Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th April 2025

I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]

When “The world is gonna end soon so let’s just rawdog from now on” gets real

yet I hold

space for it

At the start they state

The disappointment of imminent death is all the more crushing because just a few years ago researchers announced breakthrough discoveries that suggested [existing, adult] humans could have healthspans of thousands of years. To drop the analogy, here I'm talking about my transhumanist beliefs. The laws of physics don't demand that humans slowly decay and die at eighty. It is within our engineering prowess to defeat death, and until recently I thought we might just do that, and I and my loved ones would live for millennia, becoming post-human superbeings.

This is, frankly, bonkers. I'd rate the following in descending order of probability

1. worldwide societal collapse due to climate change
2. we develop an AI that will kill us all for unspecified reasons
3. we establish viable self-sustaining societies outside the limits of Earth
4. we develop techniques that allow everyone to live effectively forever

If the first happens, it removes the material requirements for the latter things to happen. This is an extreme form of "denial of the flesh", the inability to realize that without food or water no-one will be working on AI or life extension tech.

I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.

My dude you're so, so, sooo close to realising it, you should spontaneously quantum-tunnel into self-awareness any second now

The storm rages within

Yet I hold F to pay respects

Also, man why do I click on these links and read the LWers comments. It's always insufferable people being like, "woe is us, to be cursed with the forbidden knowledge of AI doom, we are all such deep thinkers, the lay person simply could not understand the danger of ai" like bruv it aint that deep, i think i can summarize it as follows:

hits blunt "bruv, imagine if you were a porkrind, you wouldn't be able to tell why a person is eating a hotdog, ai will be like we are to a porkchop, and to get more hotdogs humans will find a way to turn the sun into a meat casing, this is the principle of intestinal convergence"

Literally saw another comment where one of them accused the other of being a "super intelligence denier" (i.e., heretic) for suggesting maybe we should wait till the robot swarms coming over the hills before we declare its game over.

Oh that tattoo is regrettable

Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.

This line actually really annoys me, because they are already set up for moving the end date on their doomsday prediction as needed while still maintaining their overall doomerism.

:'( sad one. feel bad for the bebe, being raised by insane people.

"Conspiracy" is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).

A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:

Despite Malparti warning that "it would be a waste of time for everyone" I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as "the unique solution" to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be "eventually achieved", with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.

It's been a while since I've seen a math book review that said "Do not use for anything."

"This book is not a place of honor..."

I can use bad analogies also!

• If airplanes can fly, why can't they fly to the moon? It is a straightforward extension of existing flight technology, and plotting airplane max altitude from 1900-1920 shows exponential improvement in max altitude. People who are denying moon-plane potential just aren't looking at the hard quantitative numbers in the industry. In fact, with no atmosphere in the way, past a certain threshold airplanes should be able to get higher and higher and faster and faster without anything to slow them down.

I think Eliezer might have started the bad airplane analogies... let me see if I can find a link... and I found an analogy from the same author as the 2027 fanfic forecast: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HhWhaSzQr6xmBki8F/birds-brains-planes-and-ai-against-appeals-to-the-complexity

Eliezer used a tortured metaphor about rockets, so I still blame him for the tortured airplane metaphor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gg9a4y8reWKtLe3Tn/the-rocket-alignment-problem

Yes the 2 rs in strawberry machine thinks. In the same way that an airplane flies. /s

E: it gets even worse as half the AI field says the airplanes fly like how birds do. That is why the anthropomorphization is bad. Because it both doesn't think as in the function, nor think as in the system. And by anthropomorphizing people make it look like it can do both.

Dijkstra did it first, but it is very ai-booster to steal work without credit or understanding, I guess.

The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

Threats to computing science

This is too fucking dumb to even be called sophistry.

of course MBA came up with this

an airplane doesn't flap its wings

behold this fever dream animation

Its almost like flapping part isn't a requirement for something to fly.

That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)... ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I've had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).

Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.

But "AI"... it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn't. There's nothing to learn from resulting failure, except "don't use AI".

In this case, given shopify's general behaviour, I won't be sad at all though if they crash and fail.

Extreme sent at 4am energy.

As to cryonics... for both LLM doomers and accelerationists, they have no need for a frozen purgatory when the techno-rapture is just a few years around the corner.

As for the rest of the shiny futuristic dreams, they have give way to ugly practical realities:

• no magic nootropics, just Scott telling people to take adderal and other rationalists telling people to micro dose on LSD

• no low hanging fruit in terms of gene editing (as epistaxis pointed out over on reddit) so they’re left with eugenics and GeneSmith’s insanity

• no drexler nanotech so they are left hoping (or fearing) the god-AI can figure it (which is also a problem for ever reviving cryonically frozen people)

• no exocortex, just over priced google glasses and a hallucinating LLM “assistant”

• no neural jacks (or neural lace or whatever the cyberpunk term for them is), just Elon murdering a bunch of lab animals and trying out (temporary) hope on paralyzed people

The future is here, and it’s subpar compared to the early 2000s fantasies. But hey, you can rip off Ghibli’s style for your shitty fanfic projects, so there are a few upsides.

Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn't seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don't have a copy of any of Kurzweil's books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they're surely way off.

Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don't doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I've seen a couple of signs of that already.

It's possible that the most popular fora for discussions of the other topics were drowned out by AI doomerism and the people who are interested in them simply left.

One of the most popular and controversial ways in recent times to use technological means to improve human condition and overcome its natural limitations is gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy. Transhumanism is woke now — hell, "trans" is right there in the name!

Yeah this kind of stuff is why im not the biggest fan of the tescreal label.

She Licking my County till I back away is this anything?

How much of this is the AI bubble collapsing vs. Ohiophobia

So many of the responses pointing out how bad this is for the local communities in Licking County (lol), but I feel like this has to be a case where the bezzle is collapsing more than a decision causing new harm, right? The bubble wasn't sustainable and those jobs were unlikely to manifest past the initial construction, especially since data centers aren't exactly labor-intensive to run.

That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt for those communities, especially in the midst of the economic ruin left in the wake of Hurricane Tarrif, but I feel like there's an important lesson being lost here.

Tired: Propaganda of the deed

Wired: Propaganda of the Sneer

One more pic:

Any idea why the flag reassembles the Swiss one (the proportions are wrong though)?

I mean the left has been mostly absent from America in general since at least the Reagan years, so it's not all that surprising.

They're giving the American people what they voted for

Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic.

This entire enterprise is just shamanry, we are like two steps away from "throwing a goat into a volcano makes your next prompt more realistic"

What the hell

Why are there so many of them?

Why do they all look like shit?

Why do so many look suspiciously like a guy in a suit?

If only Tombstone were here to help

>humanoid robot

They're called "clankers"

@froztbyte @BlueMonday1984

Featuring:

Drunk Robot https://humanoid.guide/product/ambidex/

Obviously A Guy In Suit Robot https://humanoid.guide/product/clonealpha/

And not forgetting, Is That A Hat? What The Fuck Is Happening Here Robot https://humanoid.guide/product/kangaroo/

baking a Hear Me Out Cake for Reachy 2

Why does Reachy 2 have a tank top? Are they shy about their bot nipples or something?

Pre-watch: With the prior knowledge that her main job prior to this was wrestling promoter, the ol’ overtonussy is preeeetty loose

Post-watch: lol

Slather us in steak sauce and serve with a baked fucking potato because we are so cooked.

hold the fucking phone. The secretary of education is the wife of VINCE FUCKING MCMAHON? I thought this was a "no relation" situation but no, it's real.

Tired: AI

Wired (and delicious): A1

I'll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff

+10 bayes points

Has someone on LW already proposed a BayesCoin or have I just figured out how to steal lunch money from all rationalists at once

that's CFAR cult jargon right?

missed that at the time, but you'd think scoot would have an easy time finding a contact at a major publication like the NYT...

Spooks as a service

Check out the by-line. Big surprise!

when you say "made it", i think FUCKING ROOSE

Making a startup named Sphinctr

This one has anus in the name https://manus.im/

Addition to that, why do some look like Goatse?

somebody had to do the design + layout for that banner. i wonder what was going through their head then.

Incorporating into your workflow a company that is a shell around other companies that are selling their products at a loss with no path to profitability seems like quite an unacceptable business risk to me. But I dont get paid the big bux

couldn't help myself, there are seldom more perfect opportunities to use this one

That is odd in a way, you would expect them to honour is wishes of that data no longer being available, but nope.

I clicked on one from 2012 and it implies that if you lived in nazi germany you should have had polite debates with nazis. Thanks Scott, never change.

I'm not going to click more but it goes back to 2006 so if anyone finds any sad incel whining please bring it up!

I did a quick scan of the titles just for old time's sake and ran into a very aggressive "oh my God shut up" directed at my younger self as much as at Scooter himself.

Forced mass-adoption of this stuff by consumers is here, now, demanding our approval, attention, and precious time. A public tech demo exists to impress, and the Copilot Gaming Experience does not. Doom on a calculator, but we had to boil a lake or two to get it and are being told it's the future of games. I reject this future. Not only do I find it philosophically and ethically repugnant, it also made my tummy hurt.

💯 no notes

This demo is powered by a "World and Human Action Model" (WHAM)

George Michael must be spinning in his grave

Considering PC Gamer bought the AI hype hook, line and sinker a few months ago, I'd say this is a particularly notable sneer.

This is pure gut instinct, but it seems AI bros' ability to bedazzle the press is fading fast.

Oh gosh I looked up the post and that was a mistake. Actually Mr. Yarvin there is quote tweeting someone who dared, on twitter, to say that the Holocaust was real. The replies (including Yarvin's incorrect & off topic nonsense) being about what you'd expect from twitter nowadays. So much Holocaust denial.

Unusually shit take on WW2 but not an unusually shit take from Moldbug. Just the usual level of shit.

ironically many "WW2 enjoyers" are big fans of German hardware, uniforms and tactics...

I think it's accurate that the US and England didn't join to stop the Holocaust. Sentence 3 is a little oversimplified, and sentence 4 is straight-up lunacy.

"I’m a moderate Holocaust denier." —Curtis Yarvin

this has been happening for a while, just getting coverage again now. first coverage was months ago. morphed/evolved pretty quickly out of the typosquatting shit

((a lot of people in the) security space absolutely fucking loves "giving names" to things that have been (known to be) happening before, and acting like suddenly they're the ones who first saw the thing. see this nonsense for another good example of that happening)

Reminds me of an SMBC comic that had a setup along the same lines, that if male birth order correlates with homosexuality and family size trends being what they are, the past must have been considerably gayer on average.

Considering how rightwingers have tried to link gayness to pedophilia this is a subject I would avoid if I was them. E: and gwern just goes there.

The modern father of this literature is Ray Blanchard

🚨🚨🚨 Do not take Ray Blachard's work seriously !

I wonder how often Musk fires employees who explain to him that, no using tesla cars for distributed computing is a bad idea and we should stop working on this.

It's still on the front page, almost 300 comments. Haven't time to review them all but doesn't look like the promptfondlers have the upper hand

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43619759

Interesting that the artist/LLM rendered his physique in a manly, superhero style but kept (or inserted) a lazy eye.

Someone more versed in Japanese will have to translate the SFX for me. I don't think it's an eager heartbeat but it would be fun if it was .

Hopefully no one will actually get these images tattooed on their body.

you know there's gonna be at least that one person with multiple of them

I mean, with the instantly recognizable AI lighting design it would actually take a fair degree of skill to make something look that garbage as an actual tattoo.

I love to get my tattoos on clearance

the hawk tuah teapot is actually hysterical which is how I knew the poster was taking the piss

Thus, what appears as intellectual fast food – the ultra-processed thought-nuggets deep fried in venture capital – often conceals wholesome ingredients sourced from a gourmet pantry of quite some sophistication.

What am I even reading.

I went into this with negative expectations; I recall being offended in high school that The Flashbulb was artificially sped up, unlike my heroes of neoclassical guitar and progressive-rock keyboards, and I've felt that their recent thoughts on newer music-making technology have been hypocritical. That said, this was a great video and I'm glad you shared it.

Ears and eyes are different. We deconvolve visual data in the brain, but our ears actually perform a Fourier decomposition with physical hardware. As a result, psychoacoustics is a real and non-trivial science, used e.g. in MP3, which limits what an adversary can do to frustrate classification or learning, because the result still has to sound like music in order to get any playtime among humans. Meanwhile I'm always worried that these adversarial groups are going to accidentally propagate something like McCollough stripes, a genuine cognitohazard that causes edges to become color-coded in the visual cortex for (up to) months after a few minutes of exposure; it's a kind of possible harm that fundamentally defies automatic classification by definition.

HarmonyCloak seems like a fairly boring adversarial tool for protecting the music industry from the music industry. Their code is incomplete and likely never going to get properly published; again we're seeing an industry-capture research group taking and not giving back to the Free Software community. I think all of the demos shown here are genuine, but he fully admits that this is a compute-intensive process which I estimate is going to slide back out of affordability by the end of 2026. This is going to stop being effective as soon as we get back into AI winter, but I'm not going to cry for Nashville.

I really like the two attacks shown near the end, starting around 22:00. The first attack, if genuinely not audible to humans, is likely a Mosquito-style frequency that is above hearing range and physically vibrates the components of the microphone. Hofstadter and the Tortoise would be proud, although I'm concerned about the potential long-term effects on humans. The second attack is again adversarial but specific to models on home-assistant devices which are trained to ignore some loud sounds; I can't tell spectrographically whether that's also done above hearing range or not. I'm reluctant to call for attacks on home assistants, but they're great targets.

Fundamentally this is a video that doesn't want to talk about how musicians actually rip each other off. The "tones and rhythms" that he keeps showing with nice visualizations have been machine-learnable for decades, ranging from beat-finders to frequency-analyzers to chord-spellers to track-isolators built into our music editors. He doubles down on copyright despite building businesses that profit from Free Software. And, most gratingly, he talks about the Pareto principle while ignoring that the typical musician is never able to make a career out of their art.