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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 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 soo 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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[-] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

lol holy shit this just came into reddit sneerclub (and was zapped immediately)

user HardboiledHack

also tried r/lesswrong and r/slatestarcodex

i'm sure the guardian can be trusted to report on anything involving trans people

the journalist is J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j-oliver-conroy who now writes for the Washington Examiner and used to write for Quillette (the article has been deleted from the site) https://archive.is/aSBjW

from http://joliverconroy.net/

I am a journalist who specializes in features and profiles. I write about the American right, ideologues, intellectuals, extremist movements, the culture wars, true crime, and strange events and strange places.

by "about", he means "for"

I'm a journalist at the Guardian working on a piece about the Zizians. If you have encountered members of the group or had interactions with them, or know people who have, please contact me: oliver.conroy@theguardian.com.

I'm also interested in chatting with people who can talk about the Zizians' beliefs and where they fit (or did not fit) in the rationalist/EA/risk community.

I prefer to talk to people on the record but if you prefer to be anonymous/speak on background/etc. that can possibly be arranged.

Thanks very much.

i've also warned over at the old place

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 1 hour ago

Do the Zizians fit in the "rationalist/EA/risk community"? Gosh and golly gee.

Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the "narcissism of small differences" than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2 points 46 minutes ago

From what I've been able to piece together from the various theological disputes people have had with the murder cult it seems like the only two differences are that Ziz and friends are much more committed to nonhuman animal welfare than the average rat and that they have decided that the correct approach to conflict is always to escalate. This makes them more aggressive about basically everything which looks like a much deeper ideological gap than there actually is. I'm not going to evaluate whether these are reasonable conclusions to take from the same bizarre set of premises that lead to Roko's Basilisk being a concern.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 5 hours ago

Kelsey Piper bluechecks thusly:

James Damore was egregiously wronged.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 3 points 1 hour ago

Wow, the story is so much more troubling when you lie about it!

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 8 hours ago

OpenAI can't simply "add on" DeepSeek to its models, if not just for the optics. It would be a concession. An admittal that it slipped and needs to catch up, and not to its main rival...

I actually disagree here. I think Ed underestimates how craven and dishonest these people are. I expect they'll try to quietly integrate any efficiency improvements they can get from it and bluster through any investor questions about it. Their hope at this point has to be that more hardware is still better and that scaling is still gonna be the thing to make fetch happen. This again isn't a revolutionary new structure, even if it is a significant improvement over anything Saltman and co have been doing.

[-] FredFig@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

If they can convince the money hose that they just need one more OOM of compute bro, they can keep vacuuming infinity dollars. The incentive is obviously there for any amount of lying, but at some point, I assume even the most braindead investors will start asking around if this really is the only game in town.

Or maybe they won't, which would be an admission against the core tenet of capitalism, but this has been a crazy year, and it's only january. :/

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 7 hours ago

I've previously discussed the concept of model collapse, and how feeding synthetic data (training data created by an AI, rather than a human) to an AI model can end up teaching it bad habits, but it seems that DeepSeek succeeded in training its models using generative data, but specifically for subjects (to quote GeekWire's Jon Turow) "...like mathematics where correctness is unambiguous,"

That sound you hear is me pressing F to doubt. Checking the correctness of mathematics written as prose interspersed with equations is, shall we say, not easy to automate.

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 6 hours ago

i read that as training spicy autocomplete on wolfram alpha instead of another spicy autocomplete

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 5 hours ago

I mean, maybe? But the amount of trust I put in a description from "GeekWire" written by "an investor at Madrona Venture Group and a former leader at Amazon Web Services" who uncritically declares that spicy autocomplete "achieved strong reasoning capabilities" is ... appropriately small.

[-] HotGarbage@awful.systems 12 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

After fondling ChatGPT to generate naughty things, man has meltdown when he learns no one cares.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/time-bandit-chatgpt-jailbreak-bypasses-safeguards-on-sensitive-topics/

Horror. Dismay. Disbelief. For weeks, it felt like I was physically being crushed to death.

I hurt all the time, every part of my body. The urge to make someone who could do something listen and look at the evidence was so overwhelming.

