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.)
J. Oliver Conroy’s Ziz piece is out. Not odious at a glance.
Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye
I looked up a video of someone trying to use a potato as a suppressor and was not disappointed.
you undersold this
that guy’s face, amazing
if this is peak rationalist gunsmithing, i wonder how their peak chemical engineering looks like
the body is placed in a pressure vessel which is then filled with a mixture of water and potassium hydroxide, and heated to a temperature of around 160 °C (320 °F) at an elevated pressure which precludes boiling.
Also, lower temperatures (98 °C (208 °F)) and pressures may be used such that the process takes a leisurely 14 to 16 hours.
Well that sounds like a great way to either make a very messy explosion or have your house smell like you’re disposing of a corpse from a mile away.
That’s what we call a win-win scenario
fyi one of better methods that american cops use to detect meth labs is to just wait for them to catch fire. whether it is a statement on how hard they drop the ball or on safety mindset of cartel chemists i’ll leave that up to you
considering practicality of their actions, groundedness of their beliefs, state of their old boat, cleanliness of their
rolling frat house trailer park“stealth” rvs, and from what i can tell zero engineering or trade background whatsoever, i see no reason to doubt that they could make a 400L, stainless steel container that has to hold 200L+ of corrosive liquid at 160C, perhaps 10atm, of which 7 atm only is steam, and scrubber to take care of ammonia. they are so definitely not paranoid that if they went out to source reagents, there’s no way that they possibly could be confused for methheads on a shopping spree. maybe even they could run it on solar panels
I’m fairly sure that a 50 gallon drum of lye at room temperature will take care of a body in a week or two. Not really suited to volume "production”, which is what water cremation businesses need.
as a rule of thumb, everything else equal, every increase in temperature 10C reaction rates go up 2x or 3x, so it would be anywhere between 250x and 6500x longer. (4 months to 10 years??) but everything else really doesn’t stay equal here, because there are things like lower solubility of something that now coats something else and prevents reaction, fat melting, proteins denaturing thermally, lack of stirring from convection and boiling,
it will also reek of ammonia the entire time
He made a fancy coatrack.
Good god
From the opening, this guy has actually been more consistent about respecting her name and pronouns than most coverage I’ve read. Not what I would have expected, but I’m also only through the first section.
Yudkowsky was trying to teach people how to think better – by guarding against their cognitive biases, being rigorous in their assumptions and being willing to change their thinking.
No he wasn’t.
In 2010 he started publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 662,000-word fan fiction that turned the original books on their head. In it, instead of a childhood as a miserable orphan, Harry was raised by an Oxford professor of biochemistry and knows science as well as magic
No, Hariezer Yudotter does not know science. He regurgitates the partial understanding and the outright misconceptions of his creator, who has read books but never had to pass an exam.
Her personal philosophy also draws heavily on a branch of thought called “decision theory”, which forms the intellectual spine of Miri’s research on AI risk.
This presumes that MIRI’s “research on AI risk” actually exists, i.e., that their pitiful output can be called “research” in a meaningful sense.
“Ziz didn’t do the things she did because of decision theory,” a prominent rationalist told me. She used it “as a prop and a pretext, to justify a bunch of extreme conclusions she was reaching for regardless”.
“Excuse me, Pot? Kettle is on line two.”
It goes without saying that the AI-risk and rationalist communities are not morally responsible for the Zizians any more than any movement is accountable for a deranged fringe.
When the mainstream of the movement is ve zhould chust bomb all datacenters, maaaaaybe they are?
I feel like it still starts off too credulous towards the rationalists, but it’s still an informative read.
Around this time, Ziz and Danielson dreamed up a project they called “the rationalist fleet”. It would be a radical expansion of their experimental life on the water, with a floating hostel as a mothership.
Between them, Scientology and the libertarians, what the fuck is it with these people and boats?
I assume its to get them to cooperate.
Ah, yes. The implication.
…what the fuck is it with these people and boats?
I blame the British for setting a bad example
Hey, we’re an island nation which ruled over a globe-spanning empire, we had a damn good reason to be obsessed with boats.
Couldn’t exactly commit atrocities on a worldwide scale without 'em, after all.
a really big boat is the ultimate compound. escape even the surly bonds of earth!
What we really need to do is lash together a bunch of icebergs…
New thread from Ed Zitron, focusing on the general trashfire that is CoreWeave. Jumping straight to the money-shot, he noted how the company is losing money selling shovels in the gold rush:
You want my off-the-cuff prediction, CoreWeave will probably be treated as the Leyman Brothers of the 2020s, an unofficial mascot of everything wrong with Wall Street (if not the world) during the AI bubble.
it’s possibly a distinction without a meaningful difference, but I wouldn’t say they’re selling shovels - this shit is more like renting out shovels. or maybe timeshare?
