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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
I screenshot this the other day and forgot to post it. Well, enjoy.]
i wonder which endocrine systems are disrupted by not having your head sufficiently stuffed into a toilet before being old enough to type words into nazitter dot com
(Reposting from the last thread)
Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero
My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.
I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.
Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment
P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.
I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.
Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I don’t even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.
Well I can’t translate it but if you search for it… holy smokes are search engines amusingly bad at indexing federated content.
That random other Lemmy instance is actually doing the right thing here since it includes the right link rel canonical, so I guess Google just hasn’t caught up yet or something. I have no idea why Google chopped off the last byte of the IP address.
In the process of looking for ways to link up with homeschool parents that aren’t doing it for culty reasons, I accidentally discovered the existence of a small but active subreddit for “progressive monarchists”. It’s titled r/progressivemonarchists, because their imagination in naming conventions only slightly outatrips their imagination for forms of government. Given how our usual sneer fodder overlaps with nrx I figured there are others here who I can inflict this headache on.
Quality shitpost, I could imagine some thirteen year old actually believing this.
Yea, no fascism whatsoever took place in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, or Belgium during WW2, in which they were all very successfully avoiding being occupied by fascists.
Extra points to Spain who already avoided succumbing to their own homegrown brand of fascism before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, and where they avoided having fascists in power all the way until the 1970s. There’s a book I quite like about the war where that happened called Homage to Catalonia. I wonder if Orwell ever read it.
Missing from the list is Italy, which is no longer a constitutional monarchy, but used to be until 1946, which is why they were so good at avoiding fascism they even named it.
This might take the cake for the dumbest take I’ve seen from George Orwell and not for a lack of competition.
Oh yeah Britain didn’t become fascist, they just imposed brutal imperialist exploitation on colonies in Asia and Africa lol. It’s not fascism if you export it!
Fascism really is “we have imperialism at home”
i would love to read someone more familiar with historical fascism and imperialism who is able to articulate the link between the two. like, an analysis of imperialism as the construction and maintenance of borders across which exploitation is enforced and economic value is extracted – paired with the observation of fascism as the attempts to construct borders “across peoples” from within the imperial core
let’s also not forget these very liberal and not at all nazi-collaborating kingdoms of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Thailand and Japan. honorable mentions to Cambodia that very successfully avoided Pol Pot and Iran that very successfully avoided islamic revolution
is it a real quote from Orwell or just something someone made up?
seems to be a real quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchism#Liberty
Yeah then it is a shitty take.
A really hot take for sure. Apparently Orwell did at least say this, at least according to Wikipedia (I was doubtful initially), which is weird, but I also feel that Orwell is often misrepresented and we are probably missing context. For one, Orwell was a socialist and yet is somehow presented as a hero by Raeganists and the such. I suspect there might be context missing.
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gives a hell of a kicker to the numbers I found
when your skulls are both packed solid with wet cat food
“Oh well, time to learn absolutely nothing from this and continue to be terrible people,” said Grimes and Aella mentally, and unbeknownst to them, because they each have one brain cell quantum-entangled* with the other’s, simultaneously
*I finished the three body problem trilogy recently! Where do I sign up for the ETO
aww, look at the little collaborators trying to pretend they both got duped instead of both having been active and enthusiastic enablers
b-but i thought they hated women rationally
I’d swear I’ve seen that exact same “realization” from Aella before, when she posted something like “I got really into tradcath practices for [the writer’s barely disguised fetish] reasons, and now I’m shocked that they really actually do hate sex work.”
Edit to add:
ok what the FUCK is goin on with the neo-trads? I was just over here enjoying this free life, individualism, subversive, unwoke cultural movement and I thought everybody was on board but suddenly BAM we’ve got a a bunch of them spawning into sex-negative tradcaths or whatever […] i’m just sad cause i thought this section of culture were my allies. we both were like ‘leave me alone, authoritarian government/culture’, and were appropriately skeptical of novel identity movements, willing to say the weirdo things.
Over on Bluesky, Mike Drucker sneers this as “German scientists in 1945 filling out their job application for Operation Paperclip”.
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Getting pretty tired of new coworker spruiking copilot all the time, please send me your sympathy and energy so I can weather this trial
I have added your coworker to the list of people I will imagine being tortured in the future. Im no robotgod but it is the best I can do.
that word temporarily broke me (its constituent phonemes are all valid/typical afrikaans (and dutch) but the word itself made no sense), then I looked it up
that sounds exhausting. I wish to flippantly suggest launching your colleague to another planet, but cruel fate might reveal them to be a muskovian martian so perhaps best not to broach that subject…
You have my sympathy! Is the worst part that you have to review the slop or its general presence at all?
