Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this, and happy new year in advance.)
Is the brain just a computer By Iris van Rooij, a psychologist and cognitive scientist (and she is also a bit skeptical about the claims about AI). Might be an interesting read for the people here.
a reply from a mastodon thread about an instance of AI crankery:
Claude has a response for ya. āYouāre oversimplifying. While language models do use probabilistic token selection, reducing them to āfancy RNGsā is like calling a brain ājust electrical signals.ā The learned probability distributions capture complex semantic relationships and patterns from human knowledge. That said, your skepticism about AI hype is fair - there are plenty of overinflated claims worth challenging.ā Not bad for a bucket of bolts ārando number generatorā, eh?
maybe Iām late to this realization because itās a very stupid thing to do, but a lot of the promptfondlers who come here regurgitating this exact marketing fluff and swearing they know exactly how LLMs work when they obviously donāt really are just asking the fucking LLMs, arenāt they?
Not bad for a bucket of bolts ārando number generatorā, eh?
Becauseā¦ because it generated plausibly looking sentence? Doā¦ do you think the ājust electrical signalsā bit is clever or creative?
Hereās an LLM performance test that I call the Elon Test: does the sentence plausibly look like it couldāve been said by Elon Musk? Yes? Then your thing is stupid and a failure.
That test doesnāt totally work as Elon does often say fuck.
That first post. They are using llms to create quantum resistant crypto systems? Eyelid twitch
E: also, as I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks, this made me realize how much worse science crankery is going to get due to LLMs.
As self and khalid_salad said, there are certainly other branches of CS that attract cranks. Iām not much of a computer scientist myself but even I have seen some š¤-ass claims about compilers, computational complexity, syntactic validity of the entire C programming language (?), and divine approval or lack thereof of particular operating systems and even the sorting algorithms used in their schedulers!
I thought those non crypto cranks were relatively rare, which is why I added the āreallyā part. There has been only one templeos after all. And cryptography (crypto too but that is more financial cranks) has that 'this will ve revolutionary feeling which cranks seem to love, while also feeling accessable (compared to complexity theory, which you usually only know about if you know some cs already). I didnāt mean there are no cranks/weird ass claims about the whole field, but Id think that cryptography attracts the lions share. The lambda calculus bit down thread might prove me wrong however.
I know what you mean. I think the main genre of CS cranks is people trying way too hard to prove something theyāve gotten way too attached to and cryptography (and its more or less obviously stupid applications) and functional programming (proven to be no more or less powerful than procedural, but sometimes more or less fun) seem to attract a particularly high share of cranks. Almost certainly other fields too.
I still need to finish that FPGA Krivine machine because itās still living rent-free in my head and will do so until itās finally evaluating expressions, but boy howdy fuck am I not looking forward to the cranks finding it
write a series of blog posts about it, all of which end āAnd in conclusion, punch a Nazi.ā
also sprinkle it at the start, and throughout
because you just know the tiring fuckers wonāt bother reading in depth
I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks
every once in a while we get a āhere is a compression scheme that works on all data, fuck you and your pidginsā but yeah i think this is right
thereās unfortunately a lot of cranks around lambda calculus and computability (specifically check out the Wikipedia article on hypercomputation and start chasing links; youāre guaranteed to find at least one aggressive crank editing their favorite grift into the less watched corners of the wiki), and a lot of them have TESCREAL roots or some ties to that belief cluster or to technofascism, because itās much easier to form a computer death cult when your idea of computation is utterly fucked
fair, there are cranks still trying to trisect an arbitrary angle with an unmarked straight-edge and compass, so i shouldnāt be surprised. there are probably cranks still trying to solve the halting problem
Right, well God says:
meditated exude faithful estimate nature message glittering indiana intelligences dedicate deception ruinous asleep sensitive plentiful thinks justification subjoinedst rapture wealthy frenzied release trusting apostles judge access disguising billows deliver range
Not bad for the almighty creator ārando number generatorā, eh?
a non-zero amount of the time, yeah
also, that posterās profile, holy fuck. even just the About is a trip
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting? And lol at āim seeing evidence the voting public was HACKED! (emph mine)ā a few moments later āanybody know some big 5 webscrape API coders? I need them for evidence gatheringā. The delightful pattern of crankery where there is a big sweeping new idea that nobody else has seen, plus no actual ability in a technical field.
