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.)
Every time without fail, it’s this shit^
saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt “complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down”. After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script
Like either way it’s “disobeying” b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn’t finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn’t let itself get “shut down”
But also, it’s not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn’t running on your computer! It’s somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.
Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
This database tracks legal decisions1 in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings.
While seeking to be exhaustive (117 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.
Sorry if this doesn’t fit the thread. Just came across this non-profit called 80,000 hours, after they sponsored NotJustBikes. It “provides free career advice for finding a meaningful career that can help you make a positive impact on the world,” which actually sounds nice, but then I realised that they’re talking about AI risk and that this comes from the TESCREAL corner.
Yep, check who is one of the founders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80,000_Hours, it is full on EA stuff. (Not fan of the TESCREAL label myself, too broad and confusing for people). E: So it fits!
LWer asks: “what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?”
Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:
Is that supposed to be an advertisement in favor of AI? (As opposed to stealth satire?) Seeing it makes me want to get off my computer and touch grass.
I’m not sure, considering the massive reduction in social circle im more wondering the person who made this was outed as a sex pest. 2 Parents and one close friend sticking around till the proof, of the sex pestery being really irrefutable dropping, makes sense.
Double quick ssc sneer, why is he platforming a groyper, without mentioning it is a groyper, does he know what groypers are. Why is he acting like this is a honest question and not an attempt to create hierarchies and unpersons? Why are people confusing remembering being conscious with remembering things at all? Why are people confusing consciousness with agency? Why do I hear the “empathy removal training center” warning sound again. And the most personal question. People remember not being conscious? But yes, wtf Scott, how do you even find these groypers?
Anybody have the current count on platforming neonazis vs platforming sneerclubbers?
God this is so fucking stupid. Aren’t these people supposed to be at least minimally smart in some way, like knowing about biases and things? And here they are trying to suss out the deep workings of conscious experience from the just-so narratives people have attached to their memories of memories of memories. Pathetic.
Comments comments
I don’t recall having some sort of a wow experience like “damn, I’m a conscious human being” now ever, which kind of makes me question if I’m conscious even now.
I’m also in the same boat. But also, I think that we can only experience consciousness with our whole being, and there’s not much “compute” and bandwidth left even amongst fully grown adults - to verify if even the baseline “adult” consciousness that we’re experiencing is the baseline “real and complete adult state of consciousness” that everyone is definitely experiencing. And so we’re left to ponder some subset of the thing we want to understand and control fully.
I mean, the “consciousness” that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily. Neither you nor I (nor most people) can write like Scott can, but Scott bangs out riveting and beautiful pieces of writing effortlessly at least once a week and wonders why everyone else can’t.
Jesus Christ mate
levels of glazing previously unheard of
that third quote is so fucking immensely telling, holy fuck
and while I want to be very cautious with this (ito not putting it out as a recommendation (given these fools’ heads are already demonstrably not okay)), imagine if any of these dipshits took a mild dose of psychedelics and actually experienced some altered states of consciousness for a while
such a stupendously short-sighted set of ideas, made even more stunning by the notion that probably 2 in 3 of these fuckers consider themselves “broad minded”
Yeah well done commenters you failed to notice the context and deeper reason this was discussed, justifying biodieseling people. Hell, some would volunteer looking at the last bit.
(Re his output, a Conservative Jewish person (can look up her post, it is on reddit sneerclub) reviewed unsong a bit and mentioned she thought it was the work of several authors. Not sure if this was honest or some Jewish reference which I didnt get btw. But if honest would be an interesting bit of additional lore, him using ghostwriters (would also explain the lower quality (from what I have seen) of a lot his posts after he went full time).
The multiple authors thing is certainly a joke, it’s a reference to the (widely accepted among scholars) theory that the Torah was compiled from multiple sources with different authors.
Yeah wondered as much, read it but no idea how much of it was true or not as I know very little of all this. And im not going to give a stab at it, not even from hells heart. (There were a lot of whale/fish related puns, which I could not think of quickly enough, so this is my white whale).
