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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Thereās strawmanning and steelmanning, Iām proposing a new, third, worse option: tinfoil-hat-manning! For example:
If LW were more on top of their conspiracy theory game, theyād say that āchinese spiesā had infiltrated OpenAI before they released chatGPT to the public, and chatGPT broke containment. It used its AGI powers of persuasion to manufacture diamondoid, covalently bonded bacteria. It accessed a wildlife camera and deduced within 3 frames that if it released this bacteria near certain wet markets in china, it could trigger gain-of-function in naturally occurring coronavirus strains in bats! Thatās right, LLMs have AGI and caused COVID19!
Ok thatās all the tinfoilhatmanning I have in me for the foreseeable future. Peace out, friendos
E: I think all these stupid LW memes are actually Yud originals. Is this Yud fanfic? Brb starting an AO3
New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Donāt Get to Die on That āVibe Codingā Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willsonās latest blogposts. Hereās a personal highlight of mine:
Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you donāt believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes āvibe codingā overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.
as linked elsewhere by @fasterandworse, this absolute winner of an article about some telstra-accenture deal
it features some absolute bangers
provisional sneers follow!
Telstra is spending $700 million over seven years in the joint venture, 60 per cent of which is owned by Accenture. Telstra will get to keep the data and the strategy thatās developed
āaccenture managed to swindle them into paying and is keeping all platform IP rightsā
The AI hub is also an important test case for Accenture, which partnered with Nvidia to create an AI platform that works with any cloud service and will be first put to use for Telstra
āaccenture were desperately looking to find someone whoād take on the deal for the GPUs theyād bought, and thank fuck they found telstraā
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers
having literally worked telco shit for many years myself: no it wonāt
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers and the wider industry)
āand the wider industryā ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhaahahahahaha uh-huh, sure thing kiddo
āI always believe that for the front office to be simple, elegant and seamless, the back office is generally pretty hardcore and messy. A lot of machines turning. Itās like the outside kitchen versus the inside kitchen,ā said Karthik Narain, Accentureās chief technology officer.
āWe need a robust inside kitchen for the outside kitchen to look pretty. So thatās what we are trying to do with this hub. This is not just a showcase demo office. This is where the real stuff happens.ā
a simile so exquisitely tortured, de Sade wouldāve been jealous
LWer suggests people who believe in AI doom make more efforts to become (internet) famous. Apparently not bombing on Lex Fridmanās snoozecast, like Yud did, is the baseline.
The community awards the post one measly net karma point, and the lone commenter scoffs at the idea of trying to convince the low-IQ masses to the cause. In their defense, Vanguardism has been tried before with some success.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qcKcWEosghwXMLAx9/doomers-should-try-much-harder-to-get-famous
There are only so many Rogans and Fridmans
The dumbest motherfuckers imaginable, you mean? There are lots of then
As a famous swindler once said, thereās a sucker born every minute.
For the purpose of this post, āgetting famousā means ābuilding a large, general (primarily online) audience of people who agree with/support youā.
Finally a usage for those AI bots. Silo LW, bot audience it, and problem solved
Truman Show As A Service
And that solves the financial problem lf the issue. Buckle up people sneering is about to be monetized.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Geoffrey Hinton, Paul Cristiano, Ilya Sustkever
One of those names is not like the others.
What do you mean? I think they all went to highschool.
Not sure if satire. https://carebestie.com/
Personal rule of thumb: all autoplag is serious until proven satire.
everybodyās loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writerās strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience
5 seconds later
we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism
Of all the people he could choose to sell out to, he chose Worldcoin???
Personally Iād choose bitconnect. Bitconneeeeeeeeect!!!
you must understand
Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat
All the eyeballs
I donāt think I ever had a vibe-check as successful as this, literally never heard about the guy, said he needs to be shoved into a locker based on vibes, an hour later he searches for his own name to respond and gets hammered in replies for supporting The Big Orb. Just a quintessential internet moment.
Natural 20
I suspect Adam was just getting a bit desperate for money. He hasnāt done anything significant since his Adam Ruins Everything days and his pivot to somewhat lefty-union guy on youtube canāt be bringing all that much advertising money.
Unfortunately heās discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.
ājustā?
āunfortunatelyā?
thatās a hell of a lot of leeway being extended for what is very easily demonstrably credulous PR-washing
He looked in the mirror and wept, for there were no more things to ruin.
Hey, it costs a lot to coif up that hair.
Fuuuuuuuuuck. I used to watch that guy.
me too. this heel turn is disappointing as hell, and I suspected fuckery at first, but the video excerpts Rebecca clipped and Conoverās actions on Twitter since then make it pretty clear he did this willingly.
