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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
So I learned about the rise of pro-Clippy sentiment in the wake of ChatGPT and that led me on a little ramble about the ELIZA effect vs. the exercise of empathy https://awful.systems/post/5495333
Not worthy of a third post imho, but Scott made the trilogy post: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9108 where he is subtlety walking back his insane, proudly kid killing claim to the more reasonable, Israel needs to defeat hamas, claim.
For a man angry about his detractors being intellectually dishonest(**), this is very typical:
Incredibly, commenters on Peter Woit’s blog then blamed me for this antisemitic image, mistakenly imagining that I’d created it myself, and then used their false assumption as further proof of my mental illness
For context, it was an AI slop image, and he named it after Woit, and didn’t provide any details from the email itself. While the whole affair is quite a good reason to at least put this persons name/email out there imho.
But also:
I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence. […]
His ability to lack self-awareness and reading skills remains bad. The power thing was partially in his first blogpost already, where he realized the ‘manhaters’ were just a small group. And the latter makes no sense unless you hold the random cartoon guy (who nobody here or at Woit expressed support for) as the consensus, and actual sc people, or fans of Peter.
The last part is just nuts, whole bit of Rationalization why he is actually justified, and will change the world. Not realizing everyone was horrified because he created a thought experiment to justify a genocide:
Reading the SneerClubbers’ armchair diagnoses of my severe mental illness, paranoia, persecution complex, grandiosity, etc. etc. I had the following thought, paraphrasing Shaw:
Yes, they’re absolutely right that psychologically well-adjusted people generally do figure out how to adapt themselves to the reigning morality of their social environment—as indicated by the Asch conformity test, the Milgram electric-shock experiment, and the other classics of social psychology.
It takes someone psychologically troubled, in one way or another, to persist in trying to adapt the reigning morality of their social environment to themselves.
If so, however, this suggests that all the moral progress of humanity depends on psychologically troubled people—a realization for which I’m deeply grateful.
this bit opens up so much questions, remarks and is just silly in some ways. Yes people who are dissatisfied will push for change, why is this a revelation? But do they have the power? Is it justified? Jared Taylor(*) also pushes for a changed morality system, but I wouldn’t consider that desirable. It also leaves out that people will push for change because they just want to profit from it. Which is likely a lot bigger driver of change see the libertarian ls pushing for less regulations, because the dumb and distracted deserve to be scammed.
Anyway we got called out twice!
*: a white nationalist piece of shit who from what I heard is notable because compared to his peers he isnt a raging anti-Semite. At least not openly. **: Edit: as nobody mentioned the whole ‘Peter is intellectually dishonest’ affair, I have to say one thing. Peter is imho not intellectually dishonest for leaving out that the people who tie their children on the traintrack could stop at any time. The people who don’t mention this just don’t think it is a convincing argument. Yes people who take hostages could release the hostages at any time, still no reason to shoot through the hostages. Derail the trolley! The way Russia dealt with the Opera hostage crisis was considered bad for a reason (I hope I don’t have to point out that the hostage takers also were in the wrong here). Forgot who it was who mentioned it here, but the whole ‘I would be glad to not flip the switch’ is one of the fucked up parts, it would scar people for life to make that choice.
I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence. […]
Honestly what he should actually be grateful for is how all his notoriety ever amounted to[1] was a couple of obscure forums going ‘look at this dumb asshole’ and moving on.
He is an insecure and toxic serial overreactor with shit opinions and a huge unpopular-young-nerd chip on his shoulder, and who comes off as being one mildly concerted troll effort away from a psych ward at all times. And probably not even that, judging from Graham Linehan’s life trajectory.
[1] besides Siskind using him to broaden his influence on incels and gamer gaters.
I feel like he’s also broadly misunderstood the actual armchair diagnosis from over here. Like, no acknowledgement of claims that he’s stuck in a broken and obviously false framing of the entire world as “popular jocks” vs “put-up on nerds” and seems to match literally any conflict into that model to often horrifying results. Even though that was the main thrust of the actual “diagnosis” that he referenced.
Past a certain point I think anyone who doesn’t agree with and support him has been fully excluded from the circle of people who can actually get through to him and help. Unfortunately, he’s still a public figure, leaving the rest of us with little to do beyond sneering.
