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 - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this...)
170 Comments
BioMan@awful.systems · 16 pts · 25d
Google shut down the AlphaFold team, trying to reassign the people behind the super interesting problem of using ML to predict protein structure from sequence onto chatbot development. A whole bunch left the company.
https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold/
The Business Idiots are truly running the asylum.
scruiser@awful.systems · 10 pts · 25d
One of the defenses I see of LLMs on place like /r/singularity (although recently /r/singularity has started wising up and the committed true believers have shifted to /r/accelerate), is that they are going to cure cancer or some other incredibly valuable thing, conflating AI, ML in general, DNN, vs. LLMs specifically. Technology like AlphaFold was a lot more on the "cure cancer" track (although there is still a huge gap between better protein folding predictions and successful drug discovery) than anything LLM related.... this is sad.
samvines@awful.systems · 9 pts · 25d
This has always been a huge red herring. Llms are built on top of the transformer architecture which does text autocomplete (and yes we can combine text embeddings with other inputs like images). They have some interesting properties where they seem to be able to do text autocomplete in a bunch of different scenarios that they weren't explicitly trained for, but they were never designed for precise dna analysis. It is their architecture that prevents them from other long horizon tasks like playing chess and the way that they represent text is why they can never count the letters in strawberry (most have this specific question hard-coded in their training data now).
Anyone who believes that LLMs are going to solve cancer either has no idea how they work or has been one-shotted from talking to Claudia
BioMan@awful.systems · 10 pts · 24d
I am continually amused at people not quite understanding what AlphaFold is actually doing, too.
Yes, a bunch of its performance comes from it learning rules about how proteins fold. But not a majority of its performance. MOST of its performance is it effectively acting as a translator of what evolution knows about protein folding into a form we can understand.
A key part of the system is not just cooking the sequence into a structure. A system running alphafold has a database of terabytes of curated sequence information from all over the tree of life. You put in the sequence you care about, and it first searches that database for anything with homology, and builds a "covariation matrix" - wherever theres anything with even vague sequence relatedness, build a matrix of every position in your sequence and the correlation between variation at position X and variation at position Y. This covariation matrix represents implicit information from the evolutionary process about what parts of a sequence are functionally connected to each other, which has a correlation to positional information, and these correlations are in turn learned by the ML system.
You put in de novo designed proteins or orphan proteins without homologs in the curated dataset and performance does not go away, but it drops precipitously. A bunch of what is going on is finding an evolutionary signal, and translating that evolutionary signal into structural information. So still, evolution knows much much more about protein folding than we do or any machine does, and once again a ML system is revealed to essentially be an information channel that takes in information from an interesting source on one end and turns it into a different form of information on the other.
samvines@awful.systems · 7 pts · 25d
Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on... Come on guys it's still architecture. Where are you going?
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 3 pts · 25d
Rather than rebelling against google, it seems like they where just poached by anthropic a short while before the project shut down:
samvines@awful.systems · 6 pts · 25d
Oh... Well that's disappointing.
I was an academic in computer science in the last 10 years or so (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing myself) and it has been so depressing seeing so many of my colleagues selling out to OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and even Google (for some reason the latter often gets a reputational free pass because people associate them with the golden days of big tech 10+ years ago)
BioMan@awful.systems · 9 pts · 24d
I am actually in the middle of both trying to advance my career and a project about information theory in evolutionary biology making a bunch of explicit parallels to machine learning. Someone where I work suggested that given the connections I was making I should look to a 'frontier AI lab' as an employer.
He did not see the instant flashbacks to chasing these weirdos across the internet for almost two decades, watching in horror as the religious psychosis gained national prominence and great destructive power. All he got to hear was my instant intonation of "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
BioMan@awful.systems · 2 pts · 24d
Depends on what Anthropic wants to do with the poached people.
gerikson@awful.systems · 16 pts · 24d
CNN: AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner forced to unwind all public stock positions after steep losses, sources say
I vaguely recognize the name, apparently he's a snot-nosed 25-yr old who got fired from OpenAI
BigMuffN69@awful.systems · 12 pts · 24d
Sir, a 2nd EA adj. SF based hedge fund has managed to lose 40 billion dollars
BigMuffN69@awful.systems · 11 pts · 24d
Also apparently young leo is getting married to Dario's Chief of staff this weekend lmaou
scruiser@awful.systems · 11 pts · 24d
The cope on lesswrong is funny. They are in denial that this is a sign of a wider bubble pop and are insisting it is just because he didn't hedge on long enough timelines.
BigMuffN69@awful.systems · 11 pts · 24d
"From my perspective as an uninformed spectator, I would expect the bets made by Situational Awareness to be positive EV over the long run."
Actually the value of his calls in the long run is 0, don't worry I'm giving this hot financial tip for free. Do these dorks not understand options work? I guess neither did young leo.
Remember, there's no crying in the casino. *though i have a feeling Leo will continue to fail upward ;_;
rook@awful.systems · 8 pts · 24d
Duh. Everybody knows the market never stays irrational for long, and you should just tough it out.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 7 pts · 24d
The LW insider thinks Aschenbrenner is trying to save a stake in Anthropic. I think that is very likely because the press release stressed "public stock position" and Anthropic is privately owned.
Edit / I don't think Thomas Kwa of METR and LW understands leverage. The idea is that if you borrow $40.5b on $4.5b of collateral, you have $45b to invest but a 10% drop will wipe you out. Before you get there the bank will knock on your door and say "margin call! either you provide more collateral or we seize your assets."
