Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
Just had a conversation about AI where I sent a link to Eddy Burbackās ChatGPT Made Me Delusional video. They clarified that no, itās only smart people who are more productive with AI since they can filter out all the bad outputs, and only dumb people would suffer all the negative effects. I donāt know what to fucking say.
Show them the RationalWiki page where Scott Alexander promised that he could only absorb the smart racism from crazy bloggers and ignore the stupid stuff, Elizabeth Sandifer warned him this was like drinking sewer water with just one filter, and then Alexander posted about how all of a sudden he was feeling more conservative and maybe the things he was reading were connected to that
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander (also archive.is and other backups)
it sucks when you learn a thing like that about a person. itās like blowing an efuse: generally one way, not easy to go back without a lot of work, and you may not want to bother
Assuming they have any amount of good faith, I would make the illustration that using AI is like dunning-kruger effect on steroids. Itās especially dangerous when you think know enough, but donāt know enough to know that you donāt.
What you say is something on this note: Oh wow I have this amazing investment opportunity for someone like you, nobody has seen it yet, but with your intelligence and business acumen, we will get rich quickā¦
Actually the emperorās clothes look amazing if youāre smart enough to see them.
I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week.
FUCKIN
In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesnāt take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I donāt know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really arenāt that hard, you know? That belief eventually led him to make a public challenge that he could beat Magnus Carlsen in chess after a month of practice. The WSJ picked up on this, and decided to sponsor an actual match with him and Carlsen. They wrote a fawning article about it, but it did little to stop his enormous public humiliation in the chess community. Hereās a reddit thread discussing that incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nb5b1k/chess_one_month_to_beat_magnus_how_an_obsessive/
As a sidenote, I found it really funny that he thought his best strategy was literally to train a neural network and ā¦ memorize all the weights and run inference with mental calculations during the game. Of course, on the day of the match, the strategy was not successful because his algorithm āran out of time calculatingā. How are so many techbros not even good at tech? Come on, thatās the one thing youāre supposed to know!
Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.
alt text
A screenshot of a tweet by yougov, a uk-based organisation, showing the results of a survey which say
One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams
Include in the screenshot is a response by longwall26,
Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. Sheād be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly
Yea good luck, I am a mediocre white man and the providence didnāt even grant me the confidence.
He will train a neural network on GM games, then memorize the algorithm and compute the moves in his head.
The Rationalists.
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really arenāt that hard, you know?
lmao, whatās his lesswrong username?
So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?
Is there already a term for the extreme opposite of impostor syndrome? Techbro syndrome maybe?
āTechbro syndromeā would be a perfect name for it, honestly.
Hey, remember Grokipedia?
Its article on Newtonās law of gravity is, like, 50% rendering errors by weight.
I saw (because for some reason grokipedia is now high in google search) that grok calls Roko (from rokos basilisk) pseudo anonymous, but isnt he just using full name and face on twitter? Such a weird small error (and change to the Wikipedia page). Didnt click the link obv.
Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms
Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation āfeatureā, guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didnāt get him or didnāt deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! Itās such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.
Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:
Itās indeed the case that I havenāt been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if itād had Twitterās options for turning off commenting entirely.
So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I havenāt been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.
Uh, considering his recent twitter postā¦ this sure is something. Also" āit does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audienceā no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).
From this (indirectly) I learned that they got wordpress.com to sponsor their āInkhaven Residencyā. Feh.
ooooh photographic matthew embarking upon his f*shtech turn out loud at last?
Maybe? Or maybe they just had the right social connections to sell āblogging residencyā as a thing that should be supported for some unspecified amount? I couldnāt find any more details.
Automattic has a budget for sponsoring events https://automattic.com/events/ but a web host based in San Francisco does not sponsor Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, and Gwern by accident.
Small forum tyrants
interesting writeup on detecting ai music (newgrounds bans ai content)
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-moderation/how-to-detect-ai-audio
The Audio Mods are doing Godās work keeping the portal slop-free. Its good to know thereās at least one place where human-made work is still valued.
