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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
now seeing EAs being deeply concerned about RFK running health during a H5N1 outbreak
dust specks vs leopards
At work, Iāve been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but thatās why itās called work.
The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.
The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.
Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will saveā¦ (drumroll)ā¦ Approximately nothing!
But if we hadnāt done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.
We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.
My professor is typing questions into chat gpt in class rn be so fucking for real
gentlemen, this means war
-me imagining myself paying to sit through that
Heās using it to give examples of exam question answers. The embarrassment
I mean, that kind of suggests that you could use chatGPT to confabulate work for his class and he wouldnāt have room to complain? Not that Iād recommend testing that, because using ChatGPT in this way is not indicative of an internally consistent worldview informing those judgements.
Weāre going to be answering two essay questions in an in-class test instead of writing a paper this year specifically to prevent chat gpt abuse. Which he laughed and joked about because he really believes chat gpt can produce good results !
Iām pretty sure you could download a decent markov chain generator onto a TI-89 and do basically the same thing with a more in-class appropriate tool, but speaking as someone with dogshit handwriting Iām so glad to have graduated before this was a concern. Godspeed, my friend.
Iād pipe up and go āuhhh hey prof, arenāt you being paid to, like, impart knowledge?ā
(I should note that I have an extremely deficient fucks pool, and do not mind pissing off fuckwits. but I understand itās not always viable to do)
āSo, professor sir, are you OK with psychologically torturing Black people, or do you just not care?ā
It was there and gone fairly quickly and I wouldnāt say Iām a model student so I didnāt say anything. Iāve talked to him about Chat GPT before thoughā¦
HN runs smack into end-stage Effective Altruism and exhibit confusion
Title "The shrimp welfare project " is editorialized, the original is āThe Best Charity Isnāt What You Thinkā.
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. Itās not just because theyād be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldnāt be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled whoād be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
Ohhhh, so this is a forced-birther agenda item. Got it
rat endgame being eugenics again?? no waaay
Did the human pet guy write this
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. Itās not just because theyād be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldnāt be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled whoād be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
This entire fucking shrimp paragraph is what failing philosophy does to a mf
This almost reads like an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of worrying about animal welfare, like you are supposed to be a ridiculous hypocrite if you think factory farming is fucked yet are indifferent to the cumulative suffering caused to termites every time an exterminator sprays your house so it doesnāt crumble.
Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 285 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.
Dog, youāve lost the plot.
FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isnāt indefensible, but the way itās framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious youād be giving money to people who are weird in a bad way.
Not that Iām a super fan of the fact that shrimp have to die for my pasta, but it feels weird that they just pulled a 3% number out of a hat, as if morals could be wrapped up in a box with a bow tied around it so you donāt have to do any thinking beyond 1500Ć0.03Ć1 dollars means I should donate to this guys shrimp startup instead of the food bank!
Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.
Ah you see, the moment you entered the realm of numbers and estimates, youāve lost! I activate my trap card: ćBayesian Reasoningć to Explain Away those numbers. This lets me draw thećDomain Expertć card from my deck, which I place in the epistemic status position, which boosts my confidence by 2000 IQ points!
Obviously mathematically comparing suffering is the wrong framework to apply here. I propose a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The best shrimp is a tasty one, the best man is a philosopher-king who agrees with everything I say, and the best EA never gets past drunkenly ranting at their fellow undergrads.
Effective Altruism Declares War on the Entire State of Louisiana
Apologies for focusing on just one sentence of this article, but I feel like itās crucial to the overall argument:
ā¦ if [shrimp] suffer only 3% as intensely as we do ā¦
Does this proposition make sense? Itās not obvious to me that we can assign percentage values to suffering, or compare it to human suffering, or treat the values in a linear fashion.
It reminds me of that vaguely absurd thought experiment where you compare one person undergoing a lifetime of intense torture vs billions upon billions of humans getting a fleck of dust in their eyes. I just cannot square choosing the former with my conscience. Maybe Iām too unimaginative to comprehend so many billions of bits of dust.
lol hahah.
Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom Users Who Say Theyāre Underage
Three billion dollars and its going into Character AI AutoGroomer 4000s. Fuck this timeline.
automated grooming is just what progress is and you have to accept it. like the printing press
OK to start us off how about some Simulation Hypothesis crankery I found posted on ActivityPub: Do we live in a computer simulation? (Article), The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis (PDF)
Someone whoās actually good at physics could do a better job of sneering at this than me, but I mean but look at this:
My law can confirm how genetic information behaves. But it also indicates that genetic mutations are at the most fundamental level not just random events, as Darwinās theory suggests.
A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimisation and compression in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements to run the simulation.
I sneered that in a blog post last year, as it happens.
i mean, the Ray Charles one sounds fun. My 1st year maths lecturer demonstrated the importance of not dividing by zero by mathematically proving that if 1=0, then he was Brigitte Bardot. We did actually applaud.
āfeel free to ignore any science ānewsā thatās just a press release from the guy who made it up.ā
In particular, the 2022 discovery of the second law of information dynamics (by me) facilitates new and interesting research tools (by me) at the intersection between physics and information (according to me).
Gotta love āscienceā that is cited by no-one and cites the authorās previous work which was also cited by no one. Really the media should do better about not giving cranks an authoritative sounding platform, but that would lead to slightly fewer eyes on ads and we canāt have that now can we.
If youāre in the mood for a novel that dunks on these nerds, I highly recommend Jason Parginās If This Book Exists, Youāre in the Wrong Universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Book_Exists,_You're_in_the_Wrong_Universe
It is the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series
oh damn, I just gave the (fun but absolute mess of a) movie another watch and was wondering if they ever wrote more stories in the series ā I knew they wrote a sequel to John Dies at the End, but I lost track of it after that. it looks like Iāve got a few books to pick up!
Someone (maybe you) recommended this book here awhile back. But itās the fourth book in a series so I had to read the other three first and so have only just now started it.
Youāre doing the
lordāssimulation-authorās work, my friend.
This feels like quackery but I canāt find a goalā¦
But if they both hold up to scrutiny, this is perhaps the first time scientific evidence supporting this theory has been produced ā as explored in my recent book.
There it is.
Edit: oh God itās worse than I thought
The web design almost makes me nostalgic for geocities fan pages. The citations that include himself ~10 times and the greatest hits of the last 50 years of physics, biology, and computer science, and Baudrillard of course. The journal of which this author is the lead editor and which includes the phrase āinformation as the fifth state of matterā in the scope description.
Oh God the deeper I dig the weirder it gets. Trying to confirm whether the Information Physics Institute is legit at all and found their list of members, one of whom listed their relevant expertise as āWriter, Roleplayer, Singer, Actor, Gamerā. Another lists āHyperspace and machine elvesā. One very honestly simply says āN/Aā
The Gmail address also lends the whole thing an air of authority. Like, youāve already paid for the domain, guys.
I love the word cloud on the side. What is 6G doing there
OK this membe list experience is just šØāš³šš
- Psychonaut
- Practitioner of Yoga
- Quantum, Consciousness, Christian Theology, Creativity
Perfect. No notes.
I havenāt seen qualifications this relevant and high-quality since āarchitects and engineers for 9/11 truth.ā
the terrible tryfecta
Still a bit sad we are not doing nano anymore.
You see, nano is real now and boring
But things being real doesnāt stop the cranks. See quantum.
Quantum superpredicting machines are not real, and thatās what theyāre about. Nano- has lots of uninteresting bs like ultraefficient fluorescent things, but nanomachines are not and that was interesting to them (until they got bored)
Wait for AI and Crypto 2.0 to burn out, weāll get there
I had a flash of a vision of tomorrow, it is Nano crypto AI
Sadly it seems the next one is gonna be Quantum.
