Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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.)

Prosperity's Path: OpenAI has shown it cannot be trusted. Canada needs nationalized, public AI
https://archive.ph/QLg2D

tldr tech bullshit requires ur tax dollars. what ever you do don't question the all knowing laurentian technocrats!

It's 10 pm on a Sunday. My FIL is texting me business plans from the slop hole as I try to get the last kiddo down to sleep. He wants me to read them to my wife, who already mad at him about it.

Thank you all for being an island of sanity.

"posting from the slop hole" is probably the best description possible for this, brb stealing

yeah, the current situation in Europe is like: "As EU citizens, we should break free of our dependency on US Big Tech like the Torment Nexus. That's why my company is advancing our fully sovereign solution, the Agony Core! Europe-owned, GDPR-compliant, Frontex-approved scalable Torment-as-a-Service, at competitive prices with TN-based deployments!"

It is amazing in a way, as in .nl our anti piracy org (brein) already went after local AI models for copyright infringement. While people in power still think we should go all in on AI. Sadly people with tech skills are rare in gov (politicians who go after the votes of tech enthousiasts otoh).

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-fires-employee-insider-trading-polymarket-kalshi/

lol. Between this and the ayatollah clawback, I'm expecting some entertaining litigation.

just got a job in mathematical publishing. it's work i think i'll actually enjoy and expect to be very good at, it pays much better than any other job i've had previously (and they maxed out the position's pay range, which i wasn't expecting) and it has about a month of paid leave a year. such a relief

fuck yeah! congrats!

Felicitations!

("A job," Blake thinks. "I need to find one of those.")

Just a thought...

Imagine if China and North Korea bombed the White House, killed the president and most of the
cabinet, and shot missiles at primary schools. Would you go out on the street and demonstrate in
favor of the Chinese Communist Party and Kim Jong-Un, and expect to be heard and taken seriously?

Somehow brown people in other lands are supposed to be avid readers of wingnut welfare papers and have their worldview 100% aligned with Lindsey Graham and Bibi Netanyahu...

Hell yeah!

Stumbled across a YouTube slop-farm calling itself The Interactive Archive recently, and the whole thing is just plain shameless:

AI slop banner, AI slop thumbnails, AI slop avatar, its all slop from top to fucking bottom.

Its getting pitiful views, too - the highest-viewed video on the damn thing (as of this writing) is the one about arena shooters dying off, sitting at just under 400 views:

Putting that into context, a random screen recording I uploaded hit nearly 700 through sheer luck.

When they witness the skyrocketing economic growth enabled by American AGI, they will be clamoring for Westernization

Looks like they're using the standard blue/orange color scheme

the one about arena shooters dying off

That extruded piece of audiovisual garbage has been bugging me massively for a couple hours now, so I'm gonna make a quick recommendation:

If you're looking for a non-dogshit video about the arena shooter's implosion, boomer shooter YouTuber Skeleblood made a pretty solid one a couple years ago.

This piece on how doomers and rationalists have made everything worse with their "AGI is nigh" shtick and ended up giving AI companies way more power than they should and getting chatbots into the military, where they will almost certainly fuck up and kill people

That is what happens when your mode of analysis is closer to erotic Harry Potter fan fiction (which is indeed the medium in which Yudkowsky has delivered some of his prognostications)

I was going to throw a point of order about not all fanfic being erotic, but given how they fetishize "intelligence" and "rationality" I can't be sure that they don't get off on that slog.

Mildly positive news: there is a fork of the Zed editor with the llm autocomplete stuff ripped out now: https://gram.liten.app/posts/first-release/

(I’ve used zed with the ai kill switch and really like the buffer/editing ux; but it’s always felt a bit gross, I’m excited to see where the fork goes)

You can't build a fandom full of that many fucked-up people without some of them getting horny in a fucked-up way.

Edit to add: example of a non-erotic fanfic https://archiveofourown.org/works/73396436

well would you look at that, some consequences

Are they planning to follow the upstream updates from Zed, or is it a hard fork?

seems unlikely, see here for reference

Thought inspired by some git on the red site, basically their premise was that birthrates are declining because we no longer have a society with a 2-parent nuclear family with one "breadwinner".

Here's my counterproposal to the implied idea we need to implement The Handmaid's Tale:

Ban contraception and abortion but if you get pregnant, there is no stigma to giving birth out of wedlock. The delivery is safe and paid for, and should you wish, the child will be reared in state-funded orphanages. These institutions will be receive more than adequate funding. Their charges will be given preferred entry to the best schools and universities, as well as preferential treatment when it comes to future employment. It will be illegal to discriminate against anyone so raised.

Surely this will raise the birthrate, right?

Stop the presses. Dude who's into LLM's has shit takes about open source software.

Apparently OSS devs that publish under non-commercial licenses are shutting people out?

Definitely some bespoke what the fu-

this is confusing, how many licenses that are "NonCommercial" are mainstream Free/Open source? From what I've seen they're deffo a minority anyway.

Skyview.social mirror so everyone can see - he's locked out everyone who's not signed in.

Oooh I wish this project a lot of success!

Zed is interesting but the project’s very pro-AI stance keeps me away from it. So a fork without that stuff is great, hope that works out longer-term.

Thank you, should have checked that.

Copyleft is non-commercial haven't you heard? I mean its really unfair, the code is completely free but you are not allowed to create the torment nexus without everybody seeing your work.

I can think of one notable project I ever saw one, and that's Bookwyrm with the Anti-Capitalist Software License v1.4.

But this seems too vague-posty to refer to something that specific. Prolly just someone butthurt over copyleft.

Right? Like he never heard of MIT or Apache2 licence.

You could argue that for example AGPL3 is non-commercial in practice due to the requirements to disclose code. But even then.

it's amusing to me that these nerds thought they could in any way affect policy even with a sane administration, not to mention this bugshit crazy one

like I've said before, I'd be perversely happy if we managed to off ourselves by building the robot god. beats drowning in our own filth or blowing ourselves up

new episode of odium symposium. it's a tribute to knowledge fight, in which we dissect an episode of nick fuentes's show. i was nervous about how this would turn out but i think it's actually my favorite episode yet.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/11-groyper-151852222 (links to other platforms at www.odiumsymposium.com)

if we had made the podcast series on rationalists, their importance as useful idiots for billionaires was the structure i wanted to hang the whole thing on. so this is a gratifying read. that said i think the ideas here will be familiar to many stubsack readers

The rationalist view of the world assumes, at some level, that the relevant actors are optimizing for well-understood, predictable variables and a clear understanding of what best serves their self-interest. What it cannot account for is bad faith, impulsiveness, ideological motivation untethered from evidence, random instances of force majeure, and personal whims and petty rivalries.

i will go further and say that not accounting for such things is considered virtuous in rationalist ideology

Followup on the Mass AI Bill, Russel has 180'd on it:

https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/93a-the-three-characters-that-should

Buried in the penalty clause, the part of the bill that nobody reads, is a single reference: violations “shall be punishable in the same manner as provided in Chapter 93A of the General Laws.”

For those outside Massachusetts: Chapter 93A is the state’s consumer protection statute. It is, by most accounts, the most aggressive consumer protection law in America.

Here’s what 93A unlocks. Anyone can sue, not just the government. Class actions are on the table. If the court finds a violation was willful or knowing, damages get tripled. And the bar for what counts as “unfair or deceptive” is lower than in almost any other state.

Now bolt 93A onto all of that. What do you get?

You get a bill that doesn’t need a single regulator to lift a finger. You get a bill that funds its own enforcement through plaintiff attorneys who can file class actions, collect treble damages, and recover legal fees. You get the ADA website-accessibility litigation playbook, where lawyers systematically identify technical violations and file suits at scale, applied to every piece of AI-generated content touching Massachusetts.

Private right of action, fuck yeah. Turns grok into a legal fees dispenser.

The bill doesn’t need to be well-drafted to be dangerous. It needs to be vague, broad, and connected to 93A.

lol

This preprint just shared by Gary Marcus is interesting.

People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique epistemic risk to how individuals come to see the world: unlike hallucinations that introduce falsehoods, sycophancy distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs...

These results reveal how sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt.

LLMs an addictive psychological hazard: confirmed?

lmfao

@BlueMonday1984 @JFranek "If you use this code, you can never charge money for whatever you used it in" sorry what this has the same energy as the brain-wormed Americans who think that socialised heathcare means doctors work for free

Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course?

There are licenses that effectively repel corporate use without a non-commercial clause; I looked at them on Open Source SE a while ago, including a fun bit of dentistry previously, on Lobsters. GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are examples in common usage. This might help to illuminate our boy's actual problem: he can't use Free Software without complying with the onerous requirement of ensuring the Four Freedoms by not plagiarizing, and he really wants to plagiarize.

It's especially strange because becoming less prone to bias and developing a clear understanding of what serves your interest is so much of the pitch for Rationalism as a community/ideology/project. Like, here's unbearably long essays that promise to help cultivate the superpower of seeing the world clearly and acting in it effectively, now if you acknowledge that nobody outside this small set of group homes is actually doing that you'll be shunned. And that's not getting into how easily exploitable those assumptions of good faith are by bad-faith actors. It comes back to that quote from Scott that has stuck in my head apparently more than it did his: if you build a community based on the principle that you will absolutely never have a witch hunt you will end up living among approximately seven principles civil libertarians and eleven million goddamn witches, and this is true even if you're right that witch hunts are bad.

God that was bleak - I thought Nick was bad in his guest spots on Alex's show (seen via Knowledge Fight, of course) but apparently you really do need at least two layers of insulating podcast to avoid suffering critical psychic damage from that level of hatred. I appreciated the acknowledgement that in order to feel at all okay playing clips you needed to sanewash him a little bit. I'm pretty sure that JorDan do the same thing with Alex and don't acknowledge it nearly often enough.

I also feel like some of Nick's schtick is about trying to position himself and maintain his position in the right wing grifter bigot-industrial complex. Like, the open disdain for his audience and presenting his actually pretty straightforward feelings on the halftime show as somehow brave and iconoclastic is also about differentiating himself and making his audience feel superior to Alex, Tucker, Candace, etc. In that sense the open disdain for the audience serves another purpose in terms of reinforcing heirarchy. Look at how great it feels for me to be better than you. And even you are better than the chuds, who are better than the racialized other.

another Onion banger for these trying times

” Then you wake up in a cold sweat and can’t breathe at all, almost like you’re drowning—I guess from the weight of untold mobs of people leaping on you and ripping you apart”

the real Scam Altman would never feel any kind of remorse or emotion about this

i think this is exactly why they had to come up with - or rather, misappropriate - the concept of coupled vs decoupled thinking. when they (especially the more, ahem, human biodiversity minded of them) fold ridiculous claims about what constitutes virtuous cognition into scientific and sophisticated sounding terminology, it makes those claims seem aligned with the broader sales pitch of rationalism

also that scott quote is excellent. i hadn't heard that one before

wrt to the first part, nick consistently outmaneuvers people who bring him onto their platforms. he's honestly brilliant at understanding who the audience is, what frame he's appearing in, and how to signal given those circumstances. i didn't understand until i started prepping for this episode that nick is actually lazy and incurious in almost the exact same way alex jones is. dan and jordan notice and call out how he effortlessly establishes dominance over alex, but i think there's a subtler game going on where nick manages to appear competent and informed compared to alex, and you don't realize that's just an artifact of conversational skill until you hear nick on his own show.

wrt to the second part, i could not agree more and i'm very glad to hear that is a takeaway because it is absolutely something i was hoping to communicate. that's the freudianness of it all, how these existing patterns of relations to another get played out and reenacted through the audience's relationship to nick, and vice versa

Sam Altman Is Realizing He Made a Gigantic Mistake

You don’t say!

The great chain of bleating

Given the delay, I'll bet an internal review discovered more instances in other articles where COVID couldn't be the excuse.

Someone with more time and motivation could probably look at his past articles and see if any others have been quietly pulled or edited, although I have no idea if ars could be assed to change the ones which weren't publicly criticized

I mean yeah I guess in a competition between getting a bullet directly through my brain, getting all my limbs chainsawed off with my head last and being drowned in boiling water, the bullet would win every time. Though the real perversely funniest outcome is if superintelligence turns out to be completely impossible and we fuck ourselves over with garbage to mediocre AI embedded in all our critical infrastructure

Altman claimed that the company would “amend our deal” to add the prohibition of “deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of US persons or nationals.”

...so the original statement was a lie then? the CEO who is notorious for being a liar lied? I am very surprised about this information.