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.)
Textbook case of anthropomorphisation from The Guardian, trying to posit that AI systems are capable of feeling pain.
You want my unsolicited opinion, machines cannot feel pain/emotion, only imitate it, and the rise of LLMs have made this crystal clear. Much like with being creative or making art, feeling genuine emotion is the exclusive domain of human/animal minds.
Someone tried Adobe’s new Generative Fill “feature” (just the latest development in Adobe’s infatuation with AI) with the prompt “take this elf lady out of the scene”, and the results were…interesting:
There’s also an option to rate whatever the fill gets you, which I can absolutely see being used to sabotage the “feature”.
Please turn the elf girl into elf Grimes
Watch till end the third option made me choke on my drink it was way too funny
@BlueMonday1984 I was experimenting with generative fill and asked it to remove a person from a scene and “make the background yellow”. It made the person Chinese. No fucking joke.
Lesswronger reads about Orcas the first time in their life. Decided that training them to become smarter than humans is now the next important step.
(I’m very very far from an orca expert - basically everything I know about them I learned today.)
They made several posts about it, and just the opening bits are funny. I obv didn’t read any of them an only looked at the opening statements. I will produce a quote from each.
It is currently plausible (
352115%[1]23%) to me that average orcas have at least as high potential for being great scientists as the greatest human scientists, modulo their motivation for doing science[2].Yes, the weird percentage is in the text, the [1] footnote says 15%, no idea why they can’t edit their text normally.
(For speed of writing, I mostly don’t cite references. Feel free to ask me in the comments for references for some claims.)
Context: I think there’s a ~17% chance that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent.
And from the last article, two lines as a treat:
TLDR: I now think it’s <1% likely that average orcas are >=+6std intelligent.
(I now think the relevant question is rather whether orcas might be >=+4std intelligent, since that might be enough for superhuman wisdom and thinking techniques to accumulate through generations, but I think it’s only 2% probable. (Still decently likely that they are near human level smart though.))
(Nice of the person to think of the orcas btw, just wish it was more preservation than 'how can we make these animals help us out).
E: apparently “An alternative approach to superbabies” is also about orcas, they just no longer stand behind it.
Can someone please look into this?
The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me
They’re trying to be John Lilly, but with orcas and even more ketamine
what have the orcas done to deserve this
Dolphins tend to be pretty good hackers.
So perhaps orcas can be too.
Image description.
Still from the movie Johnny Mnemonic (1995), on the left is Keanu Reeves playing Johnny Mnemonic in a black and white suit sitting in a chair with a large cyberpunk helmet on his face. He is gripping the chair tightly. On the right there is Jones the Dolphin, a model of a diseased looking dolphin swimming in a dirty small tank with a large cyberpunk implant on his face.
Finally, after years of research, we have managed to connect the smartest Orca to a text-to-speech device! What great wisdom will those superinteligent creatures bestow on us? How can we solve our world’s problems?
Eat the rich.
… What?
Like take your billionaires, right, roast them and then eat their flesh. Burn their yachts too. We can help.
Ironically I just put down a deposit on a orca tattoo.
“Enjoy” this Wronger explaining human sexual attraction
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ktydLowvEg8NxaG4Z/neuroscience-of-human-sexual-attraction-triggers-3
I have but skimmed it, not plumbed its depths for sneers.
Ugh what is it with misogynists and compulsively writing out this nonsense again and again? Just want to punch him on the nose. Make it stop.
I think that §2 (“appearance-based sexual attraction”) will be the part that’s more centrally relevant for cis men (and most trans women)
…
kys
WTF is wrong with these people
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=wFmCveaxA5EnNtuCj
Man doesnt get to do everything he wants, this means woman has all the power. Problem with seeing everything as a hierarchy means you cant see partnerships.
The old chestnut that really these days it’s women who hold all the power is as old as times. I saw an instance in Perrault’s introduction to the tale of Griselidis (1691) and I’m sure you can go much further back. Not sure why we ever even bothered with voting rights, reproductive freedom, or personhood.
