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.)
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
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 😞
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).
Upvoted but disliked
Microsoft releases cost calculator for GitHub Copilot for the new token usage based billing. Previously you were being charged per request, kind of like hiring a cab and paying the same whether you went to the next corner or the next continent.
Turns out Zitron may have been seriously low balling the actual cost to subsidized billing ratio.
spoiler
this is likely tomorrow’s Pivot
Here’s a nice example of LW brain (albeit heavily downvoted, so might be hard to get to):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=EJs4reRGEni73dxfC
Essentially, certain hereditary diseases are very rare, leading to less resources to find a cure, so the Big Brain Rationalist solution is to breed more people with the disease so it gets profitable to cure.
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 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)
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…
New(ish) Baldur Bjarnason - a fairly politically charged one at that, going into the US hegemony powering the current tech industry (and the AI bubble by extension), and how the Hormuz crisis is all-but guaranteed to topple the whole thing.
I particularly appreciate the argument he makes about the tech industry pivoting from creating value to exercising control. I disagree that this trend is specific to the tech industry, but with the possible exception of Monsanto they have been the most successful at it.
With the obvious failings of the American state to perform it’s basic duties and the cross-pollination of the American political and corporate elites it seems plausible that at least some factions in the tech industry are awaiting an opportunity to take advantage of this weakness they’ve created and exercise that control over the functions of the state directly. I feel like I should be saying this into a webcam from behind a cartoonishly-large desk in between shilling for nutritional supplements, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fear what rough beast, it’s hour come at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
AI is bad at everything, part infinity: AI transcription whitewashes 18th-century documents
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.
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?
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.
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).
(for the record this is downvoted by the community, and the one helpful comment is slammed by OP)
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
im smarter than everyone else around me, especially those whiny feminists. why hasn’t society granted me a female to be my mate yet?
He probably paid a rationalist date coach good money to tell him to do that.
least egotistical lesswronger
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
Apparently, the American Physical Society is revising their AI policy to allow “broader applications” than the “light editing” they currently permit.
I currently have a review request sitting in my inbox from them. I’m thinking of using this as a reason to decline that request.
I would rather quit physics than accept the institutional endorsement of skill-destroying, environmentally disastrous fashtech.
looking very much forward to that crashing head first into arXiv threatening a ban if your chatbot fucks up in your name
I was pretty happy about seeing that news about arXiv! So much news has been various organizations giving into LLM usage like some kind of inevitability, so it was a nice change of pace.
It is this continuing slippage of standards that makes me appreciate a hard line against any and all genAI that place like awful.systems have. You concede one small usage and the boosters will keep pushing for more.
Yeah the first AI comes in all nice and friendly but if you dont toss them out before you know it you turn out to he an AI bar.
(Also noticed that a lot of ‘I just want some nuanced talks’ friendly looking ai bros are not friendly at all when they keep getting pushback).
But I listened and agreed that you had serious concerns about certain aspects of this technology. I even agreed when you talked about how frustrating it was that specifically other people wanted to do bad things. I listened as you asked whether I had any options to address those concerns! What more do you want from me before you agree to let me do and say whatever I want!
AI is Hungry for Power and You Are Footing the Bill - Naked Capitalsim
Money spent on grid upgrades and tax breaks tied to them means fewer resources for things people actually need, like schools, public transit, local infrastructure, or basic community services that make life more affordable and stable.
Even if you’ve never touched an AI model in your life, you’re going to pony up for it.
In 2017, a LessWronger discovered index investing but decided that most people were doing it wrong: why keep an emergency fund in cash or other safe assets when stocks have the greatest long-term return? He mentions that the US stock market lost half its value in 2007-8, and that if you hold stocks in your employer they may lose value at the same time as you are laid off, but he never uses his business degree to think through “if the stock market crashes, I may lose my job and have to draw on my savings.”
The investment platforms I mentioned can convert your index funds into cash and send it to your bank account in 4-5 days, so you don’t need to hold more cash than you’d need on a 4 day notice. I keep about 50% more than my average monthly credit card bill, so I can pay my cards on time with autopay.
I love how this guy’s blog is “about math” but there are like zero math posts on it? It’s so funny to me how these people want to seem “mathy” and smart when in reality they couldn’t tell you what a group axiom is.
He also has a take on dating:
Nostalgic for the simple days of arranged marriages and/or circa-2013 OkCupid, Rationalists have taken to writing “date me” documents online. … They credit me as inspiration. This is ironic because A, I stole the idea from Aella and B, neither Aella nor I posted dating advertisements. We posted dating applications.
The first comment is by a man who wants the Internet to know that most men have no chance of getting a hu-mon fe-male interested in them and should just give up (Men Going Their Own Way). I thought the incels and PUA mostly moved off SlateStar but they must still be part of the subculture.
I don’t write or tweet about who I want to date. I write about what I’m obsessed with, what I’m passionate about. I write insightful and funny things because I enjoy insight and humor. I write with absolute candor, not in service of an agenda or some artificial persona.
🎶 I’m so vain / I probably think that song is about me 🎶
He also launched a paid dating blog on Substack, which is as on-brand as starting a cult. This one uses the Market model which I do not recommend (what I recommend is “attend collaborative activities with people of a gender you find hot, especially creative or physical activities, and if you like them let them know”: this is extremely hard for many of us, but the solution is ‘find someone extroverted who likes local activities and go to the ones he or she recommends’ not reading a blog). https://www.secondperson.dating/p/markets-in-dating
- NYT bullying Scott.
- EA cancelling Robin Hanson.
He uses the word egregore in his dating advice.
It’s like spammers deliberately including typos to select for recipients who are more vulnerable to phishing. If you say “Dating discourse is an egregore evolved for survival” to someone and their genitals do not retreat into hibernation, then they are ready for recruitment into your cult. Statistically, they will have already read the Sequences and attended at least one Lighthaven BBQ with a white supremacist.
I only know that word from an old (pre-pandemic) book episode of Behind the Bastards, so the immediate association is esoteric antisemitism. I’m not sure how common this is but it seems to support your thesis here.
That’s the thing about esotericism. You think it’s all happy hippie New Age frou-frou, and then suddenly, whoops all Julius Evola.
He also alludes to the Robin Hanson/Scott Alexander guff about the need to distribute sex to needy men. The specific story he links involves an antisemitic edgelord who seems to be planning violence after his last girlfriend leaves him.
LessWrongers, if anyone is reading this, there are spaces where you can be social and not be exposed to these vile ideas which will destroy you and maybe some of the lonely people who give you a chance.
the need to distribute sex to needy men
It always trips me up how this is about state sponsored arranged marriages (preferably to virgins), instead of like pushing to decriminalize sex work in the united states.
