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. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)
cofnas’ suspension proceedings from U of Ghent (do read the full suspension letter here) generated a reaction from the eugenicists: an open letter; the signatories, among many other names, some even probably not white supremacists, include some of our favourites: j michael bailey, pinker, shermer and hossenfelder.
Also very disappointed to learn that Ian Pace, a pianist I admired, has been oneshotted by social media and gone down the racist transphobe 24 hour tweeting monster chute.
Oof.
We need a word for “my condolences for that cool person you liked becoming a milkshake duck”
I propose: “autorowling”
Signatories include psychologist J. Michael Bailey, best known for promoting the idea that many people who say they are trans are just kinky (autogynephilia), and running a class demo where a woman was brought to climax with help of a homemade toy called a fucksaw. The demo got a lot of attention in the dying days of the sex-positive blogosphere.
yes, precisely. he’s a fucking creep.
I love it when Americans get to find out that being a big racist is actually illegal in most of Europe.
If anyone ever wondered why I am constantly angry about AI its shit like this…
I was looking at options for securing a few services hosted behind a caddy reverse proxy and found a project with the very serious and official sounding name ‘caddy-security’. To get started I tried to find some proper documentation for it and immediately found this announcement. In future, instead of a proper documentation you will get a bunch of files in the repos
.codex/skillsdirectory. These, according to the developer, help ‘both humans and AI agents work with the codebase’. I don’t know how this is supposed to help me because the files aren’t linked to each other and are anything but proper documentation, but I guess they want me to point a slop agent at them and have it generate some security configuration for me.I have heard about caddy a couple times now from people seemingly new to hosting.
Can I ask why it’s so popular when Apache httpd still works fine and has reasonable governance?
Well, I wouldn’t call myself new to hosting, I used nginx before but switched because Caddy makes configuring HTTPS for my reverse proxy very convenient. I use it with this module which handles the ACME DNS challenge for creating and updating letsencrypt certificates for my internal domains.
So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (“ezra klein is a disgusting worm,” https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/1-ezra-klein-is-166891080 ), and i went to upload it to our rss host, zencastr. friends. zencastr is so fucked now. the only interface, as far as i can tell, is an llm, and it tormented me. im just gonna dump the screenshots. this is a fragment of an exhausting hour of back and forth.
note that i apparently have 10k credits, which i assume are temporary and there as a welcome to the new service. a single credit is a few bucks and in total the bill just for the conversation came out to about 6-7 dollars
it also tried to get me to use this absolutely horrible episode description
i asked it to schedule the episode for 9 am Tuesday, aug 18th, same as the patreon, and it said it did. turns out it went out this morning. cool! if you listen by rss it’s out now i guess.
i posted on reddit asking how to switch hosts. the ceo found that post today and offered his hand, which i bit
i keep thinking about that bit in a philip k dick novel where the protagonist’s door tries to chisel tips out of him before opening, and threatens to sue him when he bypasses the lock. i hate the future/present so much
I haven’t been listening to your podcast (no shade, it’s just not my thing) but I’ll have to listen to this because my God that man frustrates me.
He basically exists to funnel run the:
intellectually curious libs -> smug superiority complex with status quo bias -> reactionary
pipeline.
holy fuck that’s infuriating
imagine the worst possible CLI and then make it even worse and then make it an asshole
real rich of their CEO (presumably? it looks like a burner account which still checks out if it’s their CEO or someone who works for him doing damage control and trying to take this shit to DMs) to both anthropomorphize their chatbot and assert that the problem is you need uhh training on the system that doesn’t do what you want it to do and keeps trying to charge you for shit that makes your workflow worse
honestly the thing that makes me think it is actually their CEO is I’ve watched these fuckers use “let’s take this to DMs/email” as an attempted power move. they seriously think we want to talk to them privately about, like, anything at all. no fucker I’m here to call you out in public because your product is shit and you’re shit too.
