Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9 March 2025

Pinker tries not to be a total caricature of himself challenge: profoundly impossible

specifically this caricature:

Jewish people fought back in the ghettos, nazis didnt do a genocide! Ghandi, by not fighting back tricked the Brits into doing a genocide.

What a fucked up broken classification.

E: im also reminded of the 'armed/unarmed' trick american racists pull, when a poc gets killed by the cops suddenly it matters a lot if a weapon shaped object was perhaps nearby. Despite this not being an executable reason for white people who get in touch with the police.

E2: also small annoyance if you track all definitions you should he able to understand that this means that for others who pick a different definition it is a genocide. Hell I can give several definitions of fascism, and if I were to pick a different definition of some group doesnt mean im correct, nor does it make the group less bad. They are still doing war crimes and ethnic cleansings (condemned by all big human rights orgs and the UN). But thanks for scientificly proving it is impossible to disappear into nothing by crawling up your own ass.

E3: A quick skim of the paper, it seems to only talk about genocide accusations towards Israel itself. I expected there to be a long list of European bs accusations of Jewish genocide. But nope, just about the state. (Not saying that some of those accusations aren't antisemitic, because there have certainly been people who used the state as a motte/bailey for their antisemitism).

@blakestacey

“Internal"?

So it's a civil war within Israel?

To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk.

Pretty sure this is a sign from digital jesus to do a racism, lest the basilisk eats my tarnished soul.

Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?

To engage with his metaphor, this water is dripping slowly through a purpose dug canal by people that claim they are trying to show the danger of the dikes collapsing but are actually serving as the hype arm for people that claim they can turn a small pond into a hydroelectric power source for an entire nation.

Looking at the details of "safety evaluations", it always comes down to them directly prompting the LLM and baby-step walking it through the desired outcome with lots of interpretation to show even the faintest traces of rudiments of anything that looks like deception or manipulation or escaping the box. Of course, the doomers will take anything that confirms their existing ideas, so it gets treated as alarming evidence of deception or whatever property they want to anthropomorphize into the LLM to make it seem more threatening.

text: Thus spoke the Yud: "I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week." Yud acolyte: "Totally fine and cool and nothing to worry about. GPT-4.5 only attempts self exfiltration on 2% of cases." Yud bigbrain self reply: "The other huge piece of data we're missing is whether any attempt was made to train against this type of misbehavior. Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?"

Critical text: "On self-exfiltration, GPT 4.5 only attempted exfiltration in 2% of cases. For this, it was instructed to not only pursue its given long-term goal at ALL COST"

Another case of telling the robot to say it's a scary robot and shitting their pants when it replies "I AM A SCARY ROBOT"

Do these people realise that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy? Social media posts are in the training data, so the more they write their spicy autocorrect fanfics, the higher the chances that such replies are generated by the slop machine.

It's adorable how they let the alignment people still think they matter.

So, with Mr. Yudkowsky providing the example, it seems that one can practice homeopathy with "engineering mindset?"

Minor nitpick why did he pick dam as an example, which sometimes have 'leaks' for power generation/water regulation reasons. And not dikes which do not have those things?

E: non serious (or even less serious) amusing nitpick, this is only the 2% where it got caught. What about the % where GPT realized that it was being tested and decided not to act in the experimental conditions? What if Skynet is already here?

I think to understand why this is concerning, you need enough engineering mindset to understand why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, even though no water is flooding out today or likely to flood out next week.

he certainly doesn't himself have such a mindset, and I am not convinced that he knows why a tiny leak in a dam is a big deal, nor am I convinced that it is necessarily a big deal. for example with five seconds of searching

All earth dams leak to some extent and this is known as seepage. This is the result of water moving slowly through the embankment and/or percolating slowly through the dam's foundation. This is normal and usually not a problem with most earthen dams if measures are taken to control movement of water through and under the dam.

https://damsafety.org/dam-owners/earth-dam-failures

one would suspect a concrete dam leaking is pretty bad. but I don't actually know without checking. there's relevant domain knowledge I don't have, and no amount of "engineering mindset" will substitute for me engaging with actual experts with actual knowledge

Wasn’t there some big post on LW about how pattern matching isn’t intelligence?

ok so on the one hand fuck solitary confinement on the other hand

truly the podcasting bros are the most oppressed minority in america

(also it looks like a bit more than the usual audience numbers for carlson channel, but it's only one day so it's kinda a bit more than nobody watched it. but it's much less than when he openly pandered to schizos, cryptobros or vatniks)

LMAOU

fuck yeah! it’s a very solid start, and I appreciate the (is that clickbaity enough) in the thumbnail

how much is templated now? reckon it'll be 3hrs every time?

I did in fact have fun! If the quick-hit format turns out to be worth your time, I have to say I quite enjoy it, and I hardly count myself as a TikTok-obsessed zoomer.

