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.)
Enjoy this masterful account of successful human-ing by a LWer
Surely this suave persuasiveness will soon enable the faithful to convince the unwashed masses of the One True Way
undergrad relationships course
🤔
Amazing bit, you read through the first section and it’s like, okay, I mean, maybe not really insightful but at least not dumb, and then they hit you with da
Around the same time, I was using an LLM to think through a social situation.
With a new context window, it responded as if the drift [in the previous conversation] had never happened.
Now, as I understand it this is literally the definition of a context window.
No but you see that doesn’t make sense since the chatbox is conscious and very smart
“ChatGPT, explain to me why women avoid me like the plague”
Her account is just another reminder that – apart from race science – nothing goes better together with rationalism than social cluelessness.
Preprint servers and open science platforms have revolutionized the scientific process. A fundamental feature of these platforms is a lack of peer review—virtually anyone with an internet connection can upload their research in a few clicks. Although this setup has facilitated rapid dissemination of results and open access to research, it has also enabled fringe researchers to post and share pseudoscientific, genetically informed studies of differences in behavior that often advance racial hereditarian and eugenic claims. Because preprint archives are now routinely used by mainstream academics, preprints grant a degree of legitimacy to fringe research that otherwise may have been relegated to a blog post or fringe publication. Previous studies have documented individual examples of pseudoscientific, genetic studies of group differences being posted on preprint archives, but the scope of this problem remains unclear, making it difficult to formulate responses and potential solutions. The present study quantified and characterized pseudoscientific studies of group differences in behavior—including studies that used genetic methods—housed on popular preprint servers and open science collaboration platforms. Dozens of such preprints were identified. Preprinted studies on group differences often analyzed controversial phenotypes, most frequently intelligence and related traits, and furthered classical, widely rejected hereditarian and eugenic theories. Genetically informed analyses rested on fundamentally flawed assumptions about heritability and polygenic scores. The Preprint Problem is indicative of a broader effort to weaponize mainstream academic research and its mechanisms, including Open Science, and a recent resurgence of scientific racism and eugenics. Potential responses to these challenges are introduced.
With a cameo by Cremieux.
(Via Kevin Bird.)
did you mean to post this in this week’s stubsack?
Probably, yes. The way each week links to the previous still trips me up sometimes.
The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have strengthened their “LLMs fuck off” rule with VCR instructions for quickly deleting stuff by people with a history of LLM use.
This explains a lot. Yud writes in 2018:
[…] it occurred to me that I was pretty much raised and socialized by my parents’ collection of science fiction.
My parents’ collection of old science fiction.
Isaac Asimov. H. Beam Piper. A. E. van Vogt. Early Heinlein, because my parents didn’t want me reading the later books.
And when I did try reading science fiction from later days, a lot of it struck me as… icky. Neuromancer, bleah, what is wrong with this book, it feels damaged, why do people like this, it feels like there’s way too much flash and it ate the substance, it’s showing off way too hard.
And now that I think about it, I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, to take a different path from the branching point that found Stranger in a Strange Land appealing.
(I just finished re-reading Neuromance, partly because I mined it for quotes here, and I think it still holds up).
So Yud skipped with New Wave SF and the bombastic late 70s stuff that New Wave was partly a reaction to. He jumped into cyberpunk (itself a reaction to both) and bounced off hard.
There’s so much conversation within SF that he’s missing, and it’s kinda important, because his project is an SF project, and he’d probably get more traction if he’d engaged with it more.
necromancer is brilliant prose first and foremost, and yudkowsky not being able to realise this is so very symptomatic
Yeah, all that “style over substance” nonsense is really strange given that those early sci-fi authors were more notable for cleverness and sheer volume of output than for consistent literary quality (and I say this as someone who also read and enjoyed a lot of Asimov and friends growing up). Like, Sturgeon may have coined the “90% of everything is crap” law, but when you write the amount that they did for the pulps you end up with some real gems in that 10%.
I spent January 1990 I think? reading all of Analog/Astounding from about 1959 to 1975. (It was 40 deg C all month and I stayed in with my aircon.) I loved that stuff from anthologies of the best of it, and I can assure you the original mags are extremely much the 90%.