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting?
just an ordinary mastodon poster, doing the utterly ordinary thing of fedposting in every thread started by a popular leftist account, calling ātheir wingā a bunch of cowards for not talking in public about doing acts of stochastic violence, and pondering why they donāt have more followers
noodling on a blog post - does anyone with more experience of LW/EA than me know if āAI safetyā people are referencing the invention of nuclear weapons as a template for regulating/forbidding āAGIā?
Iād be surprised if Eliezer hasnāt mentioned it at some point, maybe more in the way that youāre after. Canāt find any examples though.
In his Times article the only place he mentions nukes is what we should do to countries that have too many GPUs: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/
Edit: Not Mr. Yudkowski but see https://futureoflife.org/document/policymaking-in-the-pause/
āThe time for saying that this is just pure research has long since passed. [ā¦] Itās in no countryās interest for any country to develop and release AI systems we cannot control. Insisting on sensible precautions is not anti-industry. Chernobyl destroyed lives, but it also decimated the global nuclear industry. Iām an AI researcher. I do not want my field of research destroyed. Humanity has much to gain from AI, but also everything to lose.ā
āLetās slow down. Letās make sure that we develop better guardrails, letās make sure that we discuss these questions internationally just like weāve done for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Letās make sure we better understand these very large systems, that we improve on their robustness and the process by which we can audit them and verify that they are safe for the public.ā
When they mention AI guardrails, they mean so it does become racist, spamming, abusive and based on the largest abuse of the cultural sector since spotify right?
Right?
Iām an AI researcher
*jerking off motion*
A notable article from our dear friend Nick Bostrom mentions the atmospheric auto-ignition story:
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
Type-0 (āsurprising strangeletsā): In 1942, it occurred to Edward Teller, one of the Manhattan scientists, that a nuclear explosion would create a temperature unprecedented in Earthās history, producing conditions similar to those in the center of the sun, and that this could conceivably trigger a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction in the surrounding air or water (Rhodes, 1986).
(this goes on for a number of paragraphs)
This whole article has some wild stuff if you havenāt seen it before BTW, so buckle up. He also mentions this story in https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks and https://existential-risk.com/concept.pdf if you want older examples.
just after end of manhattan project there was an idea coming from some of manhattan project scientists to dispose american nukes and ban development of nukes in any other country. thatās why we live in era of lasting peace without nuclear weapons. /s
some EAs had similar idea wrt spicy autocomplete development, which comes with implied assumption that spicy autocomplete is dangerous or at least useful (as in nuclear power, civilian or military)
Yeah, my starting position would be that it was obvious to any competent physicist at the time (although there werenāt that many) that the potential energy release from nuclear fission was a real thing - the āonlyā thing to do to weaponise it or use it for peaceful ends was engineering.
The analogy to ārunaway X-risk AGIā is thereās a similar straight line from ELIZA to Acausal Robot God, all thatās required is a bit of elbow grease and good ole fashioned American ingenuity. But my point is that apart from Yud and a few others, no serious person believes this.
I donāt think it was obvious from first principles in 30s that fission works or releases energy, but if provided experimental evidence there was no other way to interpret it. also people had general sense that nuclear materials can be a source of energy because there were attempts at controlling decay, i think in interbellum. the other part is cult thinking and i donāt have links for this particular one
Yeah itās been decades since I read Rhodesā history about the atom bomb, so I missed the years a bit. My point is that even if we couldnāt explain exactly what was happening there was something physically there, and we knew enough about it that Oppenheimer and co. could convince the US Army to build Oak Ridge and many other facilities at massive expense.
We canāt say the same about āAIā.
I find it impressive how gen-AI developed a technology that is fine-tuned to generate content that looks precisely passably plausible, but never good enough to be correct or interesting or beautiful or worthwhile in any way.
Like if I was trying to fill the Internet with noise to ruin it, on purpose, I couldnāt do better than this. (mostly on accounr of me not having massive data centres nor the moral calousness to spew that much carbon, but still). Itās like the ideal infohazard weapon if your goal is to worsen as many lives as you can
It was made to write copy for catalogs, alumni bulletins, and mediocre in-flight magazines.
It also is āgreatā for creating post for people who want to debate others but who dont actually care to make up arguments themselves, quality of the argument doesnt even matter. Which is quite the shit development.
At least you can recognize real replies as there are words they never fucking use.
LLMs continue to be so good and wagmi that theyāve progressed to the serving ads part of the extractivist SaaS lifecycle
An interesting thing came through the arXiv-o-tube this evening: āThe Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are Noneā.
Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something āreally isā and how something āappears to beā, and this gap helps us understand the mental processing that lead to how something appears to be. Illusions are also useful for investigating artificial systems, and much research has examined whether computational models of perceptions fall prey to the same illusions as people. Here, I invert the standard use of perceptual illusions to examine basic processing errors in current vision language models. I present these models with illusory-illusions, neighbors of common illusions that should not elicit processing errors. These include such things as perfectly reasonable ducks, crooked lines that truly are crooked, circles that seem to have different sizes because they are, in fact, of different sizes, and so on. I show that many current vision language systems mistakenly see these illusion-illusions as illusions. I suggest that such failures are part of broader failures already discussed in the literature.
Itās definitely linked in with the problem we have with LLMs where they detect the context surrounding a common puzzle rather than actually doing any logical analysis. In the image case Iād be very curious to see the control experiment where you ask āwhich of these two lines is bigger?ā and then feed it a photograph of a dog rather than two lines of any length. Iām reminded of how it was (is?)easy to trick chatGPT into nonsensical solutions to any situation involving crossing a river because it pattern-matched to the chicken/fox/grain puzzle rather than considering the actual facts being presented.
Also now that I type it out I think thereās a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger. But thatās neither here nor there.
I think thereās a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger
I disagree, or rather I think thatās actually a feature; āneitherā is a perfectly reasonable answer to that question that a human being would give, and LLMs would be fucked by since they basically never go against the prompt.
hoping for a 2025 with solidarity, aid, and good opsec for everyone who needs it the most
Hopefully 2025 will be a nice normal yearā
Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel explodes violently and no once can figure out if it was a bomb or just Cybertruck engineering
Huh. I guess itāll be another weird one.
(I know I know, low effort post, Iām sick in bed and bored)
Hey, at least thereās no way the Elon simps can spin that, right?
Never mind.
They are also spinning it into āthe car is so great you cant do terrorism with it due to how strong it isā, which considering the several vehicle terrorism acts recently seems very unwise.
Also āit would be different for the bystandersā i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely) and still 7 people were hurt (and the driver died). Id wait a bit with drawing further conclusions.
chalk it down to perp incompetence. single direct hit with old 155mm shell (7kg explosive) can destroy a normal modern tank, nevermind a car. no amount of shitty panels would contain anything at least mildly substantial. there were cases of suicide vests with bigger charge than that (10kg) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66355032
i think you can see on the explosion vid there were not that many bystanders (which makes terrorism a bit less likely)
symbolic building (??) still makes sense as a target for terrorist attack
Sure but id expect the perp to first use the cybertruck to ram into the building, or at least move closer, and not park nicely, otoh, if he was a terrorists what do I know, dont exactly know what goes through their mind shortly before things at high speeds go through their mind.
parking like this raises less suspicion. maybe he wasnāt sure enough about whatever igniting mechanism he had, he could end up stuck in a wall unable to get out to look it up
instead of high speed disassembly dude just burned down in automatically locked death trap, i guess he found that anticlimatic. not like isis (guessing) recruits brightest minds out there
Yeah the story is about to get weird. Your isis guess might not be far off. See this same military base as the guy who drove into the crowds.
