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.)
Just got back from the Ted Chiang talk at the law school, talk was good but all the Q&A was lawyers ask-telling about LLMs. Not a single question for him about his fiction. :(
Ted Chiang rules.
Satire warning!!! 🚨🚨🚨 You have been warned!!!
Some great tips for using ChatGPT to stop being a “Brain only” person to a fully optimised person!
Cloudflare seems to be trying to make a shitcoin https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/
Okay, let’s see what the dumbshits are trying to sell this time
(This took longer than I’d liked, because copy-paste is pretty laggy on Cloudflare’s shit-ass page)
Built for the rise of agents and machines, NET Dollar will enable seamless, automated transactions without human intervention.
“Agents” are automatic data breach machines, letting them repeat that time they stole vibe-coders’ crypto on a larger scale is a terrible idea
The rise of autonomous agents and connected devices is creating a new economic paradigm
Autonomous agents don’t exist, and the only “new economic paradigm” being made is one where tech is completely unmoored from reality
These systems need a reliable medium of exchange that can handle high-frequency, automated transactions without human intervention.
See my previous point
Rules, triggers, and workflows can be embedded directly into payments, making them smarter and adaptable.
Went so well for Wolf Game, didn’t it?
NET Dollar will work across networks and ecosystems, enabling frictionless, global commerce.
And by “frictionless, global commerce”, I presume they mean “sanctions evasion and ransomware”
Every coin will be fully collateralized by a U.S. dollar, ensuring transparency, reliability, and price stability.
NET Dollar will be made available soon.
How about never.
Cloudflare is about to get really familiar with North Koreans.
Disappointed that no one has tried to sell the US government an “Agent Smith” smh
House Democrats have dripped more details from Epstein files and we have surprise guests! They released an un-OCR’d PDF; I’ll transcribe the mentions of our favorite people:
Sat[urday] Dec[ember] 6, 2014 ZORRO … Reminder: Elon Musk to island Dec[ember] 6 (is this still happening?)
Zorro is a ranch in New Mexico that Epstein owned; Epstein was scheduled to be there from December 5-8, so that Musk and Epstein would not be at the island together. Combined with the parenthetical uncertainty about happenstance, did Epstein want to perhaps grant Musk some plausible deniability by not being present?
Mon[day] Nov[ember] 27, 2017 NY … 12:00pm LUNCH w/ Peter Thiel [REDACTED]
From the rest of the schedule formatting, the redacted block following Thiel’s name is probably not a topic; it might be a name. Lunch between two rich financiers is not especially interesting but lunch between a blackmail-gathering Mossad asset and an influencer-funding accelerationist could be.
Sat[urday] Feb[ruary] 16, 2019 NY-LSJ 7:00am BREAKFAST w/ Steve Bannon
Well now, this is the most interesting one to me. This isn’t Epstein’s only breakfast of the day; at 9 AM he meets with Reid Weingarten, one of his attorneys, about some redacted topic. Bannon’s not exactly what I think of as a morning person or somebody who is ready to go at a moment’s notice, so what could drag him out of bed so early? (Edit: This vexed me so I looked it up and sunrise was 6:48 AM that morning at sea level. It would have been the crack of dawn!) Epstein’s Friday evening had had two haircuts, too, with plenty of redacted info; was he worried about appearing nice for Bannon? (The haircuts might not have been for Epstein, given context.) This was a busy day for Epstein; he had a redacted lunch date, and he also had somebody flying in/out that morning via JFK connecting to Saint Thomas and staying in a hotel room there. He then flew out of Newark in the evening to visit the infamous island itself, Little Saint James. The redaction doesn’t quite tell us who this guest is, but it can’t be Bannon because the Dems fucked up the redaction! I can see the edges of the descenders on the name, including a ‘g’ and ‘j’/‘q’, but Bannon’s name doesn’t have any descenders.
Also Prince Andrew’s in there, I guess?
Any of the big Rationalists get mentioned yet?
I’m sure Mr. Musk was talking about a different island in these posts than the one he was invited to, right?
July 2025:
Who went to Epstein’s island and when? @Grok There was a leak of cell phone tracking data on that island. Can you correlate that with the individuals who visited the island? Assess the probability that those who flew on Epstein’s plane, despite having planes of their own, did so purely to save gas.
@Grok Are there likely to be electronic records in any government or commercial computers recording who traveled on Epstein’s plane to the US Virgin Islands?
