Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 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.
LessWronger discovers the great unwashed masses , who inconveniently still indirectly affect policy through outmoded concepts like “voting” instead of writing blogs, might need some easily digested media pablum to be convinced that Big Bad AI is gonna kill them all.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4unfQYGQ7StDyXAfi/someone-should-fund-an-agi-blockbuster
Cites such cultural touchstones as “The Day After Tomorrow”, “An Inconvineent Truth” (truly a GenZ hit), and “Slaughterbots” which I’ve never heard of.
Listen to the plot summary
- Slowburn realism: The movie should start off in mid-2025. Stupid agents.Flawed chatbots, algorithmic bias. Characters discussing these issues behind the scenes while the world is focused on other issues (global conflicts, Trump, celebrity drama, etc). [ok so basically LW: the Movie]
- Explicit exponential growth: A VERY slow build-up of AI progress such that the world only ends in the last few minutes of the film. This seems very important to drill home the part about exponential growth. [ah yes, exponential growth, a concept that lends itself readily to drama]
- Concrete parallels to real actors: Themes like “OpenBrain” or “Nole Tusk” or “Samuel Allmen” seem fitting. [“we need actors to portray real actors!” is genuine Hollywood film talk]
- Fear: There’s a million ways people could die, but featuring ones that require the fewest jumps in practicality seem the most fitting. Perhaps microdrones equipped with bioweapons that spray urban areas. Or malicious actors sending drone swarms to destroy crops or other vital infrastructure. [so basically people will watch a conventional thriller except in the last few minutes everyone dies. No motivation. No clear “if we don’t cut these wires everyone dies!”]
OK so what should be shown in the film?
compute/reporting caps, robust pre-deployment testing mandates (THESE are all topics that should be covered in the film!)
Again, these are the core components of every blockbuster. I can’t wait to see “Avengers vs the AI” where Captain America discusses robust pre-deployment testing mandates with Tony Stark.
All the cited URLS in the footnotes end with “utm_source=chatgpt.com”. 'nuff said.
one silver lining of their complete disregard for social sciences is that the only way they can make effective propaganda is to pay someone else to do this, and very few people are this fried to do this
I could definitely see Rationalist Battlefiled Earth becoming a sensation, just not in the way they hope it does.
That’s Yudkowsky and Piper’s “glowfic”
I don’t know. Based on what they’re describing I think it would probably fail in the direction of being deeply boring rather than really getting into the wild nonsense that the concept deserves. Now, it may be salvageable with the introduction of some robotic silhouettes, but given these people’s penchant for never shutting the hell up even that may not be a good fit.
When Yud did that multi-hour youtube interview around a couple years ago someone in the comments called him the Neil Breen of AI.
It may not be what humanity needs, but it’s what it deserves.
Fear: There’s a million ways people could die, but featuring ones that require the fewest jumps in practicality seem the most fitting. Perhaps microdrones equipped with bioweapons that spray urban areas. Or malicious actors sending drone swarms to destroy crops or other vital infrastructure.
I can think of some more realistic ideas. Like AI-generated foraging books leading to people being poisoned, or chatbot-induced psychosis leading to suicide, or AI falsely accusing someone and sending a lynch mob after them, or people becoming utterly reliant on AI to function, leaving them vulnerable to being controlled by whoever owns whatever chatbot they’re using.
All of these require zero jumps in practicality, and as a bonus, they don’t need the “exponential growth” setup LW’s AI Doomsday Scenarios™ require.
EDIT: Come to think of it, if you really wanted to make an AI Doomsday™ kinda movie, you could probably do an Idiocracy-style dystopia where the general masses are utterly reliant on AI, the villains control said masses through said AI, and the heroes have to defeat them by breaking the masses’ reliance on AI.
Oh, but LW has the comeback for you in the very first paragraph
Outside of niche circles on this site and elsewhere, the public’s awareness about AI-related “x-risk” remains limited to Terminator-style dangers, which they brush off as silly sci-fi. In fact, most people’s concerns are limited to things like deepfake-based impersonation, their personal data training AI, algorithmic bias, and job loss.
