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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
the next 72 hours are about to get interesting (if this is true)
Do the AI doomers/Yuddites REALLY want their signature policy tied to one of the least competent, least popular presidents in history? I would be thinking very hard about this one if I were part of their crew. “You know who took p(doom) seriously? TRUMP!” is, ah, not a marketing coup, to put it mildly
They think this is their last chance and will take anything that does not lead to extinction and the conversion of the entire universe into something that does not experience happiness. Keep in mind these are the people who thought that the world could suddenly blow up from a new innovation in a lab in 2015 and had psychotic episodes on that basis.
Trump could personally fly up and prevent a 100 kilometre long asteroid from falling on the Earth and I still wouldn’t give him a Nobel Prize
Coxon (that Anthropic employee) Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have all joined forces against AI
All I will say is please god let Anthropic’s bullshit backfire and have them pass Bernie’s bill to completely shut down all AI development it would be so fucking funny
They are going to try to, in rough order of ease and plausiblity:
- provide a legal excuse for them to stop shoveling money into a furnace of training for exponentially diminishing returns
- attain regulatory capture where their weirdos are in charge of everything
- to thereby make open source AI illegal, only things that go through THEIR gated portals can be used
- Maybe make ownership of the means of computation for ANY reason illegal so you cannot own anything and have to rent everything from them for any purpose because YOU MIGHT BE SUMMONING THE DEMON IN YOUR GARAGE!!!oneoneoen
I haven’t seen any mention of this in sneer space, so kind of a request for context/comments. I recently learned about Cortical Labs from a news story that came out about a month ago. Basically (and apologies if I’ve got this wrong), the story is that they’ve built a “biological data centre” where the computing units use lab-grown human brain neurones. They’ve been in business (actual business) since 2019. Some shallow searching on reddit and lesswrong shows a flitter of interest from those guys here and there.
Ah yes, a torment nexus.
Looks like they have ‘neuron culture and interface as a service’ going on, for all the good its for.
Its a real thing. You grow some neurons and stick some electrodes into it, and you can measure the activity of neurons or groups of neurons through some electrodes and induce some to fire through other electrodes. Now, if you have some external process that you define that takes the output from the electrodes and does some computation on it and returns signals to the input electrodes, the way that neurons work and change their synaptic weights over time ensures that the network will learn to produce outputs that make the inputs more predictable. Hence teaching a few thousand neurons to play ‘doom’ - you have a program that takes the screen and turns it into a set of input strengths, take some outputs and turn them into controls, and it feeds back, and you eventually have something that learns to do predictable actions.
Their innovation appears to be having standardized software you can use to define the input and output electrodes with respect to whatever other software you are running connected to the stuff. Who is willing to pay for this is anyone’s guess.
So, uh, remember that call for stories set in a world where we ‘somehow’ don’t get AGI and instead get modern-style LLMs providing such incredible value to the world that it is transformed? That tells people not to use LLMs to write it because its writing is low quality? https://www.gpuworld.org/
Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board. So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM. What happens in this ‘business as usual’ future?
(Incidentally, this reminds me strongly of ‘Project Heiroglyph: Stories and Vision for a Better Future’, also by Neal Stephenson, somewhat desperately trying to pretend that there is a bright future ahead of us rather than slow grinding decline)
Somehow we got… this. I can’t even. I really just can’t even.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6hFByFwDLxtnbvje/a-normal-friday-in-2042
I thought I had lost my ability to be surprised by these people. In here we get:
- anthropomorphization of current LLMs as conscious beings
- Graverobbing
- Trump magically doing everything these people want
- Married couples paying each other for chores
- Prediction market language
- Weird sex stuff
As always with LW, we can adapt the vector definition of “normal”, i.e. what is being said is completely orthogonal to reality
Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of “CPU” and rode the nopetopus out of there.
Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.
Back when our friends were just forum and Tumblr posters there was the Center for Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Who could be against that?
6 August 2013, SANTA ROSA, Calif. (CN) – In a lurid lawsuit, a former employee claims the Marin County-based Foundation for Critical Thinking is a “cultlike” group whose married bosses tried to make him have sex with the wife, and fired him for refusing. … Hale, a 40-year-old married man and father, claims he quit his job as a high school teacher to accept an offer to work as a “full-time Fellow” for the Foundation for Critical Thinking (FCT) in August 2004. According to the complaint, the Foundation for Critical Thinking, based in Tomales, “trains educators how to analyze information in an ‘objective ‘fair-minded’ manner, without allowing their own biases, prejudices and opinions to influence their objective analysis of an issue. It is a ‘think tank’ of sorts that promotes a casual work environment. Defendants Elder and Paul frequently hold meetings at both FCT offices and their personal residence, where they sit and lie on the floor amongst pillows. To encourage the free flow of ideas, defendants Elder and Paul often discuss uncomfortable topics, and encourage employees to rid themselves of social, including sexual, taboos. … About three years after he was hired, Hale claims, Elder and Paul began bringing up “inappropriate sexual topics” and asking him “about his sex life with his wife” during business meetings. … In October 2010, Hale claims, Elder and Paul graduated from discussing sex to encouraging him to have sex with Elder. After calling Hale to a meeting, Paul “explained to Hale that he was concerned about defendant Elder, his younger wife by approximately 20 years, and wanted to ensure that her sexual urges could be satisfied,” the complaint states. “Defendant Paul proposed that Hale should have sexual intercourse with Paul’s wife, defendant Elder, while defendant Paul observed them. Hale immediately became uncomfortable and anxious, as he listened to defendant Paul, and worried about his ability to keep his job, if he declined. Hale politely declined defendant Paul’s request.”
I wonder how many of our friends deliberately studied other grifts and not just pop psychology books, or if this is just in the water. Their form 990 is here, and shows they lost most of their income in 2019 and are struggling since.
University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:
And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and I’m like, what do you want me to do? I can’t control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didn’t tell me what it was.
The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, who’s the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? They’re going to figure out a way.
Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.
Interesting, he usually falls for all their BS.
So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to ‘slow down’ “AI” development:
- it’s too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all
- the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and there’s no obvious way to fix that
I’ll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.
edit I missed “blatant regulatory capture”
@gerikson My assumption is that they want a regulatory moat to protect “frontier” models from “open weight” / AKA cheap models.
It’s just margin protection.
The symbiosis between the rabid cultists, the technofedual wannabe-lords, and the get rich quick grifters is so weird to watch.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Yeah, the whole idea is to perpetuate the myth that these companies are really close to coming out with a product that people will actually pay to use. A product that people will pay enough to cover its cost. They want to simultaneously make an excuse for why it is taking so long while making gormless investors think it is just around the corner.
Also the frontier “labs” are rapidly running out of money and having to raise more and more insane investment rounds. This is a great way to save face and back away from burning $$$$ on training runs that push the frontier of can a model rearrange some arbitrary coloured squares by 10% next they just need to solve the problem of how to make their customers pay cost+ on inference when they’ve been giving it away at steep discounts for nearly 4 years… Easy!
Starting things off, New Mexico State Parks got scammed by an AI bro when looking for new mascot art.