I liked it and I’m not really into sci-fi because I need good prose to read more than the content.
I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
This is someone nakedly fantasizing about being L. Ron Hubbard.
nakedly fantasizing
Worst mental image of the day
Yud:
I didn’t stick to merely the culture I was raised in, because that wasn’t what that culture said to do. The characters I read didn’t keep to the way they were raised. They were constantly being challenged with new ideas and often modified or partially rejected those ideas in the course of absorbing them.
Also Yud: ewww Neuromancer is icky
Yud:
But if you consider me to be more than usually intellectually productive for an average Ashkenazic genius in the modern generation
It’s not just a load-bearing if, it’s a conditional that manages to be vaguely racist under all the smug. C-c-combo move!
But if you consider me to be more than usually intellectually productive for an average Ashkenazic genius in the modern generation
I don’t consider you more than usually intellectually productive for an average person, with no qualifiers, and I refuse to engage with whatever the fuck lies beneath that racist qualifier
and I refuse to engage with whatever the fuck lies beneath that racist qualifier
Oops all scientific racism
The title of the post was “Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?”. Now, “general intelligence” is something totally different from the g of Pioneer Fund/Mankind Quarterly numberwang racism, honest, we promise. It’s just something we use the presumed existence of g to argue for. See? Completely different!
Also, this post was designated among the “best of LessWrong 2018”.
Despite the explicit exhortation to take the good parts from new things and integrate them into your own thinking, and the assertion that Campbellian SF teaches this, neither Yud nor any of the commenters seem to appreciate the possibility of doing this with cyberpunk. For them, if a story does not include a scientist expositing his ideas, it cannot be a story with ideas. The slightest amount of flourish in the prose makes even rather blunt themes like “the street will find its own uses for things” and “the rich are not even human” completely invisible.
When I was a youngster (before I had developed any such notion as “taste”), my SF reading ran the gamut from A Wrinkle In Time and The Giver, to The Caves of Steel, to The Ophiuchi Hotline. (I didn’t finish The Difference Engine for the same reason I didn’t finish Foundation: Stopping the book and starting over with all new characters confounded and discouraged me. So, I expect that Valis would have been too much for me, but that I might have finished A Scanner Darkly or Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.) When I tried to write an SF novel myself, it obviously ended up trying to do all those things. The native Martians had destroyed themselves and ruined their planet in nuclear war; one tiny faction tried to survive by turning themselves into data patterns in the computer of a subterranean city from which they could be resynthesized. One of the scientists on the human team investigsting the city millions of years later is the victim of social bias because he has a rare illness that both causes blindness and makes his body reject cybernetic implants. It eventually turns out that this illness is due to an ancient, noncorporeal life form trying to form a symbiotic relationship. Et cetera.
LWer to Big Yud: Please be serious
they’re just jelly Elezier has all the cool hats and gets all the
chicksmath petsThe fan cites an article by Kevin Roose which is gently skeptical of Yud. To paraphrase President Johnson, if Yud has lost the most credulous rube the *NYT *editorial board can find, he has lost DC.
-3 upvotes and 0 karma, but the article is absolutely right (they hate this post because it tells the truth). If Eliezer wants to influence public discourse and policy on an international level, he absolutely does need a respectable image (with maybe a touch of eccentricity in an allowable way). But apparently (what he thinks is) the literal end of the world isn’t enough to make him actually try for normie public image. Or maybe he has some galaxy brain plan about how looking like a weirdo actually helps his cause? If he does, I strongly suspect it is a rationalization.
this seems like a great time to bring back AI disagreements by Brian Merchant where a rationalist AI convention spends more time arguing about AI takeover scenarios then they do discussing plans to actually stop AI and implement anti-AI policies
Yeah that was a good article. I think that is one of the fundamental issues with rationalists, they are basically a group formed around neat sci-fi ideas and not actually getting anything done, and their strong libertarian biases prevent them from actually pursuing the strategies that would be most effective for many of their nominal goals.
that image of Yud made me laugh out loud
Looks to me he took the debate the correct amount of serious.
yeah if anything this is making yud look good T_T amazing stuff
The top comments under the yt vid:
“If people like 47fu build it, everybody dies.”
