Want to wade into the snowy 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.)
This preprint just shared by Gary Marcus is interesting.
People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique epistemic risk to how individuals come to see the world: unlike hallucinations that introduce falsehoods, sycophancy distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs…
These results reveal how sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt.
LLMs an addictive psychological hazard: confirmed?
Followup on the Mass AI Bill, Russel has 180’d on it:
https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/93a-the-three-characters-that-should
Buried in the penalty clause, the part of the bill that nobody reads, is a single reference: violations “shall be punishable in the same manner as provided in Chapter 93A of the General Laws.”
For those outside Massachusetts: Chapter 93A is the state’s consumer protection statute. It is, by most accounts, the most aggressive consumer protection law in America.
Here’s what 93A unlocks. Anyone can sue, not just the government. Class actions are on the table. If the court finds a violation was willful or knowing, damages get tripled. And the bar for what counts as “unfair or deceptive” is lower than in almost any other state.
Now bolt 93A onto all of that. What do you get?
You get a bill that doesn’t need a single regulator to lift a finger. You get a bill that funds its own enforcement through plaintiff attorneys who can file class actions, collect treble damages, and recover legal fees. You get the ADA website-accessibility litigation playbook, where lawyers systematically identify technical violations and file suits at scale, applied to every piece of AI-generated content touching Massachusetts.
Private right of action, fuck yeah. Turns grok into a legal fees dispenser.
The bill doesn’t need to be well-drafted to be dangerous. It needs to be vague, broad, and connected to 93A.
lol
new episode of odium symposium. it’s a tribute to knowledge fight, in which we dissect an episode of nick fuentes’s show. i was nervous about how this would turn out but i think it’s actually my favorite episode yet.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/11-groyper-151852222 (links to other platforms at www.odiumsymposium.com)
Stop the presses. Dude who’s into LLM’s has shit takes about open source software.
Apparently OSS devs that publish under non-commercial licenses are shutting people out?
Definitely some bespoke what the fu-
Skyview.social mirror so everyone can see - he’s locked out everyone who’s not signed in.
@BlueMonday1984 @JFranek “If you use this code, you can never charge money for whatever you used it in” sorry what this has the same energy as the brain-wormed Americans who think that socialised heathcare means doctors work for free
lmfao
Thank you, should have checked that.
this is confusing, how many licenses that are “NonCommercial” are mainstream Free/Open source? From what I’ve seen they’re deffo a minority anyway.
Right? Like he never heard of MIT or Apache2 licence.
You could argue that for example AGPL3 is non-commercial in practice due to the requirements to disclose code. But even then.
I can think of one notable project I ever saw one, and that’s Bookwyrm with the Anti-Capitalist Software License v1.4.
But this seems too vague-posty to refer to something that specific. Prolly just someone butthurt over copyleft.
Copyleft is non-commercial haven’t you heard? I mean its really unfair, the code is completely free but you are not allowed to create the torment nexus without everybody seeing your work.
Thought inspired by some git on the red site, basically their premise was that birthrates are declining because we no longer have a society with a 2-parent nuclear family with one “breadwinner”.
Here’s my counterproposal to the implied idea we need to implement The Handmaid’s Tale:
Ban contraception and abortion but if you get pregnant, there is no stigma to giving birth out of wedlock. The delivery is safe and paid for, and should you wish, the child will be reared in state-funded orphanages. These institutions will be receive more than adequate funding. Their charges will be given preferred entry to the best schools and universities, as well as preferential treatment when it comes to future employment. It will be illegal to discriminate against anyone so raised.
Surely this will raise the birthrate, right?
well would you look at that, some consequences
Mildly positive news: there is a fork of the Zed editor with the llm autocomplete stuff ripped out now: https://gram.liten.app/posts/first-release/
(I’ve used zed with the ai kill switch and really like the buffer/editing ux; but it’s always felt a bit gross, I’m excited to see where the fork goes)
Oooh I wish this project a lot of success!
Zed is interesting but the project’s very pro-AI stance keeps me away from it. So a fork without that stuff is great, hope that works out longer-term.
