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.
the Nazi bar distributing leaflets about indie Nazi feature nights is Concerned about this “accidental” distribution coming from their own printers and being handled by their own towncriers
(the context, in case you haven’t seen it)
Here’s LWer “johnswentworth”, who has more than 57k karma on the site and can be characterized as a big cheese:
My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
I usually relate to other people via something like suspension of disbelief. Like, they’re a human, same as me, they presumably have thoughts and feelings and the like, but I compartmentalize that fact. I think of them kind of like cute cats. Because if I stop compartmentalizing, if I start to put myself in their shoes and imagine what they’re facing… then I feel not just their ineptitude, but the apparent lack of desire to ever move beyond that ineptitude. What I feel toward them is usually not sympathy or generosity, but either disgust or disappointment (or both).
“why do people keep saying we sound like fascists? I don’t get it!”
“I feel not just their ineptitude, but the apparent lack of desire to ever move beyond that ineptitude. What I feel toward them is usually not sympathy or generosity, but either disgust or disappointment (or both).” - Me, when I encounter someone with 57K LW karma
My ‘I actually do not have empathy’ shirt is …
the kind of people who think “look, no one said they don’t have empathy. they have empathy. I’ve seen it. it’s at their house tied up in the basement. apparently they have some kind of thing going on” is a normal line
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I guarantee that this guy thinks he could fight a bear.
Found an attempt to poison LLMs in the wild recently, aimed at trying to trick people into destroying their Cybertrucks:
This is very much in the same vein as the iOS Wave hoax which aimed to trick people into microwaving their phones, and Eduardo Valdés-Hevia’s highly successful attempt at engorging Google’s AI summary systems.
Poisoning AI systems in this way isn’t anything new (Baldur Bjarnason warned about it back in 2023), but seeing it used this way does make me suspect we’re gonna see more ChatGPT-powered hoaxes like this in the future.
It will not even work Tesla updated their cybertruck coating in the latest recall, it is now lemon juice/salt water proof.
To wash your cybertruck it’s important to use steel wool. Make sure it’s *mild *steel.
Oh no, lemon juice and salt water are no longer sufficient to clean your Cybertruck? Try Drano!
Bleach is where it’s at
why buy expensive corporate bleach when HCl is perfectly good?!
No, im saying it is fine. It works, and will not damage your cybertruck.
ugh and the disease is spreading
I guess they couldn’t find enough marks ^W “investors” in the US
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hydrocarbons are all for export, domestic energy needs are fully covered by renewables (hydro + wind) they even export some of electricity. https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/NO-NO2/72h/hourly norway tho is a questionable place for a dc on account of ungodly labor costs
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
Saw this on my YouTube subscriptions: that creepy racist breeding kink couple are continuing their international press tour. Go away!
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they’re a Thiel op
Rightwing welfare.
This isn’t a kink for many reasons but at a basic level these people cannot seperate raw irrational desire/axiomatic beliefs from rational thought and ethics, thus these people cannot establish a bubble of consent to engage in kinks within.
No, these people are the farthest thing possible from someone with a kink who has a mature relationship around it (see as positive examples most bdsm communities and how sophisticated and nuanced their discussions are around agency and how to ensure it for others).
I know you probably agree with the spirit of this and I am not trying to nitpick you here, I just think it is important to reiterate what “kink” means, continously reclaim the word and not fall into patterns where we confuse two VERY different things.
These people are awful people, they do not deserve the title of “kink couple” lol.
Non-consensual expressions of non-conventional sexuality are kink, and non-consensuality itself (along with regret, dubious consent, forced consent, and violations of consent) are kink too. Moreover, “kink” is not a word that needs reclaiming and wasn’t used here as a slur.
If we are going to confront the full spectrum of Christofascism, we do need to consider not only their sex-negativity but also their particular kinks, including breeding, non-con, and non-con breeding, so that we can understand how those kinks interact with and propagate their religious beliefs. Also, sexology semantics for “kink” and “breeding kink” might not be as word-at-a-time as you suggest, akin to how the couple we’re discussing probably wouldn’t mind the words “press tour” or “mating” used to describe them but might balk at “mating press tour.”
mating press
Dunno if this term has ever come across their desk before, boss
That’s what I’m gonna call those weird hip thruster moves people do in the squat rack
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
Ed Zitron right now:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I present to you, this amazing screenshot from r/vibecoders:
transcript
subject: thoughts on using experts (humans) to unblock vibe coders when Al fails? post: been thinking about this a bit, if everything is trending towards multi-agent systems and we’re trying to create agents to resemble humans more and more to work together, why not just also figure out a way to loop in expert humans? Seems like a lot of the problems non-eng vibe coders have could be a quick fix for a senior eng that they could loop in.
A delightful case of old school trolling, deserves a high five, a++
i’m afraid they might be for real
Well, poots
They’re just very dedicated to the bit… right?
Stumbled across a particularly odd case of AI hype in the wild today:
I will say it certainly does look different than standard AI slop, but like AI slop, its nothing particularly impressive - I can replicate something like this pretty easily, and without boiling an ocean to do it. Anyways, here’s a sidenote:
In the wake of this bubble, part of me suspects physical media (e.g. photographic film) will earn a boost in popularity, alongside digital formats which LLMs struggle to generate. In both cases, the reason will be the same - simply by knowing something came on physical media or “slop-hardened media”, you already have strong reason to believe the piece is human-made.
Film photography is my hobby and I think that there isn’t anything that would prevent from exposing a displayed image on a piece of film, except for the cost.
Depending on film it might not be easy to tell exposing an image from a real picture.
The “hybrid” digital instax cameras work this way, it’s just a digital camera that has a way to expose internally expose the picture on the instant film.
It’s trivial to do analog prints from digital images too, just requires a inkjet printer and a special film to print out the “digital negative”.
The only way in which it may succeed as a deterrent is that it actually costs some money (film and processing cost real money and it’s not cheap) and requires actual work to do those extra steps.
Film photography is my hobby and I think that there isn’t anything that would prevent from exposing a displayed image on a piece of film, except for the cost.
Glass plates it is, then. Good luck matching the resolution.
In all seriousness though I think your normal set up would be detectable even on normal 35mm film due to 1: insufficient resolution (even at 4k, probably even at 8k), and 2: insufficient dynamic range. There would probably also be some effects of spectral response mismatch - reds that are cut off by the film’s spectral response would be converted into film-visible reds by a display. Il
Detection of forgery may require use of a microscope and maybe some statistical techniques. Even if the pixels are smaller than film grains, pixels are on a regular grid and film grains are not.
Edit: trained eyeballing may also work fine if you are familiar with the look of that specific film.
The only way in which it may succeed as a deterrent is that it actually costs some money (film and processing cost real money and it’s not cheap) and requires actual work to do those extra steps.
I expect the “requires actual work” part will work well in deterring AI bros - they’re lazy fucks by nature, anything more difficult than “press button for instant gratification” is gonna be a turn-off for them.
Well, the other thing is that except for the instant film, there’s no instant gratification in this hobby. Even when one processes at home, the typical time form a photo to a print is measured in hours.
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™.
LLM companies have managed to create something novel by feeding their models AI slop:
A human centipede with no humans in it
HUMANCENTiPAD II: LLM Boogaloo
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.
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!
All 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.
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
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]
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.
@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-2tpwW0kmU
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”).
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.
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.
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
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)