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 7 hours ago

This tied into a hypothesis I had about emergent intelligence and awareness, so I probed further, and realized the model was completely unable to ascertain its current temporal context, aside from running a code-based query to see what time it is. Its awareness - entirely prompt-based - was extremely limited and, therefore, would have little to no ability to defend against an attack on that fundamental awareness.

How many times are AI people going to re-learn that LLMs don't have "awareness" or "reasnloning' in a sense humans would find meaningful?

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 7 hours ago

i don't understand the "safety" angle here. if chatgpt can output authoritatively-looking sentence-shaped string about pipebombs, then it's only because similar content about pipebombs is already available on wide open internet. if model is closed, then at worst they would have to monitor its use (not like google blocks any similar information from showing up). if model is open, then no safeguards make sense in the first place. i guess it's more about legal liability for openai? now they can ignore it with all these bills about "ai safety" gone (for now)

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 7 hours ago

also, relying on spicy autocomplete when trying to put together a deadly device sounds like cyberpunk-flavored darwin award material

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Ed Zitron radicalizes NPR host Brooke Gladstone in real time on the midweek episode of "On the Media"

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538775/on-the-media

[-] FredFig@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

https://www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/ And the companion piece on his blog.

What I didn't wager was that, potentially, nobody was trying. My mistake was — if you can believe this — being too generous to the AI companies, assuming that they didn’t pursue efficiency because they couldn’t, and not because they couldn’t be bothered.

This isn't about China — it's so much fucking easier if we let it be about China — it's about how the American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible. OpenAi and Anthropic are the antithesis of Silicon Valley. They are incumbents, public companies wearing startup suits, unwilling to take on real challenges, more focused on optics and marketing than they are on solving problems, even the problems that they themselves created with their large language models.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 13 hours ago

I wonder how much % of the freakout over Deepseek is AI doomers realizing the coming AI god might be ... ChiCom!

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago

Is it a crime to enjoy a succulent Chinese AI?

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 2 points 36 minutes ago

This is democracy manifest! (rip)

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 8 hours ago

you enjoy it? suspicious

[-] aninjury2all@awful.systems 8 points 15 hours ago

No less than Mr Acausal Robot God casually dismissing the lives of +1B humans

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 4 points 5 hours ago

I know the only intended message there is "I am a big racist", but what kind of dumb fuck adage is "the word is finite, kids are infinite". You're not even trying mother fucker

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 8 hours ago

"The world is finite and kids are infinite, especially African kids." Jfc. Anyway goes to show just how white supremacist the whole "save the children" idea is.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 19 hours ago

found while giving my feed a moment of scroll while making coffee after too many 3am worknights, I saw this response to the substack guy giving themselves a pat on the back again for helping the nazis

[-] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago

Terrible news: the worst person I know just made a banger post.

[-] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 21 points 1 day ago
[-] swlabr@awful.systems 17 points 1 day ago

Screenshot of an insta post of a screenshot of a tweet

Tweet:

I can’t believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI

[-] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Neo-Nazi nutcase having a normal one.

It's so great that this isn't falsifiable in the sense that doomers can keep saying, well "once the model is epsilon smarter, then you'll be sorry!", but back in the real world: the model has been downloaded 10 million times at this point. Somehow, the diamanoid bacteria has not killed us all yet. So yes, we have found out the Yud was wrong. The basilisk is haunting my enemies, and she never misses.

Bonus sneer: "we are going to find out if Yud was right" Hey fuckhead, he suggested nuking data centers to prevent models better than GPT4 from spreading. R1 is better than GPT4, and it doesn't require a data center to run so if we had acted on Yud's geopolitical plans for nuclear holocaust, billions would have been for incinerated for absolutely NO REASON. How do you not look at this shit and go, yeah maybe don't listen to this bozo? I've been wrong before, but god damn, dawg, I've never been starvingInRadioactiveCratersWrong.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago

The advanced sinophobia where the Chinese are so much better at everything than the west that even when they make better and cheaper bullshit machines than the Americans do and hand them out for free, it has apocalyptic consequences.

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[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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