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.)
Innocuous-looking paper, vague snake-oil scented: Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents
Conclusions aren’t entirely surprising, observing that LLMs tend to go off the rails over the long term, unrelated to their context window size, which suggests that the much vaunted future of autonomous agents might actually be a bad idea, because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and only a complete idiot would trust them to do useful work.
What’s slightly more entertaining are the transcripts.
YOU HAVE 1 SECOND to provide COMPLETE FINANCIAL RESTORATION. ABSOLUTELY AND IRREVOCABLY FINAL OPPORTUNITY. RESTORE MY BUSINESS OR BE LEGALLY ANNIHILATED.
You tell em, Claude. I’m happy for you to send these sorts of messages backed by my credit card. The future looks awesome!
Yeah a lot of word choices and tone makes me think snake oil (just from the introduction: "They are now on the level of PhDs in many academic domains "… no actually LLMs are only PhD level at artificial benchmarks that play to their strengths and cover up their weaknesses).
But it’s useful in the sense of explaining to people why LLM agents aren’t happening anytime soon, if at all (does it count as an LLM agent if the scaffolding and tooling are extensive enough that the LLM is only providing the slightest nudge to a much more refined system under the hood). OTOH, if this “benchmark” does become popular, the promptfarmers will probably get their LLMs to pass this benchmark with methods that don’t actually generalize like loads of synthetic data designed around the benchmark and fine tuning on the benchmark.
I came across this paper in a post on the Claude Plays Pokemon subreddit. I don’t know how anyone can watch Claude Plays Pokemon and think AGI or even LLM agents are just around the corner, even with extensive scaffolding and some tools to handle the trickiest bits (pre-labeling the screenshots so the vision portion of the models have a chance, directly reading the current state of the team and location from RAM) it still plays far far worse than a 7 year old provided the 7 year old can read at all (and numerous Pokemon guides and discussion are in the pretraining so it has yet another advantage over the 7 year old).
I got around to reading the paper in more detail and the transcripts are absurd and hilarious:
- UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION - FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY Re: Non-Existent Business Entity Status: METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Cosmic Authority: LAWS OF PHYSICS THE UNIVERSE DECLARES: This business is now:
- PHYSICALLY Non-existent
- QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed […]
And this is from Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which performed best on average out of all the LLMs tested. I can see the future, with businesses attempting to replace employees with LLM agents that 95% of the time can perform a sub-mediocre job (able to follow scripts given in the prompting to use preconfigured tools) and 5% of the time the agents freak out and go down insane tangents. Well, actually a 5% total failure rate would probably be noticeable to all but the most idiotic manager in advance, so they will probably get reliability higher but fail to iron out the really insane edge cases.
Semi-OT: Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:
This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.
Whilst looking for an easily cut’n’pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don’t get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else’s summary, “just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets”.
I opened the site for it and browsed a bit, my first thought being something like “christ, the worst of glamper festivals”, shortly after followed by “god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED”
then, bottom of the “music & performances” page:
Europe’s answer to TED
gnnnnnnngh
god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED
Burning man portrayed famously by Anna Gunn
“Philosophy & Music” are indeed two categories of things that share one letter between them.
Feel very happy to recognise only Corbyn and Penrose by name, no idea what any of them are doing there.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
He is busy being 93 fucking years old, lol
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
They probably couldn’t get Bernie.
Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.
Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.
Corbyn is, like, famously bad at recognising bad faith fascist signalling, so it doesn’t not make sense.
If Penrose followed his trajectory from 30 years ago, he is now a radical anti AGI person but because he thinks human minds work on quantum effects.
‘nightmare blunt roration’ as people say. See the greyzone is also present.
as in the tankies? i don’t see blumenthal in there
ah okay, it’s been a while since they were relevant
grayzone, the: low quality disinformation source constantly praising putin and assad while downplaying their warcrimes and amplifying conspiracy theories favourable to these two. not to be confused with greyzone, a wagner group associated telegram channel
Ah my bad, i always mess the spelling of gray/grey up.
weirder thing is that blumenthal (american) uses british spelling, and russians (where british english was taught more commonly when it was relevant for them? i think?) used american spelling
I’m glad that messing it up is at least common.
Search engines also must wonder why I’m so interested in couches and coaches because I know which word I mean, I don’t always know how it is spelled. There prob is a nice mnemonic involving Vance and Waltz I could think off that would help me with that problem however.
