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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Found a solution to the Fermi paradox, and solved the problem of all the ‘dark matter’, any advanced society just puts a dyson sphere around their galaxy, that is why we can’t see or hear from them.
(Yes, this is a subsneer for the silly Altman remark. The whole solar system not just the Sun (I do support walling off The Sun)).
Because of course why have a data ~~center~~ when you can have an ecumenskatasphaira.
Okay so I know GPT-5 had a bad launch and has been getting raked over the coals, but AGI is totally still on, guys!
Why? Because trust me it’s definitely getting better behind the scenes in ways that we can’t see. Also China is still scary and we need to make sure we make the AI God that will kill us all before China does because reasons.
Also despite talking about a how much of the lack of progress is due to the consumer model and this is a cost-saving there’s no reference to the work of folks like Ed Zitron on how unprofitable these models are, much less the recent discussions on whether GPT-5 as a whole is actually cheaper to operate than earlier models given the changes it necessitates in caching.
Everyone agrees that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4, that it was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for, and that the release was overhyped quite a bit.
a quantum leap might actually be accurate
Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4
Sure babe, you keep telling yourself that.
The usual suspects are mad about college hill’s expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, I’m in bed and can’t be bothered to link at the moment.
We’ve definitely sneered at this before, i do not recall if it was known that KP was the cowriter in this weird forum RP fic
E: googling “lintamande kelsey piper” and looking at a reddit post digs up the inactive since 2018 AO3. A total just shy of 130k words, a little marvel stuff, most of it LOTR based, and some of it tagged “Vladmir Putin/Sauron”. How fun!
No judgement from me, tbh. Fanfic be fanficking. I aint gonna read that shit tho.
Previous thread
E: we didn’t fucking know
An encounter of this sort is what drove Lord Vetinari to make a scorpion pit for mimes, probably.
Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?
Our Very Good Friends are often likened to Scientology, but have we considered Happy Science and Aum Shinrikyo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
aum:
Advertising and recruitment activities, dubbed the “Aum Salvation plan”, included claims of […] realizing life goals by improving intelligence and positive thinking, and concentrating on what was important at the expense of leisure.
this is in common with both our very good friends and scientology, but i think happy science is much stupider and more in line with srinivasan’s network states, in that it has/is an explicitly far-right political organization built in from day one
Yeah, good point.
Network State def has that store-brand Team Rocket vibe.
Aum is very apt imo given how it recruited stem types.
aum recruited a lot of people, and also failed at some things that would be presumably easier to do safely than what they did
Meanwhile, Aum had also attempted to manufacture 1,000 assault rifles, but only completed one.[37]
otoh they were also straight up delusional about what they could achieve, including toying with the idea of manufacturing nukes, military gas lasers, and getting and launching Proton rocket. (not exactly grounded for a group of people who couldn’t make AK-74s)
they were also more media savvy in that they didn’t pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they
had entire radio stationrented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)they were also more media savvy in that they didn’t pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they had entire radio station rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)
Its pretty telling about Our Good Friends’ media savviness that it took an all-consuming AI bubble and plenty of help from friends in high places to break into the mainstream.
With all that money sloshing around, It’s only a matter of time before they start cribbing from their neighbors and we get an anime adaptation of HPMoR.
radio transmissions in russia were money shot for aum, and idk if it was a fluke or deliberate strategy. people had for a long time expectation that radio and tv are authoritative, reliable sources (due to censorship that doubled as fact-checker, and about all of it was state-owned) and in 90s every bit of that broke down because of privatization, and now you could get on the air and say anything, with many taking that at face value, as long as you pay up. at the same time there was major economic crisis and cults prey on the desperate. result?
Following the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, two Russian Duma committees began investigations of the Aum – the Committee on Religious Matters and the Committee on Security Matters. A report from the Security Committee states that the Aum’s followers numbered 35,000, with up to 55,000 laymen visiting the sect’s seminars sporadically. This contrasts sharply with the numbers in Japan which are 18,000 and 35,000 respectively. The Security Committee report also states that the Russian sect had 5,500 full-time monks who lived in Aum accommodations, usually housing donated by Aum followers. Russian Aum officials, themselves, claim that over 300 people a day attended services in Moscow. The official Russian Duma investigation into the Aum described the cult as a closed, centralized organization.
And how it fused Buddhism with more Christian religions. Considering how often you heard of old hackers being interested in the former.
got sent this image
wonder how many more of these things we’ll see before people start having a real bileful response to this (over and above the fact that a number of people have been warning about exactly this outcome for a while now)
(transcript below)
transcript
title: I gave my mom’s company an Al automation and now she and her coworkers are unemployed
body: So this is eating me alive and I don’t really know where else to put it. I run this little agency that builds these Al agents for staffing firms. Basically the agent pre-screens candidates, pulls the info into a neat report, and sends it back so recruiters don’t waste hours on screening calls. It’s supposed to be a tool, not a replacement.
My mom works at this mid sized recruiting company. She’s always complained about how long it takes to qualify candidates, so I set them up with one of my agents just to test it. It crushed it. Way faster, way cheaper, and honestly more consistent than most of their team.
Fast forward two months and they’ve quietly laid off almost her whole department. Including my mom. I feel sick. Like I built something that was supposed to help people, and instead it wiped out my mom’s job and her team. I keep replaying it in my head like I basically automated my own family out of work.
Pressing F for doubt, looks like a marketing scam to me.
It’s pretty screwed up that humble bragging about putting their own mother out of a job is a useful opening to selling a scam-service. At least the people that buy into it will get what they have coming?
that or some kind of bait
I didn’t dig into the post/username at all so I can’t guesstimate likelihood of this! get where you’re coming from
(…I really need to finish my blog relaunch (this thought brought to you by the explication I was about to embark on in this context))
(((it’s soon.gif tho!)))
Gonna have to agree with zogwarg here. I checked out the Reddit profile and they’re a self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose one-man “agency” has zero clients and yet to even have an idea, attempting to crowdsource the latter on r/entrepreneur.
dude has a post named “from 0 to 1 clients in 48h” where someone calls him out for already claiming to have 17 customers, so it’s reasonable to assume that this guy is full of shit either way
then again, there’s plenty of clueless, could be real, because welcome to current year, where everything is fake, satire is dead and reuters puts the onion out of the business
‘set them up with’
Anybody want to bet if they did it for free?
could go either way tbh
New piece from the Financial Times: Tech utterly dominates markets. Should we worry?
Pulling out a specific point, the article’s noted how market concentration is higher now than it was in the dot-com bubble back in 2000:
You want my overall take, I’m with Zitron - this is quite a narrative shift.
Ai scrapers have managed to bypass anubis on codeberg: https://programming.dev/post/35852706
Not sure why this “member of technical staff at METR” felt the need to post about the lowered productivity of Black people in the southern US states after slavery was abolished. I’m sure it’s nothing.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zr37dY5YPRT6s56jY/thomas-kwa-s-shortform?commentId=iwGgqsmpY6Tcex5je
He seems to state that after the abolition of slavery, less of the profits from a unit time of labor accrued to the owners of the land in question. The reasons for this is of course a mystery.
It’s always the people you most expect.
Free people have less prodictivity, time to wirehead everyone! A Brave New World!
Xe Iaso’s chimed in on the GPT-5 fallout, giving her thoughts on chatbots’ use as assistants/therapists.
In related news I’ve been getting podcast ads for Anthropic touting Claude’s emotional intelligence and value in working through life’s challenges and listening to your relationship issues.
They’re not explicitly saying that their chatbot is a therapist, but they’re getting about as close as the law would allow, I’m sure.
