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.)
Enemy of awful systems Malcolm Gladwell is a full throated transphobe
Why is it always transphobia with these kinds of people… is it because they feel racism is too risky? So they need a different outlet for hating on people based on what they believe is “science”?
the answer to all those is yes. To synthesise the bigger idea, as the saying goes: scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds. Gladwell caters to a huge audience that is centrist, leaning somewhat liberal (though he flirts constantly with race science and straight up racism, see his writings on Korean Air). As liberals move towards fascism, so must he. Of course, it’s the most marginalised that are going to be targeted first.
that “90%” of the audience was “on [Tucker’s] side” but had been unwilling to admit it.
Why are transphobes always this full of shit. Polls always disagree with this, and it cant be ‘people are afraid to speak out out of fear’, as there seem to be very little consequences to just being a lowkey transphobe. Hell even raging transphobes who stalk people, assault kids, and call for violence in what can only be called a life destroying obsession with trans people get defended by the people in power. There is very little reason for people to lie on polls over this.
Also dislike the focus on ‘trans women’ as these whole shitty arguments forget trans men exist. (This seems to be a general problem sadly, trans men, same as intersex people, or detransitioners tend to be only brought up like gotcha arguments, and not much to discuss the different problems they also face. Obv, I’m also doing that here, so I’m not immune)
@Soyweiser @swlabr Reminds me.of Nixon’s weird claim of being backed by a “silent majority.”
I’ve heard two versions of this from historians. One claims that he was deluded enough to claim that everyone actually secretly backed him and was just unwilling to actually say so for some reason.
The other said that he meant the dead, on his quest to throw more lives at a cause that has already claimed so many.Populist groups pull that shit a lot. Wilders also keeps claiming we should all do what he wants because people voted for him (a scary and depressingly large group, but not a total majority). It is a way of trying to get more democratic power behind you than you should really have looking at the democratic support you have alone at least in the case of politics. It also is often just delusional.
I recall a neo-nazi guy being kicked from a bar once while he loudly (and alone, the whole place fell silent, was a massive vibe shift) started to sing what I think was the horst wessel song (I was not familiar with the song at the time, so this is my guess), and while he was being kicked out he shouted that everybody else agreed with him and was just afraid to say it. Whole group of metalheads/etc like that suddenly silent and a vibe of ‘something shit is going down’. Was a weird moment.
fuck, i can’t imagine someone doing this, even though we do have fascists and neonazis in poland, but man, horst-wessel-lied is a fist-in-the-face offence level.
Yeah Im not totally sure it was that song, but it was a neonazi/nazi song, and he was ejected very fast by the bartenders.
I just found out the name of Scott Alexander’s psychiatry practice (Lorien Psychiatry) is a Lord of the Rings reference, so my guess as to direct Thiel money just went way up
The common clay of the new west:
transcript
ChatGPT has become worthless
[Business & Professional]
I’m a paid member and asked it to help me research a topic and write a guide and it said it needed days to complete it. That’s a first. Usually it could do this task on the spot.
It missed the first deadline and missed 5 more. 3 weeks went by and it couldn’t get the task done. Went to Claude and it did it in 10 minutes. No idea what is going on with ChatGpt but I cancelled the pay plan.
Anyone else having this kind of issue?
I am extremely, extremely sickos.png for having all these weird little fucks find out that all this nonsense is heavily subsidised by VCs
Same here. The world’s been forced to deal with these promptfucks ruining everything they touch for literal years at this point, some degree of schadenfreude at their expense was sorely fucking needed.
replacing ChatGPT with a script that replies “Great, I’ll finish that for you by ${Date.Now() + 86400}”
Promptfondlers on lobste.rs are unhappy about the tag “vibecoding”, used to denote development using GenAI. I’d not recommend reading the thread, just want to observe that if slop coding had actually taken the coding world by storm, I doubt there would be much pearl clutchign about how slop-slingers are treated on the site. We’re talking about people willing to pay Scam Altman money monthly after all.
shoutouts to @dgerard@awful.systems and @mawhrin@circumstances.run for reminding me that Steve Klabnik being really shitty isn’t a temporary state of affairs
Lesswronger notices all of the rationalist’s attempts at making an “aligned” AI company keep failing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBd7xPAh22y66rbme/anthropic-s-leading-researchers-acted-as-moderate
Notably, the author doesn’t realize Capitalism is the root problem in misaligning the incentives, and it takes a comment directly point it out for them to get as far as noticing as link to the cycle of enshittification.
