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.)
Rationalists: we should always incorporate new data into our worldview
Also rationalists: I found some anthropology study of Australian First nations from 1899 and found it fascinating
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZM6pErzL7JwE3pkv/shortplav?commentId=zn2bXx2WmLmyGiefm
Of course they measured skulls.
See, it’s a good practice under the principle of charity to read as much fascist propaganda as you can and incorporate it into your worldview. It doesn’t matter who said things, but rather whether they’re true, and since you’re a rational agent you can surely evaluate each claim with perfect objecitivity. Digging a 19th-century eugenics study is expanding your objectivity score.
Reading polemics from leftists too? lol no what are you talking about, they’re all irrational and biased
/s
Also how would anybody be left behind? Lile say we are wrong an the AI stuff is real vital etc etc bla bla bla. Them we just need to learn a new tool.
Nobody died because they didnt want to learn how to use a debugger for several years and then finally reversed their stance.
I guess the idea is that the tech economy moves fast and if we don’t get to grips with AI we’ll be left in the dust, broke and unemployed. Somehow this is proof that AI is good instead of proof the economy is bad (if people are impoverished in a whim). It’s just the same self-satisfied fantasy as always.
Basically,
Yes im just trying to say that it doesnt seem like a hard skill to pick up, and a skill which you can just skip a few generations and still be fine. Prompting gpt 1 is gonna ve different than the later models. (Even of the actual model improvements (compared to modules they add to the models) has drastically slowed down). Hell if AI worked you wouldn’t even need the skills you could just ask AI whatever and it would figure it out.
joke is on us, Heaven’s Gate picked the right time to exit.
Here’s a story about a douchebag who lost because AI:
Wonkette: Creep Who Sued Women Who Warned Others Not To Date Him Loses Case Due To AI-Reliant Lawyer - “Finally, a good use for AI!”
The brief included no citation to any legislative findings, let alone any including the statute’s targets as the brief asserted. We could not find any reference to the phrases “amplified exposure and endangerment” or “cyber vigilantism” within the Doxing Act. There also are no legislative findings included in the codification of the Doxing Act, the session law, or any publicly available version of the bill. These mistakes and fictitious quotations bear the hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence.
GitHub got pwnd by a compromised VS Code extension. Internal repos were exfiltrated.
Google released their new Gemini 3.5 “flash” model at I/O yesterday. For those who aren’t familiar, the “flash” model is typically marketed as the lower end and the “pro” model is the higher end for each given model generation.
The interesting thing here is that the new “flash” model is almost as expensive as the “pro” from the previous generation.
As my favourite “neutral-but-not-really” AI booster Simon Willison says:
This fits a trend: OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 was 2x the price of GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is around 1.46x the price of 4.6 when you take the new tokenizer into account.
It feels like all three of the major AI labs are starting to probe the price tolerance of their API customers.
Speed running enshittification - a process that typically only works when people are reliant on your product and have no other option than to pay the inflated price
presented without context, because it’s funnier that way: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=yE4Y2AoMPXGcTZw8B
took me a second to understand this isn’t meant as a funny prank idea
Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?
Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas’s cloud spend.
Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.
I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.
I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.
How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?
WELL WELL WELL, if it isn’t the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling
(plus a dose of corporate greed)
people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org
How does using personal plans impact the company’s bill? If someone is so profoundly stupid as to spend their own money on a “tool” for their job then why stop them?
Dunno, maybe they believe the pinky promise that their code won’t be used for training on the enterprise plans?
It’s more like license to sue their pants off if they get caught propagating obviously proprietary code through the responses of their tool, and if they are doing it but you can’t tell that just means your enterprise code isn’t discernible from claudeslop so no harm done.
I’m assuming if suddenly an LLM code tool is able to do something like write a parser for an unambiguously closed source heavily copyrighted data format and the only possible leak is the devs using LLM tooling, it’s going to be a big legal deal.
I’ve seen the pattern be used as an enterprise pricing dodge before: rather than sign the whole org up at $$$, everyone signs up themselves at $ (and maybe get to claim or somesuch)
another reading could be that someone in leadership/security went “holy shit this exposure is terrible” and put forth a policy including “no personal” and the poor little promptfondler is left ashen-faced upon reading that the policy instruction actually thought of the first obvious workaround
does anthropic sequester the data it gets sent the same way on personal and business plans?
My assumption based on nothing except life experience is that all of that data gets pushed through differently coloured pipes into the same giant bucket with privacy concerns being “too hard” and “approved by legal”.
that would be my assumption as well, but i’m sure the business subscriptions have some language that suggests otherwise.
That’s a good point. I wonder if they’re also realizing that the promised efficiency gains haven’t manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Can’t really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.
by introducing more mess that has to be cleaned up later
that made me smile good and proper, ty for the lol
I love the orangeposters in there, some of them sure are thonkers
this is a good way of getting rid of hyperactive deadwood
(oh dear, how sad, nevermind)
If only there had been warning signs of how heavily subsidized the rates absolutely had to be, and how bafflingly stupid it was to intentionally design workflows to maximize token use. If only people had been trying their damndest to shout it from the rooftops but were ignored because Corporate was listening to the automatic yes man instead.
This author—caught using AI to make up quotes for his book about the dangers of AI—has the gall to say it proves him right. You can’t trust him, so you can’t trust anyone.
spending way too much on GPUs is the spending way to much on mining rigs
at least dude didn’t burn his house down
HN, lobste.rs and LW are jizzing themselves over the
newspress release that ChatGPT[1] has disproven an Erdos[2] conjecture.no-one pauses to think this is a transparent attempt to goose interest in OpenAI before they commit an IPO
[1] I know it’s not literally ChatGPT, it’s an “internal model”
[2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o
[2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o
in afrikaans: “deelteken”
in english: I literally can never remember it, but I remember “umlaut”
It’s not a typical umlaut, (we have those in Swedish too), it’s like 2 sharp bunny ears
edit LOL it’s literally “double acute accent” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_acute_accent#Unicode
name in Hungarian: Erdős Pál
Apparently Hungarian has 4 different Os: O, Ó, Ö, Ő
oh that one, right!
Did it actually solve this one or did it just find a pre-existing solution like it did the last time?
I would expect both lobste.rs and LW to be open sewers of credulity here
In fairness, mathematicians here are like scientists at a magic show, i.e., ill suited to asking good critical questions. How much money did OpenAI burn to get what they say they got? How many false starts got quietly tossed in the circular file drawer? When, even, did their work start? It is easy for a company to say, for example, “We spent only three weeks on thus problem”, casually eliding months of prior effort (all that was the testing phase, you see, before a specific task had been settled upon…). OpenAI has no reason to be honest about anything like this. Indeed, a company will naturally get regular practice being dishonest by careful omission at every opportunity.
ChatGPT, the most heavily used AI service, gave wrong information in 46% of its answers, including making up an expenses scandal, giving inaccurate replies on voter eligibility rules and getting the date of the election wrong by two months.
Tired: Gell-Mann Amnesia
Wired: Altman Amnesia
Better than the original (in that it’s not a bad model of media literacy given slick packaging in order to support climate change denial)
altman amnesia is when you stop in your tracks because you hit monthly limit of tokens on 5th
REALLY? LMFAOOOOO
in which our dearest friend DHH has become an unpaid shill for the novel Camp of the Saints
https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2046982319353778391
nevertheless, the finest minds at hackernews and elsewhere have assured me that he’s just a normal, sensible center right kind of guy! nothing untoward going on here, i advise every boutique computer manufacturer known to man to financially support him and his hyprland reskin wankfest.
FTX investor the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is a major investor in SpaceX. This seems to be part of the Teachers’ Innovation Platform from April 2019. Mr. Kipling said it best:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.Meanwhile the Canadian stock market is up 40% in the past 1 year.
Might as well port this over here since I posted it late in the old thread
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
I think the more telling aspect here isn’t the possible employment impacts, it’s the fact that it’s making all the things it’s supposed to touch worse. Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits. But with AI, not only are we seeing the automation impact people’s livelihoods, it’s also making the experience of interacting with all these systems worse. I don’t know how many people outside the tech industry would care about underemployment and retraining for software engineers, but everyone can feel that the systems they rely on are less reliable, more glitchy, and uglier. Combined with the way data centers and AI companies serve as focusing points for people’s concerns, I think there’s decent odds that we see blood regardless of whether the prophecied great replacement (not that one) happens as advertised.
“Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits.”
Though with the textile mill thing, the quality of the cloth is much worse; I have a few historical reenactment friends who have been unable to find linen of the quality that even poor, working class people would have used (and Bernadette Banner has a recent YouTube video on the topic that my friends found validating and cathartic to see).
I’m not disagreeing with your point or anything — this is a bit of a tangent. I guess the point that I’m making is that textile mills did make everything worse, in terms of the availability of quality cloth, but this problem wasn’t noticed for a long time because the mills also made cloth cheaper for the average person. Whereas AI doesn’t even give us a benefit like this (which is why my comment is mostly irrelevant to your point and is just some bonus info because I’m a nerd)
The dreaded midnight hour of oblivion!
It isnt just causing unemployment, it is also causing drinkable water and energy problems. And apparently there might already be a wace of workers setting fire to warehouses going on in the usa (which is not being reported on if it is, not sure of it is an actual thing btw, but saw somebody on social media say the warehouse fires which they were tracking went from 100 to 150 in a short period. I do not know enough to say if this is real or somebody mistaking normal accidents with a revolution, i assume it is the former. The one fire I saw reported was due to a cost of living thing btw).
This from a while ago but I forgot about it until today: Eliezer jumpscare in this interview about Absolute Scarecrow (its very brief but is there)
on the topic of EY’s book, the ratings on Goodreads have slowly crept down (from 3.97 to 3.92)
and on the topic of ratings, the AI Doc has also gone down to am 6.9 on IMDB
That is still very high for pulp science fiction.
I’m curious to know the % of rationalist vs non-rationalist ratings for it
