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.)
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPT’s output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubble’s hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months
This also highlights my annoyance with everybody who’s claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobody’s using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are, already trust the tech much more than it warrants
Also constantly annoyed by analysis that assumes the tech works as promised or will work as promised. The fact that it is unreliable and nondeterministic needs to be factored into any analysis you do. But people don’t do that because the resulting conclusion is GRIM as hell
LLMs add volatility and unpredictability to every system they touch, which makes those systems impossible to manage. An economy with pervasive LLM automation is an economy in constant chaos
On a semi-related note, I expect the people who are currently making heavy use of AI will find themselves completely helpless without it if/when the bubble finally bursts, and will probably struggle to find sympathy from others thanks to AI indelibly staining their public image.
(The latter part is assuming heavy AI users weren’t general shitheels before - if they were, AI’s stain on their image likely won’t affect things either way. Of course, “AI bro” is synonymous with “trashfire human being”, so I’m probably being too kind to them :P)
interesting masto thread on doge’s use of AI, from someone who helped build their LLM:
from someone who helped build their LLM
Nice to get a look on the inside from one of the 21st-century Oppenheimers.
lol, that’s too charitable to them, nukes at least work
continuing this tortured analogy for no particular reason:
oppenheimer/sutskever: we finally have a nuke to drop on nazis
groves/?: nazis?
teller/saltman: at long last, we have a chatbot capable of polluting the entire earth and internet
szilard/EY: and that’s why we shouldn’t build it (gets ignored)
teller/saltman: also we need billions of dollars for it and effects will be the same if it’s deployed in backyard
musk would be general ripper i guess, they had no ketamine back then. deepseek is new dubna and both caused diplomatic incidents. thiel would be one of these people that didn’t focus on that thing but instead on other things that make the former work (enablers) that would be missiles and surveillance
lol, that’s too charitable to them, nukes at least work
And Oppie realised the gravity of their invention. And he was trying to end the Second World War with them, not make money by causing untold suffering.
Nukes and AI both represented a new and unique threat capable of causing worldwide devastation, so I’d say the analogy works pretty well.
when bubble pops, chatbots will vanish but nukes will remain for a long time
A Bluesky post by Jamelle Bouie prompted me to reflect on how I resent that my knowledge of toxic nerd deep lore is now socially relevant.
alt text
Breaking Bad meme. Jesse: They always say “Read the Sequences”, right?
Walter White:
Jesse: But the Sequences are all cult shit, like everything Yud says about quantum mechanics
Jesse: It’s all “The scientists are insufficiently Rational™ to see the truth, don’t trust the scientists, trust me instead”
Walter White: Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about
That ‘uses an iq chart from a tabloid mag’ thread reminded me how bad the Lw Rationalists are at Lw Rationality. It is supposed to help you be less biassed, but nope first google hit from a bad source and almost zero community pushback, because it confirms their bias about IQ, and the relative value of fields.
Overcoming Bias (by renaming “bias” into “priors”)
alt text
Drunk woman yelling into man’s ear (meme image). Captioned as though she is speaking:
Their foundational text is a Harry Potter fanfic that supposedly teaches science
but it gets 9th-grade biology wrong by fucking up Punnett squares
I felt this one
r/cursor is the gift that keeps on giving:
check out this extreme value delivery in the “pro” offering that jsfiddle[0] aims to bring to market
[0] -
going by the one comment downthread, haven’t checked it bc no accounthave checked, it shows even without accountWordpress plugins pull this shit too, WP Dark Mode attempts to paywall the custom CSS that’s built into Wordpress
yeah I’ve got some clients with wp in production and wow logging into the admin on those things is an Experience
In other news, IETF 127 (which is being held in November) is facing a boycott months in advance. The reason? Its being held in the United States.
This likely applies to a lot of things, but that would have been unthinkable before the election.