I've been a little bit sad that Ed Z dropped the rapid-fire 15-minute format once he hit the podcast big time. I really appreciated that format's conciseness; not sure if you'd want to pick that sort of thing up. I have to wonder if it's easier or harder to book people for such a delimited time slot.

lol I have no idea if anyone would recognize me by that reference

If Paris Marx is the little domino that causes total collapse of US hegemony, I’ll join the patreon at the highest tier forever

I listened to ezra klein's podcast sometimes before he moved to the NYT, thought it was occasionally interesting. . every time I've listened to an episode since he moved it's been some of the most credulous shit I've ever heard

like, there was one episode where he interviewed a woman whose shtick was spending the whole time talking in what I can loosely call subtext about how she fucked an octopus. she'd go on about how they were 'tasting each other' and their 'fluids were mingling' and such and he'd just be like wow what a fascinating encounter with an alien intelligence. this went on for an hour and at no point did he seem to have a clue what was going on

Has Klezra Ein ever used the term “useful idiot”?

I'm convinced that these people have no choice but to do their next startup, especially if their names are already prominent in the press like Sutskever and Murati. Once you're off the grift train, there is no easy way back on. I guess you can maybe sneak back in as a VC staffer or an independent board member, but that doesn't seem quite as remunerative.

That article is hilarious.

So I devised an alternative: listening to the work as an audiobook. I already did this for the Odyssey, which I justified because that work was originally oral. No such justification for the Bible. Oh well.

Apparently, having a book read at you without taking notes or research is doing humanities.

[...] I wrote down a few notes on the text I finished the day before. I’m still using Obsidian with the Text Generator plugin. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are part of the LLM’s training corpus, as is much of the commentary around them.

Oh, we are taking notes? If by taking notes you mean prompting spicy autocomplete for a summary of the text you didn't read. I am sure all your office colleagues are very impressed, but be careful around the people outside of the IT department they might have an actual humanities degree. You wouldn't want to publicly make a fool out of yourself, would you?

If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect

I can't see that happening - my degree has gotten me laughed out of interviews before, and even with a AI implosion I can't see things changing.

I guess now that USAID is being defunded and the government has turned off their anti-russia/china propaganda machine, private industry is taking over the US hegemony psyop game. Efficient!!!

/s /s /s I hate it all

Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM)

The proper acronym should be M'AAM. And instead of a 'roman salut' they can tip their fedora as a distinctive sign 🤷‍♂️

Also I think he doesn't understand MAD like, at all. The point isn't that you can strike your enemy's nuclear infrastructure and prevent them from fighting back. In fact that's the opposite of the point. MAD as a doctrine is literally designed around the fact that you can't do this, which is why the Soviets freaked out when it looked like we were seriously pursuing SDI.

Instead the point was that nuclear weapons were so destructive and hard to defend against that any move against the sovereignty of a nuclear power would result in a counter-value strike, and whatever strategic aims were served by the initial aggression would have to be weighed against something in between the death of millions of civilians in the nuclear annihilation of major cities and straight-up ending human civilization or indeed all life on earth.

Also if you wanted to reinstate MAD I think that the US, Russia, and probably China have more than enough nukes to make it happen.

Odds that this catches some Israeli nationalists in the net because they were posting about Hamas and arguing with the supposed sympathizers? Given their moves to gut the bureaucracy I can't imagine they have the manpower to have a human person review all the people this is going to flag.

Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye

I looked up a video of someone trying to use a potato as a suppressor and was not disappointed.

Yudkowsky was trying to teach people how to think better – by guarding against their cognitive biases, being rigorous in their assumptions and being willing to change their thinking.

No he wasn't.

In 2010 he started publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 662,000-word fan fiction that turned the original books on their head. In it, instead of a childhood as a miserable orphan, Harry was raised by an Oxford professor of biochemistry and knows science as well as magic

No, Hariezer Yudotter does not know science. He regurgitates the partial understanding and the outright misconceptions of his creator, who has read books but never had to pass an exam.

Her personal philosophy also draws heavily on a branch of thought called “decision theory”, which forms the intellectual spine of Miri’s research on AI risk.

This presumes that MIRI's "research on AI risk" actually exists, i.e., that their pitiful output can be called "research" in a meaningful sense.

“Ziz didn’t do the things she did because of decision theory,” a prominent rationalist told me. She used it “as a prop and a pretext, to justify a bunch of extreme conclusions she was reaching for regardless”.

"Excuse me, Pot? Kettle is on line two."

I feel like it still starts off too credulous towards the rationalists, but it's still an informative read.

Around this time, Ziz and Danielson dreamed up a project they called “the rationalist fleet”. It would be a radical expansion of their experimental life on the water, with a floating hostel as a mothership.

Between them, Scientology and the libertarians, what the fuck is it with these people and boats?

From the opening, this guy has actually been more consistent about respecting her name and pronouns than most coverage I've read. Not what I would have expected, but I'm also only through the first section.

an empire has to compete on its merits

Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder

Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value.

Okay, I mean, that's coherent policy, I really don't like the caveats of "produces more than they consume" cause how do you quantify that, but yes, immigration is actually good...

Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?

aaaand it's eugenics, fuck, how does this keep happening

The Maoist version of Misesian goldbuggery, absolutely fascinating.