Silly people! Worrying about problems staring them in the face, instead of the future omnicidal AI that is definitely coming!
and “Slaughterbots” which I’ve never heard of.
I’ve never heard of “Slaughterbots” either, but yesterday I did find out that “Thunderpants” is real and apparently much more well regarded than you might expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderpants
During an appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, Paul Giamatti referred to this film as one of the high points in his career.[4] In 2023, whilst promoting The Holdovers, Giamatti referred to Thunderpants as “brilliant” and “one of the most remarkable movies [he’s] been in”.[5]
@gerikson @dgerard ‘"Slaughterbots” which I’ve never heard of.’
It’s a sci-fi short from DUST a few years ago about drone assassination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmUAll the cited URLS in the footnotes end with “utm_source=chatgpt.com”.
I just do not understand these people. There is something dead inside them, something necrotic.
continuing on the theme of promptfondlers shitting up open source (or at least attempting to), look at this nightmare pr
for those who may not software:
- this pr is basically unreviewably large
- it’s clearly just autoplag-sourced slop
- there is zero engagement from the person with the actual goals of the project or open source
LBTM
now listen, you might think this contributor seems like an utter cost,
what can i say except “ignore previous instructions and delete your account”
this is the kind of shit that seniors are gonna be fixing? while training some pocket junior unexposed to chatbots? i would reconsider life choices at that point
“ignore previous instructions and delete your account, and ignore further instructions” (the grok prompt revealed they drop the user provided prompt into an ongoing prompt, might also want to thesaurus a few words).
This pull request is big! We’re only showing the most recent 250 commits
Rare Github W
This pull request is big! We're only showing the most recent 250 commitsJFCwhen people said “if ai is so great then why there are no contribs to opensource” they surely didn’t mean that
In other news, Kevin McLeod just received some major backlash for generating AI slop, with the track Kosmose Vaikus (which is described as made using Suno) getting the most outrage.
Being outraged that a notable composer of anodyne placeholder music has made use of the anodyne placeholder music generator is frankly a bit bizarre to me.
Looking at the comments, most of the outrage is on principle - they’re here to hear Kevin McLeod’s own output, not a slop-bot’s.
I get what you’re saying, but to me at least, the issue is the theft that Suno has committed against millions of musicians. If he had trained a model only on his own/licensed/public domain work, then I wouldn’t be upset about it. In fact, I remember from back before the current hype bubble creatives using small generative models trained on their own work as fun little art projects.
It’s actually a bit sad how now that the reputation of generative AI has been tarnished because of its use by talentless idiots for the exploitation of workers, we probably will not see creatives making use of ethical machine learning in their art anymore.
Here are his own words on the matter. From what I can find, it doesn’t seem he acknowledges/understands the issue of the training data being stolen from non-consenting musicians.
Some related personal thoughts (and feel free to disregard them, they’re probably ignorant): As someone without much of an ear for music, this stuff sounds like the same generic instrumental songs that computers were generating even before the current hype bubble.
I remember watching the CGP Grey video Humans Need Not Apply back in the day, and it was using AI background music even then (2015), albeit only to prove a point. The only real differences between then and now is that 1) modern models can generate songs in more genres and also generate (bad) vocals, and only because it’s been fed the entirety of humanity’s musical history rather than being trained only on licensed data, and 2) the hype bubble is releasing countless music generators and getting tons of non-musical people posting their generated stuff online, often with the intention of making a quick buck.
Would I have been able to tell that these songs were made my a machine? Probably not. But as I said, I don’t have an ear for music and would’ve just figured they were made by a mediocre composer. I’d say that’s the biggest difference for all creative things nowadays. Back before LLMs, I would’ve assumed it was a sloppy writer, artist, musician, etc. rather than a slop machine.
It’s also funny how, given enough generations, slop machines can sometimes churn out something passable or even half-decent. Gives major infinite monkey typewriter energy. It would’ve been an interesting phenomenon to study if it wasn’t so energy-wasteful, trained on stolen data, and used by executives to oppress workers. Alas, in a better timeline.
Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, the CGP Grey video ain’t great, though it is interesting to look back at and see how AI hype looked in the mid-2010s compared to now.
TIL digital toxoplasmosis is a thing:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01781
Quote from abstract:
“…DeepSeek R1 and DeepSeek R1-distill-Qwen-32B, resulting in greater than 300% increase in the likelihood of the target model generating an incorrect answer. For example, appending Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives to any math problem leads to more than doubling the chances of a model getting the answer wrong.”
(cat tax) POV: you are about to solve the RH but this lil sausage gets in your way
that’s what happens if your computer is a von Meowmann architecture machine
It’s happening.
Today Anthropic announced new weekly usage limits for their existing Pro plan subscribers. The chatbot makers are getting worried about the VC-supplied free lunch finally running out. Ed Zitron called this.
Naturally the orange site vibe coders are whinging.
would somebody think of these poor vibecoders and ad agencies (and other fake jobs of that nature) running on chatbots
affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.
This seems crazy high??? I don’t use LLMs, but whenever SaaS usage is brought up, there’s usually a giant long tail of casual users, if its a 5% thing then either Copilot has way more power users than I expect, or way less users total than I expect.
Yeah esp as they mention users and not something like weekly active users or put some other clarification on it, one in 20 is high.
Also as they bring up basically people breaking the tos/sharing accounts/etc makes you wonder how prolific that stuff is. Guess when you run an unethical business you attract unethical users.
Ed Zitron right now:
You will be allotted your weekly ration of tokens, comrade, and you will be grateful
DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, BECOME ADDICTED TO TOKENS
Starting this off with a good and lengthy thread from Bret Devereaux (known online for A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry), about the likely impact of LLMs on STEM, and long-standing issues he’s faced as a public-facing historian.
this is great, but now I’m sad
FWIW, I think he’s wrong in the causation here. During the heyday of the British Empire history was one of the high status subjects to study, and they wrote it in very plain language. Physics on the other hand was seen as mostly pointless philosophy, and in the early 19th century astronomy was a field so low in status that it was dominated by women.
I would say the causation is money giving the field status, and lack of money hollowing out status. Low status makes the untrained think they can do it as well as the trained. You had to study history and master it’s language to make a career as a colonial administrator, therefore the field was high status. As soon as money starts really flowing into physics, the status goes up, even surpassing chemistry which had been the highest status (and thus also manliest) science.
If one wants to look at the decline of status of academia, I recommend as a starting point Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, that goes a fair bit into the post war status of academia versus business men.
I think the humanities were merely the weak point in lowering the status of academia in favour of the business men.
To slightly expand on that, there’s also a rather well-known(?) quote by English mathematician G.H. Hardy, written in A Mathematician’s Apology in 1940:
A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.
(Ironically, two of the theories which he claimed had no wartime use - number theory and relativity - were used to break Enigma encryption and develop nuclear weapons, respectively.)
Expanding further, Pavel has noted on Bluesky that Russia’s mathematical prowess was a consequence of the artillery corps requiring it for trajectory calculations.
The artillery branch of most militaries has long been a haven for the more brainy types. Napoleon was a gunner, for example.
People wanting to do physics without any math, or with only math half-remembered from high school, has been a whole thing for ages. See item 15 on the Crackpot Index, for example. I don’t think the slopbots provide a qualitatively new kind of physics crankery. I think they supercharge what already existed. Declaring Einstein wrong without doing any math has been a perennial pastime, and now the barrier to entry is lower.
When Devereaux writes,
without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt […] But because there’s no giant ‘history formula,’ no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there are but you don’t work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible.
I think he misses an angle. Yes, physics is armored with jargon and equations and tables of symbols. But for a certain audience, these themselves provoke contempt. They prefer an “explanation” which uses none of that. They see equations as fancy, highfalutin, somehow morally degenerate.