Meanwhile in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, they published a deluxe illustrated version of A Feast for Crows which is blatantly obviously āAIā āartā, Like itās bad generic souless fantasy āartā where you often canāt even recognise which character itās meant to depict. And now the responsible art director is in damage control mode, claiming that theyād ever use āAIā and unsubtly blaming the hired āartistā (one Jeffrey R. McDonald), even though it takes like 15 seconds to spot that these illustrations are completely inappropriate for the book. It feels like they hired the cheapest they could and didnāt care about anything else than cost-cutting.
And behold, the publisher is on record saying theyād do exactly that:
Mr. Malaviyaās primary goal is growth. After the collapse of the Simon & Schuster deal, it became clear Penguin Random House could not buy its way out of the decline, so much of its growth will have to come organically ā by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees ā¦ Last year, the company laid off about 60 people and offered voluntary buyouts for longtime employees.
Some of the fan backlash with samples of the āartā, if you must hurt your eyes: thread 1, thread 2.
Other than warped architecture, wonky perspectives, Escherian objects etc., the characters donāt even look like or dress in the colours of the chapters theyāre āIllustratingā. Those who know the fandom know how important heraldry is for the series, thereās no sigils in the illustrations and people wear the wrong colours, etc. This is the series were a noblewoman showing up to a party in a green dress rather than black was a declaration of war. Tywin Lannister, famously bald, is depicted in his funeral with long hair and wearing a crown, you know, to illustrate the passage that says he never wore a crown in his life. He also looks identical to King Viserys from the House of the Dragon TV series. His daughter Cersei is shown mourning him with a blue dress, as in the same character whose house colours are red-gold, in the same chapter that states sheās wearing funeral black.
At some point a character has a crucifix on the wall
The silver lining is that the swift fan backlash, even the very unconvincing attempt at denial, are further evidence of how āAIā āartā has firmly established itself as synonymous with bad/lazy/inadequate/cheating the public. Which means actual artists are far from obsolete, If you can draw for real youāll be in demand whenever someone wants actual quality in anything.
Since weāre never getting Winds of Winter anyway and theyāll have to keep cashing on calendars and guides and new illustrated editions, hopefully the backlash was big enough that they learned their lesson and will pay for actual art next time.
I expect her methodology was great but I donāt actually know what it was.
Science!
As background: the Kaufmann report that prompted all this is a load of absolute garbage. As discussed fairly extensively on social media (example).
As for Aellaās addition: oh god why did I read this?
The methodology was apparently running a āBig Kink Surveyā which was ātrending on TikTokā and had āvery good SEOā. I suppose this is the right data needed to draw conclusions about what rate 14 year olds are transgender.
The whole this is also full of weird gender essentialism (I never want to read the word ābiofemalesā again).
I think this is evidence for an increasing split between afabs and amabs
But donāt worry sheās very pro trans (JK Rowling sense):
Despite having been cancelled by the more radical subgroups of trans people, Iām nevertheless very pro trans.
Which is why she wants to make a massive reach and be concerned that maybe trans people are getting too much healthcare:
I think itās unlikely that 11.5% of afabs are actually trans men in a way that would last through adulthood. If my data is measuring any real trend in the world, and if that trend meaningfully increases permanent changes to bodies, then this high percentage might actually be quite bad.
ā¦ Nevermind that her data doesnāt even touch on stuff like rate of HRT, or regret rate; these āconcernsā are all pulled out of thin air.
(I also lament that this makes things really rough for the trans men for whom this is not a fad, and for whom earlier transitioning would be a huge quality of life improvement.)
Like dear cis people are you OK? Is society not transphobic enough for you? :'(
Are you worried that if a teenager is allowed to explore their gender a little that it will cause a bunch of precocious little cis girls to accidentally glance at a vial of testosterone the wrong way and grow a fantastic beard overnight?
When I started estrogen (later than I should have and fuck you Idaho) I was absolutely 100% sure that it was the right thing to try, and that Iād stop if I didnāt like it. Never looked back (estrogen is tasty and I encourage everyone to try it at least once), and I had years before there was much you could call permanent.