Think Germany and the Uk created travel advisories against the US. ( As we the Dutch are mostly neutral cowards, 20% putins lackey, almost an American vassal state, and very good at ignoring the rest of the world, doubt we will anytime soon).
E: To make it clear this is quite horrible and unthinkable. The MAGA people are moving so fast and the opposition is doing so little (still hoping that like the last war it will be stopped at the courts).
As a Canadian we’re just waiting for the tanks to start running through.
We’re apparently going to get an election April 28th, but is there still going to be a Canada by then? Who knows.So far France and Netherlands have already set up programs to poach american scientists fired during recent ripping copper from the walls, so i wouldn’t say there’s nothing done
A thing which came under criticism here, as while this program is being set up they are also doing budget cuts on universities. So don’t expect much from .nl here. Also our gov is a mess, more interested at putting up border controls (this year they caught 250 people, which they consider a big success for re-instituting border controls). So yeah doubt, esp with Wilders in gov and opposition at the same time.
ya know the Nicole the Fediverse Chick spam? this poster thinks it’s a revenge Joe job:
Nice detective work. The second time I got one of those I figured it resembles the false flag channel ad spammers on IRC. I still wonder occasionally what #superbowl at supermets did for someone to go on a multi-year spamming campaign against them.
Nicole was a bot? I need to make some phone calls… (jk)
Don’t make me tap the sign!
Don’t Date Robots!
Kill them instead
Don’t anthropomorphize, they are not alive, destroy them.
Roundup of the current bot scourge hammering open source projects
https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/
We can add that to the list of things threatening to bring FOSS as a whole crashing down.
Plus the culture being utterly rancid, the large-scale AI plagiarism, the declining industry surplus FOSS has taken for granted, having Richard Stallman taint the whole movement by association, the likely-tanking popularity of FOSS licenses, AI being a general cancer on open-source and probably a bunch of other things I’ve failed to recognise or make note of.
FOSS culture being a dumpster fire is probably the biggest long-term issue - fixing that requires enough people within the FOSS community to recognise they’re in a dumpster fire, and care about developing the distinctly non-technical skills necessary to un-fuck the dumpster fire.
AI’s gonna be the more immediately pressing issue, of course - its damaging the commons by merely existing.
The problem with FOSS for me is the other side of the FOSS surplus: namely corporate encircling of the commons. The free software movement never had a political analysis of the power imbalance between capital owners and workers. This results in the “Freedom 0” dogma, which makes everything workers produce with a genuine communitarian, laudably pro-social sentiment, to be easily coopted and appropriated into the interests of capital owners (for example with embrace-and-extend, network effects, product bundling, or creative backstabbing of the kind Google did to Linux with the Android app store). LLM scrapers are just the latest iteration of this.
A few years back various groups tried to tackle this problem with a shift to “ethical licensing”, such as the non-violent license, the anti-capitalist software license, or the do no harm license. While license-based approaches won’t stop capitalists from using the commons to target immigrants (NixOS), enable genocide (Meta) or bomb children (Google), this was in my view worthwhile as a rallying cry of sorts; drawing a line in the sand between capital owners and the public. So if you put your free time on a software project meant for everyone and some billionaire starts coopting it, you can at least make it clear it’s non-consensual, even if you can’t out-lawyer capital owners. But these ethical licenses initiatives didn’t seem to make any strides, due to the FOSS culture issue you describe; traditional software repositories didn’t acknowledge or make any infrastructure for them, and ethical licenses would still be generically “non-free” in FOSS spaces.
(Personally, I use FOSS operating systems for 26 years now; I’ve given up on contributing or participating in the “community” a long time ago, burned out by all the bigotry, hostility, and First World-centrism of its forums.)
In lesser corruption news, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been caught distributing burner phones to California-based CEOs. These are people that likely already have Newsom’s personal and business numbers, so it’s not hard to imagine that these phones are likely to facilitate extralegal conversations beyond the existing
briberylegitimate business lobbying before the Legislature. With this play, Newsom’s putting a lot of faith into his sexting game.Gavin Newsom has also allegedly been worked behind the scenes to kill pro-transgender legislation; and on his podcast he’s been talking to people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and teasing anti-trans talking points.