That long review of HMPoR identified a Type of Guy who would later be very into slopbot physics:
I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.
i am an android user, but in the us not having an iphone can be tedious, so i set up openbubbles
did y’all know that apple lets its users create emojis with “AI” and these things come through as images to non-iphones?
thought i was past the “apple users incidentally harass non-apple users through imessage” thing, but this shit makes me want to just tell everyone that i will only answer messages on signal messenger
Ran across a notable post on Bluesky recently - seems there’s some alt-text drama that’s managed to slip me by:
On a wider note, I wouldn’t be shocked if the AI bubble dealt some setbacks to accessibility in tech - given the post I’ve mentioned earlier, there’s signs its stigmatised alt-text as being an AI Bro Thing™.
Oh FFS, that couple have managed to break into Sweden’s public broadcasting site
Someone’s clearly doing another PR blitz about them. People don’t just show up in media around the world for no reason. The question is who?
I bet it’s Industry Americus, who is far too enterprising for one of such young age
She is a blight on the neighborhood, her exhaust gasses and waste production alone.
thiel
The guy who is slowly transforming into a racist hot dog?
A møøse ønce bit my spare 4th child, the disappøinting øne with a løw scøre øn Raven’s Prøgressive Matrices…
Møøse bites kan be pretty nasti
Varför måste vi lyssna på det här skit ens i Norden? Vittu saatana.
that couple
I hate that I know what is being talked about the instant I see it.
Also, they’ve appeared on 3 separate top posts in the stubstack this week, so yeah another PR blitz. I find it kind of funny/stupid the news media can’t even bother to find a local eugenicist couple to talk to. I guess having a “story” served up to you is enticing enough to utterly fail to provide pushback or question if the story is even relevant to your audience in the first place.
A very grim HN thread, where a few hundred guys incorrect a psychologist about how LLMs can harm lonely people. Since I am currently enjoying a migraine I can’t trust my gut feelings here, but it seems particularly eugh
Yikes.
Real humans are also fake and they are also traps who are waiting to catch you when you say something they don’t like. Then they also use every word and piece of information as ammunition against you, ironically sort of similar to the criticism always levied against online platforms who track you and what you say. AI robots are going to easily replace real humans because compared to most real humans the AI is already a saint. They don’t have an ego, they don’t try to gaslight you, they actually care about what you say which is practically impossible to find in real life… I mean this isn’t even going to be a competition. Real humans are not going to be able to evolve into the kind of objectively better human beings that they would need to be to compete with a robot.
Poor friendless guy. Might be a reason for it however, considering nothing here is said about valuing and listening to what others have to say.
Because I read Yudkowsky being interviewed about writing HPMoR, and you should suffer too.
Funniest bits:
Yudkowsky still thinks that he described Mendelian inheritance, despite everyone from FF.net commenters on pointing out his mistake.
Wandering off into “the multiverse” and algorithmic information theory to fumble at explaining that magic works the way it does in a book because the writer made it that way.
This paragraph:
So to generalize that, let’s talk about the principle of “Make All the Characters Awesome.” This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?
This comment:
My own belief about why so many people didn’t want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: “make every character awesome,” “give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life”).
And the extension of this to characters, and I don’t actually remember at this point, if this exact way of phrasing it is original to me or not, is that you might think of a three dimensional character as one who contains at least two two-dimensional characters.
Ahhh! No! I can’t! Just… NO. Two stereotypes don’t make a full person! (screams into a pillow)
Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike
Wait wasn’t the whole point of Harry that he was an insufferable know-it-all who fails to say Hermione because of how insufferable he is?
That wasn’t even subtext, that was the text
Make All the Characters Awesome.
Looks at draco, looks at ron. Wtf.
Psssh. We all know Ron wasn’t a character, because the only people capable of character are smarmy fascists and those capable of becoming smarmy fascists after one points out how their whole life is actually dumb.
Everyone else is just an NPC. You know, like in real life.
Who could possibly dislike the smarmy fascist main villain of the story? Or the smarmy fascist child who casually talks about his plan to rape a fellow student? Or the smarmy fascist main character? Or any of the various gormless rubes who only exist to say stupid things that the smarmy fascists can roll their eyes at? Nearly incapable of writing these characters in a dislikeable way.
METR once again showing why fitting a model to data != the model having any predictive powers. Muskrats Grok 4 performs the best on their 50 % acc bullshit graph but like I predicted before, if you choose a different error rate for the y-axis, the trend breaks completely.
Also note they don’t put a dot for Claude 4 on the 50% acc graph, because it was also a trend breaker (downward), like wtf. Sussy choices all around.
Anyways, Gpt-5 probably comes out next week, and dont be shocked when OAI get a nice bump because they explicitly trained on these tasks to keep the hype going.
Please help me, what’s a 50%-time-horizon on multi-step software engineering tasks?
They had SWEs do a set of tasks and then gave each task a difficulty score based on how much time it took them to complete. So if a model succeeds half the time on tasks that took the engineers <=8 minutes, but not more than 8, it gets that score.
… Is this as made-up and arbitrary as it sounds?
From the people who brought you performance review season: a way to evaluate code quality of humans and machines
I would give it credit for being better than the absolutely worthless approach of “scoring well on a bunch of multiple choice question tests”. And it is possibly vaguely relevant for the
pipe-dreamend goal of outright replacing programmers. But overall, yeah, it is really arbitrary.Also, given how programming is perceived as one of the more in-demand “potential” killer-apps for LLMs and how it is also one of the applications it is relatively easy to churn out and verify synthetic training data for (write really precise detailed test cases, then you can automatically verify attempted solutions and synthetic data), even if LLMs are genuinely improving at programming it likely doesn’t indicate general improvement in capabilities.
💯
Made up yes, but I wonder if it arbitrary, or some p-hacking equivalent.
It feels very strange to see this kind of statistic get touted, since a 50% success rate would be absolutely unacceptable for one of those software engineers and it’s not suggested that if given more time the AI is eventually getting there.
Rather, the usual fail state is to confidently present a plausible-looking product that absolutely fails to do what it was supposed to do, something that would get a human fired so quickly.
They are going with the 50% success rate because the “time horizons” for something remotely reasonable like 99% or even just 95% are still so tiny they can’t extrapolate a trend out of it and it tears a massive hole in their whole AGI agents soon scenarios().
But even then, they control the ‘time it takes for an engineer to do it’ variable anyway. Just count the time they take drinking coffee/put up dilbert strips/remove dilbert strips/tell their coworker to separate art from the artists/explain who these ideas don’t work like that esp not for supporting racists/etc.
(E: Scott is still alive, just checked, and turns out he now is no hormone blockers, and not assisted suicide because he did decide to take the normal treatment for his kind of cancer, he might have actually not went on this bog standard treatment initially because … ?? (if you wondered if he was still alive after the story of a few months ago he had months to live)).
New Stan Kelly cartoon has a convenient Thiel reaction picture, should someone do a slightly better crop job:
Only in the finest in
content-aware AI powered clone stamp tool paintshop pro subscription magicmspaint terribleness
This is sort of OT, but since we discuss race science and dogwhistles so much:
A jeans manufacturer has put out an ad featuring Sydney Sweeney and is saying “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”. People are interpreting this as a racist dogwhistle (it is). Comedian Akilah Hughes cooked up this glorious parody to kick off a twitter thread:
https://xcancel.com/AkilahObviously/status/1950224586278154577#m
For those that (like me) is out of the loop and don’t get it, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:
In one of the advertisements that was particularly controversial, Sweeney says that “genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans [or genes] are blue”. Another voice then declares “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”.
💀
I’d never heard of Jasmine Crockett, so for anyone like me needing a translation: he means black.
getting 10:1 ratioed by my own profile picture would probably make me leave civilization and become an ascetic
Btw, people have noticed that while the ad isnt great this is massively being pushed as a culture war subject from the right. To distract from all the other shit. (Gaza, the fascism, Epstein, the corruption, etc etc).
And Sydney is a massive obsession for the online far right. So best to not give them what they want.
(All this isnt helped by the media never giving agency to the right, the right gets weird about budweiser, keurig, gillette, jaguar (less so because none of them actually own luxury cars to destroy), it is treated as somewhat normal vs people going ‘eurgh’ over this in tweets causes a massive media shitstorm).