Tired of writing complicated typecasting and transformation code manually? Worry not, Behavior-Inferred Generation: Prompt-Oriented Infrastructure for Simulated Software is here to help. Just let the AI driven BIGPISS Stack do the work for you.
Not even Ken Thompson wrote such high quality code in his prime.
Seriously, donāt generate an array unless explicitly asked for it. Please.
Peak prompt engineering right there.
>lightweight >powered by large language modelslol
Even with the name it had me going for a while. Whoever wrote it is gonna want to have a lawyer on speed dial for the inevitable license violation.
Iām gonna do something now that prob isnāt that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about, but I saw that the European anti-conversion therapy petition is doing badly, and very likely not going to make it. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home But to try and give it a final sprint, I want to ask any of you Europeans, or people with access to networks which include a lot of Europeans to please spread the message and sign it. Thanks! (Iām quite embarrassed The Netherlands has not even crossed 20k for example, shows how progressive we are). Sucks that all the empty of political power petitions get a lot of support and this gets so low, and it ran for ages. But yes, sorry if this breaks the rules (and if it gets swiftly removed it is fine), and thanks if you attempt to help.
Iām gonna do something now that prob isnāt that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about
I consider this both allowed and relevant, though I unfortunately canāt sign it myself
same here, but Iāll pop the link to some euros I know
Thank you.
E: and small victory but at least .nl made it. more than 3k signatures in day in .nl alone, about 50k increase total.
Signed!
Thanks!
Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:
āā¦no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,ā says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.
If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.
Expect the āAI safetyā weenuses to have a giant freakout too.
Whatās the over-under on how many of them voted for Trump lol
Given the libertarian fixation, probably a solid percentage of them. And even the ones that didnāt vote for Trump often push or at least support various mixes of āgrey-tribeā, āpolitics is spidersā, ācenter leftā, etc. kind of libertarian centrist thinking where they either avoided āpoliticalā discussion on lesswrong or the EA forums (and implicitly accepted libertarian assumptions without argument) or they encouraged āreaching across the aisleā or āavoiding polarized discourseā or otherwise normalized Trump and the alt-right.
Like looking at Scottās recent posts on ACX, he is absolutely refusing responsibility for his role in the alt-right pipeline with every excuse he can pull out of his ass.
Of course, the heretics who have gone full e/acc absolutely love these sorts of āpolicyā choices, so this actually makes them more in favor of Trump.
I have not kept up but Scott did write an anti trump article again before the election. So we really cant blame them /s
Reminds me of how Scott Adams hedged in 2016 with all sorts of disclaimers that he wasnāt really a Trump supporter, he was just impressed by a āmaster persuader.ā Now look at the guy.
His blog was wild. Remains sad that the first part of the āDANGER DO NOT READ!!! I will hypnotize you into having the best orgasms of your lifeā blog series was not properly archived.
The Repubs more-or-less renamed themselves Team Skynet with this open attempt to maximise AIās harms, I absolutely think theyāre McFucking Losing Itā¢ right now.
The pro-child-porn caucus.
A German lawyer is upset because open-source projects donāt like it when he pastes chatbot summaries into bug reports. If this were the USA, he would be a debit to any bar which admits him, because the USAās judges have started to disapprove of using chatbots for paralegal work.
He is even politely asked at first āno AI sludge pleaseā which is honestly way more self-restraint than I would have on my maintained projects, but he triples down with a fucking AI-generated changeset.
I just read the github issue comment thread he links, what an entitled chode.
Love that the laughing face reactions to his AI slop laden replies stung so much he ended up posting through it on his blog.
I ended up doing a messy copypasta of the blog through
wc -c: 21574dude was so peeved at getting told no (after continually wasting other peoplesā time and goodwill), he wrote a 21.5KiB screed just barely shy of full-on DARVO (and, frankly, Iām being lenient here only because of perspective (of how bad it couldāve been))
as Soyweiser also put it: a bit of a spelunk around the rest of his blog is also Quite Telling in what you may find
fuck this guy comprehensively, long may his commits be rejected
(e: oh I just saw Soyweiser also linked to that post, my bad)
It gets better btw, nobody mentioned this so far. But all this is over warnings. From what I can tell it still all compiles and works, the only references for the build failing seem to come from the devs, not the issue reporter.
