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.)
Ed Zitronās planning to hold AI boosters to account:
Well if the bubble pops he will have to pivot to people who pivot. (That is what is going to suck when to bubble pops, so many people are going to lose their jobs, and I fear a lot of people holding the bags are not the ones who really should be punished the mosts (really hope not a lot of pension funds bought in). The stock market was a mistake).
New Atlantic article regarding AI, titled āAI Is a Mass-Delusion Eventā. Its primarily about the authorās feelings of confusion and anxiety about the general clusterfuck that is the bubble.
better, or equivalent to, a mass defecation event?
Found a solution to the Fermi paradox, and solved the problem of all the ādark matterā, any advanced society just puts a dyson sphere around their galaxy, that is why we canāt see or hear from them.
(Yes, this is a subsneer for the silly Altman remark. The whole solar system not just the Sun (I do support walling off The Sun)).
DAE remember when neel armstrong invented nasa and said his famous quote āThatās one small step for man, ok letās fill this motherfucker up with GPUsā
slaps moon You can make so much computronium from these atoms.
E: shit no that is wrong, I used the term computronium correctly, if it was Altman he would have called it unobtanium
Skip the unobtainium I say, letās just implement the human instrumentality project and tangify us all into a collective goo.
Because of course why have a data ~~center~~ when you can have an ecumenskatasphaira.
The usual suspects are mad about college hillās expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, Iām in bed and canāt be bothered to link at the moment.
Iām sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If itās not the implicit racialization of everything, itās the use of the stat systems as a framework for literally masturbatory eugenics fetishization.
You all can keep a stripped-down version of Starfinder as a treat. But if I see any more of this, weāre going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and thatās final.
also: The int-maxxing and overinflated ego of it all reminds me of the red mage from 8-bit theater, a webcomic based on final fantasy about the LW (light warriors) that ran from 2001-2010
E: thinking back on it, reading this webcomic and seeing this character probably in some part inoculated me against people like yud without me knowing
To be fair to DnD, it is actually more sophisticated than the IQ fetishists, it has 3 stats for mental traits instead of 1!
I would simply learn how to keep āgamesā and ārealityā separate. I actually already know. It helps a lot.
Racists are gonna racist no matter what. They didnāt need TTRPGs around to give them the idea of breaking out the calipers.
Anyone found with a non-cube platonic solid will be lockerized indefinitely
Weāve definitely sneered at this before, i do not recall if it was known that KP was the cowriter in this weird forum RP fic
E: googling ālintamande kelsey piperā and looking at a reddit post digs up the inactive since 2018 AO3. A total just shy of 130k words, a little marvel stuff, most of it LOTR based, and some of it tagged āVladmir Putin/Sauronā. How fun!
No judgement from me, tbh. Fanfic be fanficking. I aint gonna read that shit tho.
For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yudās coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I donāt know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified ālintamandeā as Kelsey Piper in 2013.
I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:
The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate.
And I got to about here:
Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.
ā¦ before the āwhat the fuck is this fucking shit?ā intensified beyond my ability to care.
Yeah I couldnāt find the strength to even get to the naughty stuff, I gave up after one or two chapters. And Iāve read through all of HPMOR. š
Iām hard-pressed to think of anything else I have tried to read that was comparably impenetrable. At least when we played āexquisite corpseā parlor games on the high-school literary magazine staff, we didnāt pretend that anything we improvised had lasting value.
Previous thread
E: we didnāt fucking know
Not sure if anybody noticed the last time, but so they get isekayed into a DND world, which famously runs on some weird form of fantasy feudalism and they expect a random high int person to rule the country somehow? What in the primogenitor is this stuff, you canāt just think yourself into being a king, that is one of the issues with monarchies.
E: ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.
ah no they are in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of hell, places that totally praise merit based upwards mobility.
Hey, write what you know
An encounter of this sort is what drove Lord Vetinari to make a scorpion pit for mimes, probably.
Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?
Weird rp wouldnāt be sneer worthy on itās own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), itās contributing factors likeā¦
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the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)
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the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (heās literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)
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the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)
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the fact that Eliezer think itās another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)
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the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of characterās working for literal Hellā¦ is certainly an authorial choice)
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and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)
ā¦At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.
And it shouldnāt be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.
obligatory reminder that ādath ilanā is misspelled āthailandā and I still donāt know why. Working theory is Yud wants to recolonise thailand
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Okay so I know GPT-5 had a bad launch and has been getting raked over the coals, but AGI is totally still on, guys!
Why? Because trust me itās definitely getting better behind the scenes in ways that we canāt see. Also China is still scary and we need to make sure we make the AI God that will kill us all before China does because reasons.
Also despite talking about a how much of the lack of progress is due to the consumer model and this is a cost-saving thereās no reference to the work of folks like Ed Zitron on how unprofitable these models are, much less the recent discussions on whether GPT-5 as a whole is actually cheaper to operate than earlier models given the changes it necessitates in caching.
Everyone agrees that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4, that it was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for, and that the release was overhyped quite a bit.
a quantum leap might actually be accurate
Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4
Sure babe, you keep telling yourself that.
Our Very Good Friends are often likened to Scientology, but have we considered Happy Science and Aum Shinrikyo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
Aum is very apt imo given how it recruited stem types.
aum recruited a lot of people, and also failed at some things that would be presumably easier to do safely than what they did
Meanwhile, Aum had also attempted to manufacture 1,000 assault rifles, but only completed one.[37]
otoh they were also straight up delusional about what they could achieve, including toying with the idea of manufacturing nukes, military gas lasers, and getting and launching Proton rocket. (not exactly grounded for a group of people who couldnāt make AK-74s)
they were also more media savvy in that they didnāt pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they
had entire radio stationrented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)they were also more media savvy in that they didnāt pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they had entire radio station rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)
Its pretty telling about Our Good Friendsā media savviness that it took an all-consuming AI bubble and plenty of help from friends in high places to break into the mainstream.
radio transmissions in russia were money shot for aum, and idk if it was a fluke or deliberate strategy. people had for a long time expectation that radio and tv are authoritative, reliable sources (due to censorship that doubled as fact-checker, and about all of it was state-owned) and in 90s every bit of that broke down because of privatization, and now you could get on the air and say anything, with many taking that at face value, as long as you pay up. at the same time there was major economic crisis and cults prey on the desperate. result?
Following the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, two Russian Duma committees began investigations of the Aum ā the Committee on Religious Matters and the Committee on Security Matters. A report from the Security Committee states that the Aumās followers numbered 35,000, with up to 55,000 laymen visiting the sectās seminars sporadically. This contrasts sharply with the numbers in Japan which are 18,000 and 35,000 respectively. The Security Committee report also states that the Russian sect had 5,500 full-time monks who lived in Aum accommodations, usually housing donated by Aum followers. Russian Aum officials, themselves, claim that over 300 people a day attended services in Moscow. The official Russian Duma investigation into the Aum described the cult as a closed, centralized organization.
With all that money sloshing around, Itās only a matter of time before they start cribbing from their neighbors and we get an anime adaptation of HPMoR.
And how it fused Buddhism with more Christian religions. Considering how often you heard of old hackers being interested in the former.
aum:
Advertising and recruitment activities, dubbed the āAum Salvation planā, included claims of [ā¦] realizing life goals by improving intelligence and positive thinking, and concentrating on what was important at the expense of leisure.
this is in common with both our very good friends and scientology, but i think happy science is much stupider and more in line with srinivasanās network states, in that it has/is an explicitly far-right political organization built in from day one
Yeah, good point.
Network State def has that store-brand Team Rocket vibe.
got sent this image
wonder how many more of these things weāll see before people start having a real bileful response to this (over and above the fact that a number of people have been warning about exactly this outcome for a while now)
(transcript below)
transcript
title: I gave my momās company an Al automation and now she and her coworkers are unemployed
body: So this is eating me alive and I donāt really know where else to put it. I run this little agency that builds these Al agents for staffing firms. Basically the agent pre-screens candidates, pulls the info into a neat report, and sends it back so recruiters donāt waste hours on screening calls. Itās supposed to be a tool, not a replacement.
My mom works at this mid sized recruiting company. Sheās always complained about how long it takes to qualify candidates, so I set them up with one of my agents just to test it. It crushed it. Way faster, way cheaper, and honestly more consistent than most of their team.
Fast forward two months and theyāve quietly laid off almost her whole department. Including my mom. I feel sick. Like I built something that was supposed to help people, and instead it wiped out my momās job and her team. I keep replaying it in my head like I basically automated my own family out of work.
Pressing F for doubt, looks like a marketing scam to me.
Itās pretty screwed up that humble bragging about putting their own mother out of a job is a useful opening to selling a scam-service. At least the people that buy into it will get what they have coming?
that or some kind of bait
I didnāt dig into the post/username at all so I canāt guesstimate likelihood of this! get where youāre coming from
(ā¦I really need to finish my blog relaunch (this thought brought to you by the explication I was about to embark on in this context))
(((itās soon.gif tho!)))
Gonna have to agree with zogwarg here. I checked out the Reddit profile and theyāre a self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose one-man āagencyā has zero clients and yet to even have an idea, attempting to crowdsource the latter on r/entrepreneur.
dude has a post named āfrom 0 to 1 clients in 48hā where someone calls him out for already claiming to have 17 customers, so itās reasonable to assume that this guy is full of shit either way
then again, thereās plenty of clueless, could be real, because welcome to current year, where everything is fake, satire is dead and reuters puts the onion out of the business
āset them up withā
Anybody want to bet if they did it for free?
could go either way tbh
New piece from the Financial Times: Tech utterly dominates markets. Should we worry?
Pulling out a specific point, the articleās noted how market concentration is higher now than it was in the dot-com bubble back in 2000:
You want my overall take, Iām with Zitron - this is quite a narrative shift.
Ai scrapers have managed to bypass anubis on codeberg: https://programming.dev/post/35852706
Not sure why this āmember of technical staff at METRā felt the need to post about the lowered productivity of Black people in the southern US states after slavery was abolished. Iām sure itās nothing.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zr37dY5YPRT6s56jY/thomas-kwa-s-shortform?commentId=iwGgqsmpY6Tcex5je
He seems to state that after the abolition of slavery, less of the profits from a unit time of labor accrued to the owners of the land in question. The reasons for this is of course a mystery.
Itās always the people you most expect.
Free people have less prodictivity, time to wirehead everyone! A Brave New World!
the eternal mba graduate worldview
Xe Iasoās chimed in on the GPT-5 fallout, giving her thoughts on chatbotsā use as assistants/therapists.
In related news Iāve been getting podcast ads for Anthropic touting Claudeās emotional intelligence and value in working through lifeās challenges and listening to your relationship issues.
Theyāre not explicitly saying that their chatbot is a therapist, but theyāre getting about as close as the law would allow, Iām sure.