I guess this all makes sense if he’s going to go for a presidential bid: try to appeal to the fascists (it won’t work and also to heck with him) while also laying groundwork for the sort of funding a presidential bid needs.
If I was a Californian CEO and received a burner phone I’d text back “Thanks for the e-waste :<” but maybe that’s why I’m not a CEO.
When this all was revealed his popularity also tanked apparently. Center/left now dislikes him, the right doesn’t trust him. So another point for the ‘don’t move right on human rights you dummies’ brigade.
Tbh, weird. If I were a hyper-capitalist, CA-based CEO, I would take the burner phone as an insult. I’d see it as a lack of faith in the capture of the US. Who needs plausible deniability when you just own the fucking country?
it’s weird and lowkey insulting imo. let’s assume that for some bizarre reason tech ceo needs a burner phone to call governor newsom: do you think i can’t get that myself, old man? i’d assume it’s bugged or worse
or worse
Man, I’m getting tired of these remakes.
the phones seem to serve no practical purpose. they already have his number and I don’t think you can conclude much from call logs. so suppose they are symbolic. what he would be communicating is that he’s so fully pliant that he is willing to do things there is no possible excuse for, and not even for real benefit, just to suck up to them. the opposite of plausible deniability
Even worse, he got caught handing them out. And even with all that, I’d expect a tech CEO to just go ‘why not use signal?’ or ‘what threat profile do you think we have?’ (sorry I keep coming back to this, it is just so fucking weird, like ‘everything I know I learned from television shows’ kind of stuff)
Brings to mind the sopranos scene of the two dudes trying to shake down a starbucks or starbucks analogue for protection money
Governor Saul Goodsom.
Update on the Vibe Coder Catastrophetm: he’s killed his current app and seems intent to vibe code again:
Personally, I expect this case won’t be the last “vibe coded” app/website/fuck-knows-what to get hacked to death - security is virtually nonexistent, and the business/techbros who’d be attracted to it are unlikely to learn from their mistakes.
Here’s my audio/video dispatch about framing tech through conservation of energy to kill the magical thinking of generative ai and the like podcast ep: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/968a91dd/kill-magic-thinking video ep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLHmtYWzHz8
A lesswrong declares,
social scientists are typically just stupider than physical scientists (economists excepted).
As a physicist, I would prefer not receiving praise of this sort.
The post to which that is a comment also says a lot of silly things, but the comment is particularly great.
That list (which isn’t properly sourced) seems to combine both high academic fields with non academic fields so I have no idea what this list is trying to prove even. (Also, see the fakeness of IQ and there is pressure for ‘smart’ people to go into stem etc etc). I wouldn’t base my argument on a quick google search which gives you information from a tabloid site. Wonder why he didn’t link to his source directly? More from this author: “We met the smartest Hooters girl in the world who has a maths degree and wants to become a pilot” (The guy is now a researcher at ‘Hope not Hate’ (not saying that to mock the guy or the organization, just found it funny, do hope he feels a bit of ‘oh, I should have made different decisions a while back, wish I could delete that’))
The ignorance about social science on display in that article is wild. He seems to think academia is pretty much a big think tank, which I suppose is in line with the extent of the rationalists’ intellectual curiosity.
On the IQ tier list, I like the guy responding to the comment mentioning “the stats that you are citing here”. Bro.
lmao, economists probably did deserve to catch this stray
Yeah, the exclusion of the dismal science got a chuckle out of me.
Are economists considered physical scientists? I’ve read it as “social scientists are dumb except for economists”. Which fits my prejudice for econo-brained less wrongers.
No, it’s just praise from lesswrong counts as a slight.