Large amounts of the LW commentariat cannot get their heads around how students JUST. DON’T. GET. AI.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySXuvJcqRindQwAk7/how-my-students-think-about-ai
They are extremely surprised by:
Perspective #1: There has not been rapid AI progress. My students do not have any intuitive sense that there has been rapid AI progress in recent years or really have much of a framework for thinking about that issue… With the exception of image/video generation, GPT-4 could do most of what they were looking for from a chatbot. Three years is a long time in their world, and their sense is that chatbots have been a mature technology over roughly that amount of time. They are an imperfect technology — students are well-aware of hallucinations — have been one, and will continue to be one… Historical context I gave them made this worse. The basic sentiment here was “AI was superhuman at chess a decade before we were born, and this is all they’ve done with it since?”…
Perspective #2: Impressive progress or not, AI is going to wreck their lives, the economy, and the social contract.… Corporate leaders are always looking to get rid of workers, even if it is irrational to do so. Various motivations were posited here (hatred of the working class, FOMO, a preference for technology, machines can’t go on strike, etc.) but many of them think that a CEO would ultimately choose to pay twice as much to get AI to do a task half as well… AI will do substandard work that makes products and experiences worse but is capable of just barely scraping past the bar of minimal functionality (many of them independently brought up constantly malfunctioning self check out machines). This will be rapidly rolled out, enshittifying most things.
Perspective #4: Catastrophic/existential risk arguments are sci-fi distractors from the urgent social/economic/political problems associated with AI. My students have a fairly strongly held view that “rogue” AI does not represent a real threat… They also mostly think that, if one does believe that AI is existentially risky, then the strategic interaction is not prisoner’s dilemma or even chicken but rather just a game theoretically boring setup where you die if you defect. Mash these together, and you end up with the view that expressed concerns about existential risk in the AI industry can’t be sincere… Students (both independently in written work and then later in group discussion) hypothesized that this might be a deliberate rhetorical choice to distract from present or immediately foreseeable harms from AI by directing attention towards a sexier but entirely hypothetical scenario… they see discussion of “rogue” AI as an attempt by the companies to divert blame (and perhaps legal liability) away from themselves as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on “rogue cars.”
Perspective #7: The Hugging Face Incident (summer students only) I described the Hugging Face incident to students in my summer course. None of them had heard of it beforehand. Their basic reaction can best be summarized as “OpenAI told a model to do some hacking and then it did some hacking. And?” None of them understood this as representing any kind of meaningful misalignment, nor anything particularly interesting.
Perspective #8: This is definitely a bubble and it’s about to pop. No one had heard about Hugging Face, but a third or so of the summer students had heard about the Situational Awareness meltdown and several brought up Michael Burry. There was near universal consensus that we are in a bubble, it’s about to pop, and everyone will look very silly.
This gives me very good vibes. The kids are all right. Maybe not economically, probably not, but in spirit at least.
My general approach telegraphs a receptiveness to “sober” forms of argument, an interest in counterintuitive strategic thinking, a distaste for wild speculation, an aversion to nakedly ideological perspectives, and a sense that the past is important for understanding the future. My students probably make some effort (implicit or explicit) to speak in ways that respond to this.
I’m going to leave this part of the author’s self-description here and resist the urge to comment on it.
Perspective #6: AI will not go rogue because AI does not have, and is likely incapable of having, desires.
This one I found interesting largely because it suggests an inability on the writer’s part to really understand point 4, despite featuring one of the better sneers on the subject (“as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on ‘rogue cars.’”). Maybe I’m overstating something here, but the way I see it the difference between the rogue AI and faulty AI scenarios aren’t really in the distinct events of the scenario. Faulty AI could absolutely do as much damage as “rogue” AI if it was plugged into all the systems that would be necessary to, say, liquidate humanity and pull the iron from their blood. The difference is entirely in framing and responsibility. We should ask questions now about how these systems are used, what their limitations are, and how we deal with that. Instead, the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything, and then use the idea that the AI went rogue and has agency to avoid how obviously bad of a decision this would be. The fact that this is also the part where the AI companies make a fucktillion dollars and finally show them, show them all, muhuhahaha is, I’m sure, irrelevant to their sober analysis.
The kids are alright!
Is it me, or do attempts to make movies with AI tools
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/24RKHEkwgZ6Hm6ygY/can-an-llm-make-a-feature-length-movie-on-its-own
Remind me of SCPs
If you wonder how you can look at any of this without viscerally realizing that it’s absolute dogshit, I found the
authorsperpetrators conclusion very insightful.Where we go from here
I expect these issues to all be fixed by the end of 2027.
It’s always, always 2027