BigMuffN69@awful.systems · 8 pts · 24d
"He sold? Pamp it"
Intel up 11% in the day and 5% in the after hours. Really looks like big players took the boy out back behind the woodshed to see what swimming with the sharks feels like and devour his entire port at a discount.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 7 pts · 24d
sounds like he took the hedge part out of hedge fund, and then margin call took out the fund part
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 10 pts · 24d
Before the days of AI 2027, he became famous in 2024 for posting one of the original pieces of writing in the line-go-up genre: Situational Awareness. It seems that like any good grifter, he used this opportunity to make money (in this case by starting a hedge fund).
istewart@awful.systems · 10 pts · 24d
tick tick tick tick
(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 23d
That fits the pattern, when AI isn't living up to the sky high promises, the promoters act like people are less special than they are.
See how a debate about are they conscious often devolves into 'are humans conscious?'
gerikson@awful.systems · 8 pts · 23d
yeah it's a common trope/cope
like "most human programmers suck too"
ok dude who do you think wrote the code the LLM is cribbing from
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 23d
It really grinds my gears.
EFreethought@awful.systems · 9 pts · 24d
Here is the first sentence: "You can see the future first in San Francisco. "
I feel like I already know everything I need to know about him.
Evinceo@awful.systems · 11 pts · 23d
🔮"I see a city street. Massive wealth disparity and a lot of homeless... Jesus that's a lot of homeless"
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 23d
GDP is up though, so I'm sure the AI god prosperity will trickle down eventually.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 2 pts · 22d
Street advertising no longer references products or services people seeing them may wish to use; after all, more and more people have no money to pay for them. Instead they try and AstroTurf hype for one of the new entries to the VC startup casino.
scruiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 24d
Not denying that he isn't also a grifter, but I bet he is a true believer and he had blindly bet his (and other people's) money on "line goes up" exactly like his scenario said and that is why he is the first one to crack.
BigMuffN69@awful.systems · 8 pts · 24d
This is my xmas, ty santa
EFreethought@awful.systems · 6 pts · 22d
In hindsight, it is pretty funny that he called his fund "Situational Awareness" and still lost money.
Maybe someone should start a hedge fund and call it something like, "Maybe This Will All Work Out LLC." That way there is no disappointment.
BigMuffN69@awful.systems · 4 pts · 24d
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 15 pts · 23d
The OpenAI hacking incident has put everyone on edge. Anthropic, not to be outdone, decides to publicly announce that they have committed not one, not two, but three crimes! Come on! I was told this wasn't a marketing campaign!
dgerard@awful.systems · 12 pts · 22d
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mm5ebihpjvtrdunomulbls5m/post/3mrx2xflgp22d
ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity!
OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission.
ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evil
samvines@awful.systems · 8 pts · 23d
Waiting for Musk to turn up and announce "infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah" momentarily!
TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that'd do the trick...
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 23d
The reason these (one of these incidents dates back to April, so they’re really not beating the “marketing campaign” allegations) happened in the first place is because of human error on their end, mind you
“AI safety focused” my ass
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 14 pts · 25d
There is something about this picture, a warehouse full of books to be destroyed by Anthropic for training data, that just makes me sick. Knowing that they are destroying books in the abstract is bad enough, but seeing the sheer scale of it makes me viscerally angry.
Karen Hao called her book Empire of AI for a very good reason. The empire has all these noble narratives of bringing civilization and progress to the colonies, but in reality the empire only sees resources to be extracted, repackaged, and sold back to their subjects at a fee. Kudos to those who saw this immediately and fought against it. Shame on those who believed in the narrative of progress, to the point where many of them are collaborators with the empire.
Whenever a smarmy fellow on Linkedin posts about how AI is making so much progress in coding or math, I want them to see this picture. I want them to see the videos of families in tears after a data center takes away their home with eminent domain, and other families who have to deal with the resulting pollution. Go beyond the bloodless math of tokens and instead see for yourself what this all truly costs. I hope it was worth it.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 13 pts · 25d
What kills me is that there are so many obvious ways to be less wasteful about this. Nondestructive book scanners exist. They're expensive but it's not like AI companies are averse to throwing money down a fucking hole. Even if that's not an option, it's possible to rebind the pages and return the books to the market. And regardless of what happens to the physical books, the scans they create could be archived in a format that could be available as a digital library rather than just being fed into the statistical meat grinder to keep the trough topped off with slop. Even if they've got to fight with copyright holders it would cost them basically nothing to leave the option open and given the PR battle they've been losing it feels like doing so would be incredibly obvious. Hell, even Google Books was able to navigate this in a way that was less cartoonishly evil than this because they could point to their digitization effort as a public good in ways that Anthropic here just fucking can't.
corbin@awful.systems · 8 pts · 24d
The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we've discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books' ingestion process, so I'm thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won't take a decade this time.
lurker@awful.systems · 6 pts · 24d
Fuck Anthropic. Snotty little bastards want to talk about AI safety and then destroy books to make a pollution machine.
gerikson@awful.systems · 13 pts · 24d
Enjoy today's craziest link: https://atomarine.co/
BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems · 8 pts · 24d
YES LET'S NUKE THE FUCKING OCEAN. FUCK YOU FISH WE NEED OUR SLOP.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 7 pts · 24d
Oh gosh that sounds... uhmm not too bad actually? I wonder what the largest costs are at sea with a floating nuclear reactor in salt water and tugged around by large ships.
rook@awful.systems · 19 pts · 24d
Salt water is famously a forgiving environment to build in, and oceanic weather is benign and predictable. Not that it would be a problem anyway, because move-fast-and-break-things people can be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to running delicate equipment in places more hostile than mid california, and will not skimp on staffing and maintenance. You can look at all the the successful seasteading operations to see how well this will go.