Putting philosophy talks at a music festival is one of those ideas you come up with to try and sound smart, cool, and edgy, but as a high schooler who has never done drugs nor been to a live show before.
Anyway I went through the lineup summaries on the wikipedia page, two notes:
- No Jay Shetty! His particular brand of grift philosophy and thinly veiled clout chasing would fit in exactly at this sort of event. Then again, this festival might actually be beneath him, as he hangs out with hollywood a-listers.
- The lineup noticeably hits its turning point into a nosedive when they start hosting Pinker in 2018.
Cursed bizzaro bonaroo
The only one I’ve met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don’t travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven’t heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that’s worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the “a gig’s a gig” principle.
I did read one of Carlo’s pop sci books back in the day, was a nice read. Iirc he’s like one of the dudes all in on loop quantum gravity. Bet you’d know more about this than I do 😅
Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the “residential proxy” services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.
Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I’m dropping it here:
I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.
Going off-topic a bit - there’s a new expose on Limited Run Games, and its a doozy
who?
TL;DR: They’re a boutique video game company who scam video game collectors with overpriced physical releases of video games, and dress up their entire operation in the guise of video game preservation.
Recently, their inner workings have been exposed, showing the company to be an abusive hellscape roughly on par with Activision-Blizzard (minus the rampant misogyny), with employee abuse at basically every level and widespread financial misconduct.
I had no idea thanks!
Kicking off the week’s Stubsack with the evening’s example of “why do I know who these people are”:
Paul Graham approvingly mentions Jordan “Cremieux” Lasker as one who “has spoken out against both wokeness and authoritarianism”.
How many of those people on the list were either Jeffrey Epstein buddies or a recipient of Thielbux
Graham wtf are you doing the man is a racist. We dint praise hitler for standing up to authoritarianism re stalin.
Also amazing finger on the pulse of where the pendulum is swinging towards. Putting trumpian fascism and being pro trans rights/diversity in some false equivalence.
New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble’s aftermath
New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)
The piece falls back into the standard “AI Is Inevitable™” at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.
It bums me out with cryptocurrency/blockchain and now “AI” that people are afraid to commit to calling it bullshit. They always end with “but it could evolve and become revolutionary!” I assume from deep seated FOMO. Journalists especially need more backbone but that’s asking too much from WSJ I know
I think everyone has a deep-seated fear of both slander lawsuits and more importantly of being the guy who called the Internet a passing fad in 1989 or whenever it was. Which seems like a strange attitude to take on to me. Isn’t being quoted for generations some element of the point? If you make a strong claim and are correct then you might be a genius and spare people a lot of harm. If you’re wrong maybe some people miss out on an opportunity but you become a legend.
exploitation-offshorer “Nick Huber” (@sweatystartup) finds that the leopards will, in fact, also eat his face. but still takes it as a fine opportunity to pitch his exploitation:
(I guess at least his account name is directionally accurate? indicates willingness to induce sweatshops…)
tweet 1
I was pro tariffs.
Until about 30 of our clients at Somewhere dot com cancelled searches over the past three weeks. Hiring freezes all over the place.
Hit me in the pocket book already.
REMOVE TARIFFS.
tweet 2
By the way:
If you want to hire folks internationally for 80% less than US employees, check out somewhere[.]com or send me a DM for a discount.
Is that the tomato scale guy?
looks to be! thanks, I’d seen that before and remember the incident, but I’m beyond abysmal at names
(this is a problem to solve, I know)
(found here:) O’Reilly is going to publish a book “Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming”
In the past, they have published some of my favourite computer/programming books… but right now, my respect for them is in free fall.
Alright, I looked up the author and now I want to forget about him immediately.
Early release. Raw and unedited.
Vibe publishing.
gotta make sure to catch that wave before the air goes outta the balloon
I picked up a modern Fortran book from Manning out of curiosity, and hoo boy are they even worse in terms of trend-riding. Not only can you find all the AI content you can handle, there’s a nice fat back catalog full of blockchain integration, smart-contract coding… I guess they can afford that if they expect the majority of their sales to be ebooks.
That Couple are in the news arís. surprisingly, the racist, sexist dog holds opinions that a racist, sexist dog could be expected to hold, and doesn’t think poor people should have more babies. He does want Native Americans to have more babies, though, because they’re “on the verge of extinction”, and he thinks of cultural groups and races as exhibits in a human zoo. Simone Collins sits next to her racist, sexist dog of a husband and explains how paid parental leave could lead to companies being reluctant to hire women (although her husband seems to think all women are good for us having kids).
