get that we put them in a no-win situation, either take their own ideas seriously enough to talk about acausal blackmail. And then either help people by disproving the idea, or help people by going ‘this part of our totally Rational way of thinking is actually toxic and radioactive and you should keep away from it (A bit like Hegel am I right(*))’. Which makes them look a bit silly for taking it seriously (of which you could say who cares?), or a bit openly culty if they go with the secret knowledge route. Or they could pretend it never happened and never was a big deal and isn’t a big deal in an attempt to not look silly. Of course, we know what happened, and that it still is causing harm to a small group of (proto)-Rationalists. This option makes them look insecure, potentially dangerous, and weak to social pressure.
That they do the last one, while have also written a lot about acausal trading, which just shows they don’t take their own ideas that seriously. Or if it is an open secret to not talk openly about acausal trade due to acausal blackmail it is just more cult signs. You have to reach level 10 before they teach you about lord Xeno type stuff.
Anyway, I assume this is a bit of a problem for all communal worldbuilding projects, eventually somebody introduces a few ideas which have far reaching consequences for the roleplay but which people rather not have included. It gets worse when the non-larping outside then notices you and the first reaction is to pretend larping isn’t that important for your group because the incident was a bit embarrassing. Own the lightning bolt tennis ball, it is fine. (**)
*: I actually don’t know enough about philosophy to know if this joke is correct, so apologies if Hegel is not hated.
**: I admit, this joke was all a bit forced.
Via Timnit Gebru’s mastodon, I just learned that Emily Bender (both of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots fame) has a podcast: “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.” Looking forward to checking it out tomorrow at the gym!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes
Summary: Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They’re joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.
It’s pretty great. The closing bits of improv from her cohost are a bit meh imo but the AI hype assessments are legitimately amazing.
Some killjoys pour cold water over everyone’s favorite dental biohack, and HN is not happy
From the comments: “Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, the dental hygiene industry in the US is for-profit, like the pharmaceutical, and would rather sell you a treatment than a cure.”
Have these people ever BEEN to the dentist? While I know that certain dental procedures (tooth straightening in kids, whitening, etc) are way overused in the US no dentist worth their salt will allow a check-up to go by without a stern lecture on preventing future trouble. And if they don’t do that then the hygienist most certainly will…
Here in Sweden the hygienist is definitely the Bad Cop in this scenario. I got sternly talked to by someone fresh out of school, so I don’t doubt there’s a retired Master Sergeant on the staff of the college they go to…
Sometimes you read an article and you think “this article doesn’t want me to do X, but all its arguments against X are utterly terrible. If that’s the best they could find, X is probably alright.”
that thread is an unholy combination of two of my least favorite types of guys: techbros willfully misunderstanding research they disagree with, and homeopaths
I’d think ‘we don’t know the side effects, it prob doesn’t work, and they are trying to sidestep the FDA’ would be good arguments against it. Esp after in the US Thalidomide (yes very much a dead horse), (mostly) wasn’t a problem because the FDA stopped it.
Anyway, it seems like the full scale FDA project stranded due to not enough volunteers, so I suggest the HN people mad about this help out. Hey, it might turn out to actually work.
What a terrible argument. Anything that involves messing around with your teeth needs to have good reasons to do it, rather than just good arguments against doing it.
this article doesn’t want me to drink a shitload of colloidal silver, but all its arguments against drinking colloidal silver (it doesn’t do anything for your health, it might turn you blue, it tastes like ass) are utterly terrible. If that’s the best they could find, drinking a shitload of colloidal silver is probably alright.
Absolutely unhinged. Are these people from the As-Seen-On-TV dimension where it’s common for folks burn their house down every time they try to fry an egg?
Pulling out a pretty solid Tweet @ai_shame showed me:
To pull out a point I’ve been hammering since Baldur Bjarnason talked about AI’s public image, I fully anticipate tech’s reputation cratering once the AI bubble bursts. Precisely how the public will view the tech industry at large in the aftermath I don’t know, but I’d put good money on them being broadly hostile to it.
If you’re against unrestricted genAI then you’re also transphobic
What. Wait has anyone claimed this? Because that’s absurd.