But of course itās not the āpermanent changes to bodiesā that made me a 6ft tall amazonian beauty that people like Aella are concerned about. āWhat if we accidentally trans one of the cis??ā fundamentally assumes it is OK to accidentally withhold critical medicine from countless trans people just to be āsafeā.
āWhat if we accidentally trans one of the cis??ā
They always like to dress up these statements as medical concern. But it shines through that, despite whatever the person may express otherwise, deep down they think being trans is not really acceptable. Maybe partially acceptable at best, but should be avoided if possible. Very similar thought model to classics like āoh Iām fine with gay people, but what if my child sees two men holding hands and then wants to try it too??ā
cursed thought
ā¦is that yud for āsheās refused to fuck meā?
cursed corollary to Poe's Law
Yud being secretly contemptuous of Aella is indistinguishable from Yud being horny for Aella
Many such cases
Aella in the comments: Iām just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work
I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.
Woman good at science? Must have a man brain. Send tweet.
Oops forgot to be weird about jews lemme amend that white jews can also be smart even if they have girl brains.
Pepper
That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.
not a single serious person in that thread lol. also is rationalist castleās isp blocking scihub? weird that that libertarian crowd didnāt hear about it
Why am I getting James Somerton flashbacks
She canāt tell the difference between āthe people who wrote the paperā and āthe group that runs the website that hosts a copy of the abstract of the paperā. This speaks to a plentiful lack of curiosity. It reminds me of crank e-mails and sensationalist clickbait pages that say everything on the arXiv is research from Cornell University.
yeah and Iām a brain surgeon because sometimes when I pick my nose I go a little too deep
second take from me. Hereās the full tweet:
one of Earthās top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work, open for all to read in a widely read venue on that science topic, where it will receive far more peer scrutiny than any lesser forum provides
Iām going to read this as a joke because he didnāt end it with a period, and he is secretly beefing with aella
Yud, Aella and Hossenfelder make me want to defend modern academic institutions. Granted, thatās not nearly as impressive as Scott Aaronson getting me to sympathize with a cop, but itās still an achievement.
After moving out at 17, Aella briefly attended college in northern Idaho but ran out of money after a semester.
Aella already has better credentials than EY
How briefly do you have to attend college to still be this clueless about how citations work?
well itāll become apparent during first attempts at writing a paper that requires them, but it can be a very long time if subject is dense enough
Ah more anti-intellectualism from the proto cult leader.
This does mean, as the standards are so low, that we all have a phd on Rationalism.
Ahh the missing period, an even worse tone indicator compared to /hj (youtube).
Both follow-up tweets end in periods, so I guess he transitioned to being completely serious 1/3 of the way through? Or maybe a missing period means a joke, a present period means heās serious, and partial periodization means that heās typing with one hand.
Glad I clicked the link, I was pretty sure hj meant handjob.
I am still avoiding YouTube, so I guess āhjā will mean handjob forever.
Itās clearly meant to mean /HalleluJah
Iām not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And āno worse than the average psychology paperā is not high praise.
PR for AI slop generated DWARF support for ocaml. Expectation: doesnāt work
Reality: replicates existing support from another project including attribution to the author.
Wow highly recommend reading all his comments where he doubles down on how everyone else is in the wrong (for wanting maintainable code that isnāt a legal liability) while he is in the right (for being brave and bold enough to type prompts into an LLM to create code that he wonāt stand behind).
Itās almost as if he went in there looking for a fight.
Lool, look at these two quotes next to eachother:
One caveat, though: even if I didnāt type the code myself, I own it ā and itās my responsibility now.
vs.
Beats me. AI decided to do so [write the copyright as someone else] and I didnāt question it.
Ah yes, the classic open source guy stance of āyou get to praise me publicly but direct criticism or problems to [over there]ā
The purpose of AI is theft, exhibit ā
Itās not where I obtained this PR but how.
the inability to follow a through b through c here isā¦.something
The statistics back up his unease. Buy-now-pay-later services have exploded to 91.5 million users in the United States
with the rapidly checked population number I found (340.1m), thatās 26.9%
ā¦, with 25% using the services to finance their groceries as of earlier this year
perfectly normal, Iām sure nothing can go wrong here. and this wonāt be tied in with just the recent SNAP shit, either
whatās the german word for āthe feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming upā?
most BNPL loans arenāt reported to credit bureaus, creating what regulators call āphantom debt.ā That means other lenders canāt see when someone has taken out five different BNPL loans across multiple platforms. The credit system is flying blind.
