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.)

(OT: 🎶 Do you remember…)

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      11 hours ago

      Damn, who knew this would yield material for my boy-band cover/parody project. Foom flop, doo wop wop wop…

    • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      11 hours ago

      It is claiming that Yud is wrong in saying Doom before Massive AI-Caused Economic Boom boosts GDP growth above 5% by saying the boom is here.

      Nah.

      This is totally from some accelerationist or oligarch-toadie

    • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 hours ago

      Despite the fact that it highlights all the times Yudkowsky was wrong, this site feels like it could have been produced by a rationalist. In addition to all the AI slop, it just has that feel.

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        12 hours ago

        it just has that feel.

        yeah. Looking past the initial quiz, a lot of the complaints about Eliezer’s predictions feel like rationalist inside-baseball about takeoff speeds and alignment strategies, as opposed to calling the whole thing bunk.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      14 hours ago

      Wow… I actually failed to get some of the times Eliezer has been wrong! His predictions are even worse than I remembered!

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      15 hours ago

      people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated

      Fittingly ironic, in my opinion.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    19 hours ago

    Zvi “I made my chops playing pro MtG” Moskovitz discovers that baldly stating that AI will kill us all fails to convince people who have a lot of money riding on the status quo, and freaks out about it

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8eDaCvSRzzKCxKSEk/politics-gets-interested-in-those-trying-not-to-die

    New York Post gets way more attention than that rag deserves, tbh

    You wanna dance with Murdoch Sacks and Trump, you best bring your A game. Maybe use some of that FTX cash to hire some real lobbyists and skip the blogging.

  • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    22 hours ago

    Something slightly more positive for once. While KDE looked at what Debian is doing in regards to AI and said “It’s my go with the shotgun!”, GNOME seems hesitant for now. I remain cautiously optimistic. At least libadwaita already banned AI contributions so maybe becoming a gnome is part of my future.

    • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      15 hours ago

      I’ve been using Plasma & Qt-apps for years for their extensive user customizability and as I came from Windows, the Mac-paradigm of GNOME/GtK has always felt foreign personally. If they really go slop I don’t think I can keep using them, but the GNOME UX just goes against the grain for me. Is there any other well-maintained modern desktop stack at all that has foregone LLMs?

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    23 hours ago

    I’ve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely “cognitive surrender,” and also “cognitive offloading”. I’m not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source I’m stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how I’ve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.

    I am not under the impression that people here haven’t seen these phrases before. “cognitive surrender” has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought I’d bring it up.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 hours ago

      I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I don’t know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. There’s a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if we’re going to have that conversation.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 hours ago

      I’ve seen “cognitive surrender” bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term “learned helplessness” doesn’t cover the underlying concept just as well.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        13 hours ago

        I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it can’t do anything to escape or prevent enough times they’ll learn that they can’t do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.

      • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        18 hours ago

        I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.

        • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          13 hours ago

          To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.

          • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            13 hours ago

            Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        21 hours ago

        Well, I don’t really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.

        That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the “Thinking Fast and Slow” model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          11 hours ago

          It feels like they’re trying also to privilege AI as “system 3” when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isn’t that different if you’re looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so there’s probably more of a continuum there. If that’s the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since it’s performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyone’s souls.

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    Just in case you thought Yud’s attitude towards minors, sex, and substance use was worse than average for a Rationalist, the NYT asked around (archive):

    Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the A.I. community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation. … The (Genesis) house (in San Francisco) quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyone’s age, he said, and “it was pretty crazy.”

    They saw a police report where a woman says she had to climb a gate at one of these parties to escape a man who demanded she have sex with him. Sounds like a great environment for a seventh-grader!

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 hours ago

      I think it’s a bit under-covered that the weird SF/Bay Area group-house scene has to be symbiotic with the housing shortage in the region. Even in my old hometown of Hayward, all the older 1950s-70s tract-home and mixed-density neighborhoods tend to have cars parked everywhere along the streets where a car could possibly be parked, because all these places that were designed as single-family homes are being used as multi-tenant rentals. I guess one underrated reason to support YIMBY is to strangle your local incipient cults.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 hours ago

        Copying what other people tell you should like is not a good strategy whether the others are high-school bullies or a sex worker slash influencer. One of the bangers at the birthday gangbang found he had more fun making out with a strange woman than giving the birthday girl what she wanted and I hope he explored that.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      And not just from AI getting fed into the AI:

      404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training.

      “I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    1990s: people using Netscspe Navigator are web surfers

    2020s: people who use Claude AI are butthole surfers