(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)

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.)

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    corey quinn at https://lnkd.in/p/gXmqzqpZ

    I’m a man. I have a yellow hat. I also have a monkey. My track record of supervising this monkey is spotty at best, but that’s not important right now.

    He is a very smart monkey. When you tell him to do something, he does it in a way that’s smarter than any monkey you’ve ever seen in your life. You had no idea monkeys were even capable of this level of greatness. Billions of dollars have now been poured into the economy, extolling the virtues and achievements of this incredible monkey. He can do things better than humans.

    Cheaper than humans.

    Get rid of the humans.

    You don’t need the humans; you have the monkey. Okay, keep a couple of humans for guardrails; not too many. They’re expensive, and the monkey does it better anyway.

    Suddenly it has come out that my monkey, in addition to being incredibly intelligent, has also been committing an escalating number of felonies. And also pooping. So much poop.

    We are now in undefined times. Never before has a monkey committed a crime; our legal systems are completely unprepared to apportion blame to me, the man in the yellow hat who has once again failed to properly supervise his monkey. Who is responsible for this monkey’s shitty, shitty behavior? It is completely unknowable. Clearly, the entire legal system will need to be overhauled to address the concept of a monkey committing crimes.

    Now please excuse me, I just got a call telling me that my teenager stole a car. Unfortunately I have a sneaking suspicion as to who is legally responsible here, and I dislike it. This is especially distressing, as the teenager has never made a cent for me in his life, yet I’m about to spend a boatload on criminal defense attorneys.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      The monkey is here to stay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if you don’t get used to monkey poop consequences you’ll be left behind

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          Uhh actually have you considered that we will need to solve monkey alignment first? Checkmate, adjust your priors

          • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            19 days ago

            Clint Eastwood famously demonstrated optimal orangutan/human alignment in the hit 1978 film “Every Which Way But Loose.” Right turn, Clyde!

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Shout out to the combined power of ibuprofen and my venting tolerant polycule group chat for allowing me to endure the two hour Copilot 365 training meeting at work. The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.

      I felt this in my soul

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    Timnit Gebru gets the Right Livelihood award this year

    https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/timnit-gebru/

    “For challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”

    I got this via Dagens Nyheter, the premiere broadsheet here in Sweden which calls the award “the alternative Nobel Prize” because it’s Sweden and we need a standard to compare to.

    Let’s see what the rats think of it. Yet another example of p0Lar1z@tion

    • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      Weaksauce but also the AI companies wanted regulatory capture and open weights models to be banned so this will have probably annoyed them somewhat

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    19 days ago

    What We Tell AI, a project collecting anonymous confessions about people’s AI use. Project was created by Synthetic Wisdom, a “emerging practice” dedicated to “public sense-making” about AI. It’s not clear who’s funding them (or if anyone is). The confessions are interesting even if I’m a little skeptical of the framing (chatbot use might be ubiquitous but it’s not inevitable).

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        Anthropic: AI MIGHT KILL US ALL WITH A BIOWEAPON

        Also Anthropic: starts an AI-run bio lab. If it’s run to the same standards as the cybersecurity division I can’t imagine it’s going to be particularly well-supervised.

        Do you want to get T-Virus? Because this feels like how you get T-Virus.

        • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          Well, we didn’t believe them that their AI can make deadly bioweapons when they already showed clear indisputable evidence (the AI passing a biology multiple choice test), so clearly they need to have it make actual bioweapons so we’ll take the threat seriously!

          • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
            0·
            16 days ago

            Continuing on the Resident Evil talk, the T-Virus itself was the product of an eugenics program called Project W (aka: the Wesker Program), an eugenics program set on creating A Superior Breed of Man™, which would line up real nicely with the rats’ beliefs.

            (They’d need to ignore Umbrella and its associates being complicit in over a dozen zombie outbreaks/apocalypses, but they can always rely on longtermism for that)

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        A former disciple says that Soryu Forall startted out wanting to exterminate humanity with a bioweapon and only pivoting to enlightening humanity later on. S.E. Gyges or his chatbot were speculating when they accused a specific Rationalist of dreaming of omnicide, but the idea is circulating in the milieu.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        Somebody tracked down things related to the ‘AI bioweapons’ stuff and a lot of them are financed by EA/related orgs apparantly. There is a preprint: https://ironholds.org/resources/papers/aixbio_one.pdf

        “We tracked the space financially, intellectually, and individually. Financially, 70% of the literature that disclosed funding was directly supported by EA orgs; 71% of the literature that didn’t disclose funding featured authors from funded orgs. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.”

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      Ahhh yes, my old friend, the uh, dia-, um, what was it again, oh, yeah, D’yer Mak’er back-to-the-future

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      That is a big head on the guy.

