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, and happy 4th July in advance.)
Unfortunately for everybody, it’s managed to outperform even the most cynical doomsday forecasts, to the degree that the US economy is now in even worse shape than it was right before an infamous downturn in the late 1920s. That’s according to the Telegraph‘s economics columnist Russ Mould, who notes that the overvaluation of US stocks has passed the level that brought the stock market to its knees to kick off the Great Depression.
The US Treasury has also admitted that the AI bubble poses systemic risks
get ready for it to get bloody
I want to piggyback off this to talk about the inevitable Uber comparisons, because not only is the mismatch between investment and returns several orders of magnitude greater, but there’s also a difference in kind. Uber’s model was to undercut the taxi industry and establish a dependence within their niche before increasing revenues. It’s the classic enshitttification cycle. But the AI plan, at least as advertised, isn’t to undercut a specific industry as much as it is to undercut literally the entire white-collar labor force. There are several problems with this, starting with the fact that the technology isn’t actually able to replace the target in the way it would need to. More significantly, however, is that labor doesn’t work like taxis. If labor can’t get work it shuts down the entire economy because they lose their income and can’t actually consume any of the things the market offers. Also labor tends to get mad and break out the pitchforks and molotovs if things get too bad, and “restructuring the economy to no longer provide you the means to sustain your family” seems like the kind of situation that definitionally makes things too bad. In either event the point is that even if this tech is somehow as revolutionary as advertised then there’s not really any winning for the company.
What will EA (and, more specifically, Lighthaven) do with all the money they expect to receive once the Anthropic IPO mints a bunch of hundred-millionaires? I’m not granting all of the article’s premises, but the interviews with rationalists might be of interest.
The author characterizes EA as being more “businesslike and professional” than LW, then spends the article talking about how their plans all hinge on getting a rich patron.
The image of the beautiful gardens floored with Astroturf is sad.
cruise ship, duh
brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored
New Odium Symposium episode. We talk about /r/fuckingfascists, a fascist domination roleplay subreddit intended for good liberals, which instead ended up getting eaten alive by nazis.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/20-death-of-162994026
The future is so strange (I got this in my youtube suggestions)
like, try explaining this to someone from 20 years ago and they’d look at you like you were off your rocker
151 thousand views
one hundred. and. fifty one. thousand. views.
brb ordering a tasty cocktail with which to distract myself
I went with the whiskey glass-sized gin/campari/martini rosso/cherry thing. a less regrettable decision
“Okay, so it starts with a doomsday cult which formed around GameStop…”
Not sure GameStop would have been a thing without shitcoins showing that this sort of mass media pushing could drive up value. So to properly explain it, start at 13th century bruge. So again you can blame the Dutch for everything. (I know it was actually French at the time).
AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism.
hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk.
The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network.
If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations.
This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things.
So half-right that it’s almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.
A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down …
Framing this as a skill issue and not a power issue is a weird choice.
A telling choice perhaps.
I hadn’t thought of Ribbon Farm in like 5 years, but when I googled it today I found this:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ribbonfarm-resurrected
For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably won’t notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest it’s no longer a standard WordPress blog.
It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months.
It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.
The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. It’s fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.
?O kay?
wget -rwasn’t good enough for a static copy?Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp.
This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora — ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters.
wat
I suspect I’m going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self.
why can’t you just make a tulpa like a normal person.
well whatever, I’ll ask about the harari.
Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.
what even the fuck is this word salad saying. at least upgrade to the one that isn’t em dash trigger happy.
now I’m afraid to google farnam street.
It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.
I’ve got wordpress sites in production that each do multiple million hits a day. they’re full of some of the worst plugins ever (because wordpress sites living more than a few years seem destined to become hellish katamaris), and still it’s barely at “performance engineering” levels of problem
solving when I see $1500/y of hosting? what the fuck are these clowns doing
Paying to run it on someone else’s computer. WPEngine charge $130/month for the level of their Essential plan that’s supposed to handle 100,000 visits/month. That’s $1560/year, which is near enough to his claim that it’s probably what he was on.
the first part wasn’t really a surprise (I am the someone else’s computer in a number of areas), but those numbers… 100k/mo hit cap/target? holy shit. no wonder such fucked fortunes have been made off wordpress
for comparison: you can get two boxes of tin (together in the ballpark of 32…48 cores, 128GB of RAM, approx 1TB of NVME or 4…8TB of spinnies) at someone like hetzner, with extra IPv4 allocations, for ~$1355/y
I’ve seen media agencies billing in the millions host on less. and venkatesh posts about his blog needing “high end hosting”? the same blog that barely had css or images? absolute clown shit
Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.
I don’t necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systems’ lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what it’s going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesn’t do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.
I could just bundle everything I’ve ever written into a ZIP file, and then it would be losslessly compressed. Just saying.
I believe that ML training is basically an evolutionary process. What does evolution produce most reliably?
Parasites.
You have created things that simulate the social signals of humans, getting us to care about things all out of proportion to what it actually does. It’s like those beetles that live in ant colonies, hacking the smell and social signals of ants so they get babied while providing nothing.
Harari is an open transhumanist from when I did some research into him when I found him on this interview so this seems in character
More ai stuff, this time from flathub: Democratizing Abandonware.
Flathub has a fairly relaxed ai policy that both ai bros and strongly anti ai people are unhappy with. It was brought in to try and deal with the review burden of slop submissions where no human is involved, and a chatbot fields review comments.
