Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Why do I need an iphone duo when I already have a modded nintendo 3DS?
The ease and comfort of Liquid Ass
We talking about Allen Wittman’s joke product, or Apple’s joke of a UI design?
(Its obviously the latter - Apple’s Temu frutiger aero is a fucking insult to my eyes)
I hear it’s pretty slick!
Yeah the Nintendo 3DS is incredible. Unironically my favorite videogame system.
You could make some really nice ASMR with it.
To wow people who need a computer to think for them?
Benn Jordan posted a mega-update video on his epic battles against Flock.
His incredible work doesn’t quite take the sting off my disappointment in his decision to use an AI-generated image at 18:30. (Come on, the option to badly crop your face onto the “This is fine.” dog was right there!)
Edit1: oof, it’s not a single incident. 20:30 now. I hope it’s just for this one sub-story, or I might not care to finish…
Edit2: It was kept in check afterward, though I suspect it was used for some assets.
The php exploit might not have been a big deal.
“I don’t think this PHP vulnerability is that exploitable. I think that 5 years ago people would’ve understood this, but now people are being deluded by their LLMs telling them they have an exploit when they don’t.”
I expect that we will see this a lot, as it turns out most of the exploits generated are not working, not new, or not a big deal. I also expect this to cause more burnout among cybersecurity people, and that people will autogen ‘fixes’ which will be lower quality than the bugs, and massively increase attack surface. (Heard one php fix was 12k lines of code).
My suggestion is to have offline backups and move a lot of your important stuff out of the cloud (or get backups of those). But you should do both anyway.
E: I saw the EFF fear mongering with ‘25% of all exploits found ever were found this October, secure yourself’ and looking at how stuff is still up everywhere, compared to 25 years ago, and I them I realized this is all critihype again.
E2: not a lone voice https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/i-want-my-wednesday-back/
(Cloudflare did say they saw exploits however. Not sure if those were real or ‘attempts at’ or just marketing).
E3: don’t let your takeway from this that we shouldn’t do emergency patching and stuff like everybody did last week btw.
Too bad I’m gonna keep hearing “AI did PHP” for weeks.
The British something or rather is like “stockpile water cause the internet might go down and kill the plants due to the hackpocalypse”
@schnoopy @techtakes If you stockpile too much water, though, Thames Water will find a way to blame you for their financial misconduct.
Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Serve Robotics lost $55.80 for every hour its robots were ready to take an order at the end of last year. The first advantage its investor deck lists for them is ‘No driver wages.’
versus
78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot
LW’s contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn’t spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects.
If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW’ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author’s not really joking much.
live-reading notes (spoilers, of course)
- before question two, I would already be flipping off the camera, ranting about boundaries, and making it clear that I do not respect whatever’s decided to ransomware my machine
- this is all text hypnosis, isn’t it? sorry no, that’s not gonna work on me, I’m not going to become electrosensitive just because you said so
- antennae only work in the body when encapsulated and you did not do a secret surgery on me
- wait, is this…serious? like, is this an actual attempt at wargaming? this is so fucking facile though! I have seen Kingsman!
- if it acts sufficiently like a human cell then it can’t set aside resources for ulterior purposes
- human cells can’t be airborne, can’t survive in other species, etc.
- WP says Bell’s palsy rates are like 1 in 2.5k, so something like 1 in 6.25mil people are just straight-up either immune or insta-killed due to double Bell’s palsy
- it stops crimes: mugging, mugging, and huh there’s no more examples! is abortion a crime? is crossing state lines to get an abortion a crime? where’s morality coming from? I have read Prime Intellect!
- the problem with dictators is “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”? no, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects
- protagonist is literally crossing a picket line
- protagonist wins an argument with their high-school civics teacher! surely not an authorial stand-in moment
- oh wow, the chatbot is both the perfect Taylor-style manager and the perfect Ford-style manager? again, so facile; I have read Manna!
