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.)
happy kirkiversary to all who celebrate
Happy kirk kirked day.
And people said rightwing minds couldn’t be changed during debates.
I thought it was his neck that got changed?
Change comes from within.
Lack of blood in this case
https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/ais-sheryl-crow-169107221
Imagine a hypothetical future history of machine learning, perhaps one that focuses on the politics of AI in the 2020s. You may be thinking to yourself, Given the rapid pace of change, it’s hard to say what this book will contain, but there’s one thing I know for certain will not be in this book: Sheryl Crow’s Instagram account.
Well—think again:
“We know and have always known that AI has the capacity to outsmart us and eliminate us in order to continue,” the “All I Wanna Do” singer wrote on Wednesday. “It will have the codes. It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids. And, it has the financial data of every single person on the planet.”
In the future, I think, we will remember this as the “Sheryl Crow moment”: The week that, effectively overnight, everyone—which is to say previously uninterested normies, previously skeptical pundits, opportunistic politicians and many other people who had never before heard the words “light cone” and whose browsers had never navigated to LessWrong—suddenly started taking “AI safety” seriously.
E: holy shit that Joe Allan quote. that guy.
It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids.
This would be a sensible course of action, since AI famously doesn’t require any significant source of energy to operate.
It’s an interesting read on the rise of the AI doomsday rhetoric, but has some questionable claims about skepticism being “hard to maintain” especially since they didn’t actually solve Navier-Stokes
The trouble with the Millennium Prize problems is that they didn’t pick one involving counting letters in fruit.
At the same time, some of that harm may be balanced on a statistical level by lives saved through AI tech.
[]The bad stuff happening now is worth it so that humanity can benefit in the future… Now where have I heard that before,
The antiai sub on Reddit is lousy with doomers now. Ugh.
Feel free to report these threads.
Speaking of movies about high-profile silicon valley grifters, what the fuck is this??
At this point given the absurdity of this combination of people I feel like the reality will likely be disappointing.
If all it took to bring these guys down was to show that they were weird and unsettling, the CIA would have infiltrated and shut down awful systems by now
Men Who Stare At Goats would have shut down the CIA first
Terry Tao talks about how he used to try to cooperate with the AI industry to achieve a positive outcome, but now he finally sees their true colors. Link
During this event, OpenAI requested an interview concerning my vision of the future of AI and mathematics. I accepted, and spoke with them for perhaps an hour. I had done similar interviews in various venues, and I assumed that, as with these other cases, they would eventually post the entire interview online, which talked about both the possibilities and risks of AI much as I have done in these other interviews. As it turned out, they only used a few snippets of that interview for that infamous advertisement instead. In retrospect, I should have pushed back harder on their decision; but I decided at the time that even a selective release of my commentary would help raise awareness of the potential for AI, and in particular on the possibility of the “best of both worlds”.
Since then, the situation has deterioriated markedly. Many of the people in the industry that shared my views have left or become sidelined, with most major tech companies now increasingly focused on the race to develop extremely powerful, autonomous AI technologies regardless of their actual value to society. The current drama surrounding the Navier-Stokes global regularity problem is the most dramatic and visible instance of this, but there have been multiple other such examples, and much of my commentary in the last few months has been aimed that the increasingly severe divergence between the current objectives of the AI industry, and of mathematics in general.
Much respect to artists for seeing all this coming from the very beginning, and holding the line.
“AI techbro syndicate looking shady as fuck to nobody’s surprise” —an actual rabbi
she’s great, isn’t she?
The discourse about AI is similar to the way people talk about Trump. A lot of us saw them for what they were immediately, and were called alarmist.
And over time, more and more people try to explain that they have changed their mind, and they were fooled, and aren’t bad people themselves, something something something.
Listening to Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich (audiobook, not podcast), and learning heaps about people I’ve known were part of the Rationalist orbit for years, but hadn’t dug too much into, like Balaji Srinivasan. He apparently used the red/blue/grey tribe setup in The Network State, which was published long after Scott’s SSC post using the same language.
I remember that Balaji went nutty when the NYT published about Scott Alexander. Durán attributes that to Cade Metz reporting on Balaji telling Yarvin that they might need to intimidate/harass journalists to keep them from reporting on their fascist bullshit, but all the parallels make me wonder how long they knew/read each other. Did Scott influence Balaji first, or the other way around?