Only good things can come of this.
right? for like 18~24mo now, the autoplag āboomā and the fucked up neo-credit-arrangements in real estate (again) have been my primary guesses for how this shit is all going to up in vapour
and then suddenly a surprise third entrant!
whatās the german word for āthe feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming upā?
The word you are looking for is āTjaā.
I was mostly riffing on the Internet Meme of āwhatās the german word forā¦ā but you are not wrong
Itās so weird to see Klarna on that list, because I keep forgetting Klarna is now a huge juggernaut, not the little service that every etailer here in Sweden uses for checkout services
letās hope that the outcomes of this helps them become a weeeee teensy lāil curious financial service again š¶
AchterbahnschraubeninkrementallƶsungsauĆerplanmƤĆigedekonstruktionsgefĆ¼hl
no bolts!
but otherwise? I mean, pretty close.
(yes I did upvote this post)
wasnāt sure if it was āschraubenā or ābolzenā that were used in roller coasters š
Iād be lying if I told you I knew! my most interesting interaction with technisch-mechanisch deutsche has been through the lens of shorthand column names in an oracle db (where truncated col name length limit caused applied). no, not kidding. that was an interesting project more ways than one!
(very Choose Your Own Adventure db schema too, and I suspect Iām still among the only in country who have strong knowledge about it today)
My clientsā billing systems now send me invoice factoring spam every month, which is basically the same trade as a payday loan or bnpl. I worry how many other freelancers are clicking that button and how this has become so normalized, itās bad enough out there already, without paying 2.5% per month.
jesus, that seems insidious
and unfortunately I speak enough ghoul that I suspect I know how thatās being sold, too! a way for companies to āmanage outflowā? and perhaps a dash of ācultivating a reputable $x baseā in there too?
nvm that these intermediation fuckers are going the standard Bridgetroll[0] route too, which is also a problem
[0] - rentseeker
invoice factoring
Is that somewhat new in the US? I recall seeing ads for it here in Sweden for 15 years or more.
For me, I started noticing Taulia spam via a clients SAP last Jan, and Bill.com started doing similar a few months after. I think the new part is that these are now integrated into the platforms, like how Klarna bnpl is directly integrated into the ecom storefronts.
itās worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and itās 78% of them (267M), according to first random source iāve found, so itās closer to 34%
from what i understand, american anomaly is that they take debt like that even when not strictly necessary in order to pump up their credit scores which might be useful later, but even then, 9% of population relies on going to loan shark the app in order to get food, absolutely nothing to look at here, move along,
And most stats are flying under the radar because the Trump administration has made it impossible to get reliable data on things. But at least we live in a rational market system that optimally allocates resources, so Iām sure the decision-makers will handle this situation wisely andā
Not wanting to be left behind, more established finance companies are racing toward BNPL now, too ā¦ What started as a niche checkout option is becoming embedded financial infrastructure.
Morris sees this shift happening everywhere. āWhen I talk to some of these software companies that are now embedding payments, lending and insurance,ā he told me, āand you say, āOkay, five years from now, where are you going to make your money?āā the answer surprises even veteran investors like him. āThey say, āYou know what, I think Iām going to make more money in embedded finance than I am in my core software.āā
Continued Morris: āIt starts off as a nice little add-on, but when the powers of the marketplace drive down the returns in the core business, itās often these financing businesses that have the greatest longevity and market power.
āIāve made a self-licking lollipop so the fun times will never end and I see no way this could ever go wrong.ā
itās worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and itās 78% of them (267M), according to first random source iāve found, so itās closer to 34%
yep, entirely correct. and the numbers will also only reflect for those that are loantakers/account holders (which implies an even smaller number), because only one person needs to take out the bnpl to groceries it up for family support
I just didnāt have the time to dig into the numbers properly this morning when I posted
itās all bad. just every single fucking part.