Getting love bombed in that rationalist con he went to recently probably didn’t help matters.
While this is close to ‘look at what you made me do territory’. We would sneer a lot less at him if he didn’t blame us for everything. ‘people who sneer made covid worse’ (not the direct quote) for example was just silly, and if you look at the reaction of sneerclub at the time also not in the realm of reality. (But yes he will just say he said sneer by which he didn’t mean sneerclub but people like us in general. Which is obv not a thing I fully agree with, but good motte/bailey).
It also is interesting, as Scott compared to the others we sneer at never really seems to break containment so to speak. I have seen people talk about Aella on bsky for example, Scott Alexander, Eliezer, lesswrong, EA, etc all come up. But Scott almost never does. (Yes, the ‘untitled’ affair was public, but that was a decade ago, and 6 months before r/sneerclub was created (and long before I joined) and also the whole broaden influence thing as you mentioned). And after all why should he, he is just a random professor, the only reason he is relevant for the broader picture is that he agrees with the AI doom stuff, and he gives the LW people some level of prestige (the only times I have brought him up is because he confirmed that Yarvin spends time personally emailing prestigious people like him but that is about Moldy). He is prob the only one whos sneering is just contained to sneerclub/awful.systems (which is why he should stop reading sc, he prob should also ignore more blog comments and emails (block Yarvin’s email Scott, do it!)).
Re fame, he ends up on the orange site often enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=scottaaronson.com
Wonder if people karma farm there…
Unmonitored RSD is a real sonuvabitch
Gonna repost a bit from comment I left on reddit:
Anyway, something useful perhaps, the World Central Kitchen seems to help out with the famine so donating to them might be useful. Not comfortable donating on a link provided by a random user (smart!), or want something to show for your donation, the current Humble book bundle is donating to the WCK (do not forget to adjust the sliders) and you get a nice collection of Martha Wells books (The Murderbot saga is great). Or buy the play for peace bundle which is donating to the UNRWA USA, and get a shitton of games and other stuff. (All links are affiliate free from my end, I know there is a system setup for Humble stuff, but I don’t use that).
E: buying the last one is also a fun way to boost yourself into Spiders Georg levels of video game ownership. So you could do it for that joke alone. Just to claim you own ~300 videogames.
I’ve followed Jose Andres on insta for about 6 years now, and while I’d love to only have nice things to say about him and WCK, I know that there is resentment/resistance to the actions of WCK, for good reason. This is the first thing that pops up, a page detailing how WCK works with the IDF and how that is not in the best interests of Palestine. What’s also really gross, ghoulish and troublesome is that, despite the fact that Israel has literally killed WCK volunteers, Andres still works with them, and is largely pro-israel. That being said, everything about this is fucked anyway and I imagine that if you’re donating, your heart is in the right place. But, uh, yeah, adjust those sliders.
E: ok I have fully read the page. Fuck Andres, fuck WCK, please do not donate to them. Donate to UNRWA instead, or any organisation that is actually willing to call what Israel is doing a genocide.
Thanks for the info, will link this comment on reddit as well.
Shamelessly reproduced from the other place:
A quick summary of his last three posts:
“Here’s a thought experiment I came up with to try to justify the murder of tens of thousands of children.”
“Lots of people got mad at me for my last post; have you considered that being mad at me makes me the victim and you a Nazi?”
“I’m actually winning so much right now: it’s very normal that people keep worriedly speculating that I’ve suffered some sort of mental breakdown.”
one horse laugh is of greater utilitarian impact across the quantum waveform of the universe than ten thousand syllogisms
"For those in writing related jobs, they may find lucrative work cleaning up attempts to sidestep them with AI slop, squeezing hefty premiums from desperate clients who find themselves lacking leverage over them.
Well, seems I was pretty close - NBC news recently reported humans are being hired to clean up AI slop. My prediction it would be lucrative was off the mark, though - artists called in for de-slopping work are getting paid less than if they were simply hired to create the work themselves. Clearly, I was being overly optimistic.
