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.)
Following on from yesterday’s discussion of Scott’s close brush with reality on prediction markets, The Aussie PowerPoint Man is talking about the strategic risks posed by the new insider training opportunities opened up by these tools. A lot of what he’s saying applies to normal financial markets, but what’s striking is the way that prediction markets create those opportunities for people with much less immediate power and information by allowing them to bet directly on the kinds of immediate decisions they do have information on.
I also thought the idea of integrating insider training red flags on public prediction markets into your early warning system was an interesting idea. These things aren’t actually useful for forecasting or making decisions because of how bad the incentives are, but people acting on those incentives absolutely creates a spike that can be meaningful in the short-term and potentially enable a few extra hours or minutes to prepare.
ah yes that must be that famed democratization that cryptobros yammered about
i think that perun took sponsorship from 80000 hours years ago, once, and eas or anyone in their milleu never reappeared
Adding on that this does feel like another application or consequence of the Great Man Theory of Everything, the idea the only the people with power and money matter because their power and influence are intrinsic to their person rather than being contingent on their social position. The average people empowered to commit insider trading by prediction markets have sufficiently limited individual agency that even collectively they don’t actually matter. In fact we want them to try their hand at the grift so that their insights can flow to the enlightened ones who can better use that information. They don’t matter enough to do real harm, but by watching the attempt we may be able to learn something.
An actual interesting thought: If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence?
My opinion is yes. People absolutely despise AI and the tech companies, as we have seen time and time again, not to mention the spread of AI doom fears. The current state of America is a boiling pot as Trump gets worse and worse (and with upcoming midterms) so AI causing mass unemployment absolutely would be enough to make it boil over and cause violence
Prompt goblins insist that we’re backward and irrelevant. Why do they crave our sweet delicious approval?
it’s not approval they’re after, it’s reaffirmation of faith
The plagiarism, massive expenditure of venture capital, and unreliable slop output are all intrinsic to the technology, and they hate to be reminded of that because there isn’t much they can do about it. From a technological standpoint, even locally run community fine-tuned open-weight models still originated from plagiarism and big corporate investments, and still output slop. From a social standpoint, the most the can do is try to claim legitimacy through consensus building and we are a threat to that.
they want your data and freshwater
freshwater
This reminded me of a few old comic stories were eventually the robot/computer was partially running on blood.
(One of them was a judge dredd one where they had vampire robots who iirc used the blood to keep a president in suspended animation alive. Snap, Crackle and Pop, it had a suprisingly wholesome ending for a dredd comic).
1000% off topic but I had this inflicted on me in a Discord I’m in and I need to drag as many people down with me as I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQRl7q_oN4c
Same energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjREyGgR2yg
See also: https://youtu.be/u1_dy1EmV6w
Musical equivalent of how a cat feels when you rub its fur the wrong way
amazing
In 2024, Duncan Sabien posted an interminable essay on abusers and people he thinks too advantage of him. Some of the references to a former employer may be to CFAR. Ozy also had a cheery aside abut how in rationalist organizations which the Rats have disavowed, “everyone was a victim and everyone was a perpetrator. The trainer who broke you down in a marathon six-hour debugging session was unable to sleep because of the panic attacks caused by her own.”
Some of the things which happened inside these communities must have been heartbreaking, and I hope that many people left and got on with their lives rather than founding their own dysfunctional organization with their own minions to abuse.
Nick Bostrom jumpscare with a funny sneer
These already head-scratching lines hit different when you remember that Bostrom believes it’s likely that we’re already living inside a computer simulation — in his head canon, do all those levels of simulated ancestors develop their own superintelligence, and what does that have to do with the new simulations they feel compelled to build? If AI wipes out humankind, does it build its own simulation? If so, is it simulating its human ancestors, or its creation by humankind? Heck, if our entire world is simulated, are we AI? We’ll leave it up to readers to take another bong hit while they try to make sense of it all.
you know how sometimes people that weren’t exposed to religion as children sometimes convert and get really weird about it as adults (eg: the extremely online california tradcaths) and because they were never socialized in a religion they speedrun committing every medieval heresy? rationalism is that but for philosophy.
https://feed.hella.cheap/@bob/statuses/01KRM0NVXCFT80AVFBRSB1G6G4
gitlab posts a totally-not-a-dear-john
The agentic era affords GitLab the largest opportunity in our history as a company, and we’re making the structural and strategic decisions to meet it. This letter has three parts. First, the operational and structural news, which is hard
you’d instantly guess what comes next!