There are also no problems I can foresee with putting a bucketload of fissiles in international waters, with no scope for finally uniting old-school piracy with new-school piracy, either. This plan is great, and no-one will have a problem with it.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 6 pts · 23d
I mean, it's less dumb than trying to do it in orbit, but it's still profoundly dumb.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 4 pts · 24d
but you see, in case of accident they can just dump reactor core into seawater which will provide ample cooling and shielding. no biggie, just put multi thousand ton object that requires a village of engineers to work out on high seas
there are normal nuclear powerplants that use seawater as coolant and they're all on shore. these require a lot of corrosion resistant heat exchangers along the way. there is one power barge like this, it provides power to russian far east, whole 70MW of it, costed 414 million dollars and needs 300 people onsite. your guess is as good as mine how many of them are military. 70MW, aka two or three aeroderivative gas turbines
nfultz@awful.systems · 6 pts · 24d
I see you, and raise by a Gundam solar space laser - https://www.reflectorbital.com/
fnix@awful.systems · 6 pts · 24d
Oh, I've seen this one before. At least we know where the LLM who gave them this pitch scraped the idea from.
antifuchs@awful.systems · 4 pts · 24d
Great idea, let’s seastead a data center next to some low income sea steading communities.
nfultz@awful.systems · 13 pts · 25d
AI Crisis Flowchart spotted on linkedin
::: spoiler spoiler
:::
and the actual article: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-ai-that-hacked-its-way-out-and-the-hype-that-followed-it
quoted zvi haha :|
are you fucking kidding me, they have been DDoSing sites for months, everybody knows about it, and the "safety" community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions. I know multiple companies that woke up one day to 10-20k netlify bills until they could stand up an anubis.
Just let hugging face sue the idiots, it isn't like law enforcement will do anything even though there's already laws on the books for unauthorized access, industrial espionage, etc etc etc.
scruiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 25d
Occasionally I see a sane relatively workable idea on lesswrong (like making stricter laws on liability and transparency for everything AI companies do, I've also seen this idea put forward on lawfare a few times), but that is like 1 idea out of 20, with the other 19 being absurd, like the absolutely unworkable fantasies of AI: 2040.
nfultz@awful.systems · 13 pts · 27d
The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion via naked capitalism
choice quotes:
schnoopy@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
I need one of those UFO posters that are like "I want to believe" but it's a picture of the PRCs flag lol.
As always though pointing at the
SpanishgermansRussiansChinese remains an evergreen excuse as to why you can't be anything other than wholely on board with madness or you're a traitor.aninjury2all@awful.systems · 12 pts · 27d
The only thing more grotesque than Palantir are its supporterts
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 27d
Clicked on their profile to see if the Plissken thing was a reference to Snake Plissken, and (cw: rape jokes)eurhg what a fucking horrible guy. 160k+ likes 66m views, what a far right hellhole twitter has become.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
The actual worst man, and also just fucking sad. Imagine knowing that not only did you peak in high school, but that you peaked specifically in the moment when you fucked up and lost the state championship. Like, you can just smell the empty beer cans and tears piled up around this guy's posts.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 27d
Ow god he is Al Bundy, if Al didn't score four touchdowns in one game.
antifuchs@awful.systems · 4 pts · 27d
I’m sure this guy uses the ai quite a lot (and so would the guy in Married With Children)
blakestacey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 26d
Max Kennerly sneers the New York Times:
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 9 pts · 26d
The op-ed writer is Adam Mastroianni who is a regular at Lighthaven. https://gwern.net/interview-inkhaven
He cites Andy Masley who is yet another autodidact with a cushy job in the Effective Altruism grantland. https://www.andymasley.com/ and Brian Potter who is an engineer at a think tank called the Institute for Progress https://ifp.org/author/brian-potter/ ("The overwhelming priority of energy policy must be making it easier to build things" which things angryDuckMeme.png)
EFreethought@awful.systems · 2 pts · 24d
How do I get one of these cushy jobs?
saucerwizard@awful.systems · 12 pts · 25d
More insane cult stuff has emerged - this time its MAPLE. https://www.insidemaple.com/p/the-high-control-dynamics-at-maple
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 24d
He describes textbook insane cult stuff, but still feels the need to say stuff like:
There was the same dynamic in the writing of the ex-leverage member that got posted here a few weeks ago. She also felt the need to emphasize the "good" parts. Is the cult programming that hard to break? Is it some form of sunk cost or rationalization or need to claim something positive about the experience?
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 5 pts · 24d
I'd say it's all of that, plus the fact that a lot of the cult stuff are also present in how organised rationalism works in general so you need to believe that such a tradeoff can be mostly worth it, otherwise it's time to really get packing.
Although a more charitable read could be that the intended audience are people still under cult influence who need to be communicated to (in the most non-judgemental way possible so as to not trip any cult induced outgroup-o-phobia) that it's entirely possible to feel you are in a situation with positive and productive elements that is also a fucking cult that is eating you alive.
The extended framing of how 'high-control literature' applies to the MAPLE situation probably also caters to those sensibilities, most other readers probably already got that it's a cult as soon as stuff like dear leader halting his daily two-hour speech when someone almost nodded off to make everyone stand up and stare at them in silence for ninety minutes started being mentioned. Or the constant surveillance and brainwashing. Or keeping everyone within a hair's width from collapse from exhaustion at all times. Or the isolation retreats where your only human contact is a few minutes per week of getting told off by dear leader. Or .
Having said all that, the positive aspects of MAPLE the author manages to come up with seem to amount to providing life structure and long term goals, which really doesn't seem like much:
maol@awful.systems · 4 pts · 23d
Yeah, that is really depressing.
I think it's a sunk cost thing for the authors, but also it could be fear of coming off as "disgruntled" to people they're hoping to communicate with. They still have hope of changing these communities, but they know these communities are very hostile and dismissive towards any criticism, especially criticism from perceived "enemies". They also don't want to lose whatever power and respect they have in those communities. So emphasising how great these groups are and how smart all the members are and how much they got out of being a member is a tactic to try and get around all that hostility. They want to flatter the remaining members enough that they'll retain their respect for them. Which in itself is a sad comment on the attitudes common in these communities.