I wanted to highlight this post from our own @self: https://mas.to/@zzt/115545758401562713
the feeling of launching an unreal tournament 2004 server by telling ucc-bin, the unrealscript compilation environment that knows itself as UnrealOS, to evaluate the editable scripts that made up the core of unreal tournament, its rich web admin interface, and the ecosystem of tools and facilities that make it nicer to host than quake, and remembering that unrealscript and self-hosted servers are both long dead and all this tech is used to make kids gamble in fortnite now
betrayal, thatās it
I hardly ever ran a server, as during the era I lived out in the country and could only get barely-capable rural wireless broadband, but it is galling what Epic threw away, especially now that theyāve memory-holed UT2K3/2K4 off of storefronts like GOG. It was perhaps the first commercial game I remember having a completely seamless cross-platform experience with, including Linux. As long as I had my CD key and the data files handy, it didnāt matter what OS I was installing on, just download the installer and go. I remember provisioning entire LAN parties and having a blast (and then reusing the CD key didnāt matter because we were partying out in the country with no chance of a good online experience anyway). Glad I was able to snag it from GOG before delisting, because I donāt know what happen to my original Mac DVD.
at://did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/app.bsky.feed.post/3m5z5da4mvk24
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/post/3m5z5da4mvk24
Windscribeās twitter account being transphobic.
Free speech can he expensive for dipshits.
@cityofangelle.bsky.social comments:
HAHAAHHAHAAHHAAA
Anthropic has posted two jobs, both paying $200K+.
FOR WRITERS. (Looks like a policy/comms hybrid.)
ANTHROPIC.
IS WILLING TO PAY HALF A MILLION A YEAR.
FOR WRITERS.
Whatsamatter boys, canāt your plagiarism machine make a compelling case for you?
LOL. LMAO, even.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Apparently theyāre doing the same with video cutters, offering fairly well paid jobs for people to try and make themselves redundant.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 Maybe they just need to be *really* good at writing prompts.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 įįįįįįįįįįįįįįį
Does that represent the š¤ (pinching fingers or ātinyā) hand gesture that makes some Korean men really mad?
found this sneer-y blog post prompted by some linkedin lunatic posting his āagentic cockpitā
Can I delete the Chromeās OptGuideOnDeviceModel safely? Itās taking up 4GB
. . .
I also founds mentions of bunch of various flags you can potentially disable to turn the whole feature off, e.g. chrome://flags/#optimization-guide-on-device-model - but Iāve seen at least 5 other ones mentioned in several sources, with various people claiming for each that they donāt work . . .
Now Chrome can hog your VRAM too. Yay
Donāt worry if you only have 8GB and need the other half for anything, Chrome will probably relinquish it. This is very intelligent, as all the browser has to do is simply load another 4GB file from disk the next time you do anything.
Armin Ronacher, creator of the vastly popular Python Flask and Jinja framworks, comes out in defence of DHH, saying his racist diatribe about the ethnic make up of London was in fact not racist, and the state of Israel, that itās apparently fine that it remains an oppressive ethnostate in order to āpreserve its particular cultural identityā.
Yep, heās been saying bad shit for a while (18~24mo Iām aware of), glad more people are seeing it though
also a massive massive promptfondler
yup
Indeed. I left a note on one of his blogposts correcting a common misconception (that itās āall just tokensā and the model canāt tell when you clearly substituted an unlikely word, common among RAG-heavy users) and he showed up to clarify that he merely wanted to āstart an interesting conversationā about how to improve his particular chatbots.
Itās almost like thereās a sequence: passing the Turing test, sycophancy, ELIZA effect, suggestibility, cognitive offloading, shared delusions, psychoses, conspiracy theories, authoritarian-follower personality traits, alt-right beliefs, right-wing beliefs. A mechanical Iago.
time for me to learn something else, then; what do people use these days for microservices instead of flask? fastapi?
EDIT:
oh come the fuck on google AIO
I finally became fed up with it and got around to writing a uBlock Origin filter that removes the AI overview, the AI results in the āPeople also askā section, and especially the AI results in the āThings to knowā section that usually covers health and drug information. There is literally so much AI bloat taking up the search page itās crazy.