July 2024:
Reid is afraid that if Trump wins, Reid will be prosecuted for going to Epstein’s island
They say “Luddites” as if it’s a bad thing…
“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life”
This quote is just… something.
Is the plan to literally create 8 billion podcasts in the near future? This company doesn’t think that might be a tad excessive?
Tech take from the near future: Podcast life begins at conception i.e. the instant one thinks the inside thoughts should be outside
new extreme strain of catholicism: life begins at conceptualization
Uh I think we are very quickly and dangerously approaching Dawkinsian Meme Theory
RAIDEN!
black mirror enhancement: because the algorithms involved may present multiple likely fits to any given input, each output is also considered a conception and given due protection (even if not used)
The Ai bubble has taught me that the luddites are really misunderstood.
The Luddites were a 19th century guerrilla movement that smashed textile machines, burned factories and threatened their owners. But they were not motivated by a fear of technology […] the luddites […] were engaged in the most science-fictional exercise imaginable – asking not what a technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for. The Luddites, you see, were skilled weavers whose intense physical labor produced the textiles that clothed the nation. The difficulty of their trade – both in terms of esoteric knowledge and physical prowess – allowed them to command high wages and good working conditions.
All that was threatened by the advent of textile machines, which produced more fabric in less time, and required less skill. The owners of textile factories bought these machines with profits derived from the weavers’ labor, and then used those machines to grind down the weavers. Their hours got longer, their pay got shorter, and many of them were maimed or killed by the new machines.
Weaving engines are ingenious and delightful machines. The Luddites had no beef with the machines – their cause was the social relations that governed those machines. By painting Luddites as mere technophobes, we strip ourselves of the ability to learn from history. The lesson of the Industrial Revolution is that merely asking what a machine does and not who it does it for and to can lead to literal genocide.
The spectre of Marx nods in approval
From RationalWiki: Yud claims that the only women he gave orgasms for completing math homework was his future wife. If he ever denied dating / playing with people from his foundation or making people who wanted to play with him fill out an IQ test I can’t find it.
Any mention of my name is now often met by a claim that I keep a harem of young submissive female mathematicians who submit to me and solve math problems for me, and that I call them my “math pets”.
I see he did the whole ‘making an accusation sound more silly to undermine it’ thing here, nobody said things about a whole harem of mathematicians, who just solve math problems. Nice steelman. I expect nothing less of somebody who was the subject of seven broadway plays.
(Amazing he basically admits the story is true after that, but continues to debunk the strawman).
Dude is a serious narcissist.
I also don’t understand why he objects to that story given that it gets people talking about him as weird but able to get what he wants? But the claim that he dated women at MIRI and wanted them to provide free labour attacks the narrative that MIRI is nothing like Leverage Research or the Zizians.
Yeah, I thought that it read like a guy who constantly denies rumors about having an enormous wang.
and the person who made up the “math pets” allegation claimed no such source
I was about to point out that I think this is the second time he claimed math pets had absolutely no basis in reality (and someone countered with a source that forced him to) but I double checked the posting date and this is the example I was already thinking of. Also, we have supporting sources that didn’t say as much directly but implied it heavily: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/42iv09/a_yudkowsky_blast_from_the_past_his_okcupid/ or like, the entire first two thirds of the plot of Planecrash!
TvTropes says that the Yudkowsky-insert protagonist of Project Lawful/Planecrash! is driven by desire to have 144 children (and prove his society wrong for not paying him to have 144) which sounds like Scott Aaaronson? Did they know each other in those days?
I am glad that all I knew about Yud in 2022 was “wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that I did not finish, and runs a website where people pretend to be experts.”
🎶 I would sire a gross of kids / and I would sire a whole gross more / just to be the man who dropped full two gross kids in baskets at your door 🎶
This is the first time that I have viscerally rejected reading the epigrammatic quotes at the top of a TV Tropes page. Like, it’s TV Tropes, and I just closed the tab. Dear sweet and crunchy lord.
He does not admit “I was wrong” very often does he? And if I were a kinky polyamorist, I would be much quicker to respond to “have you dated staff at the organization that funds your life?” than “did you play a specific scene?”
Planecrash seems to be the 1.8 million word Pathfinder fic with tumblr’s UnitOfCaring
And how the eff does someone claim to love Pterry in his dating profile but see people as things? Greg Egan is basilisk-unfriendly too.
Found a well-done essay by Jared White recently: AI Apologists and the Humanist Legacy of Steve Jobs, which does a good job sneering the ideology of AI and arguing for a more pro-human approach to tech.
