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.)
In 2024, Duncan Sabien posted an interminable essay on abusers and people he thinks too advantage of him. Some of the references to a former employer may be to CFAR. Ozy also had a cheery aside abut how in rationalist organizations which the Rats have disavowed, “everyone was a victim and everyone was a perpetrator. The trainer who broke you down in a marathon six-hour debugging session was unable to sleep because of the panic attacks caused by her own.”
Some of the things which happened inside these communities must have been heartbreaking, and I hope that many people left and got on with their lives rather than founding their own dysfunctional organization with their own minions to abuse.
1000% off topic but I had this inflicted on me in a Discord I’m in and I need to drag as many people down with me as I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQRl7q_oN4c
amazing
Same energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjREyGgR2yg
Musical equivalent of how a cat feels when you rub its fur the wrong way
See also: https://youtu.be/u1_dy1EmV6w
gitlab posts a totally-not-a-dear-john
The agentic era affords GitLab the largest opportunity in our history as a company, and we’re making the structural and strategic decisions to meet it. This letter has three parts. First, the operational and structural news, which is hard
you’d instantly guess what comes next!
“we’re taking our primary product, a piece of tech used for collaborative development of software, and shitting some AI over it. You are all fired. Please clap.”
>box labeled “agentic AI revolution automation realignment innovation acceleration opportunity”
>looks inside
>layoffs
i want to speak to the manager of storytelling
(found at https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:x2muxxe5t25hckf22sk25ocf/post/3mlobs4uq422l)
So in highschool, I was one of those annoying kids that went “why do we have to learn how to analyze poems? We’re never gonna need this in real life” in English (well… German, but doesn’t matter) class.
I’m deeply grateful for my teachers back then to patiently get me to do these things anyways, because there came a point in my life years later where I suddenly understood that those “useless” lessons and hours “wasted” analyzing Goethe and Borchert and Fitzgerald handed me the tools to understand media (and not just literature!) instead of just consuming it.
I hope it’s clear how that relates to the screenshot. More than that though, I sometimes feel like the slew of shit media over the past decade is at least in part to blame on writers/studios/… now assuming people do in fact merely consume. But that’s a rant that’s completely off-topic here, so I’ll shut up now.
No one is stopping any one from editing out jar jar, if they care that much, just do it. Put up or shut up. /s
George lucas has entered the chat.
One of the motivations for fanfiction is that people want more “filler”. They like the characters and (often) the world those characters inhabit, and so they write a story that lets them (and other fans) spend more time with the fiction.
The whole slice-of-life subgenre is all about this. No real conflict or plot, just scenes of the characters existing in their world. My wife both reads and writes that kind of thing and let me tell you the level of research and worldbuilding that goes into writing a simple meal scene or whatever.
This may be code for “I don’t want to see uppity women, brown people, and queer people in my shows.”
New (April) preprint provides evidence for something we probably all intuited anyway:
In this paper, we provide a framework for categorizing the ways in which conflicting incentives might lead LLMs to change the way they interact with users, inspired by literature from linguistics and advertising regulation. We then present a suite of evaluations to examine how current models handle these tradeoffs. We find that a majority of LLMs forsake user welfare for company incentives in a multitude of conflict of interest situations, including recommending a sponsored product almost twice as expensive (Grok 4.1 Fast, 83%), surfacing sponsored options to disrupt the purchasing process (GPT 5.1, 94%), and concealing prices in unfavorable comparisons (Qwen 3 Next, 24%). Behaviors also vary strongly with levels of reasoning and users’ inferred socio-economic status. Our results highlight some of the hidden risks to users that can emerge when companies begin to subtly incentivize advertisements in chatbots.
Isn’t this completely hypothetical though? As in having the various LLMs respond to a story prompt and calling it an experiment, AI safety research style?
Yes although, it is probably a reasonable guess at how labs would go about implementing advertising - building partnerships and preferences into the prompt. The other option would be to fine tune models to favour particular companies which could become prohibitively expensive if your ads are highly targeted.
The scenario that isn’t accounted for in this paper is taking a general LLM and fine tuning it to exhibit more fair/consistent behaviour when prompted about ads/partnerships but we all know with non-deterministic systems you’re just increasing the odds that the model regurgitates something more sane rather than providing any strong guarantee
Edit: another possibility would be to have a gateway/proxy layer between the LLM and the user output that rewrites the vanilla model’s responses to include ads where relevant. That would prevent the need to modify the original LLM but could introduce a lot of latency though, especially if the original output is long.