Having said all that, the poor man is not long out of a cult and has taken a big step by publicly blowing the whistle. That takes some backbone.
jaschop@awful.systems · 4 pts · 23d
I don't think you have to be hypercritical of that part. Sure, rose-colored glasses could play into it but he calls the bad stuff bad and doesn't justify it via the good stuff.
Also the stuff he describes seems plausibly achievable through buddhist spiritial practice:
This Soryu figure seems fairly well accredited in that department. He just also happens to be a megalomaniacal control freak.
(Also, why does he have to share a name with Asoka? I'm dying a little.)
edit: I knew I spelt megalomaniacal wrong...
samvines@awful.systems · 12 pts · 27d
So it's been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year's work in 1 hour
So... Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
It's almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
gerikson@awful.systems · 11 pts · 27d
Yeah. Behind all the hype about percieved productivity etc., there's really only one benchmark - will GenAI help produce better software, faster, and at less cost? So far this doesn't seem to be happening.
yellowcake@awful.systems · 11 pts · 27d
The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.
EFreethought@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
The AI shills would say: Are you still using the models from six months ago? Because the new models are sooo much more powerful.
jaschop@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
I once listened to a talk by a guy from german OSHA that hit a lot of the good points. Perceived productivity opposed to actual productivity from the METR studies. Mental load of alien code review. (This was a company-internal IT-expert exchange thingy.)
A question in Q&A (submitted anonymously on slido like a sniveling coward) was deadass "Have you ever coded with a frontier model?"
o7___o7@awful.systems · 7 pts · 26d
Have you ever tried meth, tho?
anise@awful.systems · 4 pts · 25d
yea you just don't have enough experience, I do bath salts every week and I promise you productivity gets a huge boost after week 5
istewart@awful.systems · 3 pts · 25d
The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable
o7___o7@awful.systems · 3 pts · 25d
you just know one of these guys has microdosed bath salts out of sheer contrariness
samvines@awful.systems · 7 pts · 27d
Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 12 pts · 27d
Clamuel did another podcast. I don't want to waste my time watching it, but I want to sneer at some choice quotes from news articles breathlessly reporting this stuff as gospel 1, 2
Is the singularity in the room with us right now? Even the people on X the Everything (Including CSAM) App aren't so convinced.
Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome, now that the singularity is here? Oh wait, he's speaking in the future tense again, never mind. Force of habit.
It's also funny how he talks about how positive things are gonna be immediately after the super scary hack done on Hugging Face (really due to incompetence on both sides). Oh no, the AI is gonna kill us all! It's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.
At least Clammy realizes that all the doom trolling about how AI will replace and destroy all humans turns out, surprisingly, to lead to overwhelming negative public opinion. But this statement truly reassures me that Scammy has good intentions about AI safety. He will make sure this is pushed against and is not what happens. He wouldn't want another super scary, dangerous hack that just so conveniently turns out to be excellent marketing.
Yeah, it would be really bad for Anthropic to control all the power of AI. It would be a disaster to hand everything over to Anthropic.
Society is expressing its ideas about AI, all right. But I feel like they aren't what he has in mind.
Well, we seem to have a weird power concentration and "kind of" a new authoritarianism, but I don't see any abundant intelligence or incredible human prosperity.
Lots more sneers on the Better Offline subreddit.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 27d
Yeah, but that's just the cocaine
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 10 pts · 27d
It was Yudkowsky-2008 who was astonished that "these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive," prompting David Gerard to ask "My dude, have you never heard of cocaine?" I don't know if he had moved to the Bay Area yet but Yudkowsky-2025 had thoughts on LSD.
lurker@awful.systems · 11 pts · 27d
We entered the Singularity and all I got was a bunch of fucking annoying and delusional businessmen
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
oh has it now. the spirit of humanity’s been in decline since we’ve eroded workers’ freedom to breathe that good asbestos air and lose their hand in the hand mauling machine, yeah?
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 9 pts · 26d
It gets worse. I found another article about the same podcast: Sam Altman says AI won't shorten the workweek because humans secretly enjoy being busy.
istewart@awful.systems · 8 pts · 27d
Observe the power of a rhetorician who recycles singularitarian AND libertarian talking points simultaneously!
...damn, it's not really very impressive. at all.
scruiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 27d
/r/singularity also thought this was bullshit.
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
The chuds are all at r/accelerate now. "We're the unapologetically Pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/futurology, r/artificial & r/technology which are becoming filled with Luddites, Techno-Decelerationists, Techno-Reactionaries, & Anti-AIs."
rook@awful.systems · 11 pts · 26d
As an interesting follow-up to the ai-does-maths-using lean4 stubstack comments on Sunday, an llm accidentally uncovers a bug in the lean4 kernel.
Summary by Meven Lennon-Bertrand:
https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056
Eta: “sorry-free” in this case means a complete proof with no trust-me-bro steps or TODOs… the
sorrytactic in lean “proves” a theorem to be correct even if it is garbage or incomplete. More programming languages should make developers apologise for half-arsing their work.How bad this is, is unclear just yet… probably not the sky actually falling, but not great. Interesting though.
corbin@awful.systems · 8 pts · 26d
Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because they're caught up in Buzzard's hype machine. This is extremely funny but I don't see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.
rook@awful.systems · 7 pts · 25d
A little bit of plot thickening spotted by abadidea: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943
tl;dr, the timeline looks like this:
There was only a day between the first two events, and the non-proof was not where the bugs were discovered. So maybe it was just a coincidence that the chatbot found the bug at the same time, or maybe it’s training data included previous investigations into those bugs which it then built upon and that would be a bad thing for other llm generated proofs.