Finally computer science is a real field, there are cranks! Suck it physics and mathematics, we are a real boy now!
Has this person turned up shilling their book on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory yet? If not, I think itās a lock for 2025
Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry.
lol
General sneer against the SH: I choose to dismiss it entirely for the same reason that I dismiss solipsism or brain-in-a-vat-ism: itās a non-starter. Either itās false and weāve gotta come up with better ideas for all this shit weāre in, or itās true and nothing is real, so why bother with philosophical or metaphysical inquiry?
The āsimulation hypothesisā is an ego flex for men who want God to look like them.
Since the Middle ages weāve reduced Godās divine realm from the glorious kingdom of heaven to an office chair in front of a computer screen, rather than an office chair behind it.
The SH is catnip to āscientific typesā who donāt recognize it as a rebrand of classical metaphysics. After all, they know how computers work, and it canāt be that hard to simulate the entire workings of a universe down to the quark level, can it? So surely someone just a bit smarter than themselves have already done it and are running a simulation with them in it. Itās basically elementary!
Ha very clever, but as quantum level effects only occur when somebody is looking at it, they dont have to simulate it at quark level all the time. I watched what the bleep do we know, im very smart.
Youāre missing the most obvious implication, though. If itās all simulated or thereās a Cartesian demon afflicting me then none of you have any moral weight. Even more importantly if we assume that the SH is true then it means Iām smarter than you because I thought of it first (neener neener).
But this quickly runs into the ādonāt create your own unbreakable crypto systemā problem. There are people out there who are a lot smarter who quickly can point out the holes in these simulation arguments. (The smartest of whom go ānah, that is dumbā sadly Iām not that enlightened, as I have argued a few times here before how this is all amateur theology, and has nothing to do with STEM/computer science (E: my gripes are mostly with the āancestor simulationā theory however)).
How sneerable is the entire āinfodynamicsā field? Because it seems like it should be pretty sneerable. The first referenced paper on the āsecond law of infodynamicsā seems to indicate that information has some kind of concrete energy which brings to mind that experiment where they tried to weigh someone as they died to identify the mass of the human soul. Also it feels like a gross misunderstanding to describe a physical system as gaining or losing information in the Shannon framework since unless the total size of the possibility space is changing thereās not a change in total information. Like, all strings of 100 characters have the same level of information even though only a very few actually mean anything in a given language. Iām not sure it makes sense to talk about the amount of information in a system increasing or decreasing naturally outside of data loss in transmission? IDK Iām way out of my depth here but it smells like BS and the limited pool of citations doesnāt build confidence.
I read one of the papers. About the specific question you have: given a string of bits s, theyāre making the choice to associate the empirical distribution to s, as if s was generated by an iid Bernoulli process. So if s has 10 zero bits and 30 one bits, its associated empirical distribution is Ber(3/4). This is the distribution which theyāre calculating the entropy of. I have no idea on what basis they are making this choice.
The rest of the paper didnāt make sense to me - they are somehow assigning a number N of āinformation statesā which can change over time as the memory cells fail. I honestly have no idea what itās supposed to mean and kinda suspect the whole thing is rubbish.
Edit: after reading the authorās quotes from the associated hype article Iām 100% sure itās rubbish. Itās also really funny that they didnāt manage to catch the COVID-19 research hype train so theyāve pivoted to the simulation hypothesis.
Oh the author here is absolutely a piece of work.
Hereās an interview where heās talking about the biblical support for all of this and the ancient Greek origins of blah blah blah.
I canāt definitely predict this guyās career trajectory, but one of those cults where they have to wear togas is not out of the question.
Not only is the universe a simulation, the Catholics just had it right, isnt that neat.
I donāt have the time to deep dive this RN but information dynamics or infodynamics looks to be, letās say, āalternative scienceā for the purposes of trying to up the credibility of the simulation hypothesis.