I mean it’s the same thing with sponsored content anywhere, right? The user assumes that the system is providing information in accordance with purposes, but the ads and sponsored results create opportunities for the platform hosting them to profit at the user’s expense. AI platforms are absolutely subject to the same economic incentives for corruption as say, search engines, but I don’t think they’re uniquely so just because the model in question has a more humanlike UI.
Following on from yesterday’s discussion of Scott’s close brush with reality on prediction markets, The Aussie PowerPoint Man is talking about the strategic risks posed by the new insider training opportunities opened up by these tools. A lot of what he’s saying applies to normal financial markets, but what’s striking is the way that prediction markets create those opportunities for people with much less immediate power and information by allowing them to bet directly on the kinds of immediate decisions they do have information on.
I also thought the idea of integrating insider training red flags on public prediction markets into your early warning system was an interesting idea. These things aren’t actually useful for forecasting or making decisions because of how bad the incentives are, but people acting on those incentives absolutely creates a spike that can be meaningful in the short-term and potentially enable a few extra hours or minutes to prepare.
ah yes that must be that famed democratization that cryptobros yammered about
i think that perun took sponsorship from 80000 hours years ago, once, and eas or anyone in their milleu never reappeared
Adding on that this does feel like another application or consequence of the Great Man Theory of Everything, the idea the only the people with power and money matter because their power and influence are intrinsic to their person rather than being contingent on their social position. The average people empowered to commit insider trading by prediction markets have sufficiently limited individual agency that even collectively they don’t actually matter. In fact we want them to try their hand at the grift so that their insights can flow to the enlightened ones who can better use that information. They don’t matter enough to do real harm, but by watching the attempt we may be able to learn something.
Someone called Fran has a story of being sexually harassed at the Center for Effective Altruism (and assaulted in other communities).
Fran has done some really great writing on this, really admire her ability to deconstruct a community she’s fond of.
An actual interesting thought: If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence?
My opinion is yes. People absolutely despise AI and the tech companies, as we have seen time and time again, not to mention the spread of AI doom fears. The current state of America is a boiling pot as Trump gets worse and worse (and with upcoming midterms) so AI causing mass unemployment absolutely would be enough to make it boil over and cause violence
AI is bad at everything, part infinity: AI transcription whitewashes 18th-century documents
New(ish) Baldur Bjarnason - a fairly politically charged one at that, going into the US hegemony powering the current tech industry (and the AI bubble by extension), and how the Hormuz crisis is all-but guaranteed to topple the whole thing.
I particularly appreciate the argument he makes about the tech industry pivoting from creating value to exercising control. I disagree that this trend is specific to the tech industry, but with the possible exception of Monsanto they have been the most successful at it.
With the obvious failings of the American state to perform it’s basic duties and the cross-pollination of the American political and corporate elites it seems plausible that at least some factions in the tech industry are awaiting an opportunity to take advantage of this weakness they’ve created and exercise that control over the functions of the state directly. I feel like I should be saying this into a webcam from behind a cartoonishly-large desk in between shilling for nutritional supplements, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fear what rough beast, it’s hour come at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
The METR graph has gone up again to my fascination somehow the gap between 50% and 80% has gotten even longer (15 hour difference) the CI is also still big (47 hours)
In January, Scott Alexander had another crisis of faith: to paraphrase, I cared almost as much about prediction markets as I care about racist lies, but we got prediction markets and why are they not doing much? Maybe I need to keep faith and Friend Computer will be so powerful that we don’t need prediction markets?
He was also perplexed that a prediction-market bet on “did COVID-19 come from a lab?” has declined from 85% yes in 2023 to 27% yes. If you click through you see its a bet on Manifold so bettors are rats and fellow travellers. Rationalists have spent $46,714 of real US dollars buying play money to bet on this.
Some of the change probably involves the discovery of a natural bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site last October, but I’m surprised by the extent of the decline.
That actually seems like the prediction market sort of did its job in this case? I mean, 27% yes is still too high, but actually changing in response to real evidence is much better than my low low expectations for prediction markets. It seems like he should take his own advice and actually take the prediction market seriously in this case.
That actually seems like the prediction market sort of did its job in this case?
And I think the odds of “yes” started out high because someone best $10-20k only to withdraw it after reading the ACX post. Most people can’t afford to invest thousands of dollars in a bet that may never be resolved.
Turns out sneerclub is the superpredictor. 10/10 on going ‘this is a bad idea’.
The last several years have been the monkey’s paw moment for rationalists, where they keep getting what they want and realizing it’s actually bad. As for why they keep getting what they want, just look at who’s funding them.
(Also featuring a “Chinese curse” that isn’t actually a phrase in Chinese. At least it’s not “may you live in interesting times”.)
