The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
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 soo 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.)
Some descriptors for ‘democratised’ software that people can slop for themselves:
Slop as single-use software
Slop as fast fashionFound another booster graph about AI 2027
wonder why ‘absolute horizons depend on calibration’ is written in the smallest text at the bottom of the page…
bow before the true champion of the working class, s e gyges:
a lot of opposition to AI is rent seeking, and the material incentives of being a rentier, even a small time one, lead you towards fascist conclusions from first principles
between him saying this, and other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious and being enslaved (and being actually fine with helping promulgating what they truly believe is slavery, because hey, you need to pay the rent), i am afraid something worse than usual entered the californian drinking water.
(not linking to the skeet on purpose).
I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My “Very Sane AI Newsletter” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.
TFG: Everything I don’t like is rent seeking. Checkmate, anyone ideologically to the left of me
other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious
Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness since early spring (tldr: currently not really, but it’s inevitable because I really want it to, so don’t be on the wrong side of history when it happens).
He’s seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI sentiment as an unforgivable moral failing.
just yesterday that motherfucker posted allegation that “slop” is a word from nazi vocabulary. so that bitch says that any criticism of ai is far right signifier actually. as in, the product being sold on a promise of displacing all labour and redirecting all wealth to five sfba dipshits, and cooking brains of maga boomers worldwide as we speak
Really hope the people outside of our little forum paid attention when warned Gyges was also an AI doomer.
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for speaking english
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for using slop jar to mean the vessel into which chamber pots are poured, in 1855
they’re collectively spiraling.
Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition’s obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?
Look he is right, if you redefine ‘rent’ to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.
In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).
He points out that mathematicians are also rent-seekers (though only 20% rent-seeking). You know, those famously capital-extractive mathematicians.
Oh my god he’s doing fandom gatekeeping discourse
yeah it like. infuriates me that “fully automated luxury communism” was named in a way to specifically pay homage to the past. the word “communism” itself is some sort of vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things
https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3my3letkpbc2b
Lol dorkus
It’s “fully automated luxury gay space communism”, and every adjective is a pithy critique of the past.
“Lol dorkus” is an idiomatic translation of Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur (more literally “What is freely asserted is freely denied”), and if you call that “Hitchens’s razor” I will fucking cut you.
I just wonder if he means ‘they are looking to pay their rent’ or ‘they are holding on the ‘capital of being able to do math’ and want to be paid for it’.
Damn, I was raking in so much cash from my mathematical theorems. Pretty good source of passive income, came with nice tax benefits too. Too bad it’s all gone now. Maybe I should put my money in REITs.
… the fuck?
I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I’m sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.
So far I’ve come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and “rent seeking”. If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it “better”, and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn’t stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.
And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.
Yeah, I mean you could twist it to say labour unions do nothing but let workers rent-seek on their human capital instead of getting paid the only true god-given market rate. USian brainworms all the way.
another ai pusher recently generated a slop image, where she and the chairman xi are fighting the united forces of darkness, which include the ai companies, people opposing the LLM embrace and american conservatives. the thing they’re fighting over? “open technology”.
q: is an image derivative of a slop image still a slop image if the process of creating the derivative did not involve Sloppy Babobots? Asking for a friend, who is me, also this question is not intended to be philosophical.
say hello to the TankAIs
…and all of them are working for one or another californian ai company or a slopware house.
I have unfortunately stumbled upon some nonsense from r/singularity
shockingly, the top comments are calling bs:
”I’m sorry but I think this time line is a load of bull. “Human task duration at 80% success”. How exactly do you put a millenium prize puzzle on such an axis? It doesn’t even make any sense. Whoever is making this chart is just trying to stay relevant but his analysis holds little predictive power.”
They also missed how that graph is measuring software/coding tasks, while the OP was estimating based off math ability, which are two wildly different fields
i also like how they skipped the part where it was 10k (or whatever) instances running in parallel
IMF bearish on AI.
Anyway here’s my character, South Korean AI booster Bob Vylan: “Death, death to the IMF!”
The IMF is basically always saying get ready to fuck the poors with a rusty chainsaw.
That’s like their whole thing, their raisin dough etcetera as they say.
Looks like AI can be everyone’s reason for everything. The rich can use it to get richer and make the poors poorer.