Asking because at my workplace it will be allowed soon, and some coworkers are unfortunately looking forward to it, and I’m horrified, especially by the thought of having to do code review then…
It’s more the latter. I can’t really stop anyone from using it, and playing the game of “can you tell if this snippet of code was LLMed” is a fools errand, so I have to choose to ignore that part of it. Testing de-risks bad code, but there is never enough testing… well, there’s only so much I can do within my pay grade.
I’ve since asked this person to stop talking about their copilot usage, so this issue has been resolved, for now.
Oh no it’s more US politics.
So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it’s the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA’s email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.
Finally a thing Musk prob did all by himself, after the printout your code thing I assume his technical knowledge is firmly stuck in 1999.
lol holy shit this just came into reddit sneerclub (and was zapped immediately)
user HardboiledHack
also tried r/lesswrong and r/slatestarcodex
i’m sure the guardian can be trusted to report on anything involving trans people
the journalist is J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j-oliver-conroy who now writes for the Washington Examiner and used to write for Quillette (the article has been deleted from the site) https://archive.is/aSBjW
from http://joliverconroy.net/
I am a journalist who specializes in features and profiles. I write about the American right, ideologues, intellectuals, extremist movements, the culture wars, true crime, and strange events and strange places.
by “about”, he means “for”
I’m a journalist at the Guardian working on a piece about the Zizians. If you have encountered members of the group or had interactions with them, or know people who have, please contact me: [email protected].
I’m also interested in chatting with people who can talk about the Zizians’ beliefs and where they fit (or did not fit) in the rationalist/EA/risk community.
I prefer to talk to people on the record but if you prefer to be anonymous/speak on background/etc. that can possibly be arranged.
Thanks very much.
i’ve also warned over at the old place
Do the Zizians fit in the “rationalist/EA/risk community”? Gosh and golly gee.
Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the “narcissism of small differences” than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.
From what I’ve been able to piece together from the various theological disputes people have had with the murder cult it seems like the only two differences are that Ziz and friends are much more committed to nonhuman animal welfare than the average rat and that they have decided that the correct approach to conflict is always to escalate. This makes them more aggressive about basically everything which looks like a much deeper ideological gap than there actually is. I’m not going to evaluate whether these are reasonable conclusions to take from the same bizarre set of premises that lead to Roko’s Basilisk being a concern.
However, I do think that the unfolding of this story presents an object lesson in why “always escalate to the max” is a wildly stupid idea. It turns out that even when you have guns (metaphorical or otherwise) and a complete disregard for the consequences of failure the average group of citizens is still at a decided disadvantage to the state at higher points on the escalation ladder.
You misunderstand, they escalate to the max to keep themselves (including selves in parallel dimensions or far future simulations) from being blackmailed by future super intelligent beings, not to survive shootouts with border patrol agents.
I am fairly certain Yud had said something very close to that effect in reference to preventing blackmail from the basilisk, even though he tries to no-true-scotchman zizians wrt his functional decision ‘theory’ these days.
No nibbles here.
Live: Chinese AI bot DeepSeek sparks US market turmoil, wiping $500bn off major tech firm
Shares for leading US chip-maker Nvidia dropped more than 15% after the emergence of DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese AI bot.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjr85l2e4l4t
lmao
Folks around here told me AI wasn’t dangerous 😰 ; fellas I just witnessed a rogue Chinese AI do 1 trillion dollars of damage to the US stock market 😭 /s
Is it too early to hope that this is the beginning of the end of the bubble?
Also, does someone know why broadcom was also hit so hard? Is it because they make various networking-related chips used in datacenter infrastructure?
When hedge funds decide to flip the switch on something the reaction never looks rational. Meta was green today ffs.
Today on highlighting random rat posts from ACX:
(Current first post on today’s SSC open thread)
On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trump’s term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.
scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication
how about the New York Times
NYT and WaPo are his specific examples. He also wants a connection to “a policy/defense/intelligence/foreign affairs journal/magazine” if possible.
well I guess the NYT is auditioning the Völkisher Beobachter rôle so that tracks
Does scoot actually know how computers work? Asking for a friend.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sT5MX8jK9tHiBM5NK/re-taste
A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.
No it doesn’t, you fools, you absolute rubes
If you consider your normative values to be true, then everything looks like progress.
wat
Scott Alexander was a founding though-leader behind the Lightcone salon.
Your future region of the spacetime diagram is inside a locker, nerd
Aaaah my eyes
The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.
This future doesn’t have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.
I mean, we tried the whole “fuck yeah grids fuck local geography” thing. That was fucking Le Corbusier and friends’ whole deal. And it created dead cities and/or places in cities that people hated to live in.