Turns out that ~75% of submissions that got a slop tag were abandoned… not just the submission, but the entire git repo behind it, too. The author is quick to point out that this is far from a representative study, but I can certainly believe that a) people who have invested little time or effort into their slopware will abandon it without much concern, and b) things like openclaw could definitely submit bullshit packages that are immediately forgotten as its internal state moves on. There’s no malice in the same way there’s no intent, just shitty tools being left running and polluting everything around them.
Via (she also predicted it): Bryan Johnson gave himself a incurable disease.
Welcome to the age of Oceangatelikes.
E: He blames it on eating sugar as a kid. AI will fix it.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 aah yes years of sketchy medical interventions, no couldn’t be that, it was that time he ate froot loops
BRYAN JOHNSON: transhumanist body hacker, fucks self up and dies by 50
HUNTER BIDEN: subsists on crack and hookers, will live to 100
move fast and break yourself!
@dgerard all due respect Hunter has said he’s something like 7 years clean so power to him.
And his social media posts are fantastic.
*The PR firm’s tweets
@schnoopy hell of a PR firm to tweet crack smokin
If it is a firm I hope they’re getting some good word of mouth on the back-end because they’re on point.
The right to bodily autonomy includes doing incredibly dangerous/untested shit to your body that will hurt you until you die; but it does not include posting through it (that is that secondary right to free expression, which also allows us to point and laugh).
Anyway, gg Johnson, maybe one day you’ll realize we are all tiny sparks trapped in decaying bags of flesh and the only thing that matters is what we do with that.
i’m sure this guy will have a sane, healthy and self-compassionate attitude to disability and long-term illness.
that could be any of who knows how many untested things he tried over years
“don’t die” - famous last words
Between this and Elon’s sad AI birthday party pics, I came to the conclusion that the default consensus for anything someone who’s wealth exceeds a certain amount should be ruled horseshit with no further verification needed. Yeah, occasionally there will be a pony under all that shit but it ain’t worth digging for when it’s there.
Anyways, calling horseshit on this because even if parts of it aren’t, they aren’t important compared to the greater horseshit coming from a guy who has an autoimmune disease like Bryan Johnson, that disease being “everything out of Bryan Johnson’s mouth is horseshit”
I missed those pics.
Me too. Saved future readers a search
Thanks, I am however one of those annoying people who doesn’t think he runs his moms account. (We knew his alts due to a lawsuit and how posting screenshots of his setup, and his mom (and that random dude he was accused of being) are not on them, and both have always been weird posters).
Soesnt change the sadcringe.
It’s both less sad because he’s probably not completely LARPing as his entire family on twitter, but also more sad because that’s his actual mother who couldn’t be arsed to actually be present and decided to slop it up for social media clout instead.
thank you for saving me a search
and even then I regret looking
Elon’s sad birthday pics he posted using his sock puppet account where he pretends to be his mom should be a top level comment here, also is hilarious but sad.
I guess the silver lining here is that “his team” might accidentally discover some actual way to help sufferers of this disease? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasn’t come across them already:
Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace
new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” the financier told the FT.
I can’t help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. They’re not all going to be grifters, after all.
Meta’s Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected
This is brilliant. They’re making so many mistakes they’re actually having to admit it. It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.
I’m sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I can’t remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.
It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
He is the voxday of the billionaire tech bros.
(Voxday is a whitenat far right alt right figure who also does that with every alt right culture war topic. He makes the plausible deniable, undeniable. For example he claimed he was big in the alt right movement and just went out and said ‘we want the 14 words’).
I’m more familiar with vox day than I’d really like. He hasn’t pivoted from the culture war stuff that he’s known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.
The main thing I knew him for is his failed attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards back in 2015.
(There’s a r/HobbyDrama post about the whole debacle, which I recommend checking out)
That is actually an example of what im talking about, he didnt create the sad puppies, he latched on to it and created the rabid puppies. See the weird latching on behavior.
Vox Day, the living embodiment of Dashiell Hammett’s line, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter”.
HA, and people thought the whole ‘AI generation is the tool of fascism’ was a joke.
@rook I am immensely proud that some years ago I made a list VD blogged of “ten SF publishing people whose chromed skulls I want as desk ornaments”.
It’s good to be hated by the *worst* people. And it’s totes on brand for him to be filling his empty mind with AI slop.
Not sure if you are aware of the work of the youtuber hbomberguy, but he had a video on some manosphere guys where said ‘what is it with these people and skulls’ when he noticed that david auroni always had his pet skull in each shot.
Top-tier resume material
new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
So not only are STEM graduates (mainly compsci grads) struggling to get jobs as it is, employers are explicitly passing them over for “”“useless”“” humanities degrees instead. I’m not sure whether to laugh at the irony of the situation, or crash out at the fact my own compsci/cybersec degrees may have become a liability.
I’m hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that I’d be safe from that particular filter, so I’ll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.
Your qualifications predate the LLM rot by fucking ages, and your position against them is crystal clear. Given both of those, bypassing that filter should be easy enough.
I’m thinking about going back to school and seeking a manufacturing job because even though I have been doing software professionally for 22 years, the entire industry is fucked by short term thinking and ignoring consequences.
Whilst I try and remember, there’s this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning children’s schoolwork.
Which was then followed in the real world by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall) because satire is impossible now, I guess? I can’t find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.
because satire is impossible now
It is because they have basically run out of ideas to try, or the ability to see the difference between good and bad ideas in the gold rush. You saw the same with cryptocurrencies, where every joke you made was already a shitcoin somewhere.
Move fast and break things taken as a religious decree.