>50 min read >”why company has perverse incentives” >no mention of capitalismrationalism.mpeg
Every time I see a rationalist bring up the term “Moloch” I get a little angrier at Scott Alexander.
“Moloch”, huh? What are we living in, some kind of demon-haunted world?
Others were alarmed and advocated internally against scaling large language models. But these were not AGI safety researchers, but critical AI researchers, like Dr. Timnit Gebru.
Here we see rationalists approaching dangerously close to self-awareness and recognizing their whole concept of “AI safety” as marketing copy.
As a CS student, I wonder why us and artists are always the one who are attacked the most whenever some new “insert tech stuff” comes out. And everyone’s like: HOLY SHIT PROGRAMMERS AND ARTISTS ARE DEAD, without realizing that most of these things are way too crappy to actually be… good enough to replace us?
My guess would be because most people don’t understand what you all actually do so gen AI output looks to them like their impression of the work you do. Just look at the game studios replacing concept artists with Midjourney, not grasping what concept art even is for and screwing up everyone’s workflow as a result.
I’m neither a programmer nor an artist I can sorta understand how people get fooled. Show me a snippet of nonsense code or image and I’ll nod along if you say it’s good. But then as a writer (even if only hobbyist) I am able to see how godawful gen AI writing is whereas some non-writers won’t, and so I extrapolate from that since it’s not good at the thing I have domain expertise in, it probably isn’t good at the things I don’t understand.
Show me a snippet of nonsense code or image and I’ll nod along if you say it’s good.
Smirk I’m in.
Look mom, I’m vibe-coding a SaaS!
I feel like aggressive proponents of genAI are so because they are intimidated and/or jealous of the people they say they will replace. They lack the skills and critical thinking to become good at the task they want to replace, but also unwilling or unable to put in the work.
Instead of reckoning with this, they construct a phantasm where artists are “gatekeeping art”, and genAI is going to disrupt that gatekeeping. Meanwhile I think deep down they know that what genAI produces is derivative by definition, and not “real art” by any means.
So I learned about the rise of pro-Clippy sentiment in the wake of ChatGPT and that led me on a little ramble about the ELIZA effect vs. the exercise of empathy https://awful.systems/post/5495333
Not totally in our wheelhouse, but seems like the Abundance movements has a bit of a right wing speaker problem: https://bsky.app/profile/therealbrent.bsky.social/post/3lxzn3lxqo22b
Oh Abundance, the repackaging of Reaganomics by liberals to court conservatives, is having a conference and has booked right wing speakers? Nobody could have predicted this
OpenPhilanthropy has been seeding (b) a bit of money to local liberal activist groups but (a) guys to get them to do Abundance shit, under that name, then the guys play coy about the EA agenda
source: talking to people wondering who the fuck these weirdos were. they said “OpenPhilanthropy” and I went “ohhh boy have I got some disconcerting news for you”
I’m not sure if it wasn’t actually Reaganomics repackaged by conservatives to court liberals.
I looked into this because I was curious. There’s a wikipedia article that discusses abundance, titled “supply-side progressivism”)
So it appears the earliest mention of liberal tinted Reaganomics is Miles Kimball’s opening blog post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal” on his blog “Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal.” I am not going to investigate his politics at any real depth, so I’d say he’s mostly a liberal/centrist.
I think my understanding of “abundance” before reading that wiki page was that known liberal quantities Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote a book on it, and therefore must have invented it.
oh no Kimball: "Astral Codex Ten—and its prior incarnation, Slate Star Codex—is one of my favorite blogs. "
Another link he posted last year: “Richard Hanania’s Argument for Legalizing Euthanasia”
Also he seems to be more of a “classical liberal” than what people tend to consider a liberal in the left-of-center sense.
“Classical liberal” usually registers to me as a libertarian/paleoconservative trying to mainstream themselves.
Yes this. Libertarian yahoos in waistcoats. “I’m not one of those people, I am dignified.”
that’s a big oof from me dawg.
RE: “liberal” as a label: the way that I define “liberal” is pretty much purely in the classical sense, and it still covers the “modern” “left-of-center” sense, because someone who claims to be a left-liberal that still supports the underlying liberal politics is actually disconnected from any actual leftist ideology. Most left-liberals are willing to throw actual leftists and leftist causes under the bus so that their
sports teamparty can get into power.When I said “repackaged by conservatives to court liberals” I was using ‘liberal’ in the common sloppy American sense where it just means someone on the center left to left, as opposed to the “progressive shop talk” sense of “ratfucking centrists”.
Ah yes, im a classical liberal of the style of Locke how he thought about slavery, that kind of classical stuff.
Yes, I posted it here so we can all pretend to be shocked a bit.
Creator of NaCl publishes something even saltier.
“Am I being detained?” I scream as IETF politely asks me to stop throwing a tantrum over the concept of having moderation policy.
Does somebody have a rundown or something on DJB? All of the tantrum throwing has me confused over what his deal is.
Sibling comment is important recent stuff. Historically, the most important tantrum he’s thrown is DJB v USA in 1995, where he insisted that folks in the USA have a First Amendment right to publish source code. He also threw a joint tantrum with two other cryptographers over the Dual EC DRBG scandal after Snowden revealed its existence in 2013. He’s scored real wins against the USA for us, which is why his inability to be polite is often tolerated.
noted for advancements in cryptography, and “stayed impartial” (iirc not quite defending, but also not acknowledging nor distancing) when the jacob appelbaum shit hit wider knowledge
probably about all you need to know in a nutshell
the most recent shit before this when I recall seeing his name pop up was when he was causing slapfight around Kyber (ML-KEM) in the cryptography spaces, but I don’t have links at hand
there’s a bit more; tanja lange, a notable cryptographer herself and djb’s partner was appelbaum’s phd advisor (and didn’t drop him after he got outed as a rapist).
heh fuck you’re right, I forgot about that
after that Flock shit that got announced recently, looks like garry tan is currently doing his damnedest to ensure people know he’s absolutely full of it
thread starts here, features bangers like this
You’re thinking Chinese surveillance
US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
“nooooo, we’re the good kind of boot to have on your face! we’re the boot from the same country as you!” says the boot in the rising fascist upswing
your periodic reminder: don’t listen to Garry Tan, unless maybe he’s doing a tequila review
oh absolutely no intention of listening to the dork, just had to share the suffering once I saw the tweet
I’m fighting an uphill battle, but people in general still need to see it
DragonCon drops the ban hammer on a slop slinger. There was much rejoicing.
Btw, the vibes were absolutely marvelous this year.
Edit: a shrine was built to shame the perpetrator
https://old.reddit.com/r/dragoncon/comments/1n60s10/to_shame_that_ai_stand_in_artist_alley_people/
Great piece on previous hype waves by P. Ball
https://aeon.co/essays/no-suffering-no-death-no-limits-the-nanobots-pipe-dream
It’s sad, my “thoroughly researched” “paper” greygoo-2027 just doesn’t seem to have that viral x-factor that lands me exclusive interviews w/ the Times 🫠
Putting this into the current context of LLMs… Given how Eliezer still repeats the “diamondoid bacteria” line in his AI-doom scenarios, even multiple decades after Drexler has both been thoroughly debunked and slightly contributed to inspiring real science, I bet memes of LLM-AGI doom and utopia will last long after the LLM bubble pops.
I mean the AGI part is basically magic. If LLMs aren’t actually the way to build it then it doesn’t change the underlying belief any more than the failure of expert systems or cybercyn or whatever else.
Eliezer came from the extropian newsgroups/mailinglists iirc. So it is quite connected.
did he actually contribute anything other than chemists nicking the name “nanotechnology”?
I use the term “inspiring” loosely.
Indeed great piece, good to document the older history of that stuff as well.
Shamelessly posting link to my skeet thread (skeet trail?) on my experience with an (mandatory) AI chatbot workshop. Nothing that will surprise regulars here too much, but if you want to share the pain…
https://bsky.app/profile/jfranek.bsky.social/post/3lxtdvr4xyc2q
I love it giving the temperature in Europe. Down to a decimal, even.
The blatant covering for the confabulated zip code is some peak boosterism. It knows what an address looks like and that some kind of postal code has to go there, and while it was pretty close I would still expect that to get returned to sender. Pretty close isn’t good enough.
Yeah, didn’t even cross their mind that it could be wrong, because it looked ok.
Where the fuck has that guy been for 20 years? I’ve seen that happen many times with junior programmers during my 20 years of experience.
also from a number of devs who went borderline malicious compliance in “adopting tdd/testing” but didn’t really grok the assignment
At a recent job, I definitely saw malicious compliance/incompetence when it came to writing tests. My team and I would work hard to retrofit tests into older functionality and adjacent teams if they bothered to write tests would avoid testing anything of consequence.