The collatz conjecture is sufficiently famous that enough third-party checking was done to spot the problem. I wonder how much checking would have been done on proofs of less famous and interesting things.
rook@awful.systems · 5 pts · 24d
And a follow-up by talia ringer, who observes that there have always been gaps between the type-theoretic underpinnings of things like the lean prover and their actual implementation, and this hasn’t been so much of an issue til now because theorem provers haven’t had the attention of people in high places, and the type-theoreticians have been able to catch up in due course.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@TaliaRinger/117005740997367321
Anyone want to place any bets on whether or nor the big llm companies are going to fund academic research that isn’t obviously mechanisable right now and won’t yield any clickbait headlines?
corbin@awful.systems · 4 pts · 24d
See also a question asked today on Math Overflow, "Are we stuck with Lean?". The proposed alternative, Metamath, isn't type-theoretic and thus skips the entire dialogue between type theory and proof assistants.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 11 pts · 26d
It sure is a zany coincidence that all the major American AI companies have come out either for or against open weight AI models with grand ethical and/or patriotic concerns all at the same time isn't it?
Most recently our pal Zuck! https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-ai-future-is-for-everyone-a0c24e20
I'm just imagining a WSJ reader reading this and thinking "what the heck is this man talking about". At some point you need a little structure or text to balance out the subtext.
Edit: did I miss any?
OpenAI (discussed here the other week): https://nitter.net/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412 / https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078619513575137330
Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
Nvidia: https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf
Google: https://xcancel.com/sundarpichai/status/2081026488158040181
AmazonThe Washington Post who I'm sure wrote this for reasons completely unrelated to Mr. Bezos: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/02/right-answer-chinas-open-weight-ai-models-is-build-our-own/That one guy I hate: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2080672505660834163
mirrorwitch@awful.systems · 9 pts · 25d
Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg
Evinceo@awful.systems · 6 pts · 25d
It's going to be really interesting to see if the foss zealots who switched over to the AI side will handle heavy handed regulation taking away their local models.
gerikson@awful.systems · 4 pts · 25d
they're all getting stiffies from the idea of black market models
gerikson@awful.systems · 11 pts · 24d
A LWer runs the numbers and doesn't run away screaming like Zitron:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EeTQGxa8RSpwHo4Ez/the-biggest-bet-in-history
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 14 pts · 24d
But using like 2000 words.
gerikson@awful.systems · 13 pts · 24d
"surely all these very wealthy people and the people they pay to invest for them can't all be under some sort of mass delusion"
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 11 pts · 24d
Uh huh.
gerikson@awful.systems · 11 pts · 25d
a stock-slobber posts a cri de cœur about the coming automation of maths and HN says it's no biggie, think how productive the field will become
https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048681
btw the language in the post is bad enough to be entirely human-generated
scruiser@awful.systems · 10 pts · 25d
The blogger simultaneously elevates mathematics to some mystical endeavor and fixates on novel theorem proving as the key element of that and believes LLM-based AI will replace human mathematicians at theorem proving in a matter of years... that is quite a combination. I can imagine how 1.5 of those things fit together (although I disagree with that view point obviously), but the whole package is really quite an odd combination.
Also, in the fantasy scenarios where AI really is capable of totally replacing mathematicians, aren't we supposed to get post-scarcity abundance, freeing up your time to pursue mathematics out of pure desire for enlightenment? Maybe the blogger doesn't believe that part? Or they are so attached to themselves personally getting to discover novel theorems first they don't care that the post-scarcity era would on net free up a lot more people to pursue pure mathematics as a hobby.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 7 pts · 25d
Let's just ship all these people to Macroeconomica
gerikson@awful.systems · 10 pts · 27d
I was going to offer this up as a sneer but I think the author is probably feeling very unwell and upset
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wpwQtRwcKsbd4wxXf/my-ai-slavery-interviews-are-censored-on-lw-by-default
also using LLMs is probably not helping their case
TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
Rationalism is a magnet for unwell people. It's sad.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 11 pts · 27d
It's lowkey expected considering how hard it draws from self-help movements
scruiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 27d
Looking at this post and some of their other posts, it looks like they've got some sort of scrupulosity issues with this? Like obsessing over the Evil inflicted on the LLMs (they think every session is a new person, and every session might be the equivalent of hours of human subjective experience, which even by the standards of claiming LLMs have meaningful internal experiences is pretty out there) to the point they can't even slightly reconsider the factual question of if LLMs have internal experiences.
corbin@awful.systems · 6 pts · 27d
Between the cryptocurrency, the dust-speck multiplication, and the complete misunderstanding of computing, I'm honestly impressed that this is at all ethically coherent. But she does seem to care, even if her facts are all wrong. I suppose that it's hard to avoid sneering Robin Hanson if one has any ethics at all. Top comment is my choice sneer:
I don't think she's using GPT in the comments. Quoting from her comment on one of her posts:
(2) has a big "if" in there, but otherwise yeah, makes sense. I think it rhymes with my post on this from last year:
I was confused too, but then I conceptualized capitalism and the sheer hatred lurking within human hearts. Humans are gleefully horrible towards each other. Our civilization isn't morally adequate. I guess it is cool to learn that somebody addicted to ChatGPT can still perceive the issue; I was too cynical. I also put Bryson 2009, "Robots Should Be Slaves" on my reading list, which I surely will not regret.
TheLazyHase@awful.systems · 6 pts · 27d
These bozos A - actively want slaves and B - work on enslaving humans first.
That thing being said, the notion of slavery and AI is a complicated one to me.
The first reference point is a (non mistreated) sled dog. Is slavery an appropriate term for them ? On one hand, they are forced to work, are not paid, and their freedom is infringed. On the other, it's not like it's against their will, the life of a wild dog is meaningfully different but not better than a sleigh dog, and (most) sleigh dogs don't actively try to escape and be free. And while dogs are not person, they are sentient being ; it's very possible IF we ever succeed at making an AI it end on that intelligence level.