Yeah prob important to note that one of the lw precursor blogs was from an economist, so that is why they consider them one of the good fields. Important to not call out your own tribe.
Imagine a perfectly spherical scientist…
or uniform duncity?
And high pomposity
Razer claims that its AI can identify 20 to 25 percent more bugs compared to manual testing, and this can reduce QA time by up to 50 percent as well as cost savings of up to 40 percent
as usual this is probably going to be only the simplest shit, and I don’t even want to think of the secondary downstream impacts from just listening to this shit without thought will be
The secret is to have cultivated a codebase so utterly shit that even LLMs can make it better by just randomly making stuff up
At least they don’t get psychic damage from looking at the code
Marginally related, but I was just served a YouTube ad for chewing gum (yes, I’m too lazy to setup ad block).
“Respawn, by Razer. They didn’t have gaming gum at Pompeii, just saying.”
I think I felt part of my frontal lobe die to that incomprehensible sales pitch, so you all must be exposed to it as well.
If I had to judge Razer’s software quality based on what little I know about them, I’d probably raise my eyebrows because they ship some insane 600+ MiB driver with a significant memory impact with their mice and keyboards that’s needed to use basic features like DPI buttons and LED settings, when the alternative to that is a 900 kiB open source driver which provides essentially the same functionality.
And now their answer to optimization is to staple a chatbot onto their software? I think I pass.
Well the use of stuff like fuzzers has been a staple for a long time so ‘compared to manual testing’ is doing some work here.
Isn’t this what got crowdstrike in trouble?
not quite the same but I can see potential for a similar clusterfuck from this
also doesn’t really help how many goddamn games are running with rootkits, either
TV Tropes got an official app, featuring an AI “story generator”. Unsurprisingly, backlash was swift, to the point where the admins were promising to nuke it “if we see that users don’t find the story generator helpful”.
Thinking that trying to sell LLMs as a creative tool at this point into the bubble will not create backlash is just delusional, lmao.
At this point, using AI in any sort of creative context is probably gonna prompt major backlash, and the idea of AI having artistic capabilities is firmly dead in the water.
On a wider front (and to repeat an earlier prediction), I suspect that the arts/humanities are gonna gain some begrudging respect in the aftermath of this bubble, whilst tech/STEM loses a significant chunk.
For arts, the slop-nami has made “AI” synonymous with “creative sterility” and likely painted the field as, to copy-paste a previous comment, “all style, no subtance, and zero understanding of art, humanities, or how to be useful to society”
For humanities specifically, the slop-nami has also given us a nonstop parade of hallucination-induced mishaps and relentless claims of AGI too numerous to count - which, combined with the increasing notoriety of TESCREAL, could help the humanities look grounded and reasonable by comparison.
(Not sure if this makes sense - it was 1AM where I am when I wrote this)
New piece from Brian Merchant: DOGE’s ‘AI-first’ strategist is now the head of technology at the Department of Labor, which is about…well, exactly what it says on the tin. Gonna pull out a random paragraph which caught my eye, and spin a sidenote from it:
“I think in the name of automating data, what will actually end up happening is that you cut out the enforcement piece,” Blanc tells me. “That’s much easier to do in the process of moving to an AI-based system than it would be just to unilaterally declare these standards to be moot. Since the AI and algorithms are opaque, it gives huge leeway for bad actors to impose policy changes under the guide of supposedly neutral technological improvements.”
How well Musk and co. can impose those policy changes is gonna depend on how well they can paint them as “improving efficiency” or “politically neutral” or some random claptrap like that. Between Musk’s own crippling incompetence, AI’s utterly rancid public image, and a variety of factors I likely haven’t factored in, imposing them will likely prove harder than they thought.
(I’d also like to recommend James Allen-Robertson’s “Devs and the Culture of Tech” which goes deep into the philosophical and ideological factors behind this current technofash-stavaganza.)
Can’t wait for them to discover that the DoL was created to protect them from labor
