Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 12 May 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 12 May 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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.
as previously discussed, the rabbit r1 turns out to be (gasp) just an android app.
in a twist no one saw coming, the servers running "rabbit os" report to just be running Ubuntu, and the "large action model" that was supposed to be able to watch humans use interfaces and learn how to use them, turns out to just be a series of hardcoded places to click in Playwright.
Google has supplemented their AI customer service backend with a just as stupid AI front-end. They're pushing you to make refund claims with "Google AI". It's a chat bot, and you're pushed to use it to see the status of your refunds. Clicking a button and viewing a table of refund requests is apparently too Web 2.0, so instead you can ask a chatbot to pull up that status of your refunds one...by...one. It's the second least useful use of a chatbot I've ever seen personally, right behind the chatbot they put into my office's seating software.
Nick Bostrom's advertising his new book about what if AIs let us sleep until noon and wouldn't that be grand.
Also call me paranoid, but "A winter wonderland glittering with possibilities for discovery and play" sounds exactly like the sort of thing an LLM might generate.
Also there was a whole thing about how CGTP tends to use 'delve' a lot because it's been RLHF'd by speakers of nigerian english, so yeah.
Outright millenarianism
Bostrom yearns for retirement/unemployment the book.
someone re-invented email-threading. It's billed as a way to have "long and complex discussions." Their prototypical example? Yud's utterly pointless thoughts on imaginary scenarios conjured up by his immense brain. Orange site is skeptical and yearns for 4chan instead.
The feature I am looking forward to the most in comminication apps is having a machine learning model listen to those "quick calls", generate summary and action items and post them right back in the thread. You get the benefits of both worlds that way.
Oh, you do, do you?
Announced a year ago. AFAIK nothing like it actually exists yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE
Fractal sealions
This sneer sponsored by me getting surgery last Friday and being extremely sore
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of-memoryless-lucidity
Surgery is the perfect opportunity to test one's "Am I in the matrix?" mental sigils and other fun rationalist mind games!
Several years ago, I was thinking about worthwhile precautions to take against strange scenarios and wanted a way to defend against erasure of my short-term memory, e.g. by the CIA or alien abductions.
Of course someone made a follow up post encouraging readers to experiment with dangerously large drug dosages for giggles.
This is presumably the sort of thing which is tough to get past an institutional review board these days, but easy to do yourself over the weekend with a friend or two.
Little mention that this might be a terrible idea, but at least someone pointed it out in the comments
Important notice: benzodiazepines are serious business: benzo withdrawals are amongst the worst experiences a human can go through, and combinations of benzos with alcohol, barbiturates, opioids or tricyclic antidepressants are very dangerous: benzos played a role in 31% of the estimated 22,767 deaths from prescription drug overdose in the United States.
Lesswrong and drug abuse. A match made in heaven.
Jesus, that second post.
[Benzos are] not only a great amnestic, it’s also apparently one of the most heavily prescribed drug classes historically, and used recreationally - which puts very strong lower bounds on the drug’s safety in practice, and means it’s probably readily available.
Yeah, because no widely used drug has ever turned out to be harmful, right?! Right?! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to huff some glue. After all, glue huffing is widely practiced recreationally - by kids, even - so it's probably safe, right?
that's a very carefully worded comment. there's a reason why benzos were commonly prescribed in the past (but less so now)
it sounds like what they're trying to do is Wada test, for no particular reason, with zero knowledge what they're trying to do or what tools do they need for that
about everything what could they learn from that is already described in psychiatry and psychology textbooks, but it's too hard for homeschooled first-principlers like them
Nothing illustrates the difference between rational and Rationalist than ignoring the advice of trained professionals and instead roping in a SO to help perform ad-hoc personality tests. Dude's gonna need to work to keep that girlfriend coz it's unlikely he's going to find someone else willing to put up with his shit.
we have mkultra at home
on the other hand, that's just speedrunning being jordan peterson
on the third hand, our very good friend apparently never had been drunk
on the fourth hand, our very good friend also didn't clock that maybe his ability to assess his own mental state was disturbed (it was) (severely)
on the fifth hand, this is an effect of many drugs, iv line suggests midazolam but maybe ketamine was an option. neither are exactly easily available for regular civilian (other benzos are)
first principling that benzos are completely safe, yeah way to go, 10/10. also not their first rodeo, but lwers on drugs would be megaminds on adderal, at least that's what could be noticed previously
Several years ago, I was thinking about worthwhile precautions to take against strange scenarios and wanted a way to defend against erasure of my short-term memory, e.g. by the CIA or alien abductions.
What...
