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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Ah, late stage capitalism at its finest.
one of OpenAI’s cofounders wrote some thoroughly unhinged shit about the company’s recent departures
Thank you, guys, for being my team and my co-workers. With each of you, I have collected cool memories — with Barret, when we had a fierce conflict about compute for what later became o1; with Bob, when he reprimanded me for doing a jacuzzi with a coworker; and with Mira, who witnessed my engagement.
I am in awe of the sheer number of GPUs… whose lives ChatGPT has changed.
If it was just this one line, this would be in the top 10 funniest things ever written around genAI. Too bad the rest of the rambling insanity ruins it.
Fun fact: All of these incidents happened at the same jacuzzi party.
I heard it was the same 50 parties, over and over
(or, well, the same party, x50…)
lmao this is weird as fuck, reminds me of the bullshit Lex Fridman comes up with, I can totally imagine him saying things like this
I can’t be the only one reading that super passive aggressively right? “Thank you Barret, whom I hated. Bob, for ruining my hot Jacuzzi date. And Mira, for existing.”
right with you on team passive aggressive.
love a good second paragraph jumpscare
Found a good one in the wild
Didn’t you know LLM stood for Limited Liability Machine
Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last week’s thread instead of this one, so let’s try again.
Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or he’d say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didn’t pay up, so he compared them to cancer.
And now they’re suing him.
https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/
Hello Matt this is your lawer speaking
Haha I saw it from new comments view, didn’t check the thread title
lol holy shit, he was barely getting started
shortly after the first posts, he (most likely personally, although remains to be seen) had the trademark usage page updated specifically to take aim at wpengine
and started making his employees do an astroturfing campaign on their private socials
and blocked wpengine from interacting with wordpress.org at all, by both blocking accounts and IPs
dude’s lost it. coming up soon, mass migrations off wordpress?
Sounds like someone under a lot of pressure to raise revenue and not having much success.
Mullenweg’s the same guy who publicly harassed a random transwoman on Tumblr and had a general meltdown to the point where Tumblr staff had to distance themselves from him, so I’m not shocked. (EDIT: Somehow used the singular masc pronoun for the entirety of Tumblr staff - don’t ask me how)
(That its Tumblr is the only thing that shocks me - you’d think he’d have realised its queer-friendly rep was one of the main things going for it)
wait are there non-queer people on Tumblr even??
I mean, it’s the same company that didn’t realize that half its traffic was porn, so it’s on brand
I mean, it’s the same company that didn’t realize that half its traffic was porn, so it’s on brand
Granted, Apple’s banhammer forced Tumblr’s hand on that front (though Tumblr’s complete failure on moderation did give Apple that golden opportunity).
(The whole debacle did lead to Newgrounds getting hit by two separate waves of new users - a minor wave in November after the NSFW purges kicked in, then a major wave in December after the porn ban was officially announced. I have nothing more to add, I think it was pretty funny Tumblr shat the bed that hard)
Turns out trump really does understand cryptocurrency perfectly. Who’d have thought? Some folk seems surprisingly unhappy about this, though.
Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in Crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper ‘$35T crypto we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.
anything that makes yglesias have a bad day is generally a good thing
but it sounds like the orange man understands the crypto market perfectly: the numbers are all made up and everyone’s lying
(at least I think it’s that one? one of them’s quite the bootlicker. I’m bad at names tho)
The question (which doesn’t matter) now is, does he really understand crypto? Or did he get at the right conclusion because he thinks that everybody else, like him, is just scamming all the time?
Given the kinds of crowds he hangs out with (i.e. mostly other rich people and political elite) is that not an understandable conclusion?
I mean there are definitely some brain rotted crypto bros who would buy shares at face value because it’s totally gonna go to the moon guys
I am sure this is totally not sketchy in the slightest and the people behind it have no nefarious agenda whatsoever.
fuck that’s gross
where’d you find/run across that? can’t tell if it’s a normal ad or some gig-site thing or what
Saw it posted on Reddit. It’s apparently from clickworker.com which is a weird-ass website by itself at first glance, with great pitches like this:
People are happier if they are more financially independent. We can help you achieve this.
ah, doman name sounds like it’s one of the microwork farms
Ah yes the advertisement which causes T&S people (who have seen some things) to go on long rants on why you should never put pictures of your kids online publically.
Job interviews by AI avatars are real and happening, apparently https://www.404media.co/ai-avatars-are-doing-job-interviews-now/
From an article about a boutique brand that sells books to rich people:
Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more.
Oh, so they publish textbooks.
“They represent stealth wealth, intended to tell you what your hosts are about and to provide visual evidence: that the owners are people of wealth, education and taste.”
🎶 Please allow me to introduce myself 🎶
Of course the books are just vapid art books or travel books.
So you’re saying that they’ve got books worth at least a grand which their owners are literally using to flaunt their wealth?
I’m legally obligated to say stealing is legally and morally wrong buuuuuuuut
@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors aren’t getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods …
(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)
now where did I leave my hammer and sickle
“…37%… That means nearly one in four…”
Eh, no it doesn’t, it means nearly two in five. Which is worse.
I just learned about this “wonderful” little item too
@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is “Veblen goods”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
“a type of luxury good… for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.”
handy to know, ty
“Complimentary Carbon Efficient Delivery”
Carbon Efficient even…
That means that DHL driver has to take bike instead of car for this one
If there is an elevator in the apartment, the driver has to take the stairs, contractually. Of course people who order that don’t live in high rise apartments where the driver can reach the door, so everybody wins.
Assouline! The gasoline of ass!
Do you think when the Trumps get paperclipped it will look something like this?
This was the woman who took over during Sam Altman’s temporary removal as CEO, which we’re pretty sure happened because the AI doom cultists weren’t satisfied that Altman was enough of an AI doom cultist.
Yudkowsky was solidly in favor of her ascension. I take no joy in saying this as someone who wants this AI nonsense to stop soon, but OpenAI is probably better off financially with fewer AI doom cultists in high positions.
Do you think they still say all that bullshit even when they’re not screenshooting it for twitter? Probably, right
hundo p
Our anti-AI milita will be called “The Artists’ Rifles”
Was salivating all weekend waiting for this to drop, from Subbarao Kambhampati’s group:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved block stacking abilities. It is a straight shot from here to cold fusion! … unfortunately, there is a minor caveat:
Looks like performance drops like a rock as number of steps required increases…
correct me if I’m reading this wrong — the results are that LLMs are much, much worse than classical AI at planning block placement for SHRDLU? that seems pretty damning
Yes, the classical algo achieves perfect accuracy and is way faster. There is also a table that shows the cost of running o1 is enormous. Like comically bad. Boil a small ocean bad. We’ll just 10x the size and it will achieve 15 steps inshallah.
Imo, this is like the same behavior we see on math problems. More steps it takes, the higher the chance it just decoheres completely. I can’t see any reason why this type of thing would just “click” for the models if they are also unable to do multiplication.
I mean this just reeks of pure hopium from OAI and co that things will magykly work out. (But the newer model is clearly better^{tm}! I still don’t see any indication that one day that chart is just going to be 100s across the board.)
ah yes, $42, definitely a “the same amount of compute is used” figure
these results are remarkably damning. I knew things were bad, but god damn this is impressively shit
Large Reasoning Models
May the coiners of this jargon step on Lego until the end of days
I feel this shouldn’t at all be surprising, and continues to point to Diverse Intelligence as more fundamental than any sort General Intelligence conceptually. There’s a huge difference between what something is in theory or in principal capable of, and the economics story of what that thing attends to naturally as per its energy story.
Broadly, even simple things are powerful precisely because of what they don’t bother trying to do until perturbed.
Ultimately, I hypothesize the reason why VCs like the idea of LLMs doing simple things far more expensively than otherwise is already possible, is because, They literally can’t imagine what else to spend their money on. They are vacuous consumers by design.
So what you’re saying is that Tim Apple could save us from these people by selling Marc Andreessen a billion dollar iphone?
It’s Veblen goods again, isn’t it?
Honestly, Yes. The hardest thing for a rich person to do is spend their money. Eventually this catches up with them: to spend no money is to lose it comparatively, to spend money is to risk not getting it back. So a great deal of the money world revolves primarily around persuasion, and the very odd things that happen along the way.
It also helps to recognize how much many of these people see all of this as a competition, and trying to out-unique/out-possess their peers
HN seems to be particularly deranged today, doesn’t it?
It mostly seems to be a mopey debate over whether Saltman’s impending apotheosis is good or bad.
I think they’ve been pretty sane AI-wise, lately.
you sure about that?
The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It’s not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you’re not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You’re out. And the growing consensus is “why shouldn’t you?”, there is no escape from that.
This is someone who literally can’t tell good writing from bad, so he assumes everyone is using AI
He’s so close to being depressed enough to maybe ask a vital and important question about meaning and his own relationships with technology. But probably he’ll just buy more AI.
Watching AI guys slowly come around feels similar to how people have to care for their alcoholic relatives. Folks have to come to the point where they recognize where the unacceptable bullshit lies on their own, then you can show them the cold hard facts and a path back to the real world, but getting there is absolutely exhausting and often heartbreaking.
ya know that inane SITUATIONAL AWARENESS paper that the ex-OpenAI guy posted, which is basically a window into what the most fully committed OpenAI doom cultists actually believe?
yeah, Ivanka Trump just tweeted it
But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.
oh boy
From that blog post:
You can see the future first in San Francisco.
“And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
barron: shows ivanka the minecraft speedrun
ivanka: I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT, BROTHER
edit: accidentally read ivanka as melania, now corrected
Personally, I was radicalized by ‘watch for rolling rocks’ in .5 A presses
parallel universes were the inspiration behind urbit, it all makes sense
