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 - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this…)
<buys giant bucket of popcorn>
CNN: AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner forced to unwind all public stock positions after steep losses, sources say
I vaguely recognize the name, apparently he’s a snot-nosed 25-yr old who got fired from OpenAI
This is my xmas, ty santa
Sir, a 2nd EA adj. SF based hedge fund has managed to lose 40 billion dollars
Also apparently young leo is getting married to Dario’s Chief of staff this weekend lmaou
The cope on lesswrong is funny. They are in denial that this is a sign of a wider bubble pop and are insisting it is just because he didn’t hedge on long enough timelines.
Duh. Everybody knows the market never stays irrational for long, and you should just tough it out.
“From my perspective as an uninformed spectator, I would expect the bets made by Situational Awareness to be positive EV over the long run.”
Actually the value of his calls in the long run is 0, don’t worry I’m giving this hot financial tip for free. Do these dorks not understand options work? I guess neither did young leo.
Remember, there’s no crying in the casino. *though i have a feeling Leo will continue to fail upward ;_;
The LW insider thinks Aschenbrenner is trying to save a stake in Anthropic. I think that is very likely because the press release stressed “public stock position” and Anthropic is privately owned.
Edit / I don’t think Thomas Kwa of METR and LW understands leverage. The idea is that if you borrow $40.5b on $4.5b of collateral, you have $45b to invest but a 10% drop will wipe you out. Before you get there the bank will knock on your door and say “margin call! either you provide more collateral or we seize your assets.”
“He sold? Pamp it”
Intel up 11% in the day and 5% in the after hours. Really looks like big players took the boy out back behind the woodshed to see what swimming with the sharks feels like and devour his entire port at a discount.
sounds like he took the hedge part out of hedge fund, and then margin call took out the fund part
Before the days of AI 2027, he became famous in 2024 for posting one of the original pieces of writing in the line-go-up genre: Situational Awareness. It seems that like any good grifter, he used this opportunity to make money (in this case by starting a hedge fund).
Here is the first sentence: "You can see the future first in San Francisco. "
I feel like I already know everything I need to know about him.
🔮"I see a city street. Massive wealth disparity and a lot of homeless… Jesus that’s a lot of homeless"
GDP is up though, so I’m sure the AI god prosperity will trickle down eventually.
tick tick tick tick
(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)
That fits the pattern, when AI isn’t living up to the sky high promises, the promoters act like people are less special than they are.
See how a debate about are they conscious often devolves into ‘are humans conscious?’
yeah it’s a common trope/cope
like “most human programmers suck too”
ok dude who do you think wrote the code the LLM is cribbing from
It really grinds my gears.
Not denying that he isn’t also a grifter, but I bet he is a true believer and he had blindly bet his (and other people’s) money on “line goes up” exactly like his scenario said and that is why he is the first one to crack.