"The AI is attuned to every molecular vibration and can reconstruct you by extrapolation from a piece of fairy cake" is a necessary premise of the Basilisk that they've spent all that time saying they don't believe in.
He retweeted somebody saying this:
The cheat code to reading Yudkowsky- at least if you're not doing death-of-the-author stuff- is that he believes the AI doom stuff with completely literal sincerity. To borrow Orwell's formulation, he believes in it the way he believes in China.
Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:
What would some good unifying demands be for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party by centrists/moderates?
As opposed to the spineless collaborators who run it now?
We should make acquiring ID documents free and incredibly easy and straightforward and then impose voter ID laws, paper ballots and ballot security improvements along with an expansion of polling places so everyone participates but we lay the 'was it a fair election' qs to rest.
Presuming that Republicans ever asked "was it a fair election?!" in good faith, like a true jabroni.
Comparing quantum computing to time machines or faster-than-light travel is unfair. In order for the latter to exist, our understanding of physics would have to be wrong in a major way. Quantum computing presumes that our understanding of physics is correct. Making it work is "only" an engineering problem, in the sense that Newton's laws say that a rocket can reach the Moon, so the Apollo program was "only" a engineering project. But breaking any ciphers with it is a long way off.
Oh, but they're just very concerned that American schools are forcing all the children into the same mold, don't you see
gag me with a fucking spoon
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23 February 2025
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.)
The man is a hollow shell, and the woman is tripping over her own tongue in the least regal fashion imaginable. There's no emotional maturity because there's no interiority. There's no communication, just Yud doing Ready Player One with Nerd Culture(TM) references. Remember the Evil Overlord list? You do, don't you? Wasn't the Evil Overlord list funny? Now imagine if an Evil Overlord had, wait for it, read the Evil Overlord list. Wouldn't that be amazing?
(Yes, he did the same damn thing in HPMOR, too.)
Writing prompt: Day one at the dildo factory
"Yarrgh. Another crew of bushy tails, more wet behind the ears than 'tween the legs. You've no idea what's in store for you, but these eyes, these old eyes have seen things. Like the great injector malfunction of aught-six..."
SHE is gowned in a black dress sewn with tiny emeralds, rubies, sapphires too small to detract from the darkness of her gown, instead giving it the illusion of a rainbow sheen.
Following "gowned" so closely with "dress" is awkward, because the latter is redundant. Consider, e.g., "She is gowned in black, the fabric sewn with..." Using both "gowned" and "gown" in the same sentence compounds the problem. Consider introducing further information about the fabric: e.g., "the darkness of the velvet" or "the darkness of the silk".
Whoof. Made it through the first sentence.
They have leveled up from the socialism of fools to the communism of dipshits.
The phrase "the bong rips of science" comes to mind.
Being an Internet Old, I do worry about rulings that could narrow the scope of fair use, since good things do rely upon it, and there's always the risk of a sowing/reaping thing, but I won't pretend to have actual legal expertise.
Like, if this guy gets a second scene, it's the one where they demonstrate that SPECTRE does not tolerate failure.
IIRC, they were promising some new kind of processor with stochastic stuff in it that was advertised as "quantum computing" but isn't really.
But he sure likes saying physics words.
It's "Bond villain aesthetics" if the "villain" you mean is the big guy guarding the next location who acts intimidating for five seconds before Bond suplexes him and walks inside anyway, quipping.
Also, Grimes is not even offering table stakes for being a Bond girl here. Like, she's an extra in the club through which Bond quickly passes in order to find the actual Bond girl. She's not a vaguely trans-coded Famke Janssen bringing herself to orgasm by machine-gunning an entire room of technicians while Gottfried John looks on with a "what the fuck, tovarisch" eyebrow lift.
Reached by the Chronicle, Yudkowsky said he would not read the letter for the same reason he refused to read the manuscript of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
Not even the MST3k version?
