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…)
A terrifying poster, spotted in the window of a tattoo shop in Dublin:
Hopefully no one will actually get these images tattooed on their body.
Hopefully no one will actually get these images tattooed on their body.
you know there’s gonna be at least that one person with multiple of them
Turns out there is, but he also has Polydactyly
I love to get my tattoos on clearance
I mean, with the instantly recognizable AI lighting design it would actually take a fair degree of skill to make something look that garbage as an actual tattoo.
So in the past week or so a lot of pedestrian crossings in Silicon Valley were “hacked” (probably never changed the default password lol) to make them talk like tech figures.
Here are a few. Note that these voices are most likely AI generated.
- A crosswalk with the voice of Elon Musk
- A crosswalk with the voice of Zuck
- Elon Musk crosswalk just wants to be friends (second video) also Zuck crosswalk is proud of his work (third video).
I didn’t get to hear any of them in person, however the crosswalk near my place has recently stopped saying “change password” constantly, which I’m happy about.
apparently a complete archive of scott siskind’s old livejournal. found on the EA forum no less. https://archive.fo/fCFQx
couldn’t help myself, there are seldom more perfect opportunities to use this one
I did a quick scan of the titles just for old time’s sake and ran into a very aggressive “oh my God shut up” directed at my younger self as much as at Scooter himself.
That is odd in a way, you would expect them to honour is wishes of that data no longer being available, but nope.
I clicked on one from 2012 and it implies that if you lived in nazi germany you should have had polite debates with nazis. Thanks Scott, never change.
I’m not going to click more but it goes back to 2006 so if anyone finds any sad incel whining please bring it up!
Some idiot on LW still thinks the same way:
I selected and worded these suspicions to sound more like things a Democrat might say, because I’m trying to persuade Democrats that conservative misinformation draws from reasonable attitudes.
Wow, that sure is a longwinded way to announce to the world that you are a dupe
Thanks Scott, never change.
Not to worry, he never will!
Here’s a screenshot of two screenshots of an AI bro getting humiliated:
the hawk tuah teapot is actually hysterical which is how I knew the poster was taking the piss
It would appear CNN was also at the eugenics conference? Why are all these mainstream news orgs at a 200-person event where all the speakers are eugenicists and racists?
https://bsky.app/profile/bmceuen.bsky.social/post/3lmmtefdl422j
And in response to an Atlantic subhead saying “Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus, but the left was mostly absent at a recent pro-natalism conference”:
yeah, weird that the left wasn’t present at the Fourteen Words conference
https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lmmqjx3fdc2e
They’re giving the American people what they voted for
I mean the left has been mostly absent from America in general since at least the Reagan years, so it’s not all that surprising.
Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
(Blog post written by a crypto-turned-AI bro, but the observation is amusing.)
Making a startup named Sphinctr
This one has anus in the name https://manus.im/
Addition to that, why do some look like Goatse?
Class inheritance
education secretary linda mcmahon speaking about AI in schools. please enjoy
https://www.youtube.com/live/lxrg28zBv94?t=7567s
saw this at https://bsky.app/profile/joshkovensky.bsky.social/post/3lmfr3ssn5s2j, but I recommend watching first so you don’t spoil what you’re about to hear
Pre-watch: With the prior knowledge that her main job prior to this was wrestling promoter, the ol’ overtonussy is preeeetty loose
Post-watch: lol
oh good for once it’s not me thinking up the cursed word
I hate you so much for the word “overtonussy”.
You’re welcome!
You need to have levels in several subclasses of extremely online to even understand that.
[✅] “achievement” unclocked
Hello fellow memebuild enjoyer
overtonussy
Mods, crush his skull /j
Slather us in steak sauce and serve with a baked fucking potato because we are so cooked.
Tired: AI
Wired (and delicious): A1
hold the fucking phone. The secretary of education is the wife of VINCE FUCKING MCMAHON? I thought this was a “no relation” situation but no, it’s real.
If Democrats win the midterm I think they get to shave her head.
Don’t look up who the president is, it might come as a shock /s
New animation (1:20) by theforestjar about AI art.
Because it is nice to have something entertaining for a change:
https://bsky.app/profile/willsmith.fun/post/3lmi2bjrao22t
Wow, that latest chat with Adam Patrick Murray about the Nintendo Switch 2 was quite the ride! The bit on the console’s dock secrets and the MicroSD Express storage had me glued. It’s amazing to see how these tech advancements are sculpting new landscapes.
Speaking of tech wizardry, have you thought about having Christian Perry on the show? As the CEO of Undetectable AI, he’s taken the whole generative AI world by storm, much like the Switch 2 is taking over gaming news! With over 15 million users and standing as a top AI writing tool, Christian’s insights into AI’s hidden workings promise to intrigue your audience, especially when it comes to how his tools seamlessly pass for human writing without tripping any detectors like GPTzero
Undetectable AI, everyone. Astounding.
New piece from 404 Media: Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”
On a related note, Baldur Bjarnason has chimed in noting how he called this exact shit happening:
Remember when I told you that using these LLMs was like giving US tech a bigotry dial for all your writing?
pedal to the metal on the content and information theft, folks:
seems it’s this lot. despite their name, there appears to be almost nothing artful or artistic about them - it’s all b2b shit for Selling Better
Incorporating into your workflow a company that is a shell around other companies that are selling their products at a loss with no path to profitability seems like quite an unacceptable business risk to me. But I dont get paid the big bux
as long as you can mark it up and as long as the charade lasts, and as long as there’s someone willing to pay, this will make money. when spicy autocomplete provider collapses just pack your bags and leave
I think when you have integrated all this into your workflows doing that and going back might be hard esp on the enterprise level.
For the enterprise using it, yes. For the enterprise selling it, probably not so much.
Bingo.
wait, what do you mean “integrating it into workflows”. this juicero of outsourcing won’t work as advertised and it’s probably cheaper and less prone to fucking up to hire a couple of southeastern asians or eastern europeans. as long as business is selling of these juiceros, they’ll be fine as long as they can find suckers. these suckers, tho, might be in trouble even before openai goes under for unrelated reasons
It has some usage if your don’t care about quality or consistency. See the vibe coders. Firing most of your team because a lot of unimportant stuff can be vibe coded (and your customers are locked in and nobody in management knows what a Trust Thermocline is), and then suddenly openAi drives up prices, causing the secondary company to go poof or also raise prices. And suddenly you are left with a garguantuan mess that you can no longer properly afford. A technical debt accelerant. I mean people are using this shit, even if we know it is shit (and they might also knwo it but it is forced from above).
Of course if you believe in markets these badly run companies will go under invisible hand etc etc.
oh but that’s not my problem, and those who got in that very stupid position deserve every last bit of it
@fullsquare @Soyweiser “I’ve sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook, and by gum, it put them on the map!”
somebody had to do the design + layout for that banner. i wonder what was going through their head then.
Wonder if the sinister look was demanded by the clients or the person doing the design.
“I should start the Butlerian Jihad”
“God I wish I was an AI so i didn’t have to do this”
I feel like some of the doomers are already setting things up to pivot when their most major recent prophecy (AI 2027) fails:
From here:
(My modal timeline has loss of control of Earth mostly happening in 2028, rather than late 2027, but nitpicking at that scale hardly matters.)
It starts with some rationalist jargon to say the author agrees but one year later…
AI 2027 knows this. Their scenario is unrealistically smooth. If they added a couple weird, impactful events, it would be more realistic in its weirdness, but of course it would be simultaneously less realistic in that those particular events are unlikely to occur. This is why the modal narrative, which is more likely than any other particular story, centers around loss of human control the end of 2027, but the median narrative is probably around 2030 or 2031.
Further walking the timeline back, adding qualifiers and exceptions that the authors of AI 2027 somehow didn’t explain before. Also, the reason AI 2027 didn’t have any mention of Trump blowing up the timeline doing insane shit is because Scott (and maybe some of the other authors, idk) like glazing Trump.
I expect the bottlenecks to pinch harder, and for 4x algorithmic progress to be an overestimate…
No shit, that is what every software engineering blogging about LLMs (even the credulous ones) say, even allowing LLMs get better at raw code writing! Maybe this author is better in touch with reality than most lesswrongers…
…but not by much.
Nope, they still have insane expectations.
Most of my disagreements are quibbles
Then why did you bother writing this? Anyway, I feel like this author has set themselves up to claim credit when it’s December 2027 and none of AI 2027’s predictions are true. They’ll exaggerate their “quibbles” into successful predictions of problems in the AI 2027 timeline, while overlooking the extent to which they agreed.
I’ll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff, and -100 for not realizing the real reason why Scott didn’t include any call out of that in AI 2027.
I’ll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff
+10 bayes points
Has someone on LW already proposed a BayesCoin or have I just figured out how to steal lunch money from all rationalists at once
it’s a fucking harry potter reference
HP fanfic but house points are crypto and the chocolate frog cards are NFTs tracked on a magical blockchain
Non Fungible Toads
Edit: this is a nonsequitur, but my wife just shared this with me and it is delightful
With a name like that and lesswrong to springboard it’s popularity, BayesCoin should be good for at least one cycle of pump and dump/rug-pull.
Do some actual programming work (or at least write a “white paper”) on tying it into a prediction market on the blockchain and you’ve got rationalist catnip, they should be all over it, you could do a few cycles of pumping and dumping before the final rug pull.
Without looking it up i can tell you that coin already exists and the value has crashed already
Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic. Unfortunately it also looks like the distinctive AI art style was pretty key to preventing the usual set of AI generated image “tells”. Mirrors, hands, teeth, etc are all very visibly wrong.
Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic.
This entire enterprise is just shamanry, we are like two steps away from “throwing a goat into a volcano makes your next prompt more realistic”
deleted by creator
Some dark urge found me skim-reading a recent AI doomer blog post. I was startled awake by this most unsettling passage:
My wife wrote a letter to our infant daughter recently. It concluded:
I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]
Though the theoretical possibility had always been percolating somewhere in the back of my mind, it wasn’t until now that I viscerally realized that P(doomers reproducing) was greater than zero. And with other doomers no less.
Left brooding on this development, I drudged along until-
BAhahaha what the fuck
I can’t. This is beyond parody.Completely lost it here. Nothing could have prepared me for the poorly handwritten wrist tattoo.
Creating space for miracles
Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.Oh how rational! Willing to entertain the idea that maybe, theoretically, the doomsday prediction could be off by a few days?
I’m not sure that I ever strongly felt that I would die at eighty or so. I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.
This guy thought he was getting clean but he was actually replacing weed with heroin
I really convinced myself that “doomsday cult” was hyperbole but uhh, nope, it’s 107% real.I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.
My dude you’re so, so, sooo close to realising it, you should spontaneously quantum-tunnel into self-awareness any second now
Oh that tattoo is regrettable
Also, man why do I click on these links and read the LWers comments. It’s always insufferable people being like, “woe is us, to be cursed with the forbidden knowledge of AI doom, we are all such deep thinkers, the lay person simply could not understand the danger of ai” like bruv it aint that deep, i think i can summarize it as follows:
hits blunt “bruv, imagine if you were a porkrind, you wouldn’t be able to tell why a person is eating a hotdog, ai will be like we are to a porkchop, and to get more hotdogs humans will find a way to turn the sun into a meat casing, this is the principle of intestinal convergence”
Literally saw another comment where one of them accused the other of being a “super intelligence denier” (i.e., heretic) for suggesting maybe we should wait till the robot swarms coming over the hills before we declare its game over.
yet I hold
space for it
Rupi Kaur should sue
:'( sad one. feel bad for the bebe, being raised by insane people.
The storm rages within
Yet I hold F to pay respects
I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]
When “The world is gonna end soon so let’s just rawdog from now on” gets real
Teach your children to envy the dead
Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.
This line actually really annoys me, because they are already set up for moving the end date on their doomsday prediction as needed while still maintaining their overall doomerism.
At the start they state
The disappointment of imminent death is all the more crushing because just a few years ago researchers announced breakthrough discoveries that suggested [existing, adult] humans could have healthspans of thousands of years. To drop the analogy, here I’m talking about my transhumanist beliefs. The laws of physics don’t demand that humans slowly decay and die at eighty. It is within our engineering prowess to defeat death, and until recently I thought we might just do that, and I and my loved ones would live for millennia, becoming post-human superbeings.
This is, frankly, bonkers. I’d rate the following in descending order of probability
- worldwide societal collapse due to climate change
- we develop an AI that will kill us all for unspecified reasons
- we establish viable self-sustaining societies outside the limits of Earth
- we develop techniques that allow everyone to live effectively forever
If the first happens, it removes the material requirements for the latter things to happen. This is an extreme form of “denial of the flesh”, the inability to realize that without food or water no-one will be working on AI or life extension tech.
“Im 99% sure I will die in the next year because of super duper intelligence, but in a world where that doesnt happen i plan to live 1000 years” surely is a forecast. Surprised they don’t break their own necks on the whiplash from this take.