I’d love to see a postmortem on deals and development… I have some suspicions on how it all got in this mess to start with (largely “if we sink piles of capex now to corner the market on the magical future, we can totes make it through 5y!” type variations), but I want to see if I’m right
see the funny thing is that ms et al are walking back/scaling down their deployment plans, but that’s all partial on the whole. microsoft isn’t going to completely explode overnight the moment everyone groks llms are trash, even though they’re gonna take a hit
the entities like coreweave whose entire existence is predicated on the fairy tale, however…
(I am still worried about the multi-industry downstream impact of when this shit finally pops though, it is going to be nasty)
Nvidia’s current downturn is probably moreso due to the disastrous launch of it’s 5000 series rather than AI.
If it was AI I’m guessing the drop would be larger.
got a question (brought on by this). anyone here know if zitron’s talked about his history of how he got to where he is atm wrt tech companies?
there’s something that’s often bothered me about some of his commentary. an example I could point to: some of the things that he comments on and “doesn’t seem to get” (and has stated so) are … not quite mysteries of the universe, just some specifics in dysfunction in the industry. but those things one could understand by, y’know, asking around a bit. (so in this example, I dunno if that’s on him not engaging far/deeply enough in research, or just me being too-fucking-aware of broken industry bullshit. hard to get a read on it)
but things like what’s highlighted in thread do leave open the possibility of other nonsense too
EZ is a PR person, and definitely has a PR person vibe. I don’t know what that poster’s deal is, and I would not accuse Ed of being an AI bro. That post kind of has “haters gonna hate” vibes
he started writing about this stuff and it struck a chord with people
I don’t think him having previously done undefined PR work companies that include alleged AI startups is the smoking gun that mastopost is presenting it as.
Going through a Zitron long form article and leaving with the impression that he’s playing favorites between AI companies seems like a major failure of reading comprehension.
According to the archived website, he did do PR for DoNotPay, which is advertised as “The first robot lawyer.”
It’s certainly possible though that at the time he thought there was more potential for this sort of AI than there actually was, though that could also mean that his flip is relatively recent.Or maybe it’s something else.
What else though, is he being secretly funded by the cabal to make convolutional neural networks great again?
That he found his niche and is trying to make the most of it seems by far the most parsimonious explanation, and the heaps of manure he unloads on the LLM both business and practices weekly surely can’t be helping DoNotPay’s bottom line.
Thing is, that by December 2023, the time of the archive, there was already a scandal with someone using ChatGPT to do the work of discovery. While he might have stopped doing PR work for DoNotPay by that time, he was willing to advertise the fact that he did do such PR work for such a company. It shows either a lack of due diligence in researching his clients, or maybe it was just a paycheque for him. Perhaps he thought he knew more than what he actually did. Or maybe there was something else, I’m not clairvoyant.
It’s clear that he’s pivoted from that viewpoint, but it does make me curious what happened between then and now that caused him to become skeptical.Notably DoNotPay seems to be run-of-the mill script automation, rather than LLM-based (though they might be trying that), and only started branding themselves as an “AI Companion” after Jun/2023 (after it was added to EZPR’s client list).
It’s entirely possible they simply consulted Ed, and then pivoted away, and Ed doesn’t update his client list that carefully.
(Happens all the time to my translator parents, where they list prior work, only to discover that clients add terrible terrible edits to their translations)
It’s an archive, so he can’t really update that.
It’s still in the client list as of today.
Before focusing on AI he was going off about what he called the rot economy, which also had legs and seemed to be in line with Doctorow’s enshitification concept. Applying the same purity standard to that would mean we should be suspicious if he ever worked with a listed company at all.
Still I get how his writing may feel inauthentic to some, personally I get preacher vibes from him and he often does a cyclical repetition of his points as the article progresses which to me sometimes came off as arguing via browbeating, and also I’ve had just about enough of reading performatively angry internet writers.
Still, he must be getting better or at least coming up with more interesting material, since lately I’ve been managing to read them all the way through.
The lesswrong-tier post lengths aren’t helping to get all the way through them
roughly this is where my thinking on it is too. and there’s a chance that because of such clients is why he hates this shit now as he does.
the guy’s quite obviously a great orator and engaging writer, evidenced by the popularity of his writing. and this is another part of why this comes to mind for me - applying a bit of critical view, just to check. while we’re at the point of building new relationships, new critiques, new platforms, figuring out all these new options to deal with sweeping hand motion all this other garbage, wisest to try make the most of it now
I didn’t know a16z was so devoted to developing new hires! Don’t you just love to see it.
During the trial, Penny’s defense brought in a forensic pathologist who claimed that Neely hadn’t died from being choked but from a “combination of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, sickle cell trait and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint,
I get that defense attorneys have to work with what they have but goodness am I tired of this argument.
“Your honor the deceased did not die from being shot through the temple, but due to having chronic migraines and exposure to second hand smoke 3 years ago and also walking towards the bullet thus increasing it’s relative velocity slighty”
It’s just racist as hell. A revival of excited delirium pseudoscience.
Tuckers quest for a second facial expression continues. The help he got from Ben Stiller turned out to be not effective at all.
Interesting to see if he gets one.
I believe Trump is A-OK with pay for play for pardons, but what’s the actual price? Something flew by where people were buying a one-to-one with him for $5M, but that’s basically “private”. A pardon of someone as high-profile as SBF has to be worth the reputation hit. Can SBF and/or his family swing it? Would SBF be a good ally/toady of Trump?
Somehow I don’t see it. Unlike UIrich, a lot of people lost real money when FTX imploded. There wasn’t that much sympathy for him from crapto huggers. And let’s not forget he’s an autistic Jew, not a clear hero for the people who have Trump’s ear.
This just hit my inbox (and spurred me to unsubscribe from future BuiltIn slop) and man, so tired of this sort of mindless drivel. Like companies still have trouble with basic application and management processes, but magic robot will fix? Fucking hell.
State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas”
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-foreign-student-visas-hamas
Odds that this catches some Israeli nationalists in the net because they were posting about Hamas and arguing with the supposed sympathizers? Given their moves to gut the bureaucracy I can’t imagine they have the manpower to have a human person review all the people this is going to flag.
we live in hell https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-global
(this is compounded by how some segment of heavy ai boosters/users - former cryptobros, but not only them - were already immersed in this particular bubble)
Ow look the thing I worried about on r/scc (yes I know my own fault for touching it) which could not happen ‘because you dont understand how llms work’ happend.
occasionally mentioned here Jan Marsalek implicated in surveillance (sometimes comically bad) and planned murder of journalists who crossed him https://theins.press/en/inv/279034 https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/07/uk-court-convicts-three-bulgarians-of-spying-for-russia
another cameo appearance in the TechTakes universe from George Hotz with this rich vein of sneerable material: The Demoralization is just Beginning
wowee where to even start here? this is basically just another fucking neoreactionary screed. as usual, some of the issues identified in the piece are legitimate concerns:
Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues…
… nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that.
yet, when it comes to engaging with this issues, the analysis presented is completely detached from reality and void of any evidence of more than a doze seconds of thought. his vision for the future of America is not one that
kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum
but one that instead
attempt[s] to maintain an empire.
how you may ask?
An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore american greatness:
-
Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?
-
Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.
sadly, Hotz isn’t exactly optimistic that the great american empire will be restored, for one simple reason:
[the] people haven’t been demoralized enough yet
an empire has to compete on its merits
Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto)
Gold, the best substance in existence outside a societal context. Extremely nutritious and tasty. Great for making tools. Easy to form into clothes, which are warm and breathable too. Ideal building material. Obviously the main reason gold is valuable is its usefulness as non-corroding coating for electronic connectors, not that it’s a socially constructed status symbol.
The Maoist version of Misesian goldbuggery, absolutely fascinating.
Isn’t this guy still mainly relevant for jailbreaking the PS3? Pretty sure he flamed out during the Muskification of Twitter
Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value.
Okay, I mean, that’s coherent policy, I really don’t like the caveats of “produces more than they consume” cause how do you quantify that, but yes, immigration is actually good…
Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?
aaaand it’s eugenics, fuck, how does this keep happening
@V0ldek @techtakes Also, WHY would anyone sane want to move TO the excited snakes of amurrrica this century?
-
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
ok so on the one hand fuck solitary confinement on the other hand
On one hand, torture. On the other hand if you wanted to throw a billionaire crypto grifter into the Omelas hole I’m pretty sure I’d take a few weeks before I started caring.
LMAOU
truly the podcasting bros are the most oppressed minority in america
(also it looks like a bit more than the usual audience numbers for carlson channel, but it’s only one day so it’s kinda a bit more than nobody watched it. but it’s much less than when he openly pandered to schizos, cryptobros or vatniks)
I hate that this shit has an established name now.
AI is going to wreck the world without even being asked to turn things into paperclips. Just giving all coders out of the loop performance problems.
To sorta repeat a prediction of mine, shit like this is gonna tank the public image of coding as a profession.
Inevitable software issues aside, “vibe coding” as a concept undermines any notion of coding as being a difficult/skillful thing, making it sound like coders are doing the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That the software produced by this method is inevitably derivative, dogshit or derivative dogshit is gonna help damage coding’s image, too.