      Creating a visual novel and then not letting the AI generate character reaction png’s you can put over the backgrounds you reuse is quite something.

      The bartender is also on the wrong side of the bar.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        I am demonstrably fucked in the head and thus continually tempted to wonder how a story could be done better. With plenty of the B-movies we’ve watched for Monsterdon, I’ve been like, “Well, if they had gotten rid of this character and streamlined like so, they’d have delivered better on the promise of this interesting idea…”. Yud has burned the impulse out of me. There is no critique, only sneer.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          16 days ago

          Yeah I saw that and I realized it was worse, as he had the ability to combine images, the weird backgroungs were somewhat intentional.

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      “AI is gonna kill us all guys!”

      Looks inside

      Using AI to make sexual fantasies about catgirls

      do these guys actually want us to take them seriously???

      • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        This is his rationale:

        (For the otherwise confused, I do not advocate that people individually refuse to avail themselves of pre-superintelligent AI or AGI. Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage; because the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real; and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. I would give it all up in a heartbeat if there were an effective and collective treaty to stop it all at once. Don’t be the “Yet you participate in the system. Curious!” meme.)

        And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious!

        I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.

        If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.

          What exactly about “the frontiers” does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?

          • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            17 days ago

            He’s hammering refresh on the prompt button until it spits out a catgirl based on that furless Sphynx breed

        • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real

          I’m baffled by this too. If I was Yud I would prefer to fall behind than to give money to the people I wholly believe will end the world so they can keep developing the things that I believe will end the world.

          Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage

          So I’m assuming this means “well less people using AI doesn’t mean less damage overall done”, which is dumb because AI has very well documented effects of damaging the individual who uses it: just look at all the AI psychosis and suicide cases.

          and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.

          you could do this without using the AI by looking at papers and stuff but most AI papers are riddled with hype so that might be difficult

          The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option

          • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            17 days ago

            I think the ‘trap’ might just be something akin to addiction? Once you’ve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why ‘people [shouldn’t] individually refuse to avail themselves’ of chatbots – it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!

          • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            17 days ago

            The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option

            Yeah, rationalist utterly fail at understanding collective action, or really anything besides lib-brained centrist methods of action. Well, maybe even lib-brained centrist is giving them too much credit, because even milquetoast liberals will occasionally avoid using products for ethical reasons. See Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, where Eliezer basically explains how all other action besides an international total ban on AI and GPUs is pointless. (I think he is trying to avoid people bombing data centers, but Elizer’s “logic” is also implicitly against stuff like going to town halls to complain about data centers.)

        • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          The closest thing Yud ever had to a job or a business was selling pulp fiction on Amazon. He is not the person to talk about pressures that working people face! (the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap)

          • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            17 days ago

            Considering how much compensation he gets a MIRI, he could afford to hire an artist out of his own pocket and he would end up with something better and not be funding the technology that he claims is going to kill us all…

            • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              17 days ago

              On the other hand, that artist might have some sort of creative vision of their own that could irrevocably taint Yudkowsky’s Authorial Intent. Even worse, he would have to prominently credit their contributions, rather than attributing to Claude only the menial labour of piecing together his sacred vision.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is… More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It’s like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You’re edging under the pretense of ethics.

    • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.

      Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game’s afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, “Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!”

        Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.

        • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          17 days ago

          Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          16 days ago

          Joyless and also bloodless. Like, there is plenty to criticize about the “I guess I got isekai’d to Gor and now I’ve got a sexy slave harem” premise. But somehow he still manages to write with barely any actual empathy for the victims of that system, foregrounds how hard it is for our hero to bravely abstain from that sweet wolf sex and how maybe it’s not even the right thing to do, and then after confronting the horrifying realities for all of one scene proceeds to write the character out of the story without even giving her a fucking name in the text. Like, he somehow wrote a story about rescuing sex slaves that feels more pro-sex-slavery than a story that just embraces the sleaze of it.

          • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            16 days ago

            “My name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you.”

            “Master, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered.”

            “I cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant.”

            “But Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant.”

            “Oh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant.”

            “Master, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master.”

            [much later]

            “Oh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died.”

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      Oh my god, he’s doing the catgirl gooner fantasy from SCP-8008: Don’t Warp Reality Into Your Catgirl Gooner Fantasy

    • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      Six AI-editing tips, and not one is “don’t”.

      Also nice to see that none of the effort in maintaining the Latin alphabet is much use when it comes to runes.

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        Yeah, the review nitpicks the quality of the AI generated slop, but overall is in favor of doing a better job slopping, not avoiding slop altogether.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world? Isn’t that more something that John of Patmos came up with after bingeing on the local mushrooms?