You want my take, anyone who gets hired for slop cleanup should try to squeeze as much cash out their clients as much as possible - they showed open contempt for humanity by choosing a clanker, they need to be shown the consequences.
Chiming in to agree your prediction write-ups aren’t particularly good. Sure they spark discussion, but the whole forecasting/prediction game is one we’ve seen the rationalists play many times, and it is very easy to overlook or at least undercount your misses and over hype your successes.
In general… I think your predictions are too specific and too optimistic…
Me, 17 days ago
this really isn’t a hard guess
You want my take
probably not
anyone who gets hired for slop cleanup should try to squeeze as much cash out their clients as much as possible
“people should try to get paid well”? that’s your whole take? really? you thought this was worthwhile posting? not, maybe, spitballing ideas for how people should get paid well? some advice on how to negotiate with clients who are quite likely to be pennypinching types (evidenced by them trying to get as much as possible for free)? none of that, just more fluff? okay then
You’re kind of a dick, maybe you’re in the wrong instance?
who the fuck are you again? what in the fucking world made you think your 14 comments and 1 post meant you got to decide who gets to have an account here?
Lol
@froztbyte@awful.systems is coming in a bit hot, but they’re not fundamentally wrong. @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems, you’ve received some pointed but good feedback on your writing style recently in MoreWrite and in other threads; I think you’ll be able to make much the same points more persuasively if you incorporate some of that feedback. I also recommend breaking out of doing predictions; I think you might get more mileage and variation out of a journalistic approach, and either way we know from crypto that prediction is a bit of a fool’s errand. these fuckers will remain irrational long after we’ve gone bankrupt, etc.
I’m not gonna force you to do anything; if posts like these are what you’re comfortable with then it is what it is. I just feel like if you break out of your current pattern, you’re capable of achieving great results.
I was going to chime in to say something similar. I don’t think trying to game out the possible reaction to the possible hype about the possible application, etc., etc., is the best use of anyone’s time. It might be more beneficial to, for example, keep track of the cases where the guys selling “quantum” are the same guys who have been selling “AI” and “crypto”.
Enemy of awful systems Malcolm Gladwell is a full throated transphobe
Why is it always transphobia with these kinds of people… is it because they feel racism is too risky? So they need a different outlet for hating on people based on what they believe is “science”?
the answer to all those is yes. To synthesise the bigger idea, as the saying goes: scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds. Gladwell caters to a huge audience that is centrist, leaning somewhat liberal (though he flirts constantly with race science and straight up racism, see his writings on Korean Air). As liberals move towards fascism, so must he. Of course, it’s the most marginalised that are going to be targeted first.
that “90%” of the audience was “on [Tucker’s] side” but had been unwilling to admit it.
Why are transphobes always this full of shit. Polls always disagree with this, and it cant be ‘people are afraid to speak out out of fear’, as there seem to be very little consequences to just being a lowkey transphobe. Hell even raging transphobes who stalk people, assault kids, and call for violence in what can only be called a life destroying obsession with trans people get defended by the people in power. There is very little reason for people to lie on polls over this.
Also dislike the focus on ‘trans women’ as these whole shitty arguments forget trans men exist. (This seems to be a general problem sadly, trans men, same as intersex people, or detransitioners tend to be only brought up like gotcha arguments, and not much to discuss the different problems they also face. Obv, I’m also doing that here, so I’m not immune)
@Soyweiser @swlabr Reminds me.of Nixon’s weird claim of being backed by a “silent majority.”
I’ve heard two versions of this from historians. One claims that he was deluded enough to claim that everyone actually secretly backed him and was just unwilling to actually say so for some reason.
The other said that he meant the dead, on his quest to throw more lives at a cause that has already claimed so many.Populist groups pull that shit a lot. Wilders also keeps claiming we should all do what he wants because people voted for him (a scary and depressingly large group, but not a total majority). It is a way of trying to get more democratic power behind you than you should really have looking at the democratic support you have alone at least in the case of politics. It also is often just delusional.
