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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A nice long essay by Freddie deBoer for our holiday week: the release of GPT-5; I wholly recommend reading the whole thing!
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy
Choice snippet to whet your appetites:
āWith all of this, Iām only asking you to observe the world around you and report back on whether revolutionary change has in fact happened. I understand, we are still very early in the history of LLMs. Maybe theyāll actually change the world, the way theyāre projected to. But, look, within a quarter-century of the automobile becoming available as a mass consumer technology, its adoption had utterly changed the lived environment of the United States. You only had to walk outside to see the changes they had wrought. So too with electrification: if you went to the top of a hill overlooking a town at night pre-electrification, then went again after that town electrified, youād see the immensity of that change with your own two eyes. Compare the maternal death rate in 1800 with the maternal death rate in 2000 and you will see what epoch-changing technological advance looks like. Consider how slowly the news of King William IVās death spread throughout the world in 1837 and then look at how quickly the news of his successor Queen Victoriaās death spread in 1901, to see truly remarkable change via technology. AI chatbots and shitty clickbait videos choking the social internet do not rate in that context, Iām sorry. I will be impressed with the changes wrought by the supposed AI era when you can show me those changes rather than telling me that theyāre going to happen. Show me. Show me!ā
Good news everyone, we will be living with Big Yud until the literal end of time (see comments)
Ran across a pretty solid sneer: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.
Found a particularly notable paragraph near the end, focusing on the people focusing on āprompt engineeringā:
In fear of being replaced by the hypothetical āAI-accelerated employeeā, people are forgoing acquiring essential skills and deep knowledge, instead choosing to focus on āprompt engineeringā. Itās somewhat ironic, because if AGI happens there will be no need for āprompt-engineersā. And if it doesnāt, the people with only surface level knowledge who cannot perform tasks without the help of AI will be extremely abundant, and thus extremely replaceable.
You want my take, Iād personally go further and say the people who canāt perform tasks without AI will wind up borderline-unemployable once this bubble bursts - theyāre gonna need a highly expensive chatbot to do anything at all, theyāre gonna be less productive than AI-abstaining workers whilst falsely believing theyāre more productive, theyāre gonna be hated by their coworkers for using AI, and theyāre gonna flounder if forced to come up with a novel/creative idea.
All in all, any promptfondlers still existing after the bubble will likely be fired swiftly and struggle to find new work, as they end up becoming significant drags to any companyās bottom line.
Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If youāre willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: theyāre called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your ānatural languageā prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha youāre doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.
Nothing expresses the inherent atomism and libertarian nature of the rat community like this
A rundown of the health risks of alcohol usage, coupled with actual real proposals (a consumption tax), finishes with the conclusion that the individual reader (statistically well-off and well-socialized) should abstain from alcohol altogether.
No calls for campaigning for a national (US) alcohol tax. No calls to fund orgs fighting alcohol abuse. Just individual, statistically meaningless āactionā.
Oh well, AGI will solve it (or the robot god will be a raging alcoholic)
Perfecting the art of getting sloshed is my 80,000 hours of meaningful work.
I just enjoy dabbling
OK now thereās another comment
I think this is a good plea since it will be very difficult to coordinate a reduction of alcohol consumption at a societal level. Alcohol is a significant part of most societies and cultures, and it will be hard to remove. Change is easier on an individual level.
Excepting cases like the legal restriction of alcohol sales in many many areas (Nordics, NSW in Aus, Minnesota in the US), you can in fact just tax the living fuck out of alcohol if you want. The article mentions this.
JFC these people imagine they can regulate how āAGIā is constructed, but faced with a problem thatās been staring humanity in the face since the first monk brewed the first beer they just say "whelp nothing can be done, except become a teetotaller yourself)
Change is easier on an individual level.
No fucking shit?
I, for one, happen to live in one of these āNordicsā and alcohol is actually taxed quite heavily here. If weāre looking at change on an individual level, it would actually be good for the society if more people were drinking alcohol, as long as the benefit of them contributing to society through tax euros outweighs the adverse health effects.
There are a bit different axes here. The tax money doesnāt directly go towards alleviating the suffering of family members of alcoholics, nor does it directly lower the effects of drunk driving. The income is a nice to have, for sure, but the stated aim is to be a āsin taxā which makes the bad thing less affordable.
[Drunk, having a good time with friends]: Iāll show you collecting state tithes for immoral substance consumption!
sin tax error
This post is not meant to be an objective cost-benefit analysis of alcohol.
Oh, youāre not doing the thing thatās supposedly the entire point of the website? Donāt worry, no one else is either.
To be scrupulously fair it is a repost of another slubbslack[1]. Amusingly, both places have a comment with the gist of āwell alcohol gets people laid so whatās the problemā. This of course is a reflection that most LWers cannot get a girl into bed without slipping her a roofie.
[1] is that even ok? I know the LW software has a āmirroringā functionality b/c a lot of content is originally on the memberās SS, maybe you cna point it at any SS entry and get it onto LW.
Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts ā 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency
āHmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words.ā
Another day of living under the indignity of this cruel, ignorant administration.
Thereās something particularly galling about āeverybody who knows how to access the money got firedā. The wholly believable implication that nobody made an active choice to fuck this guy over. Through sheer incompetence that money just vanished into the goddamn ether because God forbid anyone in the modern business or political spaces actually have to take responsibility for their decisions.
Historians like to use āstate capacityā as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.
I didnāt think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and āeverybody who knows how to access the money got firedā
Starting this off with a new Blood in the Machine: The AI bubble is so big itās propping up the US economy (for now)