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world

        Nobody knows exactly what he talked about, but the view that he passes the bar for historicity but seems to have been more of a the-end-is-nigh witch doctor type character as the new baseline has gained a lot of ground, especially with biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman breaking into popular science writing.

        Also John’s apocalypse has the whole coded anti-roman-empire screed going for it beyond the psychedelia, so it’s arguable Jesus was the more direct doom prophet, but for a more distinctly jewish flavored apocalypse.

        • rmf@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          tbc I’m not a mysticist at all, and I generally understand and agree with the historicity arguments. I haven’t read Ehrman, though. Do you know if his work is where does the “end-is-nigh witch doctor” idea comes from? Afaik neither Paul nor Josephus nor Tacitus describe him as such, and as I understand those are the main sources we have. Like, I can understand that this is a hypothesis someone floated around but I’m curious why this would be the consensus among historians.

          • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            15 days ago

            Apparently he has a book called Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium so that’s likely to have you covered. I read “How Jesus Became God” from him at some point which might have touched on this, but it was mostly about the evolution of the messiah concept itself, like how the ‘son of man’ was supposed to be it’s own specific thing and not just a euphemism for messiah, or how the term in jewish apocalyptic literature is pretty much completely separate from where the christian interpretation ended up.

            Overall a very readable book, I remember liking it but it’s really been a while.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        which fanfic prompt is worse:

        a) Yud has to do the Dragonball Z fusion dance with Jesus in order to defeat the basilisk

        b) Yud isekai’s as Jesus

      • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        I originally believed Yeshua was a misspelling of Yoshua-as in Yoshua Bengio, but no he actually wrote out a fake conversation with Jesus where he compares himself to Jesus. holy shit

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          We constantly build a case for how they are building a weird christian proto cult and he just tweets it out.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          It feels like there’s something particularly sacrilegious about someone who actively proud of their Jewish heritage having a Messiah complex. I mean I guess there was the one guy but I seem to remember it being a really big deal at the time.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        How much of a complete fucking idiot do you have to be to publicly acknowledge the Zizians in the middle of an ongoing PR disaster about your clan being on the women like to be raped they just don’t have the balls to admit it ideological bandwagon. Hey everyone, check out how my writings caused the Zizians1! Specifically by making them think we are ridiculous hypocrites for making huge claims about being scientifically unblackmailable and then paying a bunch of hush money to sexual assault victims who threatened to make a fuss. Yeah, the part where we where trying to cover up systematic abuse didn’t help either.

        1. Just like Jesus caused the crusades! !
        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          I think deep down these people think PR is unethical , because the world is always better if everyone tells the Truth, so having to massage the message is Bad. Same think for voter preferences - having to appeal to the average voter instead of only listening to the people who have read and internalized the Sequences feels deeply wrong and I really don’t think these people have enough imagination or empathy to change that.

          • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            15 days ago

            Not only that, they view commonsense moral and ethical reasoning as a PR constraint, i.e. look at the discourse around the hiring of Caroline Ellison to an EA org that handles significant sums of money. Lot of commenters were merely framing it as a PR problem and not a basic commonsense ethics problem.

            • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              14 days ago

              I mean the alternative would require (or at least allow) asking difficult questions about influential figures in Rationalism as a movement. By describing concerns about ethics or character solely in terms of perception you can avoid actually engaging with how shitty these people are by appealing to the general sense of in-group superiority.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        It is also funny that one of the people who cant spell his name is not some nobody, but Kurzweil in “the singularity is near”.

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      …so we’re admitting its an apocalyptic cult? awesome. so glad these guys dominate the AI industry

      also, ‘compassion for everyone’??? several rationalists promote mass deportation because of ‘ethnic purity’ you yourself support Richard Lyn!!!

      also also, ‘consort with prostitutes’?, Scott do you know how many sexual assault/abuse allegations your fellow rationalists have?

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        It has been a while since I read a Gospel, but I don’t think Jesus hired the sinful woman for a threesome and some light flogging.

        IMHO, being an escort is a much more honest profession than being a professional blogger on a Nazi site.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      part of the infuriation with Aella’s bullshit is that not all the women, or even many of the women, who feel compelled to participate are active sex workers. but I guess wading too far into details about consent and power structures might preclude Scott’s 90-second guest appearance at Aella’s next gangbang, soooooo

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        16 days ago

        I have no first-hand experience or evidence to prove this, but I feel like any sex workers’ union worth its salt would drum Aella out as a class traitor.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          Doubt it, considering the difference between high end escort sex workers and survival/low end sex workers.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      Yeah, when I think of rationalists I definitely think of their belief in “compassion for everyone”.

      In fact their emphasis is on care and compassion for the as-yet-unborn, not on people who are actually alive right now. Which does give them something in common with a lot of followers of a certain Jewish guy from Galilee…