I recall a neo-nazi guy being kicked from a bar once while he loudly (and alone, the whole place fell silent, was a massive vibe shift) started to sing what I think was the horst wessel song (I was not familiar with the song at the time, so this is my guess), and while he was being kicked out he shouted that everybody else agreed with him and was just afraid to say it. Whole group of metalheads/etc like that suddenly silent and a vibe of ‘something shit is going down’. Was a weird moment.
fuck, i can’t imagine someone doing this, even though we do have fascists and neonazis in poland, but man, horst-wessel-lied is a fist-in-the-face offence level.
Yeah Im not totally sure it was that song, but it was a neonazi/nazi song, and he was ejected very fast by the bartenders.
ran across this
Kaminski told SiliconANGLE in an interview he was inspired to launch the company after seeing how long and difficult it was for medical technology firms to bring innovations to market.
“Everything that’s meaningful is regulated,” Kaminski said. “I didn’t even comprehend how hard it could be.”
“I could code that in a weekend” techbro meets decades-grown safety nets, is very surprised at complexity
I haven’t dug deeper into their thing yet but some of the claims are a bit 🤨 too
“The biggest problem is that it used to take about 50 pages to prove the system works, like a scalpel, but today… that could take 10,000 pages,” Kaminski explained. “And you need to make 10,000 pages every time you make a new version. It’s just really, really difficult to make so much proof as products become more software and AI-driven.”
Methinks that scalpel is a tad simpler than insulin pump, and considering that sometimes, there are unpatchable vulns found in the latter, i’d really prefer not to see vibecoded driver for these kind of things. Would match nicely with vibe-lawyered compliance docs
It’s really only a matter of time before we get an assassination via bluetooth-enabled pacemaker or something, and it’s going to be hell.
Ultra trivialization is the blood of tech bros. Everything is so easy and everyone else is just so clueless. Boy met computer through hello world and thought that’s the pinnacle of computer science.
How long til some bright eyed influencer dev tries to take on JPL and MISRA? It’s always some middleware garbage these startups make and never a QNX competitor.
“Qnx is hard and expensive, I’m sure we could get a production quality thing out with the esp-idf arduino target!!~ You devs so like to blow things out of proportion”
(while not an exact quote, extremely close to some shit I’ve heard from some people before)
One to watch from a safe distance: dafdef, an “ai browser” aimed at founders and “UCG creators”, named using the traditional amazon-keysmash naming technique and and following the ai-companies-must-have-a-logo-suggestive-of-an-anus style guide.
Dafdef learns your browsing patterns and suggests what you’d do next After watching you fill out similar forms a few times, Dafdef starts autocompleting them. Apply with your startup to YC, HF0 and A16z without wasting your time.
So… spicy autocomplete.
But that’s not all! Tired of your chatbot being unable to control everything on your iphone, due to irksome security features implemented by those control freaks at apple? There’s a way around that!
Introducing the “ai key”!
A tiny USB-C key that turns your phone into a trusted AI assistant. It sees your screen, acts on your behalf, and remembers — all while staying under your control.
I’m sure you can absolutely trust an ai browser connected to a tool that has nearly full control over your phone to not do anything bad, because prompt injection isn’t a thing, right?
(I say nearly full, because I think Apple Pay requires physical interaction with a phone button or face id, but if dafdef can automate the boring and repetitive parts of using your banking app then having full control of the phone might not matter)
h/t to ian coldwater
An interesting talk on the impact of the impact of AI slop bug bounty submission on the curl project (youtube).
I should get a green screen for my videos. Suggestions welcomed.
- I can’t leave it up permanently, I need to be able to get it out and put it away each use without it being a massive PITA.
- I record in a small room. It’s tiny and awkwardly shaped and I’m fixed in place by perspective tricks (something I would like the green screen to alleviate).
- Amazon is the least worst vendor in this circumstance if all else is equal.
Any ideas? Do any of you use such a device yourselves?
Actual suggestion: maybe mount a roller blind to the ceiling. Might need extra weight to tension the blind but also might not.
Also, you probably don’t need a totally green background, just enough to make masking easier. You could conceivably tape a big sheet of green cardboard to the back of your chair and see how that goes.
Also: idk how hard or easy this is but if the camera position is fixed and the rest of the scene is static, maybe there’s software that can just mask out the static scene?
oh yeah anything that can be chromakeyed basically, green is canonical and quite a good colour for the job.