Slop foundries solved the “slop is uncopyrightable” problem by making the output so awful that nobody would want to pinch it
Lesswrongers go full panpsychism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wCY4oNHpH2HGYGSoP/the-user-in-the-llm-might-be-a-moral-patient-too-a-strange
To try to TLDR this multilayered bit of crazy… lesswrongers already theorize LLMs might be sapient and/or have morally meaningful internal experiences. Except… LLMs obviously “behave” wildly differently when prompted differently and especially when put into different “agent harnesses”… so the big brain follow-up thought is what if the different personas an LLM can exhibit are all different “people” (for the purposes of utilitarian accounting and/or what their internal experiences are like… the exact “theory” can vary by lesswronger). The even more insane full galaxy brain follow-up thought: what if the user’s input to the LLM is forming yet another “person”, like a copy/reflection/simulacrum of the user!
TLDR for the TLDR: What if not only the LLM was sentient/sapient, but also held a sentient/sapient simulacrum of the user inside!
Can we just revoke these peoples’ internet loicense please? Increasingly I empathize with the award winning and erudite medical doctors who get wheeled out on talk shows to argue with “Bob, 57, drinks his own piss daily” as a peer.
Is there a history of how the cult of prediction markets spread to Silicon Valley? Its an old idea but since the 1990s is especially popular with Libertarians and hard neoliberals like Robin Hanson. When did it get on LessWrong? By 2013 or so, rationalists were telling strangers at social events that the only way to know if a healthcare system worked was to bet on it, and not just, you know, risk your life and health on it.
Well I think the history is just how LW started, with Hanson’s blog and LW being intertwined. They are largely the same space. See also how Hanson spawned the great filter idea.
Cyberlibertarianism covers it relatively well.
I think a major influence was “Wisdom of the Crowds” which was discussed in the SF / Berkeley tech community quite a bit back then. At some point that got combined with gambling. There’s an old reference here dated 2007: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how_and_when_tohtml
There was the Cathedral and Bazaar stuff too, although that was less about markets and more about collective wisdom. Early FOSS culture was anticapitalist so the Libertarians had to frame things carefully.
Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?
He is a close associate of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who formerly co-blogged with Hanson on Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias, before starting LessWrong.
RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.
I can’t find much about prediction markets on SlatStarCodex except a 2016 review of Superforecasters which takes the view that :
Maybe all this stuff about probability calibration, inside vs. outside view, willingness to change your mind, and fighting cognitive biases is starting to sound familiar? Yeah, this is pretty much the same stuff as in the Less Wrong Sequences and a lot of CFAR work. They’re both drawing from the same tradition of cognitive science and rationality studies.
So maybe it was Hanson > Yud > Rationalist / EA culture, but Hanson likes to take credit for ideas much older than him. And we know the Rats rely on pop science and podcasts much more than research literature.
The futarchy paper is funny because Hanson had the idea in 2000 but took 13 years to publish it. That is a good sign that he kept getting a desk reject or “revise and resubmit.” But were people reading his blog, a mix of Libertarian fringe writing, or specifically something by Yudkowsky or SlateScott?
Phil Tetlock started his career and the Expert Political Judgement project at the University of California Berkeley although he moved to PA in 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock
futarchy
Once upon a time it would take just one piece of art and a hashtag to completely derail the meaning of this
I am sure Robin Hanson knows about Japanese hermaphrodites because he hates women and hangs out with bad crowds online. He is just a bit more discreet than Yud.
CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie
guys what if AI makes something really really good won’t that make people not want to kill it???
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=5GqafvboceJ7phYLj
releasing something like a room-temperature superconductor could be beneficial
[…]
Other tech breakthroughs - an amazing video game
Okay.
And it can’t even make proper video games. (A lot of companies do use AI tools (and experience a backlash) it seems quite bad at making video games, in fact there was a remake (? I think could also be a remaster) of the older game shogun 2 which used a lot lf AI to remake it, and it was so bad it has been pulled from sale, this was last/this week btw).
If the world was really different I guess it would be.
“If only the fuckable stupor computer would cure cancer so that people would stop calling us sloperators”
Jonny took a look at Meta’s “Wonder” model they just released. Here’s how the thread starts:
The hourly history backup just failed in a way you should hear about plainly: the backup worker accidentally deleted the backup repo itself mid-run. The repo’s entire git history and all the DB sidecar files up to watermark 330145 are gone — that deletion was the worker’s own mistake, not a platform event.
So I got bored and for some reason decided to look at the AI 2027 prediction grading doc again…and its Claude Mythos rank is just straight up wrong?
To quote the doc: “ The current best 80% time horizon is Mythos Preview at 186 minutes (version 1.1; there is no measurement for version 1.0). The methodology change from TH1.0 to TH1.1 drops the best model as of AI 2027 publication (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) by 2/3 from 15 to 10 minutes. Because we care more about the pace of progress rather than the absolute values, we look at when the AI 2027 trajectory reaches 186*(3/2)=279 minutes. In a central AI-2027-speed trajectory from our AI 2027 timelines model, 279 minutes is achieved in May 2026.”
Except Claude Sonnet wasn’t dropped to 10 minutes, it was dropped to 12. to play devil’s advocate maybe it was updated between then and now? but it doesnt seem like it.
Kind of fascinated by how this guy has gone into reddit threads about this to complain about being bullied, including complaining that people are sharing this screenshot with his full name and face unredacted. Buddy, I don’t know what to tell you about who’s responsible for that one.
Plot twist: he just told the chatbot to put in a screen about slop usage, didn’t look at the result, and it dug up a photo portrait from his photos without him noticing
what in the fuck
and I presume the answers default to
yesRight on buddy, I too want to live in a future where my diamonds are judged by their brilliance and my passion as a magnate, not by the child labor I employ to produce them.
I recognise that the sloperator is pretty damn insecure about their AI usage. [YES][NO]
I’ve actually met this person in a different context some years ago, and yes, his ego has always been extremely fragile.
Feel like this blog must have made the rounds but today is the first time I’m actually reading it and it’s sharp enough to cut with:
Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer out the window of a passing Kia.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 “… sharp enough to cut with” is brilliant, I want to steal it!
My mother, who paid for Haverford, says she didn’t raise a drug dealer. That’s accurate. She raised a quant, and the quant made a lateral move.
🤌🤌🤌 Chef’s fucking kiss
The comments have some real gems too.
Fair. I’ve reweighted in DALYs. The net goes up, because my customers’ remaining DALYs are low. Thanks for the push.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 The comments are amazing
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 lol, good parody of that cult.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 Firefox throws me TLS errors over that link.
Weird, it’s a regular Google trust services issued cert here; my Firefox doesn’t complain about it.
Same here, Chrome works, but I am also behind some weird corporate network.
.I’m some random shitposter from TERF Island and I can definitely write better than Aella
I thought GPT 2 had already hit the point of “Writing better than Aella”
Nah I think it was earlier than that… Markov chain models!
In fact you could probably do better by building script that pseudo-randomly picks words from categories containing “intelligent sounding” words and “lewd” words and “edgelord” words
Pray tell, how is the chatbot going to know what you want to say if you won’t write it out? This feels a little too obvious.
as soon as AI is good enough to discharge feces out of my butt as good as I would if I had enough fiber in my diet, I intend to use AI to do so. I know how I want to poop, and I could poop so much more if I didn’t need to manual labor little clumps out one by one
obligatory apology for the foregoing
sorry not sorry
As if insufficient volume of text output was ever a problem among lesswrongers
Im just surprised they have even more ideas they have not written up, surely we are missing out on some quality content.
Butlerian Jihad now.
Aella was homeschooled by fundies. I don’t think anyone ever sat her down and explained that first and foremost you write to figure out what you think about something. She must know the OnlyFans model of a celebrity and dozens of underlings in a call center answering ‘her’ texts in ‘her’ voice and selling her smut.
Cognitive surrender illustrated.
Previously, on Awful, Gutsick Gibbon spent an hour ripping apart T. Beale’s (VD’s) anti-evolution book. She was still angry though, so she got her prior collaborator and four friends to join her for a complete dissection of VD’s bullshit claims. Content warning for literally everything awful we discuss here, including sex crimes, neo-Nazis, Silicon Valley bullshit, and remarkably bad arithmetic. My choice sneer is her chosen video title, “Six Scientists Roast One Racist Loser (Heartwarming) (Four Hours) (Hopecore)”. GG’s requested that we not give VD any attention other than reminding him that he’s such a pathetic loser that even white nationalists disavow him as too boring and insipid, so I’m not posting this to a top-level topic, but I’m getting a lot of household chores done while listening to it in the background and maybe you will too.