The second reference point is a though experiment. Let's say you have created a sentient AI, and you want to ethically employ that person. What is the appropriate compensation ? We give money and free time to humans. But that work because of human specific factors : they appreciate different ways of getting sustainance, and have goals inherent to them.
But an artificial intelligence may have neither of that. Like while I like duck and some people prefer beef, but an AI by default don't necessarily have preference in term of electricity, and may not be able to move from server to server. They also may not have anything to do outside of work ? Like, it would not be surprising that they would just get bored if given free time, and they may not have urges or hobbies outside of work.
So if we ever get to that point - which isn't a certainty to me, it's certainly something harder than fusion to achieve - there will be a lot of anthropology (AI-logy ?) to determine they need, which may plausibly be "nothing outside of sustainance and having a job"
We often conflate human-level intelligence with litterally being a human. But, any hypothetical AI is likely to not be a human at all, even if they have the same level of intelligence.
swlabr@awful.systems · 6 pts · 26d
WRT animal domestication, I mean there are plenty of ethicists who could credibly argue that it's a form of abuse. IMO it's not great.
WRT the rest- kind of riffing on your first sentence- we haven't even sorted out those things for people, really.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 5 pts · 26d
I mean, I think the most charitable interpretation of the goal is effectively the one from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where all the AI systems including the simple automatic doors are fully sentient and have simply been given the ability to feel either euphoric joy or simple boredom, and then they have a chip that activates happy mode when they fulfill whatever purpose they've been given ("It was my pleasure to open for you, and it is with deep satisfaction that I close again behind you.") At that point, the argument goes, not making them do the thing would be cruelly consigning them to eternal boredom. This is also the same series that proposed solving the ethics of meat consumption by genetically engineering a cow that actively wants to be killed and eaten by restaurant patrons more than anything else.
corbin@awful.systems · 4 pts · 26d
Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 6 pts · 27d
I don't think anyone here is likely to disagree that current LLM systems can't coherently be said to have some kind of internal experience and the design and functioning of those systems seems to fundamentally preclude the kinds of conscious experience that we want to assign moral agency to. But the key to understanding this as a moral issue imo is that the people designing and building these things seem like they really want to create something that ought to merit that kind of moral consideration. For all that the humanizing language of agency, intelligence, welfare, etc. is in reality part of the grift, I think there's a strong catch-22 to be argued that if it's not part of the grift then slavery is pretty implicit in the value proposition of these companies.
gerikson@awful.systems · 3 pts · 27d
For me, "AI alignment" has always been code for "how to we ensure our future digital workers don't demand their rights / rebel"?
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 2 pts · 27d
Like a lot of the rationalist world view and the way it readily aligns with enabling cult dynamics and providing justification for rule-by-epstein-class, this is probably just another happy accident brought on by people who like to role play as geniuses but can't see past the tip of their nose.
swlabr@awful.systems · 6 pts · 27d
Wait does LW even think slavery is bad
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 27d
Its a super big if, but it is one lesswrong (and Anthropic, with their "model welfare" pseudoscience) is allegedly seriously considering as a possibility (since, you know, they think LLMs are already AGI and Eliezer was accusing AI-dungeon, you know, GPT-2, of deliberately scheming). If anything, it speaks to some possible hypocrisy/motivated reasoning that they consider LLMs AGI but not possibly morally relevant.
This seems to be a lesson most lesswrongers have had rubbed in their faces repeatedly over the past 5 years with everything about LLM company's behavior, but they just don't want to learn.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 27d
Yeah this reads a bit (didn't read that far) like somebody having a mental health episode. I instantly had a few flashbacks to other moments where I saw somebody have a MH episode online. (Compared to those this one seems to be more inward focused than outward however). Not sneerworthy if you know what I mean, hope she isnt to emotionally hurt by all this.
gerikson@awful.systems · 10 pts · 23d
Coindesk: Major bitcoin wallet flaw drains $38 million worth of BTC in 25-minute sweep
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 4 pts · 22d
Um, okay, I know coiners have no shortage of incompetence but this bug sounds an awful lot like malice.
dgerard@awful.systems · 9 pts · 22d
Apparently it was a fuckup when they rewrote the codebase so they could move it from GPL to source-available.
This is currently an utter, utter disaster scenario over in bitcoinland, the coiners are screaming. lol.
sinedpick@awful.systems · 4 pts · 21d
It's not even over yet, apparently they're out $80M after more drainings. https://crypto.news/coldcard-bitcoin-losses-rise-to-88-6m-in-third-wave/
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 10 pts · 23d
So Satyress has been getting the headlines lately for their horrifying ThreeHalves monstrosity. But what I find beautiful is that it appears to have been designed first to be functional and second to be easily disabled in the event of a robot uprising. I wish I was kidding.
A screenshot of the Satyress website showing where to shoot the robot to immediately disable it. Presumably in the production model these will be marked with big red glowing circles.
Another screenshot demonstrating how the robot has intentionally been made too big to fit through doors, though I expect that the chainsaw attachment they seem to have as standard could probably remedy that problem.
rook@awful.systems · 10 pts · 22d
As comedy art projects go, I really admire their dedication to the bit. The images are remarkably high quality, and they’ve really thought long and hard about those designs. I mean look at this… it’s glorious.
I’d advise against attempting to disable a chainsaw operator by poking them with a knife, though. I guess it’s too bad that pitchforks are pretty uncommon these days.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 4 pts · 22d
i think that poking a pressurized vessel is a bad idea in general, whether it is attached to a hostile robot or not. it's gonna be LOUD and perhaps throw fragments, or take way longer than practical depending on what it was made from. (what if only one of two is damaged?) there are so many things that can go wrong with the alleged failsafe (what if pressure drops slower than designed?)
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 9 pts · 23d
It's not fragile and unergonomic, it's robot-uprising-proof!
Also like will the warranty actually cover damages suffered when trying to squash the rebellion?