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.mst3k/search?q=MiSTing%3A Unabomber Manifesto
(Warning: contains some ... Tarantino-like 1995 edginess at odds with its overall tone)
Microsoft's own research confirms something that was already pretty obvious: relying on a text generating machine to come up with answers erodes critical thinking, and is a method favoured by those who never liked doing critical thinking in the first place
The whole paper is an absolute nightmare funfair ride through the behaviours that have become almost instantaneously widespread through the professional world - something Microsoft have invested billions into accelerating and worsening no matter the consequences.
a phrase to make your skin crawl right off:
Lighthaven cuddle puddle
And after that shot, a chaser:
Is the Dark Enlightenment actually fascist? Not at all. It's probably the least fascistic strain of political thought today, though this requires understanding what fascism really is, which the word itself now obscures. Is it racist? Perhaps. The term is so malleable that it's hard to say with clarity.
the “thinking” part definitely works for me
[bites tongue, tries really hard to avoid the obvious riposte]
New figures show that if the model’s energy-intensive “chain of thought” reasoning gets added to everything, the promise of efficiency gets murky.
> In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy [...] perhaps most notably, that DeepSeek’s new, more efficient approach means AI might not need to guzzle the massive amounts of energy that it currently does. > > The latter notion is misleading, and new numbers shared with MIT Technology Review help show why. These early figures—based on the performance of one of DeepSeek’s smaller models on a small number of prompts—suggest it could be more energy intensive when generating responses than the equivalent-size model from Meta. The issue might be that the energy it saves in training is offset by its more intensive techniques for answering questions, and by the long answers they produce. > > Add the fact that other tech firms, inspired by DeepSeek’s approach, may now start building their own similar low-cost reasoning models, and the outlook for energy consumption is already looking a lot less rosy.
Random Positivity Thread: Happy Book Memories
In the spirit of our earlier "happy computer memories" thread, I'll open one for happy book memories. What's a book you read that occupies a warm-and-fuzzy spot in your memory? What book calls you back to the first time you read it, the way the smell of a bakery brings back a conversation with a friend?
As a child, I was into mystery stories and Ancient Egypt both (not to mention dinosaurs and deep-sea animals and...). So, for a gift one year I got an omnibus set of the first three Amelia Peabody novels. Then I read the rest of the series, and then new ones kept coming out. I was off at science camp one summer when He Shall Thunder in the Sky hit the bookstores. I don't think I knew of it in advance, but I snapped it up and read it in one long summer afternoon with a bottle of soda and a bag of cookies.
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Facebook "Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal"
Kate Knibbs reports in Wired magazine:
> Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated in Russia, to help train its generative AI language models. [...] In his order, Chhabria referenced an internal quote from a Meta employee, included in the documents, in which they speculated, “If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.” [...] These newly unredacted documents reveal exchanges between Meta employees unearthed in the discovery process, like a Meta engineer telling a colleague that they hesitated to access LibGen data because “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃”. They also allege that internal discussions about using LibGen data were escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as "MZ" in the memo handed over during discovery) and that Meta's AI team was "approved to use" the pirated material.
Elsevier: Proudly charging you money so its AI can make your articles worse
> All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”
The resignation statement reads in part,
> In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.
(Via Pharyngula.)
Related:
The Professor Assigns Their Own Book — But Now With a Tech Bubble in the Middle Step
The UCLA news office boasts, "Comparative lit class will be first in Humanities Division to use UCLA-developed AI system".
The logic the professor gives completely baffles me:
> "Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content. But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically."
I'm trying to parse that. Really and truly I am. But it just sounds like this: "Normally, I would [do work]. But now, I can actually [do the same work]."
I mean, was this person somehow teaching comparative literature in a way that didn't involve reading the primary sources and, I'unno, comparing them?
The sales talk in the news release is really going all in selling that undercoat.
> Now that her teaching materials are organized into a coherent text, another instructor could lead the course during the quarters when Stahuljak isn’t teaching — and offer students a very similar experience. And with AI-generated lesson plans and writing exercises for TAs, students in each discussion section can be assured they’re receiving comparable instruction to those in other sections.
Back in my day, we called that "having a book" and "writing a lesson plan".
Yeah, going from lecture notes and slides to something shaped like a book is hard. I know because I've fuckin' done it. And because I put in the work, I got the benefit of improving my own understanding by refining my presentation. As the old saying goes, "Want to learn a subject? Teach it." Moreover, doing the work means that I can take a little pride in the result. Serving slop is the cafeteria's job.
(Hat tip.)
Harmonice Mundi Books: An idea for an ethical academic publisher
So, after the Routledge thing, I got to wondering. I've had experience with a few noble projects that fizzled for lacking a clear goal, or at least a clear breathing point where we could say, "Having done this, we're in a good place. Stage One complete." And a project driven by volunteer idealism — the usual mix of spite and whimsy — can splutter out if it requires more than one person to be making it a high/top priority. If half a dozen people all like the idea but each of them ranks it 5th or 6th among things to do, academic life will ensure that it never gets done.
With all that in mind, here is where my thinking went. I provisionally tagged the idea "Harmonice Mundi Books", because Kepler writing about the harmony of the world at the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War is particularly resonant to me. It would be a micro-publisher with the tagline "By scholars, for scholars; by humans, for humans."
The Stage One goal would be six books. At least one would be by a "big name" (e.g., someone with a Wikipedia article that they didn't write themselves). At least one would be suitable for undergraduates: a supplemental text for a standard course, or even a drop-in replacement for one of those books that's so famous it's known by the author's last name. The idea is to be both reputable and useful in a readily apparent way.
Why six books? I want the authors to get paid, and I looked at the standard flat fee that a major publisher paid me for a monograph. Multiplying a figure in that range by 6 is a budget that I can imagine cobbling together. Not to make any binding promises here, but I think that authors should also get a chunk of the proceeds (printing will likely be on demand), which would be a deal that I didn't get for my monograph.
Possible entries in the Harmonice Mundi series:
-
anything you were going to send to a publisher that has since made a deal with the LLM devil
-
doctoral theses
-
lecture notes (I find these often fall short of being full-fledged textbooks, chiefly by lacking exercises, but perhaps a stipend is motivation to go the extra km)
-
collections of existing long-form online writing, like the science blogs of yore
-
text versions of video essays — zany, perhaps, but the intense essayists already have manual subtitles, so maybe one would be willing to take the next, highly experimental step
Skills necessary for this project to take off:
-
subject-matter editor(s) — making the call about what books to accept, in the case we end up with the problem we'd like to have, i.e., too many books; and supervising the revision of drafts
-
production editing — everything from the final spellcheck to a print-ready PDF
-
website person — the site could practically be static, but some kind of storefront integration would be necessary (and, e.g., rigging the server to provide LLM scrapers with garbled material would be pleasingly Puckish)
-
visuals — logo, website design, book covers, etc. We could have all the cover art be pictures of flowers that I have taken around town, but we probably shouldn't.
-
publicity — getting authors to hear about us, and getting our books into libraries and in front of reviewers
Anyway, I have just barely started looking into all the various pieces here. An unknown but probably large amount of volunteer enthusiasm will be needed to get the ball rolling. And cultures will have to be juggled. I know that there are some tasks I am willing to do pro bono because they are part of advancing the scientific community, I am already getting a salary and nobody else is profiting. I suspect that other academics have made similar mental calculations (e.g., about which journals to peer review for). But I am not going to go around asking creative folks to work "for exposure".
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 29 September 2024
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories
Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?
When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about "artificial life" — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like "when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant," I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!
Off-Topic: Music Recommendation Thread
So, here I am, listening to the Cosmos soundtrack and strangely not stoned. And I realize that it's been a while since we've had a random music recommendation thread. What's the musical haps in your worlds, friends?
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!
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.