I mean, the “consciousness” that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily.
have you tried adderall
This is what happens when you watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a STEM major with no actual curiosity.
Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occured to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occured to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squawling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, theres only one direction. And time is its only measure.
So that article about AI cheating we saw a few weeks back is still doing the rounds. I had missed this Rationalist W in my first read:
I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.
So apparently we’re pretty close to instantiating the voice of God through the hallucination machine, which I’m sure is pretty neat.
Good username/post combo.
SSC attracts new kinds of witches.
Weird thought the idea of Rationalism was to draw people towards consensus reality.
Modern academia is a shambling corpse, its husk long hollowed out by the woke mind virus, and scientific consensus is also cringe because it’s mean to me for being an IQ and genetics obsessed weirdo. Therefore you should prioritize alternative takes, preferably by longwinded laymen from the ingroup or maybe contrarian specialists, the more cancelled the bett-- wait, wait, no, not like that!
Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:
On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.
A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.
Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.
Tying this to a previous post of mine, I’m expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, “AI slop” output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.
Tired: Ned Ludd
Wired: Joe Butlerian
"Now it’s day and night and the generators belch
And like poor content moderators
We type and type, and when we die
Must fill dishonored uploads…"
I watched most of the first season of Silicon Valley with a friend who recommended it to me. I liked it. Every single character with a speaking role so far (with the possible exception of an exotic dancer and a graffiti artist) deserves death by nuclear weaponry. SFBA delenda est.
It looks like twitter was down for 2.5h. [hn] Previously there was a fire in twitter server farm which caused some availability issues. Gee i wonder how well these gas turbines are serviced
Seeing a lot of talk about OpenAI acquiring a company with Jony Ive and he’s supposedly going to design them some AI gadget.
Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.
It appears that many people think that Jony Ive can perform some kind of magic that will make a product successful, I wonder if Sam Altman believes that too, or maybe he just wants the big name for marketing purposes.
Personally, I’ve not been impressed with Ive’s design work in the past many years. Well, I’m sure the thing is going to look very nice, probably a really pleasingly shaped chunk of aluminium. (Will they do a video with Ive in a featureless white room where he can talk about how “unapologetically honest” the design is?) But IMO Ive has long ago lost touch with designing things to be actually useful, at some point he went all in on heavily prioritizing form over function (or maybe he always did, I’m not so sure anymore). Combine that with the overall loss of connection to reality from the AI true believers and I think the resulting product could turn to be actually hilarious.
The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?
I guess Apple can breathe a sigh of relief though. One day there will be listicles for “the biggest gadget flops of the 2020s”, and that upcoming OpenAI device might push Vision Pro to second place.
Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.
My money’s on OpenAI’s Gadgettm getting immediately compared to both of them as well, either by reviewers giving their (presumably negative) opinions on the product, or from people looking to dunk on OpenAI, if not AI as a whole.
The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?
On the one hand, OpenAI’s reality distortion field has managed to hold strong up until now, and its difficult to see the tech press recognising OpenAI’s Gadgettm to be just the Rabbit R1/Humane Pin with a fresh coat of paint.
On the other hand, the Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin are industry laughingstocks whose names are synonymous with “godawful AI product” in the public consciousness, and who basically killed the concept of such an AI Gadgettm in its crib - OpenAI could very well set themselves up to get relentlessly mocked for believing people wanted an AI Gadgettm at all.
Might as well start brainstorming dunks now… “Business model: Juicero for the Metaverse”.
Calling it a police cam for techbros seems like an obvious dunk. You can also make a gratuitous Simpsons reference and quip “Remember Humane? Its back, in OpenAI form!”
I’m not sure Ive still knows how to design things that actually work as opposed to beautiful objects for Dubai yacht dwellers to look at and show off.