Do we have any experts on Wikipedian article-deletion practices around here? Because that looks really thinly sourced.
i applied the relevant tags and rewrote the intro, may go through the rest later
A classic example of the “AI can’t be dumb because humans are dumb too” trope, Pokemon Red edition:
I mean, it’s obviously true that games have their own internal structures and languages that aren’t always obvious without knowledge or context, and the FireRed comparison is a neat case where you can see that language improving as designers have both more tools (here meaning colors and pixels) and also more experience in using them. But also even in the LW thread they mention that when humans run into that kind of problem they don’t just act randomly for 6 hours. Either they came up with some systematic approach for solving the problem, they walked away from the game to ask for help, or something else. Also you have the metacognition to be able to understand easily “that rug at the bottom marks the exit” once it’s explained, which I’m pretty sure the LLM doesn’t have the ability to process. It’s not even like a particularly dumb 6-year-old. Even if it’s prone to similar levels of over matching and pattern recognition errors, the 6-year-old has an actual conscious brain to help solve those problems. The whole thing shows once again that pattern recognition and reproduction can get you impressively far in terms of imitating thought, but there’s a world of difference between that imitation and the real deal.
this is so embarrassing. “you say Claude is less capable than a typical six year old? yeah well what if the six year old is notably stupid? did you think of that?”
Instead of increasing the capabilities of llms a lot of work is done in the field of downplaying human capabilities to make llms look better in comparison. You would assume that the ‘be aware of biasses, and learn to think rationally’ place would notice this trap. But nope, nobody reads the sequences anymore. (E: for the people not in the know, the sequences is the Rationalist bible written by Yud (extremely verbose, the new bits are not good and the good bits are not new) used here as a joke, reading it (and saying you should) used to be part of the cultic milieu of LW).
Wait even LWers aren’t reading the sequences anymore? Or rather aren’t pretending to have done so?
It wasn’t really done that much during the era when Scott A was called the new leader of lesswrong so not sure if it has increased again. I assume a lot still do, as I assume a lot also pretend to have read it. Never looked into any stats, or if those stats are public. I know they put them all on a specific site in 2015. (https://www.readthesequences.com/) The bibliography is a treat (esp as it starts with pop sci books, and a SSC blog post, but also: “Banks, Iain. The Player of Games. Orbit, 1989.”, and not one but 3 of the Doc EE Smith lensmen books).
Why put in the work when you can ask Claude to summarize them for you and reap those sweet sweet internet points?
LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.
Claude couldn’t exit the house at the beginning of Pokémon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore it’s dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldn’t figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!
Without a captcha the AIs would be trained on cutting edge AI alignment research like “videogames are unintuitive sometimes”, and this would greatly increase the chance of P(Doom).
The CAPTCHA failed to load properly for me at first, and then was mega slow. Quality custom implementation of a (wrapper around a) CAPTCHA, millions of EA money well spent.
HEY GUYS CHECK THIS OUT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1yHrZR_Sgg
with the awful (systems) assistance of self, fasterandworse and jp of this parish
no idea when i’ll do another one, this one was 3 hrs faff for 5 min video lol
things I need: a better mic, a chair that doesn’t swivel
lol I have no idea if anyone would recognize me by that reference
(I don’t mind, just surprised at someone Of The Internet actually using that name :D)
I did in fact have fun! If the quick-hit format turns out to be worth your time, I have to say I quite enjoy it, and I hardly count myself as a TikTok-obsessed zoomer.
I’ve been a little bit sad that Ed Z dropped the rapid-fire 15-minute format once he hit the podcast big time. I really appreciated that format’s conciseness; not sure if you’d want to pick that sort of thing up. I have to wonder if it’s easier or harder to book people for such a delimited time slot.
oh yeah loved that format, perfect
however, Better Offline makes money
fuck yeah! it’s a very solid start, and I appreciate the (is that clickbaity enough) in the thumbnail
how much is templated now? reckon it’ll be 3hrs every time?
if i stop saying “um” all the time that’s half an hour less in post right there
I was going to write that it was good that you didn’t say “um” all the time. (Being silent in pauses is in my experience a learned skill for most people and one that comes once one has heard oneself say “um” too many times.)
The sound was fine. I think your (Jabra?) headset did its job unless that was also the result of editing.
The imagery got a bit distracting because you look to the side of the camera. No problem for podcasts, but for video it’s better to look straight at the camera to look at the audience so to speak. (Also a learnt skill.) So maybe a webcam you can place in front of the screen you are presumably reading of?
No idea about marketing a YouTube, but you got in the “like and subscribe”, so that is probably good.
I thought I was looking into the camera, but phones are annoying
New piece from Brian Merchant: So the LA Times replaced me with an AI that defends the KKK
This “insight” tool gives a very incisive critique of the opinion-page journalism we’ve been seeing lately. Oddly enough, not the kind of critique you’d see printed on an opinion page.