Oh, I wonder if they are referring to this shit, where somone came to r/lgbt fishing for compliments for the picture they’d asked Clippy for, and were completely clowned on by the entire community, which then led to another subreddit full of promptfans claiming that artists are transphobic because they didn’t like a generated image which had a trans flag in it.
remembering the NFT grifter who loudly asserted that if you weren’t into NFTs then you must be a transphobe
(it was Fucking Thorne)
It warms the cockles of my heart that all across the web people find AI as annoying as I do.
Considering how much the AI hype feels like the cryptocurrency hype, during which every joke you made had already been seriously used to make a coin and been pumped and dumped already, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
Dunno but why not, after Nanowrimo claimed that opposing “AI” means you’re classist and ableist. Why not also make objecting be sexist, racist etc. I’m going to be ahead of the curve by predicting that being against ChatGPT will also be a red flag that you’re a narcissistic sociopath manipulator because uhh because abused women need ChatGPT to communicate with their toxic exes /s
I suspect it’ll land somewhere above “halitosis” but below “wearing black socks with crocs”
what are you folks doing for/with bookmarking? I’ve killed my usage of pinboard because I learned the dude’s going off the deep end
already found a couple of the link* flavoured open source things, but looking for some practical/lived feedback
Yeah found that, unfortunately it’s js-ware so I refuse to put my data near it
(that’s very much a me thing, but a thing nonetheless)
Hm, what do you mean by js-ware? That its front end uses JavaScript libraries? I guess, fair. Backend is python though (:
As a stunt (when I was unhappy with the previous linkding frontend), a pal and I wrote https://github.com/lz-bookmarks/lz, which is basically just linkding without the useful api and frontend (which is rust+webassembly, lol). Has a decent cli though, and interlinking between bookmarks and other URLs.
yeah I despise the entire modern js ecosystem, so anything that increases my risk of even having to think the letters
n p mstarts making my trigger finger itch (and in this case, that’d happen if I wanted to do UI tweaks or whatever)of all the things I found so far linkding has appeared to be the least rabid. lz sounds like a neat experiment, will check it out :)
Do you actually need to share your bookmarks? I found that bookmarks in Firefox and an RSS reader hosted on my nextcloud are enough for personal use.
the sharing part of it is indeed the thing I give the fewest shits about tbh. things I care more about are software choices and longevity. so, for example, fuck anything js/php - by and large those tend to be unserious software that’ll be a nightmare to run even now, and even worse in time
I should probably do a bit of a sketchdown of the exact shape of my desires here, if for nothing else than giving direction to whatever I may have to write myself. a friend and I have been mutually grumping about this in chat for a while, because our wants are quite close but also just different enough to bounce ideas off each other
Oh no, what happened to that dude? He seemed fairly sane from his blog.
Oh no, what the hell. I found his personal Twitter, which has nothing from the last few years, but I didn’t realize he was using his company’s Twitter to defend JK Rowling. Eurgh!
ja. I’d unfollowed him in the lead-up to 2020 because US election shit gets noisy enough as it is (and holy fuck did he make it worse), then killed off my twitter usage so I just didn’t see this before
but straight nope from me on that shit
I honestly just use browser bookmarks. That’s always been enough for me. Firefox can sync them too, so that takes care of backups as well.
For anything that needs special attention, I create a todo item with the link in org-mode.
fair 'nuff
I keep finding myself in a position of thinking “bah imma have to write this myself, aren’t I”, because nothing I’ve found as yet actually works the way I want things to work :|
DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it’s a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors
first comment is a masterpiece.
DHH: today I will RP as a high schooler writing an essay for software class about a program you should use
full disclosure: I use vim and honestly I don’t even know why anymore. Maybe it’s because I had a brief, trivial interaction with Bram Moolenaar (RIP king) in which he closed a bug that I opened by mistake, and I imprinted on him for some reason.
This is old news (but news to me, a non twitterer): edgelord musk changes water pistol emoji to gun
Man the Pistol unicode mess has always given me mixed feelings
Apple indeed lead the design change, but they did it unilaterally without the input of Unicode. So the standard is still saying that the character represents a pistol, and all the fonts are ignoring that to have it a squirt gun instead, so as to be compatible with a specific Apple font rather than compatible with unicode.
It might have been a mistake for Unicode to introduce Pistol in the first place (I wonder how it was chosen, can’t look that up right now),Pistol apparently came from Softbank, so Unicode was probably including it for compatibility with existing encodings.IMO it would have been technologically more sound for UI designers to hide it in a UI or font designers to omit it entirely, than to replace it with another graphic with significantly different meaning. Emojipedia demonstrated the potential for confusion with this cheeky text message example.