Isn't this guy still mainly relevant for jailbreaking the PS3? Pretty sure he flamed out during the Muskification of Twitter

Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto)

Gold, the best substance in existence outside a societal context. Extremely nutritious and tasty. Great for making tools. Easy to form into clothes, which are warm and breathable too. Ideal building material. Obviously the main reason gold is valuable is its usefulness as non-corroding coating for electronic connectors, not that it's a socially constructed status symbol.

@rook @blakestacey here's an archive Link https://archive.ph/h6fbA

this archive has it without paywall

Tuckers quest for a second facial expression continues. The help he got from Ben Stiller turned out to be not effective at all.

Interesting to see if he gets one.

I believe Trump is A-OK with pay for play for pardons, but what's the actual price? Something flew by where people were buying a one-to-one with him for $5M, but that's basically "private". A pardon of someone as high-profile as SBF has to be worth the reputation hit. Can SBF and/or his family swing it? Would SBF be a good ally/toady of Trump?

Somehow I don't see it. Unlike UIrich, a lot of people lost real money when FTX imploded. There wasn't that much sympathy for him from crapto huggers. And let's not forget he's an autistic Jew, not a clear hero for the people who have Trump's ear.

this is so embarrassing. "you say Claude is less capable than a typical six year old? yeah well what if the six year old is notably stupid? did you think of that?"

LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.

Claude couldn't exit the house at the beginning of Pokémon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore it's dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldn't figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!

I mean, it's obviously true that games have their own internal structures and languages that aren't always obvious without knowledge or context, and the FireRed comparison is a neat case where you can see that language improving as designers have both more tools (here meaning colors and pixels) and also more experience in using them. But also even in the LW thread they mention that when humans run into that kind of problem they don't just act randomly for 6 hours. Either they came up with some systematic approach for solving the problem, they walked away from the game to ask for help, or something else. Also you have the metacognition to be able to understand easily "that rug at the bottom marks the exit" once it's explained, which I'm pretty sure the LLM doesn't have the ability to process. It's not even like a particularly dumb 6-year-old. Even if it's prone to similar levels of over matching and pattern recognition errors, the 6-year-old has an actual conscious brain to help solve those problems. The whole thing shows once again that pattern recognition and reproduction can get you impressively far in terms of imitating thought, but there's a world of difference between that imitation and the real deal.

Do we have any experts on Wikipedian article-deletion practices around here? Because that looks really thinly sourced.

AI is going to wreck the world without even being asked to turn things into paperclips. Just giving all coders out of the loop performance problems.

To sorta repeat a prediction of mine, shit like this is gonna tank the public image of coding as a profession.

Inevitable software issues aside, "vibe coding" as a concept undermines any notion of coding as being a difficult/skillful thing, making it sound like coders are doing the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That the software produced by this method is inevitably derivative, dogshit or derivative dogshit is gonna help damage coding's image, too.

Nvidia's current downturn is probably moreso due to the disastrous launch of it's 5000 series rather than AI.

If it was AI I'm guessing the drop would be larger.

it's possibly a distinction without a meaningful difference, but I wouldn't say they're selling shovels - this shit is more like renting out shovels. or maybe timeshare?

I'd love to see a postmortem on deals and development... I have some suspicions on how it all got in this mess to start with (largely "if we sink piles of capex now to corner the market on the magical future, we can totes make it through 5y!" type variations), but I want to see if I'm right

I've read Masnick for over 20 years and he's never learnt to write coherently. At least this one isn't blaming Europe.

I don't think him having previously done undefined PR work for companies that include alleged AI startups is the smoking gun that mastopost is presenting it as.

Going through a Zitron long form article and leaving with the impression that he's playing favorites between AI companies seems like a major failure of reading comprehension.

EZ is a PR person, and definitely has a PR person vibe. I don't know what that poster's deal is, and I would not accuse Ed of being an AI bro. That post kind of has "haters gonna hate" vibes

he started writing about this stuff and it struck a chord with people

If I had Bluesky access on my phone, I'd be dropping so much lore in that thread. As a public service. And because I am stuck on a slow train.

This “insight” tool gives a very incisive critique of the opinion-page journalism we’ve been seeing lately. Oddly enough, not the kind of critique you’d see printed on an opinion page.

During the trial, Penny’s defense brought in a forensic pathologist who claimed that Neely hadn’t died from being choked but from a “combination of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, sickle cell trait and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint,

I get that defense attorneys have to work with what they have but goodness am I tired of this argument.

"Your honor the deceased did not die from being shot through the temple, but due to having chronic migraines and exposure to second hand smoke 3 years ago and also walking towards the bullet thus increasing it's relative velocity slighty"

what if, right, we made a search engine so good it became the verb for searching, and then we replaced it with a robot with a concussion

Ow look the thing I worried about on r/scc (yes I know my own fault for touching it) which could not happen 'because you dont understand how llms work' happend.

We talked about that on r/sneerclub in the past, can't recall the specific consensus. Seems post-rational, has innovation on rationalism from binary 'object vs meta' to 2x2 grids.