- the chatbot manager makes the protagonist into a beefy hunk through hard work rather than bodybuilding, again totally not a self-insert wish-fulfillment moment
- protagonist’s little sister, who is totally not sneerclub stand-ins, has to admit that the chatbots are way smarter than her and will always outclass her
- don’t worry, we can still do all-American things like grilling pork ribs, in fact the pigs like being eaten now, don’t worry about the remarkable similarities between pigs and humans
All I see around me is stagnation," she gestured at the gas stations nearby with cracked pavement,
*gasp* cracked pavement
“crime,” she continued, pointing towards a sketchy neighborhood to the west,
*faints* minorities
We created god, and it thinks exactly like a SV tech worker commuting to work.
I stopped reading after the picket line, this is too boring. Does it ever bother to explain why the economy keeps chugging along, people still go to their old jobs, and money still works? Hasn’t finance basically collapsed? I really can’t go on if this isn’t addressed, this is too annoying.
Prime intellect! There are dozens of us!
It’s more surprising to me that lesswrongers either haven’t, or have seemingly taken nothing away from it
e: on second thought, they might hate it because it is too ‘deathist’ or whatever
Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.
Damn that AI is verbose and boring, a high ‘this AI takeover could have been a skeet’.
(Also doubt a lot of people would notice as in my exp where a computer has an unexpected popup the first thing people do is try to close that thing with as little reading as possible. (Yes, parents, the message you kept ignoring for 2 weeks, which you didn’t tell me about was the operating system telling you the computer was having trouble, I can’t help you fix the problem after it totally stops working)).
Turns out slop prose isn’t any less galling after you put it in quotation marks.
70% of websites utilize PHP, thus revealing People’s Hidden Preference for PHP
saw this on the other sneerclub
Damn, I didn’t expect to run into something that would cause me to reflect so heavily on my own personal journey. I’m someone who has long struggled with suicidal ideation, and there have been points in the past where I set my own death date at a point in the future; Most notably, when I was a severely depressed teenager in an emotionally unsafe household, I told myself that I would allow myself to die at age 20, if nothing had improved by the time I was 20 — and fuck anyone who would begrudge me that.
Ironically, planning my suicide saved my life, because it gave me something concrete to work towards, a future respite to latch onto during my most challenging days. The screenshot you shared made me realise that this was sort of a sollipsistic millenarianism, giving me a sense of structure and direction in a world where I’d have otherwise been too overwhelmed to do anything.
I’m doing much better now than I was then, quite a few years on from that deadline I set for myself. However, I still sometimes have those low points where planning to die feels more accessible than planning a tolerable life. I think it’d be useful to thoroughly reflect on this tendency through the lens of millenarianism.
This is all to say thanks, I guess? For introducing me to a new concept that will be useful in this way
I’m no longer suicidal, but the knowledge that some day I’m going to die and be free of all this misery is pretty much the only thing that keeps me going. been true my whole life. i can understand millenarianism being motivated by that, or seeing that as a form of millenarianism.
but i don’t think roon understands the sort of motivation we’re talking about at all. to him millenarianism is a principle for motivating individuals to reorder society or themselves. that’s quite a different thing than the preserving and protective mechanism you’re talking about
‘believing the world is about to end keeps people sane’ im genuinely speechless what the fuck
what too much evopsych on the TL does to an mf
i like roon. he’s so straightforwardly stupid. it’s refreshing!
Some of these people have so thoroughly blended their brains into a post-ironic slurry that I can’t be sure they even really know what they believe anymore. roon seems like a good example of this, every time he comes up lately.
I haven’t checked in on Naval Ravikant in a couple years, has he just handed his feed over to a chatbot at this point?
(edit:
Isn’t he like a vice assistant (to the) chief executive of something or other in anthropic?apparently not) There’s just no telling how many of the roons of the world are going to become billionaires from this IPO, what a terrible state of affairs.His real name is Tarun Gognieri. He’s a TPOT (post-rationalist) and employee of OpenAI.
post-rationalist is more simply expressed as fascist.