Are they planning to follow the upstream updates from Zed, or is it a hard fork?
seems unlikely, see here for reference
This piece on how doomers and rationalists have made everything worse with their “AGI is nigh” shtick and ended up giving AI companies way more power than they should and getting chatbots into the military, where they will almost certainly fuck up and kill people
if we had made the podcast series on rationalists, their importance as useful idiots for billionaires was the structure i wanted to hang the whole thing on. so this is a gratifying read. that said i think the ideas here will be very familiar to many stubsack readers
The rationalist view of the world assumes, at some level, that the relevant actors are optimizing for well-understood, predictable variables and a clear understanding of what best serves their self-interest. What it cannot account for is bad faith, impulsiveness, ideological motivation untethered from evidence, random instances of force majeure, and personal whims and petty rivalries.
i will go further and say that not accounting for such things is considered virtuous in rationalist ideology
it’s amusing to me that these nerds thought they could in any way affect policy even with a sane administration, not to mention this bugshit crazy one
like I’ve said before, I’d be perversely happy if we managed to off ourselves by building the robot god. beats drowning in our own filth or blowing ourselves up
That is what happens when your mode of analysis is closer to erotic Harry Potter fan fiction (which is indeed the medium in which Yudkowsky has delivered some of his prognostications)
I was going to throw a point of order about not all fanfic being erotic, but given how they fetishize “intelligence” and “rationality” I can’t be sure that they don’t get off on that slog.
You can’t build a fandom full of that many fucked-up people without some of them getting horny in a fucked-up way.
Edit to add: example of a non-erotic fanfic https://archiveofourown.org/works/73396436
just got a job in mathematical publishing. it’s work i think i’ll actually enjoy and expect to be very good at, it pays much better than any other job i’ve had previously (and they maxed out the position’s pay range, which i wasn’t expecting) and it has about a month of paid leave a year. such a relief
Felicitations!
(“A job,” Blake thinks. “I need to find one of those.”)
fuck yeah! congrats!
Hell yeah!
Stumbled across a YouTube slop-farm calling itself The Interactive Archive recently, and the whole thing is just plain shameless:
AI slop banner, AI slop thumbnails, AI slop avatar, its all slop from top to fucking bottom.
Its getting pitiful views, too - the highest-viewed video on the damn thing (as of this writing) is the one about arena shooters dying off, sitting at just under 400 views:
Putting that into context, a random screen recording I uploaded hit nearly 700 through sheer luck.
the one about arena shooters dying off
That extruded piece of audiovisual garbage has been bugging me massively for a couple hours now, so I’m gonna make a quick recommendation:
If you’re looking for a non-dogshit video about the arena shooter’s implosion, boomer shooter YouTuber Skeleblood made a pretty solid one a couple years ago.
Looks like they’re using the standard blue/orange color scheme
Just a thought…
Imagine if China and North Korea bombed the White House, killed the president and most of the cabinet, and shot missiles at primary schools. Would you go out on the street and demonstrate in favor of the Chinese Communist Party and Kim Jong-Un, and expect to be heard and taken seriously?
Somehow brown people in other lands are supposed to be avid readers of wingnut welfare papers and have their worldview 100% aligned with Lindsey Graham and Bibi Netanyahu…
When they witness the skyrocketing economic growth enabled by American AGI, they will be clamoring for Westernization
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-fires-employee-insider-trading-polymarket-kalshi/
lol. Between this and the ayatollah clawback, I’m expecting some entertaining litigation.
It’s 10 pm on a Sunday. My FIL is texting me business plans from the slop hole as I try to get the last kiddo down to sleep. He wants me to read them to my wife, who already mad at him about it.
Thank you all for being an island of sanity.
“posting from the slop hole” is probably the best description possible for this, brb stealing
Prosperity’s Path: OpenAI has shown it cannot be trusted. Canada needs nationalized, public AI https://archive.ph/QLg2D
tldr tech bullshit requires ur tax dollars. what ever you do don’t question the all knowing laurentian technocrats!
yeah, the current situation in Europe is like: “As EU citizens, we should break free of our dependency on US Big Tech like the Torment Nexus. That’s why my company is advancing our fully sovereign solution, the Agony Core! Europe-owned, GDPR-compliant, Frontex-approved scalable Torment-as-a-Service, at competitive prices with TN-based deployments!”
It is amazing in a way, as in .nl our anti piracy org (brein) already went after local AI models for copyright infringement. While people in power still think we should go all in on AI. Sadly people with tech skills are rare in gov (politicians who go after the votes of tech enthousiasts otoh).