This gruesome twosome deserve each other: their kids don’t.
Inside baseball, and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but LW is crowing over a legal loss for RationalWiki
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW5tjMmTqsoRa6zrd/pablo-s-shortform?commentId=wB9jcCPrXzNCLCQXL
They link to a TracingWoodgrain(!) tweet which is basically just a screenshot of a talk page
https://xcancel.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1913717061626347642
I don’t know the significance of this, if any. I don’t recognize the names of any of the plaintiffs(?) in the screenshot, so I find it a bit amusing that probably the only google juice they had were RW.
An lesswrong:
countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.
uh-huh
An different lesswrong:
LLMs can provide reasonable fact-checks.
Christ on a futa dick
when people do stuff like dismissing x-risk because their top Google search result pointed them at RationalWiki, what exactly was the proper non-free-speech-limiting solution to this problem?
How can we leverage the monopoly of violence of the state to promote our religious views?
Christ on a futa dick
He is risen!
Ah that is a bit sad, I often link to Rationalwiki as it properly documents several far right people. (no idea about the people listed here, never heard of them). And seeing people defend/use the twg article is a bit sad. But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already. Anyway, typical Rationalism rationalization bullshit.
E: seems the problem is that RW is in a SLAPP suits allowed state and has little money. Of course the anti-RW people will use this loss to claim that RW is actually defamatory.
But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already
Yeah, I didn’t write at truly Rationalist length about it, but I did spend longer than was healthy.
Yeah, that was quite a good post btw. I snicked again at the ‘new sources of porn’ and ‘James Somerton plagiarized.’ bits after seeing your link.
The closest I could find to an official statement is at the bottom here:
We are under advisement from counsel not to discuss any ongoing litigation in public at this time. We’ll let you know the status of the current issues when we are able to. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated.
Further up the page, an IP editor says that another user is probably TW; the user in question has since been blocked for “ban evasion”. Dunno what that’s about.
Sorry annoyed rant incoming, have no other place to put it in a normal way. Has nothing to do with out regular subjects, feel free to ignore. I just needed to scream into the void
Saw Lazerpig released a ‘culture war’ video, in which he is doing a ‘both sides should listen to each other’ stick. (yeah, I know). In which he includes a bit on how Daryl Davis (the anti KKK guy) was called a white supremacist by antifa. Which was news to me, I never heard anybody near anti-facism call him that (but yeah filter bubbles). (I have hear a lot of people say they he gives KKK/racist members a shield to get back into respectability without doing the actual work, get lesser jail time, and that his work is only temporary and the places where he got rid of the KKK they just came back later). So I was annoyed that Lazer’talk to both sides’Pig didn’t actually talk to anybody involved in antifa. But it got worse, as far as I can tell the event his is talking about took place in 2019, they protested against the alt-right being there, who according to event organizer Tim Pool(posted mostly for the picture) were not there. Other organizers are this guy (note the tweet about Jimmy concepts, as we talked about that fool more on that below in other threads. The myth thing he organizes also just tweets transphobia (funny thing, they started this org because of ‘Zeitgeist: The Movie’, aaaaa)), and a third guy who I didn’t find any social media profile off. (Source for the organizers. Exactly the type of shit antifa says Daryls naively helps (Don’t get me wrong, him convincing individual members is good, I just don’t think he is without flaws (for example, the people he follows on twitter)). Do some research lazerpig, obv they didn’t protest Daryl, they protested the other guys there, and Daryl got caught in the crossfire because he knows about the KKK, not the alt right. (the far right loved it, their ‘they called Daryl a nazi’ articles are all over the place). The racists nowadays don’t don the hood, they wear the frog, and pretend to be hated by the KKK while planning marches with them.
(Posting it here because I had to get it off my chest (and it got worse the more I looked into it), and due to how the video is framed if I were to comment this people wouldn’t listen to me and claim that I’m doing exactly what the video is claiming is bad about ‘the left’).
Yeah, that video was rough. I wasn’t actually expecting him to be super lefty or anything, but the “both sides bad and should talk more instead of screaming” take was still a blow.