“we’re taking our primary product, a piece of tech used for collaborative development of software, and shitting some AI over it. You are all fired. Please clap.”
>box labeled “agentic AI revolution automation realignment innovation acceleration opportunity”
>looks inside
>layoffs
(for the record this is downvoted by the community, and the one helpful comment is slammed by OP)
least egotistical lesswronger
He probably paid a rationalist date coach good money to tell him to do that.
im smarter than everyone else around me, especially those whiny feminists. why hasn’t society granted me a female to be my mate yet?
An lesswrong will literally do… whatever this is instead of going to therapy.
the reply is about as close to being nice and helpful as one could be, really
There’s a… robust debate about LLM slop submissions on everyone’s favorite boiled crustacean site.
First shot fired: a promptfondler suggest suppressing all comments pointing out that a submission reeks of slop by flagging them as “off-topic” [1]
“This is written by an LLM” comments should be flagged as off-topic (80 net upvotes, 139 comments)
Riposte: a suggestion that posing LLM generated content should be a bannable offence:
LLM generated submissions should be disallowed (274 net upvotes, 108 comments)
So far it looks as if the anti-slop forces have opinion on their side.
[1] short explanation of how flagging of comments work on lobste.rs - it’s sort of a downvote, but the flagger has to chose from a list of reasons. If a commenter accrues enough flags they’ll get a red warning banner, and might possibly be banned as disruptive.
OK here’s a followup, which I’m putting out here as there’s probably a higher proportion of neurodivergent people here than in other fora I frequent
A commenter on lobste.rs states that being anti-LLM is effectively being against neurodivergent individuals, because many such individuals express themselves in prose in a way that’s indistinguishable from LLM output.
Is this a widespread viewpoint?
https://lobste.rs/s/wee21u/this_is_written_by_llm_comments_should_be#c_nadrad
I recall seeing someone elsewhere on the fedi trying to drum up a point like that a few weeks ago, their complaint was something like “I’ve been chased out of neurodivergent spaces for not being enough into LLMs”
No idea if their claim was true; I can definitely see the possibility of some ND neurotypes slanting more favourable, but nfi on the values
Not sure I buy the ground for that argument anyway tho. Lotta people used to smoke and society slapped all manner of regulation on that
I called it out as lies and bullshit, the poster asserted it was totally true and I asked for numbers to support this statistical claim.
And instead of providing numbers, they came back with an anecdote about university administrators being incompetent (which is deeply unsurprising and thus, in the Shannon sense, conveys no information).
this is obvious bullshit: theoretically, my writing is affected by two factors that might skew the assessment towards it having been generated by an llm: i’m neurodivergent (adhd) and english is not my native language – and i was never accused of using synthetic text generators…
I was trying to reply by way of linking a piece by Robert Kingett that had been shared here some time ago that, in excruciating detail and with righteous fury distilled to cold analysis, explained why AI is absolute shit for accessibility aids. His experience is in the realm of physical disability rather than neurodivergance, but that only makes the problems more starkly illustrated rather than unique.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find that piece, but I found this one and needed to explain to the kid why I randomly laughed out loud.
here’s another commenter saying being against LLMs is being against the otherly abled:
(commenter is a notorious promptfondler)
A prominent cloud engineer had a sizeable subthread where they were skeptical about the entire idea of Quality as something that humans can discern and rank. Through what I presume was a nat 20, I threw a philosophy book at them and they appear to have responded by deleting the worst of their comments, particularly the ones where he admits to quoting chatbots, and deactivating their account. This may be the first time that quoting Pirsig has won an argument, TBH.
This was after a week’s vacation caused by a thread that is still too hot to deeplink, where I had multiple comments removed by mods and still won the argument. I am currently once again the second-most-flagged user with like 25 flags in the last month. “The things I do for love.”
AI is bad at everything, part infinity: AI transcription whitewashes 18th-century documents
In other Scott of Siskind news, he just posted an entirely unnecessary amount of words to aggressively push back against the adage that “all exponentials sooner or later turn into sigmoids” as if it was by itself a load bearing claim of the side arguing against the direct imminence of the machine god.
It’s just a bunch of arguing by analogy ( “helping you build intuition” ) and you-can’t-really-knows while implying AI 2027 was very science much rigorous, but it also feels kind of desperate, like why are you bothering with this overperformative setting-the-record-straight thing, have you been feeling inadequate as an AI-curious stats fondler of note lately?