Green and blue are canonical because they tend to have strong contrast with the people and their clothes, so the cromakey isn’t likely to pick up random bits of people’s face and outfit to cut out. If you want to go for the green cardboard option I would just make sure you get as consistent a color as possible and see about finding a cheap light and/or reflector to put behind you so that it doesn’t get obscured by your shadow. Definitely had that happen in a couple of student projects I did and it was impossible to set it up to be an aggressive enough match to always get the board (including the shadowed parts) without also picking up the lining of someone’s jacket or something.
I’d scrounge the biggest piece of cardboard that I could and go at it with spray paint.
I know Elgato do a collapsible greenscreen, but that’s the only one coming to mind.
i’ve had several recs for that greenscreen and frankly it looks ideal for the job. Now for the £160 … it’s on my channel wishlist.
Maybe you could paint the wall greenscreen, and hide it behind a tapestry when not in use. Then you wouldn’t need a place to store or deploy the screen frame hardware.
imma hazard a guess and bet David doesn’t want to do nearly that much work
Mount camera to ceiling, get a green rug, record lying on the ground (jk)
While lying on a lazy susan and rotating slowly, with Major Tom playing faintly in the background.
really leaning into the pivot theme
More reclining into but yes.
I was thinking about ethics
in game journalismin software engineering and I think it might be easier to create a whitelist than a blacklist:What are some serious software/hardware companies that have NOT participated in the AI bubble? No AI nonsense in their marketing slides, no mentions of AI on their landing page, etc.
Gonna cheat a little bit and put one-woman consultancy firm/personal blog deadSimpleTech up as an example. The sole member is Iris Meredith, whose involvement begins and ends at publicly lambasting AI’s continued shittiness.
Procreate, a digital painting software for iPads, has not just avoided AI, they even have an anti-GenAI statement on their website.
I was planning to mention Procreate as well, but felt like that’d be spamming the replies a bit.
On a wider note, I expect it’ll be primarily art-related software/hardware companies that will have avoided AI participation - with how utterly artists have rejected the usage of AI, and resisted its intrusion into their spaces, the companies working with them likely view rejecting AI as an easy way of earning good PR with their users, and embracing it as a business liability at best, and a one-way trip past the trust thermocline at worst.
As a CS student, I wonder why us and artists are always the one who are attacked the most whenever some new “insert tech stuff” comes out. And everyone’s like: HOLY SHIT PROGRAMMERS AND ARTISTS ARE DEAD, without realizing that most of these things are way too crappy to actually be… good enough to replace us?
My guess would be because most people don’t understand what you all actually do so gen AI output looks to them like their impression of the work you do. Just look at the game studios replacing concept artists with Midjourney, not grasping what concept art even is for and screwing up everyone’s workflow as a result.
I’m neither a programmer nor an artist I can sorta understand how people get fooled. Show me a snippet of nonsense code or image and I’ll nod along if you say it’s good. But then as a writer (even if only hobbyist) I am able to see how godawful gen AI writing is whereas some non-writers won’t, and so I extrapolate from that since it’s not good at the thing I have domain expertise in, it probably isn’t good at the things I don’t understand.
I feel like aggressive proponents of genAI are so because they are intimidated and/or jealous of the people they say they will replace. They lack the skills and critical thinking to become good at the task they want to replace, but also unwilling or unable to put in the work.
Instead of reckoning with this, they construct a phantasm where artists are “gatekeeping art”, and genAI is going to disrupt that gatekeeping. Meanwhile I think deep down they know that what genAI produces is derivative by definition, and not “real art” by any means.
Show me a snippet of nonsense code or image and I’ll nod along if you say it’s good.
Smirk I’m in.
Look mom, I’m vibe-coding a SaaS!
DragonCon drops ban hammer on slop slingers
Kind of generic: I am a researcher and recently started a third party funded project where I won’t teach for a while. I kinda dread what garbage fire I’ll return to in a couple of years when I teach again, how much AI slop will be established on the sides of teachers and students.
in what seems to be a very popular theme of “maybe we can just live off defense money” for tech outfits, oura is planning to manufacture in texas for simping to the DoD
I’m struggling to sneer it, it’s so fucking absurd
