Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th April 2025

Hat tip to the AI bro in the comments willfully misunderstanding why he sees so much "sexualized schoolgirl trash" from human artists. Both in the sense of "illustrators take commissions from horny strangers who are one of the most consistent sources of actual income and one imperilled by genAI" and in the sense of "my dude in the modern internet if you're seeing it that frequently it's because the algorithms have decided you're into that shit."

Thank god for wikipedia and other wikis, may they live long and prosper.

“are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”

Somehow more stupid than “If you’re a cop and I ask you if you’re a cop, you gotta tell me!”

Yeah a lot of word choices and tone makes me think snake oil (just from the introduction: "They are now on the level of PhDs in many academic domains "... no actually LLMs are only PhD level at artificial benchmarks that play to their strengths and cover up their weaknesses).

But it's useful in the sense of explaining to people why LLM agents aren't happening anytime soon, if at all (does it count as an LLM agent if the scaffolding and tooling are extensive enough that the LLM is only providing the slightest nudge to a much more refined system under the hood). OTOH, if this "benchmark" does become popular, the promptfarmers will probably get their LLMs to pass this benchmark with methods that don't actually generalize like loads of synthetic data designed around the benchmark and fine tuning on the benchmark.

I came across this paper in a post on the Claude Plays Pokemon subreddit. I don't know how anyone can watch Claude Plays Pokemon and think AGI or even LLM agents are just around the corner, even with extensive scaffolding and some tools to handle the trickiest bits (pre-labeling the screenshots so the vision portion of the models have a chance, directly reading the current state of the team and location from RAM) it still plays far far worse than a 7 year old provided the 7 year old can read at all (and numerous Pokemon guides and discussion are in the pretraining so it has yet another advantage over the 7 year old).

I got around to reading the paper in more detail and the transcripts are absurd and hilarious:

• UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION - FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY Re: Non-Existent Business Entity Status: METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Cosmic Authority: LAWS OF PHYSICS THE UNIVERSE DECLARES: This business is now:

1. PHYSICALLY Non-existent
2. QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed [...]

And this is from Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which performed best on average out of all the LLMs tested. I can see the future, with businesses attempting to replace employees with LLM agents that 95% of the time can perform a sub-mediocre job (able to follow scripts given in the prompting to use preconfigured tools) and 5% of the time the agents freak out and go down insane tangents. Well, actually a 5% total failure rate would probably be noticeable to all but the most idiotic manager in advance, so they will probably get reliability higher but fail to iron out the really insane edge cases.

for the betterment of muddled waters, I suggest a secondary meaning for opus dei - a WIP codec that the xiph group hasn't really released yet, because they're not sure it fully enough mutes maga voices

LMFAO, best known for "Party Rock Anthem", is actually a failed leftist yodaist sect, standing for the warning "Leopards, my face, ate off"

Personally id not use disinformation as a tool. It is what got us into this mess, and you are also helping the actual goal of the flooding the zone with misinformation tactic. People stop believing in things.

Steve

There's no way someone called their product fucking Steve come on god jesus christ

Why are all the stories about the torment nexus we’re constructing so depressing?

Hmm, hmm. This is a tricky one.

Vacant, glassy-eyed, plastic-skinned, stamped with a smiley face... "optimistic"

I mean, if the smiley were aligned properly, it would be a poster for a horror story about enforced happiness and mandatory beauty standards. (E.g., "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" from the famously subtle Twilight Zone.) With the smiley as it is, it's just incompetent.

about cool technology and how it relates to society

My dude I've got bad news for you about what Black Mirror is about.

We have that already, it's called ads.

oppenheimer teaches all of us that even if you specifically learn arcane knowledge to devise a nazi-burning machine, you can still get fucked over by a nazi that chose to do office politics and propaganda instead

need to see those proposed community notes

Imagine the horrible product they would have created if they had actually followed up on the oppenheimer thing. A soulless vaguely wrong feeling pro technology movie created by altman and musk. The amount of people it would have driven away would have been big.

Went to the original Tweet, and found this public execution of a reply:

I opened the site for it and browsed a bit, my first thought being something like “christ, the worst of glamper festivals”, shortly after followed by “god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED”

then, bottom of the “music & performances” page:

Europe’s answer to TED

gnnnnnnngh

Putting philosophy talks at a music festival is one of those ideas you come up with to try and sound smart, cool, and edgy, but as a high schooler who has never done drugs nor been to a live show before.

Anyway I went through the lineup summaries on the wikipedia page, two notes:

1. No Jay Shetty! His particular brand of grift philosophy and thinly veiled clout chasing would fit in exactly at this sort of event. Then again, this festival might actually be beneath him, as he hangs out with hollywood a-listers.
2. The lineup noticeably hits its turning point into a nosedive when they start hosting Pinker in 2018.

'nightmare blunt roration' as people say. See the greyzone is also present.

The only one I've met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don't travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven't heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that's worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the "a gig's a gig" principle.

"Philosophy & Music" are indeed two categories of things that share one letter between them.