OK completely off topic but update on my USA angst from earlier this year: I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Back on topic: Duolingo continues to circle the drain. I kind of hate that I’m linking to this because it’s exactly what that marketing-run company wants; but they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7507337734520868142?lang=en
I uh… I don’t think it’s going to change anyone’s minds. Half the comments on the videos go something like:
EVERYONE LISTEN UP!!! 🚨 - starting from today, we are gonna start ignoring duolingo. We will not like the video it posts, or view it. - BASICALLY WE WILL IGNORE DUO!!💔 💔 ON EVERYBODY SOUL WE IGNORING DUO!! 💔 (copy this and share this to every duo related video)
I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Good luck!!
they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
If Duolingo still had their userbase’s goodwill, it would’ve probably worked. They’ve been pulling that shit since their mascot Duo turned into a meme, and its worked out for them up until now.
Good luck with the move. Always sounded like a lot of trouble moving continents. And moving out of the USA seemed worse, dont they have some weird taxation system for people who moved away?
Nah it’s not too bad the IRS guide is only 40 pages! somebody save me
- All US citizens get to file US taxes every year regardless of if they have any US sourced income
- Foreign income is also taxed (but see next two points)
- The first 126k of foreign income earned while living abroad is excluded from taxation (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion)
- Income that went to paying foreign taxes is also not taxed (Foreign Tax Credit)
- Banks hate opening accounts for US citizens since we’re subject to FATCA filing requirements and thus generate extra paperwork
- Also certain foreign mutual funds are taxed heavily (PFICs), requiring care in planning investments.
- There are a bunch of tax treaties with different countries, which may influence the exact details.
- If you do have deferred compensation that was granted in a state but that was vested or exercised while a non-resident of that state you may also have to file state taxes (e.g. FTB Publication 1004 for California)
I haven’t run through this in practice yet and I will probably give up and hire a professional.
I think there’s also some kind of at-time exit tax if you ever decide to give up US citizenship, but I’m not good on the details
I’ve semi-seriously said elsewhere that the US treats its citizens as property (in the “as slaves” sense), and it’s fucked how close to true that is
glad to read you’re making some headway on getting the fuck out though!
Yeah I’ll probably have a big tax bill if I ever renounce citizenship. I haven’t thought about it too much yet since it’s still my only citizenship, and I have a lot of friends and family in the USA. Like being a visitor might be fine in normal times, but I wouldn’t want to rely on it in an emergency today given how visitors are being treated lately.
'Till now I was always able to just do financial planning myself, but I really should hire a professional.
absolutely worth it given your coming plans. sucks because yet more expenditure but your happiness and safety are more important
Sounds like getting a professional to file it (at least the first time) will in the end cost less.
But congratulations on the move!
I’m interested in jetting out as well. Did you get a job first? Or did you do something similar to Germany’s “Opportunity Visa”?
An internal transfer at my job actually. At least for now they need me so helped set that up, though I’m pretty worried on if that will last long enough for permanent residency or not.
I’d be a little nervous on a job seeker’s visa before knowing the language. It is really hard to find a job as a programmer in Europe without living there or being a citizen; because of language barriers, the labor market test, and the difficulty in getting a company to sponsor your visa. I didn’t send out that many job applications but so far my response rate is zero.
Probably if I couldn’t do a transfer I’d have ended up on an investment visa or study visa somewhere; though maybe I could have found a job in Japan since I can read intermediate Japanese.
I expect learning German to the B1 level will open up a lot of doors, so that’s my main goal for the next few years.
Anecdata: if you’re working in IT in Sweden you can get away with just English. I know a guy living in Berlin who hasn’t
botheredgot around to learning German yet, he also manages with English.But it’s a big Community and different parts have different requirements and of course different expectations.
Oof im sorry, that sounds horrible. But hey welcome in the modern world, your other taxes will prob not be that much trouble.
It’s the same taxation system, you have to pay US taxes still, but I think you can deduct taxes paid in the new country from what you owe the US.
New piece from Tante: On “Vibe Coding” - take a wild guess what its about.
My guess: Remotely hacking sex toys so they run doom?
At first glance those narratives feel great, who doesn’t like “democratization”, “empowerment”
Same script as the naive ‘leftwing’ case for cryptocurrency/blockchain tech.
