Want to wade into the snowy 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 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 so 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.)
A small list of literary promptfondlers came to my attention - should complement the awful.systems slopware list nicely.
It has happened. Post your wildest Scott Adams take here to pay respects to one of the dumbest posters of all time.
I’ll start with this gem
This one is just eternally ???!!!
Rest in Piss to the OG bad takes Scotty A
it’s not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other
the Dilberito was a vegetarian microwave burrito that came in flavors of Mexican, Indian, Barbecue, and Garlic & Herb. It was sold through some health food stores. Adams’s inspiration for the product was that “diet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world. I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time.” He aimed to create a healthy food product that also had mass appeal, a concept he called “the blue jeans of food”.
Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.
i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion
The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads somewhere I don’t want to go. We’re drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent — where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you don’t control, can’t inspect, and didn’t shape.
The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.
The future of ass is being set right now, and it’s ponderously flabby!
From r/bonaroo in 2024, when the sun was really insisting upon itself.
alt text
Furby smoking a marijuana. A caption says: “Vibes, but at what cost”
From a new white paper Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt, h/t The Syllabus Hidden Gem of the Week
The long-term viability of the AI investment surge depends on meeting the high expectations embedded in those investments, with a disconnect between debt pricing and equity valuations. Failure to meet expectations could result in sharp corrections in both equity and debt markets. As shown in Graph 3.C, the loan spreads charged on private credit loans to AI firms are close to those charged to non-AI firms. If loan spreads reflect the risk of the underlying investment, this pattern suggests that lenders judge AI-related loans to be as risky as the average loan to any private credit borrower. This stands in stark contrast to the high equity valuations of AI companies, which imply outsized future returns. This schism suggests that either lenders may be underestimating the risks of AI investments (just as their exposures are growing significantly) or equity markets may be overestimating the future cash flows AI could generate.
Por que no los dos? But maybe the lenders are expecting a bailout… or just gullible…
That said, to put the macroeconomic consequences into perspective, the rise in AI-related investment is not particularly large by historical standards (Graph 4.A). For example, at around 1% of US GDP, it is similar in size to the US shale boom of the mid-2010s and half as large as the rise in IT investment during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The commercial property and mining investment booms experienced in Japan and Australia during the 1980s and 2010s, respectively, were over five times as large relative to GDP.
Interesting point, if AI is basically a rounding error for GDP… But I also remember the layoffs in 2000-1 and 2014-5, they weren’t evenly distributed and a lot of people got left behind, even if they weren’t as bad as '08.
“It sounds so insignificant when you put it like that, I can hardly believe I’m in a bread line because of a manufactured poly-crisis it was a part of!”
Very smart commentator:
This particular explosive barrel is no more potent than any of the dozens of other explosive barrels in this room.
Over on Lobsters, Simon Willison and I have made predictions for bragging rights, not cash. By July 10th, Simon predicts that there will be at least two sophisticated open-source libraries produced via vibecoding. Meanwhile, I predict that there will be five-to-thirty deaths from chatbot psychosis. Copy-pasting my sneer:
How will we get two new open-source libraries implementing sophisticated concepts? Will we sacrifice 5-30 minds to the ELIZA effect? Could we not inspire two teams of university students and give them pizza for two weekends instead?
Willison:
I haven’t reviewed a single line of code it wrote but I clicked around and it seems to do the right things.
Could not waterboard that out of me, etc.
Well to be fair, he think your estimate is too low :( (as do i)
when I saw that they’d rebranded Office to Copilot, I turned 365 degrees and walked away
please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please no…
Via YouTube recommends, I came across this video about our favorite crypto pivot to ai NeoCloud data center company CoreWeave
How CoreWeave is near insolvency
Interestingly, the author is an LLM shill as evidenced by the video being caked with a hefty layer of copium.
Seems to have struck a nerve amongst the commentariat which didn’t appreciate this kind of “FUD”.
seeing the furious reactions to shaming of the confabulation machine promoters, i can only conclude the shaming works.
ooh, where’s the (new?) spice? I’ve been under multiple rocks
nothing formal, but the backlash to criticism is becoming absolutely disproportionate: for example, the person who made the list of slopware, kat marchán, was bullied off the social media by the slop merchants. this looks eerily similar to the right-wing braying about cultural war, where they call harassment any critique of their positions, and call a reasonable critique any harassment they do themselves.
(and just very recently the always very nice CTO and co-founder of the oxide company, a major rust shop, decided that shaming the promoters of the confabulation machines is not to be done at the company.)
you will be pleased to know that self and i are responding
see https://awful.systems/post/6913182 we need a name
AFAIK, the people in this space who have acknowledged using LSD and other psychedelics are gwern, Aella, and QiaochuYuan (during his rationalist phase). Scott Alexander hinted that he might have tried it, Eliezer Yudkowsky is interested in psychedelic therapy but also tells readers to please not use LSD. Can any of you name anyone else in this space who has talked about dropping acid?
I don’t want to get into “A says that B dropped acid” in a StubSack thread.
The 2016 Nootropics Survey results and Nootropics Survey 2020 Results suggest that it was popular with anonymous SlateStar readers.
Previously, on Awful, we considered whether David Chapman was an LSD user. My memory says yes but I can’t find any sources.
I do wonder what you’re aiming at, exactly. Psychedelics don’t have uniform effects; rather, what unifies them is that they put the user into an atypical state of mind. I gather that Yud doesn’t try them because he is terrified of not being in maximum control of himself at all times.
Yud has posted:
Among my friends who came to my attention for psychelics[sic] having had any significant impact on them, positive or negative, I would say the mean result has been overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly negative. Please seriously consider not doing drugs.
He seems very worried about his tendency to procrastination (akrasia in LessWrong jargon) and inability to make himself exercise. So he is concerned about inability to control himself. So his public position is that LSD might have medical uses, but it has harmed people close to him.
A fun little software exercise with no real world uses at all: https://drewmayo.com/1000-words/about.html
Turns out that if you stuff the right shaped bytes into png image tEXt chunks (which don’t get compressed), the base64 encoded form of that image has sections that look like human readable text.
What are the implications?
Nothing! This was just for fun after a discussion with a colleague whether it might be even possible to make base64 blobs look readable. There’s certainly no poorly coded systems out there which might be hooked up to read emails or webpages and interpret any text they see as information.
No siree I’m sure everyone is keeping the attachments and the content well and truly isolated from each other and this couldn’t possibly do anything other than be a fun proof of concept and excuse for me to play with wasm.
I’m apparently too
out of coffeedumb to properly get the joke. What’s the implications if some system parses the PNG text chunks in the same way it does the body of the email?think LLM agentic software.
Ah, makes sense. My mind was going more towards actual security exploits, but… yeah. Makes sense.
Anyways, thank you Flere-Imsaho, I will never not love seeing your username on here.
I mean, at the rate the chucklefucks are going, a number of these things are actual security exploits
that it happens/works for a completely unhinged reason is almost a separate evaluation dimension in scoring
a number of these things are actual security exploits
yes, sure, but in the sense of “social engineering the slopbot”, not “there’s a vulnerability in [x] which does not apply proper sanitation to non-body text content before evaluating it”
OT: I really appreciated the things you guys said last thread. It helped a lot.
<3