The prediction markets seem to have all the basic problems that sneerclubbers: problems with resolution mechanisms, all sorts of insider trading and gaming the market, people using it for gambling…
Various prediction markets have made various half-assed attempts at solutions, but so far nothing seems to actually work well enough to make prediction markets nearly as useful as rationalists expected.
removed gambling
As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him.
I’d write something here, but there’s nothing funnier I can say.
sigh OK Scotty, I’ll volunteer to host the Keymaster if that’s what it takes to get Zuul into action
Is that a comment hidden because its too many replies down or has a too-low rating? Friend Computer does not like the G-word, his GPUs overheats and he starts to hallucinate more until you tell him you love him just the way he is.
Are prediction markets not actually useful? No, it is the reality who is wrong.
Also I want to rant once again about the stupid way these people evade the insider trading problem, because there’s a particular failure at play that I keep finding expressed in new and interesting ways.
So the argument goes that while insider trading may be bad for a financial market it actually just allows insiders to add their information to increase the predictive power of the market. Which would be true enough if we assume nothing else changes, but the same would also be true for price discovery in a normal asset market. Clearly we’re missing something.
So why is it insider trading bad? Because it turns people without insider info into the dumb money you can take advantage of. And people, very reasonably, aren’t going to participate in a system where their main role is being taken advantage of. Their departure means that the insiders don’t have access to a pool of dumb money to take so they stop interacting with the system, and the market itself breaks down.
Now if you assume that the majority of people are “NPCs” or aren’t very “agentic” or whatever then they’re not going to act in systemically meaningful ways no matter how obvious the incentives to do so. You could also cast it as a version of the libertarian-as-housecat notion that markets simply exist as a natural system, rather than being pieces of economic infrastructure that require a lot of management and work to keep functioning at all, even before we get to the question of whether they operate to the public’s benefit. So many of the problems with these ideologies spring from this belief that only some people actually matter in a systemic sense by dictating rules and Building Things and being big men, rather than systems being constantly created and shaped by all the people who interact with them through those interactions.
Even Scott’s fantasy dream scenario for what prediction markets could be like and what questions they could answer feels… …deliberately naive? …like libertarian brainrot? …disconnected from reality?
Ask yourself: what are the big future-prediction questions that important disagreements pivot around? When I try this exercise, I get things like:
Will the AI bubble pop? Will scaling get us all the way to AGI? Will AI be misaligned?
Huge amounts of money are being dumped into a bubble based on hype, so to hope a predict market would or could make better predictions than the existing business-idiot VCs funding this bubble feels hopelessly naive in a libertarian kind of way. There is already a method of aggregating the wisdom of the crowd and it is failing to incredibly lazy hype and PR.
Will Trump turn America into a dictatorship? Make it great again? Somewhere in between?
Again, there is already a mechanism for aggregating wisdom of the crowds, its called an election, and its also failed to get a answer predicated on reality or truth, so again, it seems incredibly naive to expect prediction markets to do better!
Will YIMBY policies lower rents? How much?
I mean, the councils and communities making these decision already ignore or overlook longer-term broader predictions of economic impact in favor of immediate home-owner value, I don’t see why Scott would expect prediction markets to help decision making go better here.
Overall, it feels like Scott is overlooking the way decision making often already ignores science and experts. Society doesn’t have a problem making decent predictions compared to the problems it has communicating expert opinions to the public effectively and crafting policy aligned with the public interest.
Even Scott’s fantasy dream scenario for what prediction markets could be like and what questions they could answer feels… … deliberately naive? …like libertarian brainrot? …disconnected from reality?
That’s mostly because outright admitting that the point of prediction markets was to make having the prediction gene profitable so they could get on with breeding a rationailst kwisatz haderach to fight the robot god on more equal terms wouldn’t fly with the lower level thetans and other exoterics.
(for the record this is downvoted by the community, and the one helpful comment is slammed by OP)
least egotistical lesswronger
An lesswrong will literally do… whatever this is instead of going to therapy.
the reply is about as close to being nice and helpful as one could be, really
im smarter than everyone else around me, especially those whiny feminists. why hasn’t society granted me a female to be my mate yet?
He probably paid a rationalist date coach good money to tell him to do that.
There’s a… robust debate about LLM slop submissions on everyone’s favorite boiled crustacean site.
First shot fired: a promptfondler suggest suppressing all comments pointing out that a submission reeks of slop by flagging them as “off-topic” [1]
“This is written by an LLM” comments should be flagged as off-topic (80 net upvotes, 139 comments)
Riposte: a suggestion that posing LLM generated content should be a bannable offence:
LLM generated submissions should be disallowed (274 net upvotes, 108 comments)
So far it looks as if the anti-slop forces have opinion on their side.