Hexagons are great, would love to see some hexagon based city plans. Especially if they have designed for walkability and public transport!
Heck yeah walkability!
Also note how the author said the city transcends geography, as if geography was something useless or to be overcome by an advanced civilization (except for a bunch of artsy folks tucked away in a corner I guess?). But humans need variety. I would get so antsy if I lived in a perfect grid city with nothing out of order (or even a perfect hexagon city, no offense hexagons). There need to be paths and trails and rivers. There need to be trees and mountains in the distance.
Yeah weird thing to eliminate from a city, or weird thing to see without context. Basically: Wrongers try and envision a better world without deleting the parts of human experience that make it meaningful or worthwhile challenge (impossible)
But think of how high the number can go!
The ideal wronger future after all is a simulation where human experience is deleted altogether!
To be fair, im not sure how much the story intends it to be a positive development. (But considering the dada reference by the author in the comments, not sure how much is intentional at all, the whole story feels like it is retreading very tired themes in the intentional parts).
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, if he wanted to transcend geography then he would have used heptagons!
My understanding was that 21st-century psychiatrists didn’t speak Baseline nor thought that precisely
Ah a dystopian story. (Not sure if it is intended as much bte, but for me ‘ha the past was foolish, as we now have a perfect way of talking/thinking that uses math! (No you are not allowed to see it dear reader)’ is quite dystopian coded. Prob why I read Starship Troopers not as it was intended. (E: and yes prob the intention here, in this science fiction story which hypes up the writings of Scott)
A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.
I aint clicking on LW links on my day off (ty for your service though). I am trying to reverse engineer wtf this poster is possibly saying though. My best guess: If we have a random walk in Z_2, with X_i being a random var with 2 outcomes, -1 or +1 (50% chance left at every step, 50% chance for a step to the right), then the expected squared distance from the origin after n steps E[ (Σ_{i=1}^n X_i)^2 ] = E[Σ_{i=1}^n X_i^2}] + E[Σ_{i not = j, i,j both in {1,2,…n}} X_i X_j}]. The expectation of any product E[X_i X_j] with i not = j is 0, (again 50% -1, 50% +1), so the 2nd expectation is 0, and (X_i)^2 is always 1, hence the whole expectation of the squared distance is equal to n => the expectation of the nonsquared distance should be on the order of root(n). (I confess this rather straightforward argument comes from the wikipedia page on simple random walks, though I swear I must have seen it before decades ago.)
Now of course, to actually get the expected 1-norm distance, we need to compute E[Σ_{i=1}^n |X_i| ]. More exciting discussion here if you are interested! https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RandomWalk1-Dimensional.html
But back to the original posters point… the whole point of this evaluation is that it is directionLESS, we are looking at expected distance from the origin without a preference for left or right. Like I kind of see what they are trying to say? If afterwards I ignored any intermediate steps of the walker and just looked at the final location (but why tho), I could say "the walker started at the origin and now is approx root(2n/pi) distance away in the minus direction, so only looking at the start and end of the walk I would say the average velocity is d(position)/(d(time)) = ( - root(2n/pi) - 0) /( n ) -> the walker had directional movement in the minus direction at a speed of root(2/(pi*n)) "
wait, so the “speed” would be O(1/root(n)), not root(n)… am I fucking crazy?
I think they took the rather elementary fact about random walks that the variance grows linearly with time and, in trying to make a profundity, got the math wrong and invented a silly meaning for “in retrospect”.
hundo p.
Good news everyone: A new tarpit to trap LLM scrapers just dropped
https://xcancel.com/tsarnick/status/1882927003508359242
Eliezer Yudkowsky says he would like to be a post-human some day, but the way to get there is by experimenting on augmenting biological intelligence through adult gene therapy targeting the human brain with suicide volunteers who may end up schizophrenic rather than taking a “leap of death” into unconstrained AI development
(found via flipping through LW for sneerable posts/comments)
L. Ron Hubbard says new “high-voltage” e-meters set to enter testing with Sea Org volunteers, possibly capable of purging body thetans at an unlimited rate
Am I reading this right? Is he suggesting doing experiments on the suicidally depressed?
Kelsey Piper bluechecks thusly:
James Damore was egregiously wronged.
Wow, the story is so much more troubling when you lie about it!
i read this and my brain started leaking out my ears
i want to slap each and every one of the people of X replying with something about autism
bad faith is actually incredibly easy to detect with a little practice if you’re not a bad faith idiot yourself
see why i never hang out in berkeley these days
Aella last seen shouting ‘but it is in the dictionary, I dont understand why yall keep telling me it isnt!?’