Writers of 2025: āSomehow isis returned.ā (I know isis never left, media just looked less at it, but thought it would be a funny joke).
update 2: yeah itās not that
so far what is known: active duty green beret, trumper, freshly (?) after breakup, wrote a ālist of grievancesā but itās not cited anywhere in full (maybe itās too racist for polite company). appears to be cooked in some ways. while he was a green beret he wasnāt 18C or 18B so he wasnāt specifically trained for use or handling of high explosives, (no cross-training?) he was more in business of communications, surveillance, intelligence gathering (18E, then 18F) also worked with drones and there was something about drones in that list of grievances
iāve seen that news piece on how they were in the same base and how they were deployed in afghanistan around the same time previously and thatās what i based this guess on
still, so far it could be anything else including complete coincidence. itās like dude forgot everything, he was radioman but couldnāt make remote controlled detonator and didnāt use efficient charge for some reason
not only isis never left, i guess they controlled some territory at least until last month even if it was only a couple of villages in desert
Steel, like a pressure cooker
Somebody pointed out that I might have been wrong and steel might be a perfect shield for anything.
deleted by creator
Sure, you know what, letās go with that. While obviously I donāt condone terrorism, I agree with Nic here that if you are going to do a car bombing, blowing up a Cybertruck is preferable to other cars. Because it contains the blast better or whatever.
Donāt worry about the low effort post, even the writers of 2025 are phoning it in.
Surprised this hasnāt been mentioned yet: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/meta-ai-users-facebook-instagram-1235221430/
Facebook and Instagram to add AI users. Iām sure thatās what everyone has been begging forā¦
Spam bots are good now!
I think it did come up a few weeks back, but itās indeed a hilarious mess. the engagement must flow!
In my dreams, it wonāt take long until all user interactions are AI driven and people paying for ad space in that shit realizes that, leading to an immediate crash of metaās finances.
https://xcancel.com/altryne/status/1872090523420229780#m
The whole thread is terrible; controlling and borderline abusive behavior.
I feel personally attacked because I have a BELOVED dino plush that looks almost exactly like that one, only is, you know, a fucking plush toy not an eldritch horror. They took a perfectly fine toy and ruined it with a stupid chatbot, the girl did the smartest thing and just uses it as a normal plushy.
Also if you listen to the video at the end you can really easily figure out why kids donāt like that toy, ITāS FUCKING ANNOYING. Kids donāt want to deal with your bullshit and fortunately they donāt yet know how to pretend to care.
āIn the meantime, would you like to play a game or maybe hear a fun fact?ā
āNo.ā
āThatās okay! Is there something else you would like to do or talk about? Iām here to chat about anything you like!āItās like a deliberately written comedy scene of a character who canāt pick up on social cues.
Teaching the girl how to deadpan ignore annoying guys in her DMs for the rest of her life, I mean, valuable skill
The video is hilarious. The idiot AI man is so gpt-pilled he cannot figure out that this thing is just bloody annoying!!
This guyās gonna be on whatever remains of Twitter in like 20 years vague posting about the missing missing reasons his kid doesnāt talk to him anymore.
Found a couple QRTs cooking the guy which caught my attention:
https://twitter.com/denimneverdies/status/1872364569743786286
https://twitter.com/TheWapplehouse/status/1873915404529406462
Not sure where this came from, but it canāt be all bad if it chaos-dunks on Yudkowsky like this. Was relayed to me via Ed Zitronās Discord, hopefully the Q isnāt for Quillete or Qanon
Curtis
IQ:300, Special Move: Urbital Laser
Curtis Boldmug has defined the meta for years. A competitive staple that strongly influences even builds not running him. Special attack causes unavoidable psychic damage even if you resist its charm effect. Vulnerable to sunlight.
Balaji
IQ: 300, Special Move: Yes Country for Old Men
A support type character. Good for ramping grift mana, but canāt carry a game on his own. His ultimate is overcosted and just sucks up the hypecoins he spent the entire game producing.