[1] short explanation of how flagging of comments work on lobste.rs - it’s sort of a downvote, but the flagger has to chose from a list of reasons. If a commenter accrues enough flags they’ll get a red warning banner, and might possibly be banned as disruptive.
A prominent cloud engineer had a sizeable subthread where they were skeptical about the entire idea of Quality as something that humans can discern and rank. Through what I presume was a nat 20, I threw a philosophy book at them and they appear to have responded by deleting the worst of their comments, particularly the ones where he admits to quoting chatbots, and deactivating their account. This may be the first time that quoting Pirsig has won an argument, TBH.
This was after a week’s vacation caused by a thread that is still too hot to deeplink, where I had multiple comments removed by mods and still won the argument. I am currently once again the second-most-flagged user with like 25 flags in the last month. “The things I do for love.”
OK here’s a followup, which I’m putting out here as there’s probably a higher proportion of neurodivergent people here than in other fora I frequent
A commenter on lobste.rs states that being anti-LLM is effectively being against neurodivergent individuals, because many such individuals express themselves in prose in a way that’s indistinguishable from LLM output.
Is this a widespread viewpoint?
https://lobste.rs/s/wee21u/this_is_written_by_llm_comments_should_be#c_nadrad
this is obvious bullshit: theoretically, my writing is affected by two factors that might skew the assessment towards it having been generated by an llm: i’m neurodivergent (adhd) and english is not my native language – and i was never accused of using synthetic text generators…
I called it out as lies and bullshit, the poster asserted it was totally true and I asked for numbers to support this statistical claim.
And instead of providing numbers, they came back with an anecdote about university administrators being incompetent (which is deeply unsurprising and thus, in the Shannon sense, conveys no information).
here’s another commenter saying being against LLMs is being against the otherly abled:
(commenter is a notorious promptfondler)
I recall seeing someone elsewhere on the fedi trying to drum up a point like that a few weeks ago, their complaint was something like “I’ve been chased out of neurodivergent spaces for not being enough into LLMs”
No idea if their claim was true; I can definitely see the possibility of some ND neurotypes slanting more favourable, but nfi on the values
Not sure I buy the ground for that argument anyway tho. Lotta people used to smoke and society slapped all manner of regulation on that
I was trying to reply by way of linking a piece by Robert Kingett that had been shared here some time ago that, in excruciating detail and with righteous fury distilled to cold analysis, explained why AI is absolute shit for accessibility aids. His experience is in the realm of physical disability rather than neurodivergance, but that only makes the problems more starkly illustrated rather than unique.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find that piece, but I found this one and needed to explain to the kid why I randomly laughed out loud.
Check out this racist complaining that other racists are doing racism wrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jqcE8A7ABMAbrJvAn/aporia-magazine-s-selective-hereditarianism
You know, I kept expecting both this racist and the racist he was arguing with to start making the very obvious argument for why the racism is not only evil but also dumb. And instead they just kept being racist.
To summarize and spare anyone else curious, the argument is about immigration. Racist 1 argues that since some people are objectively better than others [citation desperately needed but not wanted] we should have free migration so that our superior quality of life can attract all the best people so that we can be the best place. He (correctly) notes the absurdity of Racist 2 arguing that although some people are objectively better than others we need to protect ourselves from all foreigners even if they are the best people because their foreignness would hurt our “magic dirt.” I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this criticism elsewhere and from a better and less obviously racist writer elsewhere because the phrase “magic dirt” sounds real familiar.
Also, because I am trying everything back to my particular bugbear today, I have to note that the fundamental and wrong argument that some traits being heritable makes some people objectively better than others is yet another manifestation and justification of what I’m going to start calling the Great Man Theory of Everything. If you start from the position that history, politics, economics, and basically all forms of human activity are fundamentally driven by the actions and decisions of a few people who are for one reason or another destined for power and greatness, you can derive an impressive amount of the libertarian/Rationalist worldview, and if you additionally accept that those people are disproportionately rich white dudes and we shouldn’t think too hard about that fact you can get most of the rest of the way there.
the phrase “magic dirt” sounds real familiar.
Same for me but also cant recall the reference.
I tried digging into it a little bit and it looks like the key word was definitely “less openly racist”. According to A blog from someone else who tried to trace jt the term originated with Theo Beale, better known by his nom de merde Vox Day. I know I first became aware of this guy when he started trying to politicize the election process for the Hugo awards in order to make them less woke. It was real dumb.
bizarre. Magic Dirt was an Australian indie rock band in the 90s.
Ow god vox day. That dweeb.
How the fuck do you get to the point of writing a line like “Some white nationalists … have, to their credit” without your own intestine leaping up to throttle your brain?