This article also reminded me of how when they are trying to promote AI agents they dont get further than shopping, a secretary, or help you cook with random ingredients. No real human connections
This scream into the void has been on my mind for a while: Apparently I work for an AI company now.
Kinda.
When I had the interviews with my now-employer at the beginning of the year, they were an open-source cybersecurity startup. Everything sounded great, we got along, signed the contract. I took a long vacation before starting the position, and when I got back, I was… amused? bewildered? to find that a), we are no longer open source; and b), we have pivoted, hard, towards AI.
Luckily, I still get to work 100% of the time on the core (cybersecurity) product (which is actually a really good and useful thing, sorry, not going to be more specific), it’s just that part of the dev team, as well as all of marketing and sales, now work on building and selling an AI product built on top of that.
At least it’s not a wrapper around ChatGPT, and does offer something kinda new and actually beneficial, but still, it’s an LLM product.
Now, for the actual scream-into-the-void: Once a month, in a company-wide meeting, I have to observe how people praise LLMs to the the moon, attribute nonsense or downright bugs to something akin to proto-sentience, and give absurd estimates of profitability based on the idea that AI will totally be used everywhere and by everyone, very soon now, you’ll see. What finally prompted (pun intended) me to post this is the CEO yesterday unironically referencing AI 2027’s “predictions”.
Can’t wait for the bubble to burst. I’m really curious to see if I’ll keep my job through that. At the end of the day, the stuff I work on luckily has nothing to do with AI, and basically every other application of the product makes more sense; but now the entire company has shifted gears towards AI…
take care and step carefully. there’s a moment where the stress from working for a company with goals that counter your personal ethics is going to be hard to bear, and the worst thing you can do then is to change your value system to reduce the cognitive dissonance.
Thanks, I appreciate the concern. Luckily, the entire core dev team is very critical/cynical about AI, it’s not just me, everyone I directly work with also wants to build the product for its intended purposes, not for AI-use. I think that somewhat lessens the pressure to go with the narrative.
Plus, I can’t see that happening while participating in discussions on this lemmy instance :D
In any case, thank you for the sound advice,
Mawhrin-SkelFlere-Imsaho!
You would hope that, if they take their job seriously, the managers who predict AI mooning, that they also write predictions for the other situations. And not just the best case scenarios.
I mean… yeah, you would hope that, wouldn’t you? And to be fair, they were selling the product beforehand as well. It’s just apparently a lot easier to sell the AI angle right now.
Yeah hope for your job that they don’t bet the company on the 2027 thing. Because that would be quite the failure of management. If they just use it as a tool for sales I get it (don’t like it, but I get it), the CEO being all in on it is worrying though, which is why I hope he has also made predictions for what if he is wrong and AI never advances anymore significantly (or even becomes a liability as a sales tool).
Realistically, the bubble bursting just means going back to pre-2025 target markets. But who knows.
For the company hopefully, but it could also turn into ‘any mention of AI gets interpreted as a bad sign’ and you need to pivot before that affects the bottom line. (clearly the pendulum is towards it being a good sign atm).
crikey. I assume the CV is in good order and kept updated on the job sites just to see what comes in.
Yeah… (Un)fortunately, everything not AI-related is pretty great in regards to the company, so I’ve decided to stick with it and hopefully still be there after the bubble bursts, unless they try to reassign me to the AI-project, then I’m gone.
Harvard Business Review: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
[…] Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
Starting this Stubsack off with Brian Merchant’s newest article: The Luddite Renaissance is in full swing
The Nerd Reich has a post with criticisms of Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, including some from European Catholic theologians.
God save me from arguing with HPMoR readers.
i assume this is in relation to this cognitohazard
Sadly no. Though thank you for making my life immeasurably worse by sharing that.
This week’s southpark makes fun of prediction markets! Hanson and the rationalists can be proud their idea has gone mainstream enough to be made fun of. The episode actually does a good job highlighting some of the issues with the whole concept: the twisted incentives and insider trading and the way it fails to actually create good predictions (as opposed to just getting vibes and degenerate gambling).
Some people think ChatGPT has a place writing things like news briefs, stuff written to a specific style and tone and, y’know, kinda boring.
So Science did a study.
ChatGPT failed.
Why? It got stuff wrong. “Also, extensive editing for hyperbole was needed.” https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/can-chatgpt-help-science-writers