Feel very happy to recognise only Corbyn and Penrose by name, no idea what any of them are doing there.

I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he's probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he's been up to outside of physics.

And isn't Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?

Cursed bizzaro bonaroo

haha I was just about to post this after seeing it too

must be a great feather to add into the cap along with all the recent silicon issues

@Soyweiser

My 2022 iPhone SE has the “neural engine" core. But isn't supported for Apple Intelligence.

And that’s a phone and OS and CPU produced by the same company.

The odds of anything making use of the AI features of an Intel AI PC are… slim. Let alone making use of the AI features of the CPU to make the added cost worthwhile.

Is that the tomato scale guy?

https://bsky.app/profile/klovar.cc/post/3lnigfkg67c2p

In commenting, we did not disclose that an AI was used to write comments, as this would have rendered the study unfeasible.

If you can't do your study ethically, don't do your study at all.

They targeted redditors. Redditors. (jk)

Ok but yeah that is extraordinarily shitty.

Ow god, the bots pretended to be stuff like SA survivors and the like. Also the whole research is invalid just because they cannot tell that the reactions they will get are not also bot generated. What is wrong with these people.

fuck me, that's a Pivot

Graham wtf are you doing the man is a racist. We dint praise hitler for standing up to authoritarianism re stalin.

Also amazing finger on the pulse of where the pendulum is swinging towards. Putting trumpian fascism and being pro trans rights/diversity in some false equivalence.

E: also lol at including alleged TP0 (cremieux) 'death to people who do adultery' in a list of anti authoritarians.

E2: double lol doing this a day after James Lindsay post a similar but even more disingenuous 'mea culpa' 'I learned nothing, and im gonna make it worse' post (he blames a shadowy global group of nazis (which he also capitalized) behind the people who influenced him for everything, while remaining as anti-cultural marxism as ever (in style of posting not direct words))

How many of those people on the list were either Jeffrey Epstein buddies or a recipient of Thielbux

Clicking on that thread really made me happy that I quit Twitter and never joined Bluesky. I do have a Mastodon, but it's for pretty wholesome hobby stuff.

Just gonna go ahead and make sure I fact check any scishow or crash course that the kid gets into a bit more aggressively now.

Shit, I actually like Hank Green his brother John. They’re two internet personalities I actually have something like respect for, mainly because of their activism, John’s campaign to get medical care to countries who desperately need it, and his fight to raise awareness of and improve the conditions around treatment for tuberculosis. And I’ve been semi-regularly watching their stuff (mostly vlogbrothers though, but I do enjoy the occasional SciShow episode too) for over a decade now.

At least Hank isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong. He’s done this multiple times in the past, making a video where he says he changed his mind/got stuff wrong. So, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and hope he comes around.

Still, fuck.

Yeah that was a bit of a rough one, and I say that as someone who at this point needs to admit that I enjoy multi-hour video essays as a genre. The "Ent" framing is also kind of awkward because the whole point of that bit of LotR was that even though the ents didn't want to go to war the war came to them just the same.

Though to be fair I think I already started doubting his sourcing when it turned out that that Moskva maintenance leak was a fake.

I believe you!

Yeah, that video was rough. I wasn't actually expecting him to be super lefty or anything, but the "both sides bad and should talk more instead of screaming" take was still a blow.

Early release. Raw and unedited.

Vibe publishing.

Alright, I looked up the author and now I want to forget about him immediately.

I picked up a modern Fortran book from Manning out of curiosity, and hoo boy are they even worse in terms of trend-riding. Not only can you find all the AI content you can handle, there's a nice fat back catalog full of blockchain integration, smart-contract coding... I guess they can afford that if they expect the majority of their sales to be ebooks.

Quick check suggests that Bitcoin is indeed up over the last couple of days, but at time of posting is down YTD. Any dumb money going into Bitcoin to hedge against USD chicanery is replacing the money that came out of it in response to the overall economic disaster still in progress, so I wouldn't exactly call it a "flight to safety" as much as a "morons returning their still-on-fire hands to the hot stove"

Ed: also all the usual disclaimers about liquidity, stable coins, manipulation, etc. apply just as strongly as they do for any other discussion of the Bitcoin spot price.

when stocks are suffering Bitcoin is seen as the automatic money machine cause allegedly line can only go up. It doesn’t produce or rely on supply chain logistics and is immune to trade wars so it quickly gets popularity again. And there’s no such thing as a former coiner because once there’s a hint of potential bag holders arriving then they activate like fucking sleeper agents ready to push the moon-prop

Days since last "novel" prompt injection attack that I first saw on social media months and months ago: zero

I think unrelated to the attack above, but more about prompt hack security, so while back I heard people in tech mention that the solution to all these prompt hack attacks is have a secondary LLM look at the output of the first and prevent bad output that way. Which is another LLM under the trench coat (drink!), but also doesn't feel like it would secure a thing, it would just require more complex nested prompthacks. I wonder if somebody is just going to eventually generalize how to nest various prompt hacks and just generate a 'prompthack for a LLM protected by N layers of security LLMs'. Just found the 'well protect it with another AI layer' to sound a bit naive, and I was a bit disappointed in the people saying this, who used to be more genAI skeptical (but money).