And
When I saw Eliezer’s attire in the thumbnail, I was a bit disappointed. However, after listening to the first five minutes, I’m wondering how the hell he knew to dress so appropriately. Now I’m convinced he is a genius.
Unrelated to that, but is it just me or does Liron Shapira look weird? Did he use some sort of genAI overlay on his own looks, or some weird postprocessing something? His older vids don’t give me that vibe. The bowtie looks oddly floaty. (But can be that they always do that and I’m just not around enough people who wear that).
math pets
I’d forgotten this
Cliff Stoll (author of The Cuckoo’s Egg and maker of real-world Klein bottles) declared dead by AI
Yud takes $10k to debate a random bro. The bro claims to work at an AI lab. The moderator is an acolyte of Yud. Everybody sucks here and I could not stop laughing.
Jesus his fucking hat metastasized
It’s absolutely crazy, but I think Yud is the less unhinged person here
Clown v. Clown. This is about the level of discourse Yud deserves.
Kevin Roose mentioned that in 2023 Yud started a relationship with a Gretta Duleba in Washington State. Her professional site is here. She started out in IT, and retrained to be a Marriage and Family Therapist. “Gretta’s other areas of clinical focus include neurodivergence, ethical non-monogamy, LGBTQ+ issues, sexuality, and kink.”
In 2023 she said she shut down her practice (although the NYT implies she is still working) and started full-time jobs at MIRI as communication director then executive assistant to Eliezer Yudkowsky. “Right now: I’m doing independent technical alignment research.”
She met one of her long-term partners, Duncan Sabien, at a CFAR workshop in 2015. Sabien is also in a relationship with one of Yud’s former long-term partners who has changed names and gender presentations. That seems a bit incestuous and explains some of the drama and incompetence in these spaces. She and the former partner both use the A-word about themselves.
Her social media presence is mostly Substack, Twitter, and Discord, and she has a whole blog sharing letters to former partners and an invitation to proposition her by email because of course she does. And she organizes orgies with Aella. Yud sometimes seems flirty with Aella on twitter.
They seem happy together but giving up your career for a partner you are not married to is a big risk. She has 8
17years of Google money and was paid $200k by MIRI in 2024. She is also another female LWer who has much more impressive academic and professional achievements than any of the men.My dominant MtG colors are blue and black.
Basically admitting to being evil
The newest addition to her polycule “got my attention by radiating Dark Lord energy while actually trying to save the world. He’s ruthlessly excellent.”
When he funded Manifold, Scott Alexander said that it was “Chaotic Evil.” These people keep switching between cutesy language and rawr I am the dark lord language, and their examples of evil are often bathetic while their serious plans are things like “expel brown people so they don’t pollute our blood” and “better nuclear war than giving sand anxiety.” They reject history, and they reject real-life adventures and contact with people with diverse experience, so evil is a very abstract concept to them.
The newest addition to her polycule
Isn’t this mostly a pretentious way of saying someone I recently fucked?
Polycule implies some level of ongoing relationship that probably involves more than just meeting up for sex.
Source: I live in Somerville, Massachusetts
someone i recently fucked for the second time
There is a difference between “sleeps or plays around” and “has extended physical and emotional relationships outside of cohabitation and shared bank accounts.” It sounds like she has four ongoing long-term relationships and attends kink events, and that her partners know she has other partners and attends kink events.
I think this means we need a moratorium on fantasy TTRPGs until we figure out what’s going on
This is exactly what a white MtG main would say.
I think that’s a romantasy thing, it’s a compliment
Another review of Yudkowsky and Soares: if anyone reads it, everyone laughs (sadly, Substack). This one gestures to the whole university of academic fields that a book like this touches on.
The reviewer mentions “The wickedly smart Scott Aaronson” and maybe he means Aaronson’s academic publications because his general blogging is not impressive.
Wow, that’s probably one of the most in-depth critiques of the book I’ve read. Kudos to the OP
I nearly bounced off when I couldn’t tell if his praise of Kissinger (spit) was ironic, but it was ultimately a very well-rounded examination.
came here to react from the same sentence
He does seem to list Kissinger as one of several “smart people” which is odd for a US military veteran. Lots of nonagenarians with PhDs say stupid shit.
a world where lots of matter and energy was spent on its weird and alien needs, rather than on human beings staying alive and happy and free
Good thing we don’t live in a world like that right guys?
Under Threat of Perjury, OpenAI’s Former CTO Is Admitting Some Very Interesting Stuff About Sam Altman the interesting stuff in question is that Sam is a massive liar, which we all already know, but hey more proof can’t hurt
Also an email came up where Demis Hassabis tried to convince Elon to stop insisting on open sourcing OpenAI for AI safety reasons by sending him a 2015 scott alexander blogpost.
spoiler
I saw the emails where Musk and Altman treated Hassabis like some great evil, but I didn’t know a Scott blogpost was involved
To be fair, 2015 was definitely after he was a red flag, albeit for very different reasons than anything Saltman or musk care about
Google is forcibly installing Gemini Nano onto every Chrome installation without the user’s knowledge, and actively re-installing it if the user deletes it. Probably an attempt to juice the numbers.
(h/t Matt Roszak)
Last summer the Web Speech API got incorporated into browser standards, it’s supposed to offer in-browser speech-to-text and the like, and full support of the API requires the browser vendor to offer the ability to download a language appropriate model for autonomous inference.
Going from this to deciding that it’s now ok to side load unspecified 4GB models without telling the user is why we should never give these people an inch.
I’d say the numbers are more a bonus.
I assume they’re putting it in under the guise of various browser “features” like automatic tab grouping or something, but also using it for Google products like Drive / Docs / Sheets to have offline agentic crap in there that would be more efficiently done without LLMs. I suspect this is as far up as they can hoist it because any further would be outside the bounds of the browser sandbox, which would prevent those products from easily calling it.
But the features themselves are probably not the end goal either. The more tempting motivation is that it allows for circumventing the data center problem by offloading the compute to the client. A couple of quick updates to the ToS and I can see it being used as a mesh llm network, sort of like the “find my device” network they rolled out last year.
The article mentions eprivacy and gdpr, but I don’t think those are the most problematic here, assuming Google maintains mostly local-only compute. What I’d be interested to know is how this plays with DSA and DMA, which have more explicit requirements and more teeth.
the guy’s a bit of an infosec mall ninja, so reread anything he claims in the calmest possible way
I certainly got that impression, and I confess to mostly skimming the parts beyond the technical breakdown for that reason. The conclusions he draws are arguably a bit spurious, but the persistent download and opaque opt-out are interesting facets.
Given the controversial nature of AI and the EU’s recent antitrust fines of Google, I can see this getting some legal scrutiny - just not under the legislation he cited. I’d be interested to see how next year’s Google’s DMA compliance report frames it, assuming it’s not lumped into a “confidential” redaction (which shouldn’t even be allowed in a transparency report…).
How to ensure your entire pool of addiction attention is directed towards GenAI: take absurd measures to lock down your phone
https://lobste.rs/s/pzx24l/iphone_dumbphone
You don’t need a “browser” when you can ask ChatGPT!
TOTO pivots from bidets to, well, you know by now. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/toilet-maker-toto-ai https://archive.is/wip/rzLqn
Toto is also the world’s second-largest producer of electrostatic chucks, a critical component that holds NAND computer flash storage chips in place during manufacturing.
huh
Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong decides GenAI is good enough to replace 14% of his shitty company
PR-laden longtweet for source
https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/2051616759145185723
One thing I have noticed is a lot of AI-bros will brag that they automated workflows, or refactored code with AI. If they were really smart and/or had good processes, they would have done those things without AI a long time ago.
On the other hand, if AI and griftocurrency sink each other, I am fine with that.
Starting this Stubsack off with a double bill from the tech world.
First, Blender accepted cash and slop commits from Anthropic, and Adobe’d their public image in the process. They put out some corpo-speak to try and quell the mob, but it isn’t working.
Second, FFmpeg put out a showcase of AI’s coding prowess:
