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.)
Previously, on Awful, I predicted that Oracle would be all-in on the bubble:
Microsoft knows that there’s no money to be made here, and is eager to see how expensive that lesson will be for Oracle; Oracle is fairly new to the business of running a public cloud and likely thinks they can offer a better platform than Azure, especially when fueled by delicious Arabian oil-fund money.
But, uh, there’s not going to be any Arabian money while we’re dancing in the desert, blowing up the sunshine. The lawnmower is now running low on gas. Today, Oracle continues to make astoundingly bad business decisions:
Oracle is the only major player funding the AI buildout with debt, carrying over $100 billion on its books while free cash flow has gone negative.
Hmm, he’s still sticking to tweet-threads on Twitter. We’ll know he’s fully cracking when he resorts to Ackman-style unreadable text blocks on there.
I somehow missed how American leftists were instrumental in urging the Iranian people to oust the Shah. Leftists like… Jimmy Carter[1]
edit this is typical US-centrism, other people don’t have any agency, it’s all about America
[1] I know, I know, about as left-wing as Genghis Khan
to what extent does he actually believe this? is that even a meaningful question? i think this narrative is way too esoteric and absurd to really convince anyone, so it doesn’t even appear valuable if his goal is to flood the zone with post-truth nonsense.
“Aging left” has lost “vitality” - he’s phoning this one in, straight out of the house style guide.
Really weird focus on Brooklyn.
Revealed: UK’s multibillion AI drive is built on ‘phantom investments’
Does anyone know a summary of the shakeup at CFAR in 2016? In January AnnaSalomon promised LessWrong that “CFAR’s mission is to improve the sanity/thinking skill of those who are most likely to actually usefully impact the world.” In December she announced a pivot to preventing the Reign of Steel. Julia Galef left that year and has not been very visible since. Her husband Luke Muehlhauser is OpenPhil’s Managing Director for AI Governance & Policy so still Roko-curious.
LessWrongers sometimes say that Michael Vassar influenced the curriculum of CFAR’s workshops even though he was no longer employed by a Rationalist charity. Brent Dill was living in Berkeley participating in rationalist events at that time.
The four-day live-in rationality workshops at CFAR remind me of the live-in blog fests and conferences at Lighthaven. Someone in the comments to the January 2016 posts asks why pay $4,000 for a workshop in the SF Bay Area when you can learn similar content at a college where you live or from free online courses (the commenter later recanted this blatant heresy). Its hard to argue that in-person events in the SF Bay Area are an efficient use of funds, but they let people who already live there keep themselves busy.
Hello from the Center for Applied Rationality! … We have a new experimental mini-workshop coming up soon (June 2025) and hopefully more workshop content to follow after! … Pricing is $750 for the CFAR event, plus another $450 to sign up for Arbor (at Lighthaven in Berkeley). This is notably cheaper than the $3900 we’ve historically charged for most mainline CFAR workshops, since it’s a more experimental program – future workshops will likely be more expensive than this test. https://less-wrong.livejournal.com/4396115.html
This post claims that they could not find anyone doing anything similar https://acritch.com/cfar-scaling/ I know a US military veteran who had a critical thinking course which he pulled out whenever he had a training day to occupy, so maybe they needed to look outside their bubble?
Anthropic is suing the Pentagon
This whole saga is a resounding “everyone sucks here”. but I’m gonna have to side with Anthropic on this one because at least they have some incredibly basic standards, which is far more than I can say for the current government and OpenAI, though the real best outcome is if the government and the AI industry destroy each other
The specific article’s framing pisses me off…
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei picked a major fight with the Department of Defense last month, asserting that his company’s AI models couldn’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or direct autonomous weapons systems.
As to who picked a fight with who, the DoD wanted to change the terms of their contract, to which Anthropic apparently compromised on every term except for mass surveillance of Americans (fuck the rest of the world I guess) and fully autonomous weapons (cause a human clicking “yes to confirm” makes slop-bot powered drones so much better). This wasn’t good enough for this authoritarian strongman administration, so Pete Hegseth took the fight public with tweets first. So the article framing it as Anthropic “picking a fight” is a bullshit framing. I mean, they did kind of bring it on themselves hyping up their slop machine like it was a sci-fi AGI, but they didn’t start the fight.
For one, “it’s 100 percent in the government’s prerogative to set the parameters of a contract,” Snell & Winter partner Brett Johnson told Wired, effectively meaning there may be very little chance of an appeal.
So they find a quote about contracts, but a Supply Chain Risk isn’t just the DoD deciding on contracts, it is a specific power that has specific mechanisms set by legislation. If (and it is a big if with the current Supreme Court’s composition) the court actually considers the terms set out in the legislation (including, most problematically for the DoD, a risk assessment and consideration of less intrusive alternatives), I think the DoD loses. Of course, the SC has all too often been willing to simply defer to the executive branch’s judgement, even if the process for the judgement was “Trump or one of his underlings made a choice on a spiteful or idiotic whim, announced it on twitter, and the departments underneath them rushed to retroactively invent a saner rationalization”. If the DoD decided to just end the contract (without all the public threats of SCR or invoking the Defense Production Act) Anthropic wouldn’t be in a position to sue and this drama wouldn’t have been as publicized in the first place.
But the lawsuit itself takes a dramatically different tone.
Yeah because one set of a language is a CEO trying to grovel and backtrack on one of the rare few ethical commitments he has ever made, and the other is making a court case about the actual law.
whoever loses, we win
If the DoD accidentally pop the AI bubble by triggering a cascade when Anthropic runs into issues; then later the DoD loses the court case in a humiliating enough way; then DoD loses a civil case with the money going to pay the debts owed in Anthropic’s bankruptcy proceedings, and the American public blames all of (without letting one shift the blame to the other) the Trump administration, the Republican party, the parts of the Democrat that acted as pathetic enablers, and the tech ceos for the following economic depression… I would count that as a relative win?
Missed this when it was first going around
Leave it to fucking zuckco to figure out the worst way to make They Live happen
Starting this Stubsack off, I’ve found another FOSS project that hit the digital krokodil - ntfy.sh v2.18.0 was written by AI
I feel like at this point I want to highlight the ones that took a clear stance against LLM code. On a chardet thread, people listed:
- Gentoo
- Servo
- Loupe
- Qemu
- postmarketOS
- GoTo Social
- Zig
guess i’ll have to write my own unifiedpush provider
I’m still happy with Pushover. Hasn’t changed in a decade (and a half?! Been using that since 2012, damn), works really pretty well.
It’s not self-hosted but when there are push notification services on the path, nothing really is.
there’s also overpush, which is meant as a self-hostable drop-in replacement for pushover and does not use ai afaict.
Never have so few been so unsatisfied to be so correct.