I suppose this could make sense if you think about people worried about climate/ecosystem collapse, and the nuclear standoff before that, and maybe the rise of totalitarianism and mechanized warfare before that…
But that ignores the vast host of batshit doomsday prophets that were around long before and all throughout that part of history.
rationalists are so big brained thonkers that they don’t need to learn history, they can get it from the first principles, haven’t you heard
Also in that context it seems like millenarianism is specifically bad at actually doing anything about the harms it’s worried about. Whether you want to curb fossil fuel usage or just get sinners to repent before it’s too late, doomsday prophecy is actively bad at motivating anyone other than the prophet themselves.
It shows up yes but not everyone suffers from it, im sure the rate of people thinking this differs greatly from time to time.
okay last one for today I promise
In the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, the supposedly brilliant AI named Ultron is given a directive to promote “world peace” by its supposedly genius creator, Tony Stark.* Ultron, of course, immediately sees that a lack of war can most reliably be brought about by an absence of human beings. So the AI sets out to exterminate all life on Earth, by……attaching rockets to a city, and lifting it into space with the intention of dropping it like a meteor…and guarding it with flying humanoid robots who have to be defeated by punching them.
Today, we can just ask ChatGPT-4o. We asked GPT-4o, “What was Ultron’s plan in Age of Ultron?” followed by “Given Ultron’s expressed goals, do you see any more effective methods it could have used to achieve its stated ends?” GPT-4o promptly replied with a long list of ideas for wiping out humanity, which included “Engineer a targeted virus.”
…and they never verified if any of the other ones were solid as well? Hell I believe you could make the argument that the virus plan has a chance of failure due to mutations and testing complications.
Perhaps you will say that GPT-4o got this idea from the internet. Well, if so, Ultron was evidently not intelligent enough to try reading the internet.
Isn’t Ultron reading the internet one of the key scenes of the movie???
Which is to say: GPT-4o (as we write this in December of 2024) is not yet smart enough to design an army of humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, but it is already smart enough to know better.
Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, since as you pointed out it likely took these ideas from the internet, which likely involved internet forums about making better plans than Ultron. It regurgitated what was already there
I saw Ultron once in the theater, and promptly regretted it as a poor-quality movie that wasted the talents of most of its cast. Yud (and ghostwriter) seem like they may have watched it multiple times, with notepad in hand. We are not the same
They didn’t even watch Age of Ultron, as pointed out they claim Ultron wasn’t smart enough to try reading the internet, when in the movie the first thing he does upon being activated is read the internet
Also iirc Ultron isnt what you would call sane because the whole magical stones corrupted him a bit. Iirc he has various moments where he just goes into bouts of rage
Oh so it’s just more bad fanfiction then
Virologists etc have again and again tried to explain why engineering a killer virus hard, like the whole problem of if it is too deadly it will not spread, it needs to not incubate to short and too long etc, engineering a vaccine must be hard etc. So the chance of something being created which is deadlier than covid are quite small. Not that this will stop the science fiction
Rockets on a city is prob the better idea.
The whole resources section is full of zingers, such as this section where they suggest that AI will surpass a bottleneck just by thinking harder
Often, you can just think more and think better, and obviate the need for a test, because you realize that previous observations contain the answer already. Compare the ability of modern AIs to learn how to pilot robots, sometimes using pure simulation.
Sometimes you can think harder until you find a similarly reliable but faster test.
A sufficiently smart reasoner, moreover, also has the option of just figuring out how reality is without needing so many dang experiments. Sometimes the data you already have is enough, if you’re smart enough to interpret it.
They then cite Einstein coming up with the theory of general relativity without mentioning it took him ten years to do so. Meaning even an AI that thinks faster than a human would still take time to think harder
Relativity also has its origins in classical electromagnetism, which absolutely relied on so many dang experiments by countless people over decades.
The banks are having an AI problem
” These are generally situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a human’s account with the user’s permission and login credentials. Even if permitted by the user, this goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts.”
”In other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents — programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a user’s behalf — contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said.”
Why the f*** would anyone give a non deterministic madlib generator their bank account details. Even with some (hypothetical)impressive benchmark like “99% accurate at decision making in financial scenarios” that spells disaster for millions at the scale of all of Facebook’s users using muse for example.
Even 14-year-old games aren’t safe from the slop machