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.)
There is a problem where well-endowed men will go to public places, drop trou, and do the helicopter dance.
This is called an indiscreet log-a-rhythm, and can be solved with quantum computers (or so I’m told).
The requisite refrigeration equipment causes “shrinkage,” just like George suffers in that one Seinfeld episode, bing bong so simple
Now, getting the quantum hardware to the point of service, so to speak, is the obvious challenge, and that’s why I’m seeking funding for multiple container trucks so we can realize Uber for QC
promise a cubit, give five to ten qubits
Apparently Eliezer is actually against throwing around P(doom) numbers: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4mBaixwf4k8jk7fG4/yudkowsky-on-don-t-use-p-doom ?
The objections to using P(doom) are relatively reasonable by lesswrong standards… but this is in fact once again all Eliezer’s fault. He started a community centered around 1) putting overconfident probability “estimates” on subjective uncertain things 2) need to make a friendly AI-God, he really shouldn’t be surprised that people combine the two. Also, he has regularly expressed his certainty that we are all going to die to Skynet in terms of ridiculously overconfident probabilities, he shouldn’t be surprised that other people followed suit.
There’s a part where they quote someone saying “I am not particularly confident [in my p(doom)]” and I’m still remembering getting talked down to about how Actually all subjective uncertainty can be represented as probabilities because Bayesianism and you wouldn’t happen to be one of those stupid frequentists right?
“wRiTiNg WiTh LlM iS nOt A sHaMe” https://awful.systems/post/5390645
not even hn is having it lmoa
also claims that llms are good for proofreading, clearly didn’t do that
so it’s been observed by many that github’s been getting worse for a while as they keep shoving copilot into every corner
with the upgrade diff review, I wanted to quickly fold closed the 485 files in the diff. I could’ve sworn github’s diff view used[0] to have a button for this, and I know bitbucket does[1], but nope. so of course I open browser inspector to dig at elements (then quickly iterate over them with
.click()in the js console)which is when I noticed that even the elements are renamed for copilot:
<copilot-diff-entry data-file-path=".cargo/config.toml">which both makes me wonder my memory is right and this did used to have a button that was just overlooked in the rush for terrible chatbot shit, and makes me boggle at how astoundingly far the org is deepthroating this nonsense
[0] it’s been a few years of no longer actively using github
[1] fairly recently for client work
imagine how fucking terrible it must be to be in this room
(and I won’t lie: there’s definitely a moment that Inglorious Basterds briefly flashed to mind)
How often do you get the see the Antichrist on stage though?
in today’s world? too many possible answers to that question
What do we imagine that’s going to end up smelling like? Especially if Peter really works up a lather, like he’s done in his last couple of media hits
gwern: It’s not “AI slop” if I wasted hours dicking around with MidJourney to make it.
rsaarelm: People don’t appreciate the beauty of Substack’s built-in slop generator.
gwern: “I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations.” Have you appreciated the depth of my artist’s statement?
I put several hours of thought and effort into the concept and creating it,
Several hours of thought.
He is talking about an ice skating image where they are skating on flowing water, without skates. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/gene-wolfe/suzanne-delage/2023-10-28-gwern-midjourneyv5-germanexpressionistlinocutofsinisternewenglandtowninwinter.jpg this image. It is supposed to evoke the idea of a declining town under draculas influence.
(Imagine if had just spend those hours on something else and paid an artist the same hours to make something. Or if he had grabbed a pencil or charcoal himself).
God I looked into the article this is meant to illustrate, and I have feelings. The idea this mysterious, evocative short story is something to be solved, and that he’s somehow cracked the code. And it must be precisely about Dracula. Don’t ask yourself why the name comes from Proust, and why the style and themes are so heavily proustian. Proust is not genre literature, it isn’t in communication with the literature of ideas, which means it is of no value. Gene Wolfe is genre literature, so the story must be about vampires, and nothing else. Any literary depth is mere distraction, a ruse meant to mislead you and have you fail the test. Can’t wait for the rationalist Pale Fire remake!!!
From Gwern’s “solution”:
Ophelia goes mad and forgets being in love with Hamlet
Dafuq?
One of the most striking aspects of the Dracula interpretation of SD is that SD turns out to be alluding to it indirectly, by making parallel allusions—the opening chapters of Dracula allude to the same parts of Hamlet that SD does! This clinches the case for SD-as-Dracula, as this is too extraordinary a coincidence to be accidental.
Yes, two different stories both alluding to the most quoted work in English goddamn literature can’t be a coincidence. It’s not like the line “there are more things in Heaven and Earth…” has been repeated so often that even Wolfe’s narrator calls it “hackneyed”… Hold on, I’m getting a message, just let me press my finger to my imaginary earpiece…
I would say myself that Wolfe’s alluding to a line rather than quoting it exactly serves to call up the whole feel of Hamlet, rather than a single moment. It evokes the Gothic wrongness, the inner turmoil paired with outer tumolt, the appearances that sometimes belie reality and sometimes lead it. You could take this as suggesting that Susie D. is the Devil in a pleasing shape. Or, with all the Proustian business, and the lengthy excursus about historical artifacts hanging on as though the past lies thick in the present and refuses to lift… Perhaps the secondary Hamlet allusion behind the obvious one is “the time is out of joint”. Maybe Suzanne is a notional being, an idea tenuously made manifest, a collective imaginary friend or dream-creature leaking out into our reality. She looks the same from one generation to the next, because the dream of the girl next door stays the same. Perhaps the horror is that our reality is fragile, that these creations are always slipping in, and we only have a stable daylight world because we refuse to see them.
Also, the illustration sucks.
Thanks for pointing me to this. I hadn’t read the Wolfe story and I appreciated it. I skipped most of the gwern fluff, precisely because while his preferred interpretation is one possible of many, what I like about Wolfe is that the story can be about multiple things beside that.
And the illustration sucks.
Goddammit now I actually have to credit Gwern for something unambiguously positive in directing me to this story.
I found myself appreciating it a lot even just on a relatively surface level. I must confess to having no experience with Proust or some of the other references it makes, but it sent my mind back to my own time in school and struck me with a very particular kind of social vertigo, thinking about all the people I vaguely knew but haven’t spoken to or about since we were classmates. Like, people talk about the feeling that everyone around you is a full person with their own inner life and all that, and it feels similar to think how many people, especially in childhood, live their lives almost parallel to ours, intersecting only in passing.
Also given how many rationalists seem utterly convinced that many of not most people are just NPCs who don’t meaningfully exist when “off screen” I’m not surprised that they’re excited to have this mess of an interpretation that sidesteps that whole concept.
Ed: Also, the illusion sucks.
After spending hundreds of hours per mod year trying to get a Wronger on the Right track , mod Habryka spends multiple hours writing a post explaining why the Wronger gets a 3 year ban
Bonus appearance of r/SneerClub right after the preamble!
DavidG already posted this here: https://awful.systems/post/5382402
“AI is obviously gonna one-shot the human limbic system,” referring to the part of the brain responsible for human emotions. “That said, I predict — counter-intuitively — that it will increase the birth rate!” he continued without explanation. “Mark my words. Also, we’re gonna program it that way.”
groks gunna make u fuck
So why did you have your first child?
Optimus found a gun.
…I’m sure someone has already found and indulged that fetish.
Also, common autobot L; Megatron is a gun.
Here’s my idea to increase the birth rate:
Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children won’t have horrible lives.
Ran across a viral post on Bluesky:
Unsurprisingly, the replies and quotes are universally outraged at the news.
Every task you outsource to a machine is a task that you don’t learn how to do.
And school is THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LEARN THINGS, JESUS H. FUCK
gemini isn’t even trying now
Oh, looks like gemini is a fan of the hacky anti-comedy bits from some of my favorite podcasts
@dgerard is never going to run out of content for pivot, is he:
it is difficult to overstate the stupendous degree to which Peter Kyle’s job is beyond him
In other news, I’ve stumbled across some AI slop trying to sell a faux-nostalgic image of the 1980s:
Unsurprisingly, its getting walloped in the quotes - there’s people noting how it misrepresents the '80s, people noting much the '80s sucked and how its worst aspects are getting repeated today, people noting the video’s whiter than titanium dioxide, people suggesting there’s suicidal undertones to it, and a few comparisons to San Junipero from Black Mirror here and there.
Personally, this whole thing has negative nostalgic value to me - I was born in 2000, well after the decade ended (temporally and culturally), and the faux-nostalgic uncanny-valley vibe this slop has reminds me more of analog horror than anything else.
Lmao, piss-soaked fake nostalgia aside, what is even the point of this? How exactly is one supposed to go back to the 80’s? Is this an ad campaign for a toaster bath or something?
No idea. Best guess is that its some attempt to sell fascism under a thin veneer of '80s nostalgia, mainly because this one full minute of Oops! All White People, and fascists are the biggest boosters of AI bar fucking none.
When it comes to falling for nostalgia, its generally Y2K-tinged stuff that gets me - I’m much closer to that era (again, I was born in 2000), and I’ve got a soft spot for the general visual style of that era (that its facing against Corporate Memphis/AI slop definitely helps).
Does anyone else just … not have nostalgia for any time period? Like, middle school was shit, high school was shit, and then 9/11 happened. Where in the span of my life am I supposed to fit in a motherfucking golden glow?
I have fond memories of individual bits of media, but the emotions there are wrapped up with the time period when I discovered them, or revisited them, which could have been years or decades after they first came out.
Thinking about it a bit, I suspect you’re not alone - whilst the '00s were pretty great for me (I was born in 2000, remember), the '10s were a complicated mess (for a long list of reasons), and the '20s have been one wash after another - and thanks to the 'Net, I’m aware how much hot garbage the '00s and earlier decades had.
I do also have individual bits of media which I’ve got fond memories of, but that’s about it. Thinking about it, my general soft spot for Y2K stuff is probably a lot less rooted in nostalgia than I thought.
These fake people all have extremely 2025 voices
BLOOMBERG BREAKING: Sam Altman promises that GPT-6 will generate Ghibli images with levels of piss yellow heretofore “unseen”
altman is the waluigi to musk’s wario
Why would you do waluigi and wario dirty like that?
i have on good authority (ed zitron’s low effort skeets) that wario works for anthropic, and his surname is amodei
Not a sneer, but there is this yt’er called the Elephant Graveyard (who I know nothing about apart from these vids) who did a three part series on Joe Rogan, the downfall of comedy, hyperreality, which is weirdly relevant, esp part 3 where suddenly there are some surprise visits.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EuKibmlll4