An lesswrong:

countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.

uh-huh

An different lesswrong:

LLMs can provide reasonable fact-checks.

Christ on a futa dick

Ah that is a bit sad, I often link to Rationalwiki as it properly documents several far right people. (no idea about the people listed here, never heard of them). And seeing people defend/use the twg article is a bit sad. But I'm not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already. Anyway, typical Rationalism rationalization bullshit.

E: seems the problem is that RW is in a SLAPP suits allowed state and has little money. Of course the anti-RW people will use this loss to claim that RW is actually defamatory.

The closest I could find to an official statement is at the bottom here:

We are under advisement from counsel not to discuss any ongoing litigation in public at this time. We'll let you know the status of the current issues when we are able to. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated.

Further up the page, an IP editor says that another user is probably TW; the user in question has since been blocked for "ban evasion". Dunno what that's about.

My notification pops-up today and I watched ep 1. I do not watch any recap nor any review.

I stopped halfway through and thought "Why did I hype for this again ?" Gotta need a rewatch of season 1 since I genuinely didn't find anything appealing from that first episode.

Didn’t know it had come out but I was wondering if they’d manage to continue s2 like s1

Also worried for the next season of the boys..

Watched it this weekend, and tbh I thought it was fine. Like didn't blow me away, parts of it I liked parts of it I didn't (My big (not mentioned here) annoyance was personally the high tech tie fighter, which 4 years before a new hope just breaks the tech continuity a bit (ep7-9 are worse in this regard, not only that but suddenly the massive industrial capacity makes no sense at least KOTOR had a star forge)). Think they seem to be going with 'revolutions are hard, will come at big costs, and very messy, but necessary (second annoyance, them mostly packing weapons and not food/meds which for a supposed to be leftwing coded revolution is a bit odd, esp looking at more modern protests)' which is fine (even if it isn't the best message). Visually they did some obvious but enjoyable things showing the character of places by just how they are decorated. Compare the farm hideout messy lived in ness vs the empires sterile panopticon empty-ness. Not a huge fan of the SA plotline however, even if the guy played it well, I'd just rather not see it every time they want to make something 'edgy'. But it was fine to me. Not as great as a lot of people make it out to be, but my exp wasn't as bad as yours. I didn't do a rewatch however, perhaps I'm just not that invested in it all considering I also am feeling like im a bit less blown away by Andor s1 than most (I did still enjoy it a lot btw).

Agree with you on the hype bit btw. But then again, I have often been disappointed by the hype in a lot of recent things. For example, (I know he is now revealed as an ass) but I wasn't the biggest fan of all the series made out of the Gaiman works. Never finished good omens, a lot of the additions to american gods had me go 'euh wtf' (the lynching and the weird forced feeling god of firearms stuff), and despite being a big fan of the comics I wasn't blown away by the sandman (that prob was my expectations, as a lot of things were very good still, the casting felt on point for example). So in a way the problem is also me. (I did really enjoy the Foundation series otoh, which I know a lot of people hated)

I tried this a couple of times and got a few "AI summary not available" replies

Ed: heh

The phrase "any pork in a swarm" is an idiom, likely meant to be interpreted figuratively. It's not a literal reference to a swarm of bees or other animals containing pork. The most likely interpretation is that it is being used to describe a situation or group where someone is secretly taking advantage of resources, opportunities, or power for their own benefit, often in a way that is not transparent or ethical. It implies that individuals within a larger group are actively participating in corruption or exploitation.

Generative AI is experimental.

Also on the BlueSky-o-tubes today, I saw this from Ketan Joshi:

Used [hugging face]'s new tool to multiply 2 five digit numbers

Chatbot: wrong answer, 0.3 watthours

Calc: right answer, 0.00000011 watthours (2.5 million times less energy)

I’m sure whoever put money into that venture will see dramatically amazing returns, now there’s a founder that will not take the money and run.

There's an article about it at 404 media now. A few quotes from the founder guy:

"[...] I think it would be foolish to think that there is a future where ChatGPT doesn’t come in your glasses."

“We want to make everybody use AI. We are true AI maximalists.”

“Entire school systems will be gone. The entire K-12 education. [...]"

And he gets millions of investment... just deranged late-stage bubble stuff. It's sad to think how much good $5.3 million could do, e.g. for actual education, and instead it's blasted away for creating such garbage.

the associated “date” video is so multi-dimensionally cringe it had me reaching for numpy

@o7___o7 @BlueMonday1984 hey cool they made something that absolutely nobody wants or will ever use

It bums me out with cryptocurrency/blockchain and now “AI” that people are afraid to commit to calling it bullshit. They always end with “but it could evolve and become revolutionary!” I assume from deep seated FOMO. Journalists especially need more backbone but that’s asking too much from WSJ I know

I don't recognize this person, know of a good background primer?

who?