Want to wade into the sandy 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.)
SpaceX has chosen a
sacrificialdisposablenaivecrypto billionaire to captain a mars fly-by someday: https://gizmodo.com/spacex-taps-crypto-billionaire-to-lead-first-crewed-mission-to-mars-2000762451The mission is expected to take two years and here’s what he has to say about that:
I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.
He already pulled the same con on a Japanese billionaire in 2018, just talked about flying around the moon not landing on Mars (Wikipedia: dearMoon)
oh boohoo Beff let me play a sad song for you on the world’s smallest violin
As always with these people, note that the replies make frequent reference to “loopholes” and people “exploiting the system” without ever being specific about what those loopholes are.
I don’t know Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos but Forbes’ profile begins:
Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen says @BasedBeffJezos is a “patron saint of techno-optimism.” Garry Tan, who cofounded the venture firm Initialized Capital before becoming CEO of Y Combinator, calls him “brother.” Sam Altman, who founded OpenAI — the company that finally mainstreamed artificial intelligence — has jokingly sparred with him on Twitter. Elon Musk says his memes are “🔥🔥🔥.”
He has an entry on the Effective Accelerationism wiki https://www.eaccwiki.com/index.php?title=Beff_Jezos
The number of bitter fascist weirdos kicking Beff (of all people) while he’s down sure is something.
No honor among thieves i reckon.
xheet is deleted, was is Beff Jezoz who wrote that? background? though he was as American as
apple piethe Ku Klux KlanURL Typo - fixed it
🎶 sing us a song you’re the nano man 🎶
Holy Empire of AI - Predictive History
Once you have the AI state, you now have the technocracy and the world will be perfect.
All right? Does it make sense you guys? What he’s saying here? This is an amazing paragraph written 40, 50 years ago.
So, I’m not saying he’s a Freemason. I’m not saying he’s part of a society, but, he sure thinks like a Freemason.
Zbigniew Brzezinski has been dead for nearly a decade, but sure, let’s play the hits. plus AI! /s
Jiang hadn’t popped up in my feed in a while, guess he’s still at it. At least he’s reading Karen Hao, maybe some viewers follow his cites. He really should just write a Dan Brown novel or something, he’s obviously capable enough at lore dumping.
Can’t find the exact post rn but I remember an AI yt channel (im 90% sure it was the AISpecies guy) using this as proof that ASI is imminent, and conveniently left out the part at the end where they say this does not indicate that AI is now a general-purpose alignment scientist (and also left out the link to the sources in numerous posts iirc so no one could fact check him easily)
deleted by creator
The heartwarming story of the PHI sponge helping the professional racist also hate fat people.
Then again, there is a lot of synergy between the inevitable antifatness and his usual project of hating black people.
So a mid-sized software company called Epic is chatting with Cremieux / Jordan Lasker on twitter?
If your employer is using their software, that might be something to email and ask for a meeting about.
All hospital systems I’ve used use Epic’s software for medical charting which is why I’m baffled
Epic has no competition which is why it can do whatever it wants, like make garbage software and talk to garbage people.
The myth that talking about bubbles prevents bubbles for when someone starts saying some “oh but everyone says AI is a bubble which must mean its not”
Owenomics is also worried about changing the rules to add SpaceX and OpenAI to NASDAQ and the S&P500 while only a tiny fraction of their shares are available for trading. "Bad idea. If float is too low, the market cap is meaningless and should not be relied upon for any purpose. "
Back in January he said that the US stock market is not in a bubble until Robert Shiller’s “CAPE rises to 80 (similar to Japan’s CAPE in 1989).” The CAPE (a ratio of price to the average earning for the past ten years) of the S&P500 is around 40, similar to the US in January 2000.
He does not mention new era thinking (chapters 5 and 6 of Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance).
This website is intended for the use of the wholesale clients only. I declare that I am a wholesale client as defined in the Corporations Act 2001. I declare that I will not provide any information on this website to a retail investor.
Jokes on them I read the page without clicking the agree button here and without being a wholesale client!
the new flipper one will have a “local llm” slopbot, because of course it fucking will. also suspect they’ve used an llm for the blog post because of the emoji list. and the illustrations are also giving me weird vibes.
I don’t think it’s actually going to be doing a lot of LLMing. It has a coprocessor for inference type stuff, but only 8GB of RAM on the SOC. So I assume they just stuck this in for marketing.
several other people have commented on the tone, and I believe it’s just because it’s massaged to be more marketing-ly
same with the local LLM crap, it’s to appeal to investors
I have seen nerds be mad at them for using Discord and GitHub too, some people are really hard to please
doubt this will ever see the light of day anyway
joke is on us, Heaven’s Gate picked the right time to exit.
A LWer of the female persuasion makes the entirely reasonable point that most screw-top openings are probably constructed by looking at median male grip strength, not female. But the real fun is in the comments, where people who can post comments on a blog are seemingly unfamiliar with opening jam jars.
I use grip gloves for opening jars and love them so much. Same ideas as plastic jar grips, but even easier. I find I usually have enough strength but that my skin is too sensitive to fully apply it without grip gloves.
Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages?
James Damore flashbacks ohno
depressing datapoint, this comment was downvoted to the point where it was auto-collapsed yesterday, today it’s “only” on -2
But anyways - why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
what is going on with these people i’m so annoyed i’m about to cry
Why do so many containers require women asking a man for help in order to open them? (Or carrying around an opening tool or living in a kitchen?)
how often do you open jam jars outside the kitchen?? it’s not that hard! you don’t actually have to force them open through grip strength like an idiot man!!
why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I…basic common sense alone would tell you that something with a lot of fruit and a lot of sugar in it might spoil if left open outside of a fridge. Why do these people act like they’ve never seen a banana before
why understand biochemistry, if you’re part of the cognitive elite who can reconstruct it from first principles should it become necessary
Also, real talk: I got a jar opener when my wife moved in and it is a goddamn revelation how much easier that things makes life. Absolutely recommended purchase. You want to have a sandwich but you closed the jar before you came down with a cold? No worries. You stick the yeast towards the back of the fridge because you haven’t made your own bread since you got the cold and that was fuck long ago? Not a problem. You have a third reason why this fucking jar is stickier than you would normally have the capacity to handle (and trust me, you will)? Not anymore you don’t.
But anyways - why is there a vacuum in the jar? To preserve the jam? Isn’t jam a preserve? Like, I thought the whole raison d’etre of jam was as a way to make fruit keep, unrefrigerated, through the winter? Why must we preserve the preserve? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
this is “fucking magnets, how do they work” translated to rationalist, except that explaining magnets involves quantum mechanics and explaining jam jars involves high school physics (saturated vapor pressure vs temperature. that might be before high school). i also like how one linked explanation sits near two pieces of slop and is wrong
The comments section really is incredible, the level of ignorance about basic kitchen things, which since it’s womanly knowledge instead of dyson spheres they seem to be completely incurious about …
their practical skills are weak, and they won’t survive the winter (because they don’t know how to make jam)
but frame the same physics in terms of what makes steam turbine spin, and they’ll pretend to get it but won’t apply it anywhere else. the longer you look the worse it gets. it’s like they have never watched how it’s made as kids
High-status rats have minions to order their lunches, pick up their shopping, and inflate their bike tires and yell at them if they make mistakes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BGLu3iCGjjcSaeeBG/related-discussion-from-thomas-kwa-s-miri-research
From the post linked therein:
There’s this thing Nate and Eliezer do where they proclaim some extremely nonobvious take about alignment, say it in the same tone they would use to declare that grass is green, and don’t really explain it.
Gambling? In this establishment?!
Nate thinks in a different ontology from everyone, and often communicates using weird analogies
This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?
when Nate thinks you don’t understand something or have a mistaken approach, he gets visibly distressed and sad. I think this conditioned us to express less disagreement with him. I have a bunch of disagreements from his world model, and could probably be convinced to his position on like 1/3 of them, but I’m too afraid to bring them all up and if I did he’d probably stop talking to me out of despair anyway.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
The structure where we would talk to Nate 4h/day for one out of every ~6 weeks was pretty bad for feedback loops. A short meeting every week would have been better, but Nate said this would be more costly for him.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
(Every functional research group I’ve been part of has had weekly staff meetings. Even the undergrads were encouraged to participate and got at least that much talking time with the professor.)
In my frustration at the lack of concrete problems I asked Nate what research he would approve of outside of the main direction. We thought of two ideas […] I worked on these on and off for a few months without much progress, then went back to Nate to ask for advice. Nate clarified that he was not actually very excited about these directions himself, and it was more like “I don’t see the relevance here, but if you feel excited by these, I could see this not being totally useless”.
Wow, that’s a bad research supervisor.
This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?
They keep doing it and it drives me mad!! I finally understood that they got the word from computer shit and not philosophy. Isn’t it just amazing? Here we thought they were vaguely aware of established philosophical concepts for a second!
Nate Soares actually has some work experience at big organizations (NIST, DND, Google, Microsoft) but he clearly is not ready to run a research group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Soares He let the HTTPS certificate for his personal site expire.
D: Not only does this community have a missing stair, but they’re all explaining to each other how to avoid the missing stair, and the missing stair is in the chat replying to comments?!
So much debate about whether his employer was diligent enough at tyre-pumping when the obvious solution is “pump your own tyres yourself, you buffoon”
What The Shit
I’ve been dating Nate for two years (tho wanna clarify we are not doing marriage-kids and we’re both actively looking for more serious other partners).
Nate is profoundly wonderful in many ways, like often surprises me in new ways of wonderfulness, and has raised my standards in partners. He’s deeply caring, attentive, competent, hilarious, and of course brilliant.
[…]
Iirc he’s explicitly said he doesn’t respect my thinking (edit: he clarifies he respects it in some areas but not others)
The way these people are larping conflict resolution is so exhausting aaaaaaa please can you just do normal abuse
From elsewhere in the comments:
… I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when it’s really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
High-status? Why?!! Jesus H. Fuck, I hope that if anyone ever gives me a get-out-of-social-consequences-free card, it’s for a better reason than my blogging.
Oh and I’m curious now, but can’t be bothered to look it up myself in this slop era,
Has anyone done a men’s vs women’s grip strength study controlling for hand size, height, etc? I’d love to know what the results would be.
A Substack in the name of Cape Fear Advisors LLC argued that SpaceX wants to get in people’s retirement accounts then say to Uncle Sam “you had better give us lots of contracts or we will crash and take grandma’s retirement funds with us.” Sucking on the government teat has been one of Elon Musk’s favourite strategies since he got access to a State of California green transport grant.
I do not know if that can work because only a few percent of the company will be for sale so they will only be a fraction of a percent of those index funds. They can definitely sell some shares for real dollars, and if they keep the price high they can borrow real dollars against the shares which are not on the market like people borrow against bitcoin.
I will not link because it is in that articulate but empty style that does well on Substack. It may be written by or with help from AI.
I do not know if that can work because only a few percent of the company will be for sale
I think a 30% chunk will be available for non-institutional investors, which as far as these things go is supposed to be humongous and also an indication that they are very much counting on stupid money to prop their valuation.
I think that is 30% of 3% of the market cap for retail investors. There are many ordinary people who keep the price of Tesla shares high because they have faith in the CEO, but an index fund spending 0.2% of its money on something then losing it is just an ordinary day (one S&P 500 fund I checked has 4% of its money in M$ which has about twice the market cap as SpaceX wants to have, I assume that at least ten times as many shares of M$ are available to trade on the stock market).
CW: Deutsch
Heise was gushing about (1) Google & OpenAI working together on tagging AI output and (2) camera-makers trying to push cryptographical attestations for real photographs.
Felt the need to point out that (1) is just fear of Habsburg-AI and (2) is a road to a DRM-like unworkable dystopia.
spending way too much on GPUs is the spending way to much on mining rigs
at least dude didn’t burn his house down
HN, lobste.rs and LW are jizzing themselves over the
newspress release that ChatGPT[1] has disproven an Erdos[2] conjecture.no-one pauses to think this is a transparent attempt to goose interest in OpenAI before they commit an IPO
[1] I know it’s not literally ChatGPT, it’s an “internal model”
[2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o
Did it actually solve this one or did it just find a pre-existing solution like it did the last time?
[2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o
in afrikaans: “deelteken”
in english: I literally can never remember it, but I remember “umlaut”
It’s not a typical umlaut, (we have those in Swedish too), it’s like 2 sharp bunny ears
edit LOL it’s literally “double acute accent” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_acute_accent#Unicode
name in Hungarian: Erdős Pál
Apparently Hungarian has 4 different Os: O, Ó, Ö, Ő
oh that one, right!
I would expect both lobste.rs and LW to be open sewers of credulity here
In fairness, mathematicians here are like scientists at a magic show, i.e., ill suited to asking good critical questions. How much money did OpenAI burn to get what they say they got? How many false starts got quietly tossed in the circular file drawer? When, even, did their work start? It is easy for a company to say, for example, “We spent only three weeks on thus problem”, casually eliding months of prior effort (all that was the testing phase, you see, before a specific task had been settled upon…). OpenAI has no reason to be honest about anything like this. Indeed, a company will naturally get regular practice being dishonest by careful omission at every opportunity.
ChatGPT, the most heavily used AI service, gave wrong information in 46% of its answers, including making up an expenses scandal, giving inaccurate replies on voter eligibility rules and getting the date of the election wrong by two months.
Tired: Gell-Mann Amnesia
Wired: Altman Amnesia
altman amnesia is when you stop in your tracks because you hit monthly limit of tokens on 5th
Better than the original (in that it’s not a bad model of media literacy given slick packaging in order to support climate change denial)
REALLY? LMFAOOOOO