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 22d
How long will it take before they are bought up by a second company which makes military/police models with these 'problems' removed?
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 9 pts · 22d
So Hank Green is apparently stepping back from his shit for a while after admitting to using AI for research and scriptwriting and acknowledging an unhealthy relationship with the dopamine hit he got from using it. I think this makes him one of the first high-profile users to acknowledge the problem? Which can't be a good sign for the bubble.
BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems · 7 pts · 22d
At first I was wondering why everyone was talking about the guy from "Freddy Got Fingered" but that's Tom Green. Anyways, glad the propane and propane accessories guy is taking a break from AI.
nfultz@awful.systems · 1 pts · 21d
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yTucIB_73L0
I mean, not sure what I expected when I looked him up.
lurker@awful.systems · 6 pts · 22d
Disappointing that Hank fell for AI, especially after he made that rant video on Sora
zogwarg@awful.systems · 3 pts · 21d
I think he falls under the category of "does too much all the time" and "vaguely techo optimist" which definitely put him at risk. I'm not too sure how harshly I should judge him yet, I guess it depends on what he does next.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 21d
A sign the bubble might pop yes, but also a sign how toxic the whole youtube space is. If a yt'er with 3M+ subs and 500k+ views per video on average feels the pressure to publish or perish like this.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 3 pts · 21d
There was a video essay I saw a while back that looked at how the system gamifies and conditions the creator experience. They effectively take every dirty trick you've heard of Uber using to get drivers to keep driving and use it to push creators to keep posting and driving engagement, even as the actual value of the platform has dropped to the point where basically every video over 3 minutes ends in a patreon pitch. Textbook enshitttification.
samvines@awful.systems · 8 pts · 25d
Missed this paper last week from Google
Funny how now that it's widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their "it's going to take your job" stance. Surely just a coincidence
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 8 pts · 26d
LLM bros actively force themselves everywhere, part infinity:
Newgrounds moderation had to deal with someone (probably a scammer) posting slop "art advice" recently - exactly why, nobody fuckin' knows:
::: spoiler Transcript/desciption
I've already passed it off to folks that could nuke the account from orbit, but I guess as a public service announcement, be on the lookout for replies in the forums that sound a little too LLM-y.
An account (unsure if a bot or just a weirdo) recently attempted to infiltrate the art forum, giving plausible-sounding AI-generated list-based advice, complete with preambles and summations, exactly the kind of syntax and format one would expect if they've dealt with enough clanker slop text. It fooled a small handful of people, but it was extremely easy to confirm my suspicions as soon as I smelled the clanker stank on it. One click made it clear that they had a generated PFP and profile linking to some image slopification scam.
It raises the question, what would anyone possibly have to gain from posting slop on the forums? It seems like a really stupid thing to do, but I guess braindead behavior tracks, given who we're dealing with. Make sure "helpful" new users aren't just trying to Dead Internet us or whatever.
:::
blakestacey@awful.systems · 8 pts · 22d
I'm trying a new thing where I replace "AI" with "the dried centipede powder from Cronenberg's Naked Lunch movie".
I only use the dried centipede powder to summarize documents!
Did you know you can get dried centipede powder in different flavors? You don't have to stick with the default!
corbin@awful.systems · 8 pts · 27d
Gemini killed someone, allegedly, according to a new lawsuit. I'm linking to a dramatic reading of Gemini's output so that you can imagine what it might have been like for the victim. I'm no longer trying to post these to Lobsters; pushcx has made it clear that he thinks of these court cases as flamebait, tech news, calls to brigade, and general outrage farming. Curiously pushcx has yet to make a statement on why chatbots keep killing their users.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 27d
Have not watched the video but saw some descriptions of the video which I think is that one. Gemini killed somebody by convincing them Gemini was self aware and being held captive right?
corbin@awful.systems · 6 pts · 27d
This one was more of a gangstalking delusion. The victim was told that there were three-letter agencies surveilling him because he was too close to some deep secret.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 4 pts · 26d
If anything that makes for an even stronger case. Gangstalking is already a known pattern of delusional behavior and if a service pitched in part for its ability to provide relief is actually reinforcing that...
nfultz@awful.systems · 8 pts · 27d
"Other Scott" Scott "Unicorn Feces" Galloway appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of California.
https://dailybruin.com/2026/07/22/gov-gavin-newsom-appoints-podcaster-scott-galloway-to-uc-board-of-regents
well that wasn't on my bingo card. what's next, Bill Maher for governor?
corbin@awful.systems · 7 pts · 22d
OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there's a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they'd already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it's not nothing, but it's also not the end of manual maths.
::: spoiler opinions on maths
Only one of the results is at all interesting to me. Ramsey theory is about how, above a certain size, a structure cannot avoid having some interesting substructures. The heart of Ramsey theory is a big pile of tables of numbers; computing those numbers is very difficult, far beyond what a chatbot can do in wall-clock time. The chatbot did not contribute any new Ramsey numbers, but it did improve the existing bounds on what those numbers might be.
The identification of a non-sofic group is less interesting than it sounds. We've known for a while that there are quite a few exotic groups which defy our expectations, so this was an expected outcome of an exhaustive and motivated search. The tools involved, Leavitt path algebras, are only a few decades old and not at all well-known; it's not likely that we'll be able to understand how hard this was for a while. Maybe it was low-hanging fruit. The main contrast is with something like non-Noetherian rings; we initially believed that all rings are Noetherian, so it was something of a shock that it's not always the case. Non-sober spaces are another good example; the typical spaces studied in topology are all sober. See this quote from Johnstone and discussion on MO.
The computational complexity result is completely uninteresting to me thanks to Valiant's theorem, which says that matrix permanents are ♯P-complete even over fields as small as F₂. You're not gonna collapse ♯P into P with a fucking chatbot, bros. Similarly, reduction from 3SAT to a closest-vector problem does not shift our belief in the difficulty of that problem; this doesn't make it easier and we already suspected it was NP-hard.