Sorry darling, but according to my game-theoretical model this discussion ends in my victory in every possible combination of moves, so can we just skip to the point you apologise?
Where… where are you going
Are they drawn to the cult because they are obsessed with status, or does the cult foster this obssession? Yes.
From the other reactions, dont have the energy to read it atm (it was this or orcas), looks like he is recreating heartiste from first principles.
I’m assuming that certain pop-culture stereotypes, for example the idea that women tend to feel attraction towards taller men (other things equal), are indicative of timeless human universals, as opposed to being specific to my own culture
lol. lmao.
I wrote this post quickly and without thoroughly studying what people have historically written on this topic.
What a coincidence! I read this post quickly and without thoroughly considering much of anything.
I acknowledge that I haven’t provided any direct evidence here […] But the former is at least an elegant story that fits in with other things I believe.
This comes shockingly close to self-awareness.
I wrote this post quickly and without thoroughly studying what people have historically written on this topic.
I think that goes without saying on LW but glad someone put it in writing
it’s just this with more words (context: someone dead serious tweeted that speedrunning is communism and brought into it peterson’s mouth noises on sex somehow, and all in 14 tweets)
(that’s the same link)
In this exciting new research direction in the making-stuff-up field I build upon previous work by Myself et. al in the making-stuff-up field.
Ugh reading more of this and it’s awful.
He writes that women are attracted to men who could beat us up or control us. He writes that the reason for this attraction is so we have a chance to marry the man and prevent these bad things from happening.
His “science” assumes that women think like they do in shitty erotica written by men for men. Even by rationalist evo-psych standards this is pretty poorly thought out.
And yet, per Steven Pinker, “a middle-aged congresswoman does not radiate the same animal magnetism to the opposite sex that a middle-aged congressman does”. What’s the deal?
OK other straight ladies here, raise your hand if you’ve ever felt that middle aged congressmen, as a whole, “radiate animal magnetism”. Anyone? Anyone?
Having now read it (I have regrets), I think it’s even worse than you suggested. He’s not trying to argue that women are attracted to dangerous men in order to prevent the danger from happening to them. He assumes that, based on “everyday experience” of how he feels when dealing with “high-status” men and then tries to use that as an extension of and evidence for his base-level theory of how the brain does consciousness. (I’m not going to make the obvious joke about alternative reasons why he has the same feeling around certain men that he does around women he finds attractive.) In order to get there he has to assume that culture and learning play no role in what people find attractive, which is just absurd on it’s face and renders the whole argument not worth engaging with.
It’s almost endearing (or sad) that he believes (or very strongly wants to believe) his experience is “typical”, exploring the boundaries of what you are attracted to typically doesn’t involve this much evo-pysch psychology, or even this much fragile masculinity.
I feel like this is some friggin’ Kissinger “power is an aphrodisiac” nonsense. Which is hilarious because while yes Kissinger spent more time out on the town with beautiful women than you would expect for a Ben Stein-esque war criminal, when journalists at the time talked to those women they pretty consistently said that they enjoyed feeling like he respected them and wanted to talk about the world and listened to what they had to say. But that would be anathema to Rationalism, I guess.
Imagr description: Steven Pinker, Lawrence Krauss and Jeffrey Epstein, posted as per tradition when either of the latter two are mentioned
Don’t they just radiate animal magnetism
Wronger explaining human sexual attraction
Are we sure this isn’t an SCP entry?
I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always “ya but what is intelligence” or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while I’ve tried to use the example that if these “AI coding” things are tools, why would I use a tool that’s never perfect? For example I wouldn’t reach for a 10mm wrench that wasn’t 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have “it could still be useful” responses.
I’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR:
Age, Sex, Location RandomizationI’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
On a semi-related sidenote, part of me feels that the AI bubble has turned programming into a bit of a cultural punchline.
On one front, the stench of Eau de Tech Asshole that AI creates has definitely rubbed off on the field, and all the programmers who worked at OpenAI et al. have likely painted it as complicit in the bubble’s harms.
On another front, the tech industry’s relentless hype around AI, combined with its myriad failures (both comical and nightmarish) have cast significant doubt on the judgment of tech as a whole (which has rubbed off on programming as well) - for issues of artistic judgment specifically, the slop-nami’s given people an easy way to dismiss their statements out of hand.
sidenote
you have so many of these! it’s amazing! are you going to publish soon? it seems like it might need a whole guide of its own!
moderately barbed jesting aside, a serious question: have you spoken with any programmers/artists/researchers/… ? so many of your comments have “part of me feels” parts hitting pop-concern-direction things and, like, I get it, but. have you spoken with any of them? what were those conversations like? what did you take away from them? what stuck with you that you want to share?
New Public Good newsletter, talking about YouTube editing users’ uploads without their permission/knowledge.
More of a pet peeve than a primal scream, but I wonder what’s with Adam Tooze and his awe of AI. Tooze is a left-wing economic historian who’s generally interesting to listen to (though perhaps in tackling a very wide range of subject matter sometimes missing some depth), but nevertheless seems as AI-pilled as any VC. Most recently came about this bit: Berlin Forum on Global Cooperation 2025 - Keynote Adam Tooze
Anyone who’s used AI seriously knows the LLMs are extraordinary in what they’re able to do … 5 years down the line, this will be even more transformative.
Really, anyone Adam? Are you sure about the techbro pitch there?
Sad if true. I really enjoyed his book The Wages of Destruction which mythbusts a lot of folk knowledge about the Nazis
https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/The-Wages-of-Destruction.html
I literally just got the audiobook.
James Gleick on “The Lie of AI”:
https://around.com/the-lie-of-ai/
Nothing new for regulars here, I suspect, but it might be useful to have in one’s pocket.
New Ed Zitron: “How to Argue With An AI Booster”, an hour-long read dedicated to exactly what it says on the tin.
It’s a nice master post that gets all his responses and many useful articles linked into one place. It’s all familiar if you’ve kept up with techtakes and Zitron’s other posts and pivot-to-ai, but I found a few articles I had previously missed reading.
Related trend to all the but achskhually’s AI booster’s like to throw out. Has everyone else noticed the trend where someone makes a claim of a rumor they heard about an LLM making a genuine discovery in some science, except it’s always repeated second hand so you can’t really evaluate it, and in the rare cases they do have a link to the source, it’s always much less impressive than they made it sound at first…
I’m curious, do you get paid for being a multiprotocol rss repeater?
I don’t know if they do but as someone too lazy to actually set up an RSS feed I deeply appreciate it.
I appreciate it, and this also gives us an easy way to discuss it as Zitron seems to be quite popular here. So makes sense to me to just also post it here. And not everybody uses RSS (or Eds one).
maybe that means something like this should be a linkblog/{atom,rss,…} feedsite on its ace?
No, I do this for the love of the game
Being paid 90s tv ad money has to suck donkey nads :<
Even for the people that do get email notifications of Zitron’s excellent content (like myself), I appreciate having a place here to discuss it.
Via, prob posted here already “Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code”, as the article is a month old.
They need debugging tools specifically designed for AI-generated solutions.
What the hell does that even mean, lmao?
Focus on AI tool literacy: Developers using AI tools daily show 88% favorability compared to 64% for weekly users. This suggests proper training and integration strategies significantly impact outcomes.
What kind of drugs are they on
Second quote is classic “you must be prompting it wrong”. No, it can’t be that people which find a tool less useful will be using it less often.
What the hell does that even mean, lmao?
Feel like people are just reaching for things ‘clearly we need tools to help us with the process, so lets just call them debuggers for AI’
So the normal debuggers that we have for ages, right?
but can you grift using these?
AI innovation in this space usually means automatically adding stuff to the model’s context.
It probably started meaning the (failed) build output got added in every iteration, but it’s entirely possible to feed the LLM debugger data from a runtime crash and hope something usable happens.
I assume these ‘ai debuggers’ are for looking inside the AI black box when they AI goes ‘yes I’m very sorry I will not do it again’ before doing it again.
deleted by creator
It wasn’t posted yet in lemmy, did search. Yours was the only thing I found. So, I posted it in programming to rile people
Yeah I did a search for “stack overflow” and found zero results so think search was a bit buggy atm. Votes also not showing atm for example. Not sure if by design.
this might be a federation breakage, or the queue catching up
Sorry searched only locally forgot to mention that, but pretty quickly after the server came back up
Finally, I dislike the arrogant, brash, confident, tone of many posts on LessWrong.
Hmm, OK. Where might this be going?
Plausibly, I think a lot of this is inherited from Eliezer, who is used to communicating complex ideas to people less intelligent and/or rational than he is. This is not the experience of a typical poster on LessWrong, and I think it’s maladaptive for people to use Eliezer’s style and epistemic confidence in their own writings and thinking.
yes, instead they use Scott’s and just keep typing forever
“Which Scott?”
“Any of them.”
OmniScott.
Yud once debated Massimo Pigliucci and did poorly. He tried and failed to publish academic research in a journal not controlled by his groupies (desk reject? failed to pass peer review?).
Have there been any other times when he engaged with someone with actual education and experience who was not his fan? It sounds like he was on twitter.
You can’t talk to us like that, we are not the biassed masses, we are unbiased!
I apologize to bring you the latest example of the intersection of US fascism with silicon valley tech industry.
This time the Whitehouse have decided that UI design is kinda important (gee I wonder if there used to be a department or two for that): https://americabydesign.gov/
Well nothing wrong with a little updating of UI anywa–
What’s the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you’re not wrong. But what’s the foundation of that brand? One that’s more globally recognized than practically anything else. It’s the nation…where he was born. It’s the United States of America.
To update today’s government to be an Apple Store like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software.
Oh god kill it with fire.
The web design of their website is also worth remarking on here:
- The title text that reads “AMERICA by DESIGN” is an SVG. The alt text is “America First Legal logo”
- The page contents are obnoxiously large and obnoxiously gray before they fade in.
For some reasonEvery single word gets it’s own <span> element to make the obnoxious fade in possible. Because I guess that’s what happen when you fire all the people who actually know what they’re doing.- They managed to include a US flag icon with only 39 stars which is too few stars to be official and too many stars to be visible at teeny sizes
- The favicon is just 16x16 pixels of the word “by” in cursive that’s so blurry you can’t actually tell that’s what it is.
- If your browser width is between 768px and ~808px there is overlapping text at the top.
The tech bros tied to this? Joe Gebbia co-founder of AirBNB, along with Big-Balls. Maybe others but those are the two who were retweeted by the twitter account.
Edit: also this part:
©2025 National Design Studio
Someone ought to remind them of US copyright law because official federal work is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States
I have no idea what is good web design. I’ll just note makes the waving red, white and blue flag in the background makes the white heading text pretty hard to read.
Seems you do have some idea.
Yay! *pats myself on the back*
Is this National Design Studio actually part of the federal government, though? Or is this a further collapsing of the distinction between state and enterprise? Because honestly I could totally buy members of this administration looking for ways to use copyright law to go after people who make parodies or otherwise use US iconography without toeing the party line. I’m doing my damnedest not to go full tinfoil hat with this shit, but it’s proving so hard.
The Trump administration could’ve gotten some rando on neocities or nekoweb to do their website and unironically gotten a better result than this bland garbage.
The favicon is just 16x16 pixels of the word “by” in cursive that’s so blurry you can’t actually tell that’s what it is.
They might as well have gone with the Schutzstaffel lightning bolts - they’re pretty recognisable even if the resolution is Jack x Shit, and they fit Trump’s general ideology pretty well.
Finally a page Trump can read. (that font size damn…)
Unironically, this was surely the primary design brief.