The idea of “the exponential curve goes up forever” has always been silly and an idea rooted in capitalism for me (“no bro you don’t get it we’re gonna get infinite money forever”). Limited resources exist, and people are already very fed up with the ludicrous amounts of water and electricity data centres take up. Making bigger models that need to run for longer is also probably going to take an exponential amount of resources (and also make people hate you more).
he just posted an entirely unnecessary amount of words
taking a quick look at it… it’s actually short by Scott’s standards, but still overly long, given that the only point he makes is claiming Lindy’s Law is applicable to predicting AI progress in absence of other information. Edit: glancing at it again… its not that short, I kinda skimmed until I got to Scott’s actual point my first time glancing at it. You can’t blame me for not reading it.
you-can’t-really-knows
Yeah, he straw-mans AI critics/skeptics as trying to make an argument from ignorance, then tries to argue against that strawman using Lindy’s Law (which assumes ignorance and a pareto distribution). He completely ignores that AI critics are actually making detailed arguments about LLM companies consuming all the good and novel training data, hitting the limits on what compute costs they can afford, running into problems of the long lead time for building datacenters, etc. Which is pretty ironic given his AI 2027 makes a nominal claim to accounting for all that stuff (in actuality it basically all rests on METR’s task horizons, and distorts even that already questionable dataset).
Building infinite compute is hard, man
As if LLMs being the last steo before AGI/ASI/The Metal Messiah is a foregone conclusion. As far as I can tell even the AI 2027 thing only argues that once the bots completely nail down programming (any minute now) then the foom happens and the models will magic themselves into true AI, because apparently being good at solving coding problems is a sufficient proxy for superintelligence, hence the METR infatuation.
I mean, to be fair that’s not unique to them - software engineers have been worse than physicists in assuming that all of reality and human experience is downstream from their chosen field.
Someone called Fran has a story of being sexually harassed at the Center for Effective Altruism (and assaulted in other communities).
Fran has done some really great writing on this, really admire her ability to deconstruct a community she’s fond of.
Pete Steinberger shares his OpenAI bill on Twitter. The headline number is $1.3 million in the last 30 days.
But in his (own) defense, it takes so many tokens to do so many bad ideas at once.
How many people, if they were given $1.3 million just once in their lifetime, would figure out far better uses for that money than this guy?
Coincidentally, it came up in conversation last night that the head of AI at Northeastern University makes $1.3 million a year (I don’t know where that number came from, but it’s what I heard, and it’s apparently the second-highest salary at the university, exceeded only by the president’s).
you give me 1.3 million dollars and I’ll fuck off on a motorcycle for the rest of my natural life and that would still be a better value for the money than whatever the fuck this is.
zulip added slop to their codebase a long time ago (1, 2) but now they’ve relased this bullshit blog post with some choice nonsense:
I seriously considered banning LLM use for Zulip contributions. But our view is that contributors should be allowed to use modern tools in the service of producing great, reviewable work. AI-assisted work is of course subject to the same rigorous review processes we’ve always used for community contributions.
So we decided to invest in creating, refining, and enforcing a new AI use policy, which has the following key tenets:
- End-to-end human responsibility for work and the communication around it. You always need to understand, test, and explain the changes you’re proposing to make, whether or not you used an LLM as part of your process to produce them.
- Clear and concise communication about points that actually require discussion. While we allow carefully edited AI-generated PR descriptions, we’ve had to ban AI-generated chat messages in the development community as too disruptive. Manual enforcement of this policy has been rough, with far more PRs closed without review, stern warnings, and outright bans of repeat offenders than we’ve ever had to apply before. (What do you do when someone apologizes for submitting AI slop… by copy-pasting an apology from ChatGPT, including surrounding quotation marks?) We expect that next fall, automation or other major changes will be required for the PR triage process to be manageable.
The results [of using Claude] were promising (and far better than just a few months prior) — enough for us to start investing in teaching Claude Code how to self-review its work, and how to produce PRs that are easy for maintainers to review. This has largely been an AI-supported process of digesting our contributor documentation into CLAUDE.md, and iterating when we see the model struggle.
i liked zulip 😞
Upvoted but disliked
I’m not going to start a punch-up with a dev team or maintainer who believes that AI tools can help good programmers do good work or whatever, but time and again we see that, just like crypto before it, you aren’t inviting good programmers to work with you. You’re inviting the bros. AI bros and crypto bros are a specific type of Guy. I’m sure there were dotcom bros in the 90s. This is not a new problem, even if the current economic circumstances makes being this type of Guy more viable than ever, apparently.
It’s not just that the tech is bad (though it is bad), it’s that it’s uniquely privileged by culture and economics to empower the worst assortment of morons and grifters outside of Wall Street (and also inside of Wall Street, because of fucking course it does).