Certainly I am amused that none of the Rationalists have been named yet, 3 hours in. I wonder if it rankles, knowing how bad Eliezer has wanted to make something that people would actually pay for, having a whole book written about Thiel and Yarvin and Srinivasan where he doesn’t rate at all because he’s just some podunk little cult leader who has to beg for grants and find girlfriends to live with and do his laundry while he eats the crumbs off of their tables. Or if it stung Scott when Srinivasan’s book was panned as idiotic, knowing that at least some of those ideas were his.
i first became aware of srinivasan because he was running an extremely funny bitcoin scam. it was a $400 computer, the crypto mining platform of the future, a veritable font of wealth, and when people got it it was a raspberry pi with some shielding incorrectly attached, so that if you touched it wrong you shorted it and bricked the device. it mined a few cents a year and sent something like half of that to a16z
i also first became aware that noah smith was going to lose his mind when he cited srinivasan approvingly on twitter, i drew his attention to this, and he replied no i just asked balaji about this and he said he’s cool, that it wasn’t a scam and also that he was actually put in charge of it to make it not a scam
Noah Smith has an Econ PhD, contacts at YCombinator, and lives in San Francisco. He is in the hot take business. I always felt bad vibes from him.
‘is this a scam? You have to tell me if this is a scam, that is the law’
You know, never once have I heard of a crypto bro with the good manners to say “aww shucks, you got me” when called out for their flagrant con artistry.
So Altman and Musk agree with Amodei’s latest assessment that AI should slow down, whether or not they actually stick to that is to be seen
Another oped from StudyHacks Cal Newport:
Opinion: How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now? | NYT
The time has come to push back. Once we understand the key ideas of Rationalism, we can begin to filter them out. Be very wary, for example, when A.I. leaders or online commentators begin talking in sweeping generalities about the future of the technology, such as stating with confidence that many jobs will soon be automated or that their language models will soon become sentient beings intent on escaping their creators’ control. (No, OpenAI’s autonomous agents conducting hacks doesn’t mean that A.I. is rising up against its human overlords.)
The correct reply is to promptly turn the conversation back to the possibilities, harms and viability of the products that actually exist. To extend an analogy I’ve made before, if Ford automobiles were spontaneously catching on fire, we wouldn’t tolerate the chief executive’s changing the subject to discuss our general lack of preparedness for a future with flying cars. We’d demand that the company address the acute problem happening right now.
(Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president? “We” tolerated exploding cars and people dying for years, until someone actually stepped up and forced the issue. How’s the country been treating that guy?)
It’s not surprising that so many Americans feel negatively about A.I. at the moment, but these sentiments aren’t inevitable. Our current crop of L.L.M.-powered tools are exciting — and worrisome, and promising, and frustrating, all at the same time. With proper direction, they’ll hopefully make our lives better. But they don’t have to be terrifying. We thought Silicon Valley was trying to warn us of an unavoidable danger, but maybe they were just being weird.
wonder if such a moderated, watered down position in a large publication ends up sending more eyeballs to Yudkowsky than it does to innoculate the general public, could end up a net negative.
Cal was on Better Offline recently and towards the end of the interview he was talking about a need for some sort of structured language for interacting with LLMs for purposes of code gen that could remove the ambiguity of natural language and my only thought on it was “my guy, you are describing a programming language but with extra baggage.”
We had this and it is such a hassle that after decades of word a lot of old programmers are now flocking to the chatbots (I really wonder how much of the codegenai hype is due to older coder burnout).
structured language for interacting with LLM
that’s_not_how_any_of_this_works.webm
Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president
didn’t Nader basically throw the election to Bush II?
Not compared to the supreme court, no. E: your recollection kinda proves the point imho.
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.
Apparently they can also sick the police on you on a trust-me-bro basis:
Last month, The San Francisco Standard reported that Anthropic had reported a man to San Francisco police for telling Claude that he had bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.” When the Standard contacted the man in question, he told the newspaper he was “just fucking around.”
But while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.
image shamelessly stolen from https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv5puo47ns2z
LITERALLY 1984
(I am morally obligated to make this joke)
Never wanna hear any bullshit about Anthropic being the “good guys” ever again
Tesla’s new self-driving taxi seems to be entirely made of red flags and those horror movie moments where you can’t understand why anyone would go in there, because they’re clearly going to die.
Highlights:
- No door handles. Good luck getting out instead of burning to death and/or drowning!
- Doors might not unlock if there are power issues, eg. Bad things happened in a crash.