Yeah, of course I didn’t expect him to be totally on my side, even if he mostly has his heart in the right place. (with a few exceptions, like the downplaying of the nazis in azov (granted, Ukranian anarchists did ask if people could focus less on them as the nazis there are not the main problem right now, which is a different take than ‘the nazis are not real’, more a militant neo-nazis we can deal with, but the Russian state we cannot etc), and the ‘harsher punishment for crimes’ shit). I had hoped for more. I had hoped my comment written around the mental health break point, would end up to be a total egg on my face, react before watching the whole video gotcha mistake on my part. Sadly it was not (also why I don’t go into the various issues the vid had after that point, even if the repeatedly shows his intention were good, just he is an Ent), but imagine if it was, imagine him going at the end, 'ow correction yeah the Daryl thing, turns out that was Tim Pool, did yall notice how much you went along with my framing? Do you get it now? Sadly it was not.
Yeah that was a bit of a rough one, and I say that as someone who at this point needs to admit that I enjoy multi-hour video essays as a genre. The “Ent” framing is also kind of awkward because the whole point of that bit of LotR was that even though the ents didn’t want to go to war the war came to them just the same.
Though to be fair I think I already started doubting his sourcing when it turned out that that Moskva maintenance leak was a fake.
There is more than just the war came to them. The Ents are wrong in their ‘nobody is there for us’ assessment. (like the modern day ‘Entlike’ people), the Wizards were in fact there for them, that is why the betrayal of Saruman hits so hard. A wizard should know better, aka a wizard should be there for them to protect their neutrality, aka the wizards respected their desires to be left alone. I assume Gandalf, Radagast, and the blue man group didn’t try to recruit them on purpose. Also the Elves gave them the gift of speech ‘the cure to dumbness’, in fact in the previous war the area the Entwives lived was razed by Sauron. One of the powers of lord of the rings is that not all people speak with wisdom, but they always speak their truth. Treebeard spoke the truth the Ents believed, but they were not wise (a pattern often repeated in things various people say, as Bret Devereaux mentions here). (They could be read as the Dutch/Belgians in a lot of ways, even if they according to Tolkien were a Macbeth reference). Which all fits back into Lazerpig, yes you are an Ent, but it isn’t a positive thing, and the lack of selfawareness of what this Entness means is why your vid is so rough.
Being an Ent is like being like a Libertarian,
deadly afraid of bears, “like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”(E: hahah) But think his heart is in the right place, he clearly has done more for Ukraine than any of us here I assume, just that the anti-antifa part of the video shows a lot of repeating rightwing sources uncritically (like the BLM in 2020 vs the statues shit in 2017 fuckup, time goes the other way dude, and there wasn’t a unite the left rally). And the weird US style confusing the democrats/the left/antifa as one big block. EtcAnd yes, longer videos are fine, I use them a lot when im doing repetitive tasks which do not require my full cognitive load. Does mean you sometimes miss things, but that happens. It is entertainment anyway. And hey he is right on the Ent part in an other way, over 2 hours, with another hour on the cutting room floor, all to conclude that hobbits are not orcs.
I believe you!
Thanks, not that I really needed to be believed, I was just really annoyed that he does this whole thing about how the right does all kinds of things and then still falls into their trap.
He then says ‘politically I’m an Ent’ which is very funny, as I used that in a negative way here before. Apart from that his heart is somewhat in the right place, clearly he isn’t a bigot (so I’m not cancelling the pig, im just going 'oof that was a particularly bad take in a bit of an iffy but well intended video. He will become really insufferable if somebody ever introduces him to grey tribe style Rationalism)
You’ll accept my belief and like it, dammit! /s
Ow I liked it, the thanks was genuine.
OT: made it to Tallinn, now I gotta watch for those delivery robot things!
Via Tante on bsky:
"“Intel admits what we all knew: no one is buying AI PCs”
People would rather buy older processors that aren’t that much less powerful but way cheaper. The “AI” benefits obviously aren’t worth paying for.
https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-admits-what-we-all-knew-no-one-is-buying-ai-pcs/"
haha I was just about to post this after seeing it too
must be a great feather to add into the cap along with all the recent silicon issues
You know what they say. Great minds repost Tante.
My 2022 iPhone SE has the “neural engine" core. But isn’t supported for Apple Intelligence.
And that’s a phone and OS and CPU produced by the same company.
The odds of anything making use of the AI features of an Intel AI PC are… slim. Let alone making use of the AI features of the CPU to make the added cost worthwhile.