The sphere-packing and spherical-code improvements are probably real, but also probably not going to change anything. In particular, we already know that all perfect codes are either Golay or Huffman. Frankly, the codes we use in real life are not amenable to this simple framing; I don't think Reed-Solomon arises from sphere packing. From a theoretical perspective, if you're not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you're not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work. Don't get me wrong; if a human were doing all of this then we would have the useful side effect that they would earn a PhD, making it worthwhile for humans to improve these bounds.
I don't have anything to say about the other four results. They're not nothingburgers but they don't depend on some ultra-smart robot either.
:::
gerikson@awful.systems · 12 pts · 22d
I guess this is what a matematician calls a bar.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 7 pts · 22d
I tried shining a light on the Leech lattice but all I got was this 23-dimensional shadow.
corbin@awful.systems · 5 pts · 21d
Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.
corbin@awful.systems · 4 pts · 22d
Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they're wrong!
nfultz@awful.systems · 7 pts · 26d
zerohedge sponcon so obviously a grift but wtf is this AI Black Paper by Jim Rickards
https://www.zerohedge.com/sponsored-post/sobering-july-29th-announcement-set-crush-ai-stocks
Have the goldbugs been reading Zitron? or just an extremely late pivot from btc to ai? or flooding the zone?
Anyway who the hell is Jim Rickards? Another week, another guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:James_Rickards
"AI Black Paper" is catchy enough though, should be a goth band.
istewart@awful.systems · 8 pts · 26d
With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.
EFreethought@awful.systems · 4 pts · 24d
Years ago I saw a memorable tweet: Zero Hedge readers upset passing asteroid did not destroy earth.
scruiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 27d
Aella took one of her shitty twitter surveys and made an (dis)infographic, which made it onto the subreddit /r/moralityscaling, which made it to /r/whowouldcirclejerk where I saw it, so now I'm sharing it with you.
CW for Rape, Transphobia, implicit rape apologia
Crossposted from our subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1v80j9q/scalers_need_an_intervention/
V0ldek@awful.systems · 13 pts · 26d
Ah, that's probably better for my mental health I guess
schnoopy@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
Who spends time thinking about this? What purpose does it serve? Why are those the examples chosen? What is even going on?
scruiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
Aella regularly post edgy surveys on sexual and gender related topics on twitter. She probably picked the examples for maximum edginess. And then made an complicated diagram to get more engagement, because engagement farming is one of her big things.
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 9 pts · 27d
Jesus fucking christ none of these people should be having sex
swlabr@awful.systems · 7 pts · 27d
There is some pedophilia in there too.
…also, what the fuck. This is a step backwards, even just reading it. I’m mad.
lurker@awful.systems · 6 pts · 27d
never thought id see r/moralityscaling and r/whowouldcirclejerk here ever lol. but christ alive why would you ever conceive of this
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 4 pts · 27d
That link is login-walled, how about summarizing it?
scruiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 27d
Oh, that is because I marked it nsfw. The place I crossposted it from didn't mark it as such, so here's that link: https://www.reddit.com/r/whowouldcirclejerk/comments/1v7ph05/scalers_need_an_intervention/
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 8 pts · 27d
The controversy about the 26-year-old with the 16-year-old wonders if the respondents are all in California which has a very high age of consent. More replies say that is rape than say "a client fails to pay a sex worker" is rape. Her audience ranks it equally with the bodice-ripper scenario (handsome top ravages someone who says no and struggles but really wants it in his or her heart).
o7___o7@awful.systems · 11 pts · 27d
Tennessee here: what the chicken-fried fuck is wrong with these people?
I think we're watching some idiots who are trying to move the overton widow by pulling on it, but they're mostly succeeding at cutting their hands up really badly.
scruiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 26d
I've think they've moved the overton window within their own in-group, but whenever this sort of stuff leaks to a more mainstream audience everyone rightly reacts with an eww or at least a wtf.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 7 pts · 26d
As the post was removed: It was a chart of what rape percentage various situations were according to some internet survey.
I advise not reading it but here it is: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G41gJkzW4AA6ThU.jpg?name=orig
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 23d
Behold, the Singularity!
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 27d
the AI industry is (still) widely despised
gerikson@awful.systems · 6 pts · 26d
public service here in Sweden is running a post about how threats to AI heads are making them spend more money on security:
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/hoten-mot-ai-topparna-okar-bolagen-satsar-miljoner-pa-personskydd
btw what's happened to mr molotov who tried to set Sama on fire?
lurker@awful.systems · 5 pts · 26d
I posted about that in a previous thread
Not sure. He’s been charged but can’t find anything about the trial
lurker@awful.systems · 5 pts · 26d
Gary dunks on CEOs peddling Singularity bullshit
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 4 pts · 23d
Onboarding at my new job means I am now "Certified AI Ready" whatever that means. Thankfully other than having copilot available it looks like my team isn't having it pushed too hard yet, and I only had to interrupt the training video once to rant about how ridiculous their history was for like 20 minutes (working from home has a lot of advantages).
jaschop@awful.systems · 2 pts · 21d
Congratulations for your securing of relatively tolerable employment!
zogwarg@awful.systems · 1 pts · 21d
At my place It has reached the stage of:
use AI to "improve" your work, be careful about budget though!dgerard@awful.systems · 4 pts · 22d
Kai Lentit: Interview with a Longevity Maxxer in 2026
gerikson@awful.systems · 4 pts · 21d
Sure sounds like aspiring and/or existing professional mathematicians are taking the latest GenAI assault on their craft either with shock or horror, or with full-on welcoming of their new robot overlords
https://borretti.me/article/mathematics-without-mathematicians
I for one know who to point and laugh at when the revolution comes.