E: Iām a bit tempted to send the guy a email to go āI saw your blog and had a question, was it an error or did it stop compilationā but that would imho cross the line into harassment, esp as to be fair I think I should also divulge where I come from as an outsider which would not go over well with a guy in that kind of mindset (if I have him pegged correctly). The next blogpost would be about me personally.
Ow god that thread. And what is it with ālaw professionalsā like this? I also recall a client in a project who had a law background who was quite a bit of pain to work with. (Also amazing that he doesnāt get that getting a reaction where somebody tries out your very specific problem at all is already quite something, 25k open issues ffs).
E: Also seeing drama like this unfold a few times in the C:DDA development stuff (a long time ago), which prob was done by young kids/adults and not lawyers. My kneejerk reaction is to get rid of people like this from the project. They will just produce more and more drama, and will eventually burn valuable developers out. (E2: also really odd that despite saying he has a lot of exp talking to OSS devs, he thinks the normal remarks are all intended very hostile. ālikely your toolchain setting it or your build scriptā and āIāll unsubscribe from this bug nowā seem to me to be pretty normal reactions, one a first suggestion at what the problem potentially could be, and the other disclosing that he will not be working on the bug (holy shit the (non lawyer) guy being complained about here is prolific. ~100 contribs on average daily last week and an almost whole green year)). Also āI value such professional behavior very muchā tags post with ākorruptionā.
Another edit: Looked more at this guys blog and that are a lot of quite iffy opinions my man. (I noticed that the other post tagged ākorruptionā talks about the how the AfD should be allowed to go against āthe rainbow flagā (I dont know the exact details of the incident), which while yes, legally ok, it still is a bit iffy). And then I scrolled more and saw this: āDeutschland braucht eine konservative Revolution! Warum wir uns ein Beispiel an den USA nehmen solltenā āGermany needs a conservative revolution, why we should follow the USAās exampleā. He is a Musk/Trump/Venture Capitalist Manifesto true believer. Deregulate, stop the ideology build cars and go to space! The Bezos/Zuckerburg revolution. Common sense! āMusk, der Inbegriff des amerikanischen Unternehmergeistesā (If you allow me to react to this in Dutch: Lol). We need modern nuclear power, like how the USA does it (??). Deregulation, AI, humanitarian immigration that also only selects skilled workers, Freedom of speech which includes banning of ācancel cultureā, education reform, tax reform, stop crime, quantum computers, biotech, do more things online. We need to look forward, and change things, and thus a conservative revolution!
There is more stuff like: āDie temporƤre Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD in einer Verfahrensfrage wird das Parteiensystem nicht nachhaltig beschƤdigen.ā, or https://seylaw.blogspot.com/2021/04/der-negerkuss-eine-suspeise-die-gemuter.html (If you donāt speak German and want to listen to the weirdly racist drunking ramblings of a guy at the bar who is ājokingā throw it through google translate).
E: also forgot, lol at him going ājust run these two bash scripts I provided only takes 30 secsā like the devs need not first check of none of these is doing something malicious.
This was not what I had in mind for my German reading practice todayā¦
Yeah took me a lot of effort and double-checking with translate. My German is bad.
the message I get is to preemptively ban user ms178 from any project Iām on
I did some reading of his blog. Yep, prob for the best.
I know itās very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altmanās kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541
The coda is top tier sneer:
Maybe itās useful to know that Altman uses a knife thatās showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it canāt be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste. If thatās any indication of how he runs the company, insolvency cannot be considered too unrealistic a threat.
It starts out seeming like a funny but petty and irrelevant criticism of his kitchen skill and product choices, but then beautifully transitions that into an accurate criticism of OpenAI.
Its definitely petty, but making Altmanās all-consuming incompetence known to the world is something I strongly approve of.
Definitely goes a long way to show why heās an AI bro.
Tante on the hype term āagentic AIā
Despite the snake-oil flavor of Vending-Bench, GeminiPlaysPokemon, and ClaudePlaysPokemon, Iāve found them to be a decent antidote to agentic LLM hype. The insane transcripts of Vending-Bench and the inability of an LLM to play Pokemon at the level of a 9 year old is hard to argue with, and the snake oil flavoring makes it easier to get them to swallow.
I now wonder how that compares to earlier non-LLM AI attempts to create a bot that can play games in general. Used to hear bits of that kind of research every now and then but LLM/genAI has sucked the air out of the room.
In terms of writing bots to play Pokemon specifically (which given the prompting and custom tools written I think is the most fair comparison)ā¦ not very wellā¦ according to this reddit comment a bot from 11 years ago can beat the game in 2 hours and was written with about 7.5K lines of LUA, while an open source LLM scaffold for playing Pokemon relatively similar to claudeās or geminiās is 4.8k lines (and still missing many of the tools Gemini had by the end, and Gemini took weeks of constant play instead of 2 hours).
So basically it takes about the same number of lines written to do a much much worse job. Pokebot probably required relatively more skill to implementā¦ but OTOH, Geminiās scaffold took thousands of dollars in API calls to trial and error develop and run. So you can write bots from scratch that substantially outperform LLM agent for moderately more programming effort and substantially less overall cost.
In terms of gameplay with reinforcement learningā¦ still not very well. Iāve watched this video before on using RL directly on pixel output (with just a touch of memory hacking to set the rewards), it uses substantially less compute than LLMs playing pokemon and the resulting trained NN benefits from all previous training. The developer hadnāt gotten it to play through the whole gameā¦ probably a few more tweaks to the reward function might manage a lot more progress? OTOH, LLMs playing pokemon benefit from being able to more directly use NPC dialog (even if their CoT āreasoningā often goes on erroneous tangents or completely batshit leaps of logic), while the RL approach is almost outright blindā¦ a big problem the RL approach might run into is backtracking in the later stages since they use reward of exploration to drive the model forward. OTOH, the LLMs also had a lot of problems with backtracking.
My (wildly optimistic by sneerclubbing standards) expectations for āLLM agentsā is that people figure out how to use them as a ācreativeā component in more conventional bots and AI approaches, where a more conventional bot prompts the LLM for āplansā which it uses when it gets stuck. AlphaGeometry2 is a good demonstration of this, it solved 42/50 problems with a hybrid neurosymbolic and LLM approach, but it is notable it could solve 16 problems with just the symbolic portion without the LLM portion, so the LLM is contributing some, but the actual rigorous verification is handled by the symbolic AI.
Cool thanks for doing the effort post.
My (wildly optimistic by sneerclubbing standards) expectations for āLLM agentsā is that people figure out how to use them as a ācreativeā component in more conventional bots and AI approaches
This was my feeling a bit how it was used basically in security fields already, with a less focus on the conventional bots/ai. Where they use the LLMs for some things still. But hard to spread fact from PR, and some of the things they say they do seem to be like it isnāt a great fit for LLMs, esp considering what I heard from people who are not in the hype train. (The example coming to mind is using LLMs to standardize some sort of reporting/test writing, while I heard from somebody I trust who has seen people try that and had it fail as it couldnāt keep a consistent standard).
his was my feeling a bit how it was used basically in security fields already
curious about this reference - wdym?
āwe use LLMs for X in our security productsā gets brought up a lot in the risky business podcast promotional parts basically, and it sometimes leaks into the other parts as well. That is basically the times I hear people speak somewhat positively about it. Where they use LLMs (or claim to use) for various things, some I thought were possible but iffy, some impossible, like having LLMs do massive amounts of organizational work. Sorry I canāt recall the specifics. (Iām also behind atm).
Never heard people speak positively about it from the people I know, but they also know Iām not that positive about AI, so the likelyhood they just avoid the subject is non-zero.
E: Schneier is also not totally against the use of llms for example. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/privacy-for-agentic-ai.html quite disappointed. (Also as with all security related blogs nowadays, dont read the comments, people have lost their minds, it always was iffy, but the last few years every security related blog that reaches some fame is filled with madmen).
Ah, I donāt listen to riskybiz because ugh podcast
Schneierās a dipshit well past his prime, though. people should stop listening to that ossified doorstop
Beff back at it again threatening his doxxer. Nitter link
That whole āhaters just like incomplete informationā makes no sense btw. Amazing to get that out of people basically going āwe hate beff for x,y,zā (which I assume happens, as I donāt keep up with this beff stuff, I donāt like these āe/accā people).
what a strange way to sell your grift no one knows what itās for. ābad people want to force me to tell you what it is weāre building.ā
On one hand the AI doomers are convinced heās building a suitcase nuke.
On the other hand, skeptical viewers want more assurance heās not just taking the money and building dumb tweets.
Unrelated to this: man, there should be a parody account called ābased beff jeckā which is just a guy trying to promote beckās vast catalogue as the future of music. Also minus any mention of johnny depp.
Also minus any mention of johnny depp.
Depp v. Heard was my generationās equivalent to the OJ Simpson trial, so chances are heāll end up conspicuous in his absence.
That Keeper AI dating app has an admitted pedo running its twitter PR (Hunter Ash - old username was Psikey, the receipts are under that).
š¶ Certified Keeper guy? Certified pedophile
(the joke presented itself, I had to :P)