- No manual controls! First responders will have to push it out of the way.
- Unless there’s a power issue, because the parking brake will engage if there’s no power, so it’ll need to be barged by another vehicle, I guess?
- Or you push it faster than 5mph, because the brake will engage for safety reasons.
- Or if it is in the wrong gear or mode, because back-driving the motor can cause electrical safety issues or overheating, which will presumably increase the risk of people trapped inside being burned to death.
- The vehicle is silent and may move without warning. You can’t tell if it is unpowered. First responders are instructed to “cage” the vehicle before trying to interact with it. Otherwise I guess it might just main or kill them by surprise.
- Not all high voltage components are labelled. Exposed bits in a crash might just kill you if you don’t have suitable ppe, and you can’t tell which bits those are, lol.
The guide advises first responders to contact the company via the car’s communications system or phone for most emergencies, and says that the Tesla can assist emergency personnel by moving the car remotely, helping provide access to on-board controls or putting the car in neutral so that it can be pushed.
If Tesla cannot be reached by phone, the manual advises first responders to use an email address to learn more about how to move the Tesla, though it warns, “This email is not monitored for emergency requests.”
🤡
Welcome to the future, where first responders might just opt to watch you die because they’re not certified to rescue you from your autonomous death trap, because there’s no point in you all dying.
H/t to violet blue. https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/117237691936474802
Tesla has not gotten clearance from safety regulators to deploy vehicles without features such as brake pedals, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it had opened an investigation into whether the Cybercab meets vehicle safety standards.
The fuck do you mean opened an investigation. I don’t care that the US are a fake made-up country, there is no conceivable world in which you can legally put random shit on public roads without some kind of permit.
Quick search and from somewhere else
the company relied on self-certification, the standard method automakers use to affirm compliance with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards without pre-approval from regulators. NHTSA can audit that self-certification at any time, and it has now requested the engineering data and testing records Tesla used to reach its conclusion
you can’t be fucking serious
That’s horrifying.
oh wow, it’s that bad huh. i guess it make sense, there’s a reason why the cybertruck is not legal in europe yet still on the streets in the us.
The door handles don’t sound so bad from a firefighter perspective. More excuses to break out the slicy claw. ಠᴗಠ
Having to account for the stupid thing to start driving on its own for no reason seems more irritating. Maybe we can invest in some big jaws attached to the front of the truck to crunch down on and immobilize struggling robo-taxis. This seems like a very reasonable direction to develop car technology.
There was a photo from a cybertruck crash not so long ago where you could see that the doors and windows had been attacked with crowbars to try and get the damn things open before the people trapped inside burned to death. It didn’t work.
Things (and skills) for busting open locked doors and laminated glass aren’t (yet?) commonplace, and I wouldn’t trust tesla engineering to keep me alive long enough for the professionals to turn up with the right tools 🫤
Literally “just push it over there with the rest of the fire and send an email.”
Dario’s back at it again-agent swarms could shut down the whole internet in 6 months
He also wanted AI research to slow down over a month ago. Surprise surprise Anthropic didn’t do jack to slow down
They can’t even swarm their own corporate content writing.
In this role, a given day might include drafting, editing, brainstorming, on-site event support, and coordinating executive response to breaking news, all in close collaboration with the External Communications team and other leaders.
- Executive Communications Writer Job Posting at Anthropic (Annual Salary: $295,000 - $345,000 USD)A swarm of large language models is capable of shutting down the entire internet in 6 months, but for some reason they need to pay a single human over a quarter of a million dollars to draft and edit language.
My line break produced some good comedy:
Posting at Anthropic (Annual Salary: $295,000 - $345,000 USD)
“Could rogue agent swarms take over the entire internet in the next six months?”
Nobody tell these three stooges about dead Internet theory
Here is a roundup of the “october tech movie” superfecta
is there a kalshi market for which one tanks the hardest? Or will we get crossover sequels for musk vs altman a la MCU?
without going into the merits of the specific case, I find it highly amusing that OpenAI fucked up their big Navier-Stokes announcement which is now more about how they stole research from honest mathematicians rather than how awesome their AI is
One detail that seems to have not spread around: the announcement was so rushed that when the 165 page output was released, it only included 16 citations, and those citations did not even include the work of Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, who introduced the overarching framework for attacking the problem (that Buckmaster-Alpöge and OpenAI used). After the announcement and after these redditors pointed it out, they threw in a few more citations to include them, but come on.