Of course by this point we’re stuck with water gun so Twitter is just needlessly adding to the mess and Unicode should give up and redefine or add errata to the symbol.
‘make it look more badass’
I’m so tired of that man. I’m rethinking my idea that capitalism is good and this is meritocracy in action.
E: also just annoyed he went with an 1911, and not something like a Mateba, or the Chiappa Rhino which look futuristic but are real (the barrel is aligned to the bottom cylinder not the top), and fits into the previous patterns of revolver icons.
E: more on I’m so tired of that man
The 1911 is Murican, not some Italian crap
/s obviously, Italian gunmakers are very good.
Also it’s really weird how there’s a ton of small-business innovation in American gun gear, but the only ones who seem to be making money are European companies?
the 1911 is perfect for musk because it’s also notorious for throwing fucking ridiculous tantrums. though I’m pretty sure he only chose it cause of action movies and airsoft guns
1911 fans are people who just won’t give up their beeg gun for something smaller that still makes sense, then refuse to train properly and expect badly placed shot to be good enough bc mah stopping powah. stubborn, outdated and propping their claims with horseshit, this fits musk perfectly. (this includes us army that refused to switch to intermediate calibre rifle until it fucked them over in vietnam but i digress)
you just know Musk has internalized all the pro-1911 arguments so he can hang out with the “cool guys” on the range
the sum total of luxury ZA coiners’ mettle was measured, and it was found to be extremely lukewarm
that’s about 60k usd raw. PPI-equiv would be a bit higher (we have really cheap goods compared to US/UK), but I laugh at this number
I realized late last night that I could give a better frame for this: it’s the equivalent of weekly shopping for 100~300 people (boundaries for varying lower or higher grocery taste)
our population is close to 60m
fuckin. when did Mozilla’s twitter feed turn into wall to fucking wall AI spam https://x.com/mozilla
Oh, and I just saw this: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758
they’re really speedrunning this downslide, huh
fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole “you can’t trust AI, except when we and our business partners do it” openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, they’ve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I can’t imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.
who is the investor who pushed Mozilla this hard? where the fuck is this coming from?
all their hiring is AI too
haven’t really had the headspace to dig into this but one of my hypotheticals about how this could come to pass is “not enough counter-friction left”. foundations of the guess are: years of ill-advised products, constant killing of worthwhile projects, creep of bayfucker mentality. that shape of thing
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
not that the above guess eliminates the thing you’re pointing to, mind you. I agree that this drive has to be coming from somewhere. my stuff was more coming at it from the “why has this suddenly accelerated so much” angle
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
remember when bringing up Mozilla’s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
my personal theory for why it’s accelerating so much is, their board might be doing a Sears[1]. they’re inventing ways to make Mozilla bankrupt because there’s profit in it, and that profit window might be closing rapidly with the antitrust actions against Google coming up. this is all based on vibes though, I’m the polar opposite of an accountant
[1] see also, doing a Red Lobster. no, endless shrimp isn’t why they’re going bankrupt, why in fuck would it be, of course it’s capitalists
remember when bringing up Mozilla’s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
yup. absolutely nuts shit. I know there’s often a lament to lack of nuance in contemporary internet but god damn if there isn’t also a massive shortage of critical thinking skills and the ability to engage with criticism well
For some reason, the news of Red Lobster’s bankruptcy seems like a long time ago. I would have sworn that I read this story about it before the solar eclipse.
Of course, the actual reasons Red Lobster is circling the drain are more complicated than a runaway shrimp promotion. Business Insider’s Emily Stewart explained the long pattern of bad financial decisions that spelled doom for the restaurant—the worst of all being the divestment of Red Lobster’s property holdings in order to rent them back on punitive leases, adding massive overhead. (As Ray Kroc knows, you’re in the real estate business!) But after talking to many Red Lobster employees over the past month—some of whom were laid off without any notice last week—what I can say with confidence is that the Endless Shrimp deal was hell on earth for the servers, cooks, and bussers who’ve been keeping Red Lobster afloat. They told me the deal was a fitting capstone to an iconic if deeply mediocre chain that’s been drifting out to sea for some time. […] “You had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,” Josie said. “I would get screamed at.” She already had her share of Cheddar Bay Biscuit battle stories, but the shrimp was something else: “It tops any customer service experience I’ve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.”
Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.
I dated someone who worked at Red Lobster, and that absolutely checks out. the number of people who’d come in hoping to grift free shit and take it out on the servers when they didn’t get it (or would try and get someone fired so they could get free shit, depending on the night) was astounding
Behind the Bastards is starting a series about Yarvin today. Always appreciate it when they wander into our bailiwick!
Also means we’re likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who aren’t already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.
They did do one on Yud, it’s hard to find and has an annoying amount of side chatter but it’s a pretty solid breakdown of the dude.
The episode is mentioned here: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/rationalist-harry-potter-and-the
But I can no longer find it on YouTube.
Their episode on Rudolph Steiner was great when explaining to the grandparents why we had to pull our kids out of a Waldorf kindergarten asap. Funny how so many things fall into the trap of “It can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong.”
Also, big L for me on due diligence. I thought outdoor classrooms would be good for our fellow ADHD enjoyer; nope.
They did come up in the Tech Bros Have Built a Cult Around AI episode.
Orange site on pager bombs in Lebanon:
If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.
what we are best at here at HN
It’s always bootlicking with this crowd jfc
technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)
“best at”, they say? I shall have to update my priors
If HN is best at technical discussion that just means they’re even worse at everything else!
They suck at technical explanations too, unless it’s a Wikipedia link.
My joke didn’t land apparently but I did not mean to imply they were particularly good at technical explanations. Adjusted the working a smidge.
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged:
CryptoPunk sells for a fraction of its likely market price due to zombie smart contract
If you want decentralized systems you have to take the good with the bad. It’s part of the game
I wonder if these people are at all familiar with the stages of grief
Paul Krugman and Francis Fukuyama and Daniel Dennett and Steve Pinker were in a “human biodiversity discussion group” with Steve Sailer and Ron Unz in 1999, because of course they were
I’m mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.
Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. He’s been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think he’s even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, I’m curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.
Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But I’ve never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.
Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since I’m pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I haven’t seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonald’s another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evan’s account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesn’t emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.
Yeah, Krugman appearing on the roster surprised me too. While I haven’t pored over everything he’s blogged and microblogged, he hasn’t sent up red flags that I recall. E.g., here he is in 2009:
Oh, Kay. Greg Mankiw looks at a graph showing that children of high-income families do better on tests, and suggests that it’s largely about inherited talent: smart people make lots of money, and also have smart kids.
But, you know, there’s lots of evidence that there’s more to it than that. For example: students with low test scores from high-income families are slightly more likely to finish college than students with high test scores from low-income families.
It’s comforting to think that we live in a meritocracy. But we don’t.
There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.
So it’s comical, in a way, to see [Paul] Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.
I suppose it’s possible that he was invited to an e-mail list in the late '90s and never bothered to unsubscribe, or something like that.
I thought that Sailer had coined the term in the early 2000s, but evidently that’s not correct
The Wikipedia article on the Human Biodiversity Institute cites the term human biodiversity as becoming a euphemism for racism sometime in the late 90s and Marks’ book is from 1995, so there was apparently a pretty quick turnover. Which makes me wonder if hijacking or if independent invention. The article has a lot of sources, so I might mine them to see if there’s a detailed timeline.
I look forward to the ‘but we often disagreed’ non-apologies. With absolute lack of self reflection on how this helped push Sailer/Unz into the positions they are now. If we even get that.
Pinker: looking through my photo album where I’m with people like Krauss and Epstein, shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disagree with them
Also John McCarthy and Ray fucking Blanchard
Mr AGP? Wow.
Who could have predicted that liberalism would lead into scientific racism and then everything else that follows (mostly fascism)???
Surely “scientific” is giving them far too much credit? I recall previously sneering at some quotes about skull sizes, including something like women keep bonking their heads?
I believe the term is not so much meant to convey properties of science upon them as to describe the particular strain of racist shitbaggery (which dresses itself in appears-science, much like what happens in/with scientism)
Oh, definitely. For clarity my intention was to riff off them and increase levels of disrespect towards racists. In hindsight, the question format doesn’t quite convey that.
Just discovered Patrick Boyle’s channel. Deadpan sneer perfection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jhTnk3TCtc
edit: tried to post invidious link but didn’t seem to work
The only invidious instance that works this week is nadeko:
his delivery regarding the content is absolute perfection
