Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
Kelsey Piper posts a new fanfiction about Ed Zitron :
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost-the-plot
I advise being very cautious about consuming Zitron’s posts, but the same is true of Piper. Many coders are using chatbots, but I don’t know of evidence that it makes them more productive since the “where is all the AI code?” study last year (especially when we consider the whole software lifecycle and not just lines of code pushed to codeberg).
Another day, another company that hooked up the random text generator to production and lost their entire prod db and backups: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue
Cue the long drag (https://x.com/amyngyn/status/1072576388518043656)
But also, damn, the random text generator did not “go rogue”, it generated text, randomly!
New copilot pricing just dropped, takes effect after June 1:
Some highlights for copilot pro and pro+:
Jeez that pricing scheme is so confusing. You swap your dollars for credits and then using models to burn tokens consumes some multiple of those credits. It is so abstract and meaningless it almost reminds me of crypto.
Once usage billing kicks in, what value does copilot offer above and beyond what ClosedAI and MisAnthropic offer directly? A more clunky user experience and even worse reliability? Bargain!
cost multiplier?
Apparently, you buy some currency type thing called AI Units and this is the rate the different LLMs consume them. The multipliers used to represent requests I think, i.e. times you triggered inference, but ai units are a proxy for token burn in a somewhat vague way, which makes me think there will be rate limit related controversies similar to what’s now happening with anthropic.
Existing enterprise users will get double the AIUs for three months to ease them to the new pricing model, so autumn (when the enterprise AIU pools get effectively halved) is gonna be fun.
This gives me very high live service video game monetization feelings, another reason to stay far away from it. At least they don’t have the thing where every times costs multiples of 50 and you buy tokens amounts not divisible by 50.
This gives me very high live service video game monetization feelings
Bingo
It’s a day ending in “y”, so here’s another bad rat take on Banks’ Culture:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZdJM6ZAdnjisDu249/the-great-smoothing-out
Once again, for the ones at the back, the Culture is not the main subject of the novels. We almost never see the perspective of “normies” in the Culture, it’s always from the view of misfits (Culture recruits into Contact/Special Circumstances) or outsiders (mercenaries like Zakalwe, enemies like Bora Horza Gobuchul, or allies like Ambassador Kabe).
Banks wanted to write novels about characters in dangerous situations facing their personal demons - like almost every other novelist wants - and the Culture was just the backdrop he invented as contrast.
Interesting that in the comments somebody also mentions that the people of the culture euthanize after a couple of centuries. No big shock that the LW people would disagree with that, as parts of the LW idea space is living forever in a computer simulation. So the culture can’t be utopian or good just because of that.
Yeah I think I linked to another similar take where another Wrong’un was mighty pissed that the Culture was infested with “deathism”.
Technically there’s no reason you can’t live forever in the Culture, through a combination of cryosleep and life extension, but it seems that the natural thing is to get pretty bored after 3 centuries or so. And I think that’s perfectly reasonably from what imagine it would be like.
Remember that there’s no private property in the Culture, so things that people here obsess over (keeping the family business going, making sure no non-deserving relative gets an inheritance) simply goes away. After a while you’ve played the Game of Life on all challenge modes and it’s time to pack it in.
I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.
I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.
Yeah, I don’t think they would care if it was just a few, or a small group, but culture people who start to claim others are deathists and the extreme of whom have all kinds weird violent thoughts on them would be concerning. Doubt it would be a huge concern to the minds however, they prob only really get active when one of them also starts wants to create an empire or something, but it is hard to amass resources for that in the culture, esp if no mind is on your side.
Do wonder why we never see culture people who worship the minds as gods.
Isn’t it sort of a big point that the Culture is an oddity in that it’s thriving on inertia instead of doing like so many other civilisations and transcending out of physical reality?
I figured I’d re-read “A few notes on the Culture” https://theculture.adactio.com/, and lo and behold almost everything the in these threads is answered there.
Also , look at these ghouls being delighted that the “deathism” author is dying: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RspqaNmJKKBnXTqwk/open-thread-april-1-15-2013?commentId=pnoiQZL7id6cav6aN, fascist gnome Gwern among them
they seem to be mostly angry that banks didn’t write their vision of the post-singularity paradise.
“why do we have to write our own propaganda???”
You’ve gotta love finding fault with “not preserving heritage” over “imperialistic complete lack of democracy”.
There’s local democracy - in one book some activist reserved a big part of an orbital just to run cable cars back and forth. And I believe the decision to go war with the Idirans was subjected to a vote - part of the Culture split off when it didn’t go their way.
But yeah, the Minds decide everything and Contact/SC is all about doing the “needful stuff” that every right-thinking Culture citizen would deplore.
The Culture is imperialist in the previous US sense of “everyone wants to live our lifestyle” but not in the “invade planets and strip them” sense.
I’m less interested in discussing the minutiae of the fictional Culture than exploring nerd’s reactions to it, honestly .
Agreed, agreed.
EDIT: Though as far as ambiguous anarchist utopias go, I think I’d rather live on Anarres in “The Dispossessed”, even though the material welfare and personal freedoms are much much lower.
and of course there’s absolutely nothing in the books that suggests it’s a problem. (hell, there’s a good chance there actually is a lively japanese folk dance fan community there despite the fact that earth was never a part of the culture.)
I figure part of the “scan” that a Contact ship does when it encounters a “lesser” planet is to basically slurp down all media, read all the books, and send drones down to do full-3d immersive recordings of basically everything going on.
I guess some stuff you really need to train as a monk for 30 years to really grok, but if there’s an interest for that some Culture weirdo will volunteer and get sent down with a drone in the form of a crucifix or whatever, and incidentally become the next pope.
incidentally I feel I’m seeing in this post and in the shit like Karp’s 22 points a growing sense of ennui and purposelessness that was also reported in Europe before WW1 . Everything is safe and soft and real manly virtues like killing are downplayed so what we need are big strong men throwing missiles.
Banks wrote during the 70s/80s and just imagining a future that wasn’t a nuclear wasteland or the Empirium of Man was an act of opposition.
explicit in “State of the Art”:
It was about a week later, when I was due to go back on-planet, to Berlin, when the ship wanted to talk to me again. Things were going on as usual; the Arbitrary spent its time making detailed maps of everything within sight and without, dodging American and Soviet satellites and manufacturing and then sending down to the planet hundreds upon thousands of bugs to watch printing works and magazine stalls and libraries, to scan museums, workshops, studios and shops, to look into windows, gardens and forests, and to track buses, trains, cars, seaships and planes. Meanwhile its effectors, and those on its main satellites, probed every computer, monitored every landline, tapped every microwave link, and listened to every radio transmission on Earth.
Yeah I vaguely remember that part from the novella.
This is yet another story where a Culture citizen weirdly decides that living in a shithole (1970s Earth) is preferable to literal utopia, so maybe the LW crowd have a point it’s not a very good utopia. Or maybe there are weirdos in every time and space. Again, see LW.
agree, plus: that blog is yet another case of people just not comprehending the scale of Culture’s civilisation and Culture’s culture. a Culture orbital is not just a fancy space station ffs.
When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didn’t matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica.
I was so surprised by the absurdity of that statement that it stuck with me vividly. To her credit, some years later she asked if I remembered her saying that and then admitted that it was a dumb thing to say. I occasionally remember this as an amusing childhood experience.
Besides the credit part, I remembered it again today for a different reason, this time in a conversation about model collapse.
[Model collapse is] a solved problem. We can see that it’s solved by the fact that AI models continue to get better, despite an increasing amount of AI-generated data being present in the world that training data is being drawn from.
…
AI models are never going to get worse than they are now because if they did get worse we’d just throw them out and go back to the earlier ones that worked better, perhaps re-training with the same data but better training techniques or model architectures.This is my fault for letting myself get into a discussion about model collapse on the fediverse.
I’m not sure why model collapse isn’t a big topic anymore, but maybe that’s just because the environmental catastrophes are a more pressing concern. To be clear, I’m not concerned about the models themselves, just our increasing inability to verify the authenticity or accuracy of any information we encounter, including search engines just not turning up any useful results.
On a slightly different topic, if anyone has suggestions for how a person could acquire money to live, which can’t involve physical labor, is probably remote-only, and possibly allows part-time flexibility, while unable to move from an expensive location for at least the next couple of years: I’m open to ideas. Because scamming people on Polymarket with a hairdryer sounded far more appealing than it ought.
When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didn’t matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica.
this is the level the median hackernews poster thinks on
ZSNES makes a comeback, has No Vibe Coding stipulation front and center.
A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge.
I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrow’s dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish.
Bonus sneer: since HN couldn’t rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.
If this isn’t pure engagement bait, what’s the real world situation this is supposed to map to? Pressing red means you always live, and if everyone pushes red everyone lives so…
I mean if blue is supposed to be a proxy for altruism, that usually doesn’t come with a certain death conditional.
I rather like my examples because they iterate. If we don’t cooperate on food this year then we starve next year, so voting red only means one year of selfish life. If we don’t cooperate on water this year then we can try again in a subsequent year, but eventually a drought will wipe us out. Rationalists love to talk about iterated game theory but they’re so hesitant to recognize instances of it!
I kinda wanna see LW tackle this
I love the way people who go “yeah but IN REAL LIFE with real stakes you would totally chose the red button”
- are entirely missing the point of thought experiments,
- why the fuck would you comply with such a fucked up scenario in real life lmao you worm
i feel like people in real life would be far less likely to press the red button, because twitter is almost wall to wall nazis and real life is not
Sounds like the winning move in that scenario is to purge the button enthusiasts before they cause any damage lol
like i said, the actual value of that little exercise is finding people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the population for no reason whatsoever.
@mawhrin Sadly, they exist. And there are too many of them! I guess this means we should kill people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the—
HEY WAIT
:-)
there’s this. (though i find it useful to know who not to rely on if/when things get worse: for example i already know our neighbour from the apartment a floor below did write many missives to our cooperative’s administration, without having a single reason.)
HN:
The cost of saving a kid in Africa by donating malaria medicine and insecticidal nets is only about $5,000. How many people do you know who will cancel their Hawaii vacation and donate that money to an African charity?
tfw your model of an average person on earth is someone who spends $5,000 on a hawaii vacation. good lord.
This feels like another case where the specific context matters more than whatever supposed principal the thought experiment is supposed to illuminate. The example that came to my mind when I tried to think about how to justify “voting red” was about running into a burning building. Sure, if some large fragment of people did so then their combined numbers would presumably let them get everyone out. But on the other hand, throwing yourself in is a wholly unnecessary risk, and the only people in need of rescuing are the people who ran in trying to do the right thing without thinking. Noble, but stupid and creates that much more risk for the firefighters who now have to not only stop the fire from spreading but also figure out how to rescue the failed good samaritans.
But then what really makes the difference between the examples is purely in the details not included, which is the kind of null case. Nobody has to go into a burning building that isn’t already in there when it catches fire. The danger of harm is entirely optional and voluntary. But you can’t just choose to not eat; the danger in your framing is omnipresent threat of starvation, and the question is whether to prioritize individual or collective well-being.
Ed: also, to reference the scholarly work of Christ, Wiener, Et Al.:
RED IS MADE OF FIRE
I don’t understand the relevance of Arrow’s theorem. Why is your phrasing the correct way of analyzing the situation?
Picking red guarantees your survival by endangering everyone else, making it morally fucked, but risk-free. Picking blue puts your life at risk, but saves everyone’s ass if it pays off, making it the more moral option overall. Picking blue also requires you to put some trust in your fellow man, so I’d have probably picked red if I didn’t know how the Twitter poll came out.
Someone else on the orange site claimed the experiment would end with only red-pushers left if it went for multiple rounds. Adding my two cents, the outcome would depend on how the first round goes - if red wins round 1, voting blue looks like suicide, shifting the calculus in red’s favour, and if blue wins round 1, you have reason to trust everyone will continue voting blue, making it a lot less risky and shifting the moral calculus in blue’s favour.
I didn’t see red as risk-free at all. You’re setting yourself up for a post-button Mad Max world where you know all of your fellow survivors are willing to kill you and up to 49% of humanity.
I mean, it seems pretty obvious that there’s no incentive to change your vote from blue to red once it’s been established that blue can win unless your goal is to murder up to 49% of everyone, which is certainly a moral calculus.
a very neat test to find people who are perfectly fine with the general idea of genocide.
(i’m entirely unsurprised by the number of genocidal ghouls in that hn thread)
There are some amazing justifications from many amongst the red-pushing side:
- “But if everyone presses red, nobody dies!” (As if that would every happen. Funnily enough strong overlap with the group that claims that “< 90 IQ can’t reason about hypotheticals”, although that is also just that part of twitter.)
- “People who press blue are just blackmailing us!” (I think this accounts for a large portion, ie: not liking to depend on others).
- “The number of people choosing blue can’t be that high! (It would be lower in a true-stakes scenario!)”
- [Many others, but these are those that come to mind.]
It’s a bit baffling how many strongly they refuse the “blue-selection” as possibly moral/rational. Even so far as calling people pressing blue evil or subhuman, simply baffling.
I wonder if the button colours immediately made US readers pick a side e.g. republican Vs democrat. If the buttons had been Yellow and Purple would it make a difference?
The color choice was either super lazy or super inspired.
green and purple. :-)