Makes you wonder if LW just attracts people with weird paranoid thoughts, or that you get more weird paranoid thoughts due to being a lot on lesswrong. Right
This is another example of how LW is a cult, if some other commenter had replied like this you’d expect the reply to be ignored but the respondent is of the same tribe, so author has no problem exposing them (and himself, by extension) as cranks to an appreciative audience (us).
Ohio State commencement speaker was grifter Chris Pan, who tossed a suggestion to buy bitcoin into the middle of his speech, got audibly booed. Full speech (around 1:33:45)
Molly has some fun details on Musk's hell site.
More fun detail's from Ohio's The Rooster (definitely read this one!)
From the notes, it starts with normal inspirational speech garbage-- life pro-tip: do not repeat stupid parables saying that blind people have limited perspectives to large audiences-- then bitcoin comes up in the middle:
I know this might feel polarizing but I encourage you to keep an open mind. Right now, I see Bitcoin as a very misunderstood asset class. It is decentralized and finite which means no government can print more at will. In the early days, the exchanges for Bitcoin were prone to hacks and fraud. But this issue has been solved with the recent launch of bitcoin ETFs backed by the world’s 2 largest asset managers, BlackRock and Fidelity. And you can hold these ETFs in your retirement accounts just like you hold the S&P 500.
I’d love to do a demo for you: So here are 4 quarters. Inflation after 4 years has turned this into 3 quarters of purchasing power. Now if we apply some innovation and open-mindedness… Investing in your financial literacy will unlock so much freedom and possibilities for you.
University President Carter holding up a "bitcoin" in the part of the speech about the quarters
Ayahuasca Intelligence
I often thing back about the smug coiners mocking the TSA agent looking for physical bitcoins on a pro bitcoin person, when they do stuff like put bitcoin data in actual coins or make bitcoin coins.
(It does amaze me a little bit none of them seem to got that this was actually bad for bitcoin, as this just shows how hard to understand it all is for normal people, and them doing it themselves is just confusing more people intentionally)
His Twitter bio says that he's "helping a billion people." That's quite a flex!
Here's molly white's thread on nitter.
The slatestar subreddit is doing its regular so what's up with all the racists constantly crawling out of the woodwork around here surprised pikachu thread, in response to Scotty doing Hanania Week in the substack.
You can like a thinker without endorsing all of their beliefs, even if their beliefs are evil. Why do people like Schmitt and Heidegger even though they were fascists? Or Foucault given his views on the age of consent? I agree that Hanania's views are relevant context, but I think it's fine to write a book review that doesn't try to analyse the author's motivations or the book's place in a wider political context.
Hanania is clearly analogous to Foucault and Heidegger, and also is it even wrong to completely divorce a work from all context.
I think Scott was simply more interested in writing an article on arguments aginst civil rights law than an article on whether Hanania is engaged in an insidious project to smuggle rascist ideas into the mainstream via his legal arguments, and frankly I find that kind of review more interesting too. Perphaps this is irresponsible, but at the end of the day Scott is a modestly influential blogger that just likes to write about things he finds interesting.
uwu smolbean blogger with absolutely no agenda besides the pursuit of truth and civility strikes again.
Scott is of the opinion that being able to maintain peaceable discourse with people who you deeply disagree with on political issues is an important feature of society which we shouldn't readily make exceptions to.
"Scott being nice to racists and reviewing their books positively actually means he's less racist" is a good rhetorical trick.
HBD is a legit line of scientific inquiry you guys, it's not just eugenics obsessed weirdoes and fascists trying to bring back birthright as the primary path to privilege.
It's also a patently idiotic philosophy boiling down to basically negotiating with terrorists.
Amazing how much they memoryholed the Scott emails.
So what exactly happens to people who get really into Scott et al. and then realize that they're racist? I mean people like OP who genuinely seemed shocked by how buddy buddy their "unorthodox" intellectuals are with blatant racists.
Do they slowly disengage from rationalist-spheres, or do they just become cryptoracists like all the other idw types?
at least one vein of this goes off into the vibes cluster that is TPOT
EA forum: Stock prices in a VC-forced bubble show that society will make trillions from AI!!!
first comment: "uh, wtf, that's not how anything works."
reply to this comment: "oh yeah? well DEBATE ME"
For such ostensibly smart people, the basics of finance and economics are surprisingly elusive!
not that we should complain too much about this: it's given them the loss of the castle, the loss of a university-shielded
wastebasketthink tank, and may yet give them some more losses at scale!
at least crypto isn't involved this time. few understand (real world economics)
"Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies" - posted to HN
Another set of
social darwinismsdark bio troofs feat. 2 year old accounts made by promptfondeling libertariansI swear to god, starting a nature vs. nurture debate in a place leaning even slightly libertarian just breaks my brain because I never understand what point they’re even trying to make.
Half of them seem to argue that this is proof rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor (although I fail to see from which side they’re coming) while the other half uses it as thin-veiled excuses to be racist without mentioning race.
They’re just cowardly racists really.
Oh look, another company’s “we won’t data scrape against our users’ wishes to feed spicy autocomplete” mask has just crumbled. I am so surprised.
Let’s see how many of my comments I can delete or overwrite with garbage before they ban me.
i couldn't delete the one question i had on stackoverflow, so i used a text generator to overwrite the body and title of the question. fight garbage with garbage
Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational Fiction Classics
You know, sometimes I wish my words had touched more lives, but at least I can console myself with the discovery that nothing I've written has fucked people up that badly.
just reminded again of: What if the moon got mad?
This is almost the plot of The Fifth Season, a hugo winner from a while back.
I read this as The Fifth Element, but it also (almost) works!
Also I think a final fantasy, where the moon drops monsters on the planet, and a zelda game.
in the last couple of years I've gotten back into sound (used to work live/tv sound ages back, been trying to learn more production and shit) and as a result of that I've gotten to know a looooooot of synth/production/effect/.... related things
and christ it hurts to listen to that
sorry bro, maximum good across the quantum wave function of the universe
That is not the only bad thing, check the right side of the moons opening image, why is the moon hairy?
Is the AI lying? wonders the Guardian and turns to this guy:
“As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research.
Who of course validates the sentient AI frame. They should have asked him if this means that we are closer to Terminator or Matrix.
Orange Site denizen plays Dr. LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331850
Show NH [sic]: "data-to-paper" - autonomous stepwise LLM-driven research
data-to-paper is a framework for systematically navigating the power of AI to perform complete end-to-end scientific research, starting from raw data and concluding with comprehensive, transparent, and human-verifiable scientific papers
The example "research paper" was some useless fluff about diabetes, based off an existing data set (read: actual work produced by actual humans), and mad-libs.
The study identifies an inverse correlation between physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake with diabetes occurrence, while higher BMI is positively correlated
I'm too sleepy and statistics-impaired to check how nonsensical the regression "analysis" or findings are, so instead let's check out the references (read: the actual humans who were plagarized to make this fluff)!
Reference #5
[5] T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.
This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:
Hermina Jakupović, Germán D. Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild I. A. Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, Tuomas O. Kilpeläinen
I guess AI has an easier time advancing science than producing a PDF with non-ascii text in it
The fact that actual engineers have been trying to educate newcomers on Unicode for at least 20 years and not only is it still pervasively ignored but the hottest, newest, cutting edge AI that Will Change Everything™ with billions of dollars and so many manhours behind it gets absolutely dumbfounded when it sees
éis the exact combination of funny and sad that will eventually result in me turning into a Butlerian Jihad Joker.Every respectable programming language has functionality in its standard library that recognises letter characters
As a C++ programmer I've never been so offended by something I so entirely agree with.
This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:
hmm. I can guess at a few reasons this could be happening: model coders "normalizing" everything to flat-ascii in training, or similar happening at training stage (because of the previously-referenced RLHF datamills employing only people with specific localized dialects, instead of wider context-local languages), etc.
wonder if this particular thing is a confluence of those, or just one specific set
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd says the app could embrace AI
"Your dating concierge could go and date for you!" this woman actually said out of her mouth
- you each send your robots out to date
- they fuck, creating a nanobot plague that destroys the earth
- you both stay at home shitposting on bsky
previously both a Black Mirror and an Oglaf (highly NSFW)
https://less.online/ - they couldn't be bothered to write the 5 lines of js to do their karma discount automatically
"A Festival of Writers Who are Wrong on the Internet"
How is it possible to be so thoroughly immune to self-reflection.
Vampires?
Why is Patrick McKenzie attending this, I wonder?
That 'only show authors confirmed coming' button. Wtf lol.
Seeing Cremieux Recueil will be there, does anyone know who's behind it, what's the deal with it, etc? I'm always seeing it pop up on these freaks' timelines and I imagine it's eugenics shit but I can never be bothered to dig enough to find the really incriminating stuff. It's well creepy though.
Aha! It turns out Cremieux is the r/slatestarcodex poster formerly known as /u/Tr--yPorn0 (slur dashed out), or TP0 for those who don't even want the slur in dashed-out form. A really persistent race scientist with a habit of (a) misrepresenting the papers he spammed as links (b) misrepresenting himself. He used to run a tiny blog as "Cremieux" when he was claiming to be an economist from Liechtenstein. Then he got pumped by the other race scientists. So I expect this to very much be Racist Fest.
some past hits from TP0:
- https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/9ypgfl/commenter_calls_hbd_junk_science_ssc_is_having/
- https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/bje7oh/this_whole_exchange_is_gold/
- https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/amna7n/we_know_nigerians_have_low_national_iq_because/
his style is gish gallops and paywalled papers that turn out not to support his claims, and citing Emil Kirkegaard's pseudojournals a lot
frequent ACX commenter, Here he is on IQ and genes Very into citing OpenPsych as solid gold scientific fact. Race scientist, yes.
Wtf? It's like they made a sex offenders list, just nothing but libertarians and racists
can't wait to see how the felon musk stans try to excuse this one (archive)
The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data
ah yes, because the lost data is the problem, but the thing floating in someone’s brain after coming loose 3 months ago isn’t something to speak up about. totes fine.
and there's a certain kind of regularity to keeping the lid on that news. like it was a choice to take that action. if only there were words for something like a pattern? of behaviour? if only[0]
[0] - (with apologies to stealing the phrasing from mmfish)
PZ Myers called this: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/05/09/i-predicted-the-fate-of-neuralink/
yeah I mean not to dismiss that, it's not the hardest of predictions. the thing i'm pointing at here is more that another felon musk company lies and misdirects, in the pattern of culture set by the fucking turd-in-chief.
I just feel bad for the guy they implanted this in. Going to join the list of people who had a short term working piece of tech implanted and now are walking around with scrap. (It isn't that far yet for this guy, but Musk doesn't have the best track record).
I haven't read it yet (and I might not even bother) but Google's probably lying about their ML models again
"I can predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules"
it does seem mildly useful https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/screening-against-alphafold-models-maybe-better-it-looks
note that google's thing is pattern matching, and if there's few similar protein structures in literature, then alphafold is working on poor quality data. comments do notice a red flag or two
So facebook (I’ll never call it the other name, get fucked zuckyboi) decided their LLM is so good that obviously they have to force it on everyone with an icon in your face you can never turn off[0].
Figured I’d give it a try via support channel/address, their response is even more insulting than you might guess:
[0] - of course when it doesn’t see enough adoption they’ll probably start trying to force use of it in even sneakier/controlling ways
You can share feedback and tell us about your support experience by completing this [three question survey.](https://www.whatsapp.com/survey/......)lol. the sheer fucking hubris.
Some rich investor/math nerd croaks (from old age), HN's resident mod team declines to add a black bar to the site, leading fans of licking rich boots to wonder if "the community" should decide which dead rich guys get commemorated:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40327812
Bonus for the dude still salty Terry Davis didn't get one.
Their comments section just never fails to deliver ... something.
Online communities with reasonable debate are under attack by state actors, HN is no exception. In this context, no matter how well meaning the proposal is, opening an avenue for acrimony here is not something we can afford.
At least this dead hedge fund guy has a wikipedia "controversies" section as a legacy. I wonder if a genius mathematician could figure out a way to enrich his friends and family while the markets took a dump.
According to The Wall Street Journal in May 2009, Simons was questioned by investors on the dramatic performance gap of Renaissance Technologies' portfolios. The Medallion Fund, which has been available exclusively to current and past employees and their families, surged 80% in 2008 in spite of hefty fees; the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF), owned by outsiders, lost money in both 2008 and 2009; RIEF declined 16% in 2008.
https://x.com/louisanslow/status/1789751075026661855?s=46&t=nT1XIOTx9ax3_3I0GXvgVQ
Rat orgies reach stand up comedy circuit. (Sorry for no nitter)
This is the greatest ad for Twitter ever, hosting content like this. God damn that is amazing.
came here to post that, amazing
Ah yes, tell me again about the novel useful things genML can do. I seem to remember something about it helping people?
from bsky: "It is now officially fair game to make fun of this little shit"
Don't forget Tiffany. Chick got a 13 carat diamond engagement ring from her fellow lucky sperm club member billionaire husband.
Sam Bankman-Fried interviewed by Puck News!
this has been going around to great publicity from all!
it's an insufferably vapid and self-serving rehash of Sam's late 2022 crime confession tour. i can see why Puck grabbed for the exclusive, but jesus fuck nobody needs to hear from this conman again. Anyway, this copy isn't paywalled.
I’m sure the prison rice arbitrage thing will end well.
that's definitely not a set of words I thought I'd read today
so we learn, I guess