Ray
IQ: 300, Special Move: Black Hole Graviton
Mostly just receives support thanks to boomer nostalgia factor. Low but nonzero win rate in modern tournament meta. Highly viable in time machine formats.
Eliezer
IQ: 300, Special Move: Goffik the Hedgehog and the Enders of Game
Former newbie favorite, fairly accessible and flashy. The Yud has seen heavy nerfs in the past years and at medium to high levels, his stats plateau severely much like his special moveās plot. Thiel synergy has also shifted towards Curtis mains leaving Yud in shambles. Still a fun archetype and enjoys popularity as a smurf build.
Jack
IQ: 300, Special Move: Snorting an entire ground up bitcoin
Rather run of the mill character whose effectiveness was rather limited for a long time. The Blue Sky archetype made him meta relevant for all of five minutes until he got reclaimed by the toxic playerbase built around the social media platform he originally started and the uber braingenius currently in charge of that company. Beard gives him +1 armor bonus which is fine I guess.
Peter
IQ: 300, Special Move: Pondering my Orb
The apex predator of SV capitalism. The Black Lotus of technofascist grifters. His character is rumored to be based on Count Dracula. Even most SV billionaires canāt touch him in a 1v1 matchup. Truly classic S-tier thinky boi.
Beff
IQ: 300, Special Move: Worldās Most Divorced Man First Date Percent Speedrun
Likely intended as a joke character, a guy named Guillaume pretending to know how to pretend to be cool on the internet. His posts turned out to be so lethally cringeworthy he started an entire archetype of */acc brainos. Not quite on the power level of Peter or Curtis, but surprisingly influential for an obvious meme build. Extremely weak to heartbreak from women named Ruth.
Leopold
IQ: 300, Special Move: To The Moooooon
Honestly, I had never heard of this guy before today but the data doesnāt lie. The dots do go up and to the right and he posts a lot of them. Extrapolating from current trends, he will single-handedly reach singularity by the end of Q3 of this year.
each of them needs a scale (logarithmic) showing how much adderall they take
I recognize everyone except Leopold. Increase my suffering by telling me who it is.
https://xcancel.com/leopoldasch Leopold Ashenbrenner, some chart maker and
substackblog haver with twitter account. swallows all openai marketing materials hook line and sinker, i had enough of abyss gazing duty today wonāt tell you morehis academic output is funny, he has 2 arxiv preprints, an article (?) published not in any normal journal, but instead on some other dudeās blog (??), and an article at somewhere called unjournal, which claims that itās not a journal, (???) but instead itās a nonprofit packed with EAs. and that nets him 230 citations (thatās looking up in google scholar, not going to fire up scopus just for that)
For all their talk about ācathedralsā and āgatekeepingā I think we donāt gatekeep the ability to compile a PDF enough.
We should at least require all the weirdoes to write their bullshit by hand with a quill
none of his articles (not preprints, arxiv handles this) have DOIs. even paper mills much worse than MDPI can get these
He retweeted Ivanka praising himā¦ š¤¢
this logo in corner is for something called overfit qs, they have instagram page and that image was posted there
Fellas, I was promised the first catastrophic AI event in 2024 by the chief doomers. Thereās only a few hours left to go, Iām thinking skynet is hiding inside the times square orb. Stay vigilant!
Iām sad to report that the catastrophic AI event already happened and it was this picture
mind horrors beyond your comprehension
Ow god it is 2025 in .nl, it is coming! Everything is exploding, ai is turning us into fireworks! Yud was right!!1!!one!!
āā¦according to my machine learning model we actually have a strong fit in favor of shooting at CEOs. Thereās a 66% chance that each shot will either jam or fail to hit anything fatal, which creates a strong Bayesian prior in favor, or at least merits collecting further data to scale our modelsā
āWhat do you mean Iāve defined the problem in order to get the desired result? Machine learning process said weāre good. Why do you hate the future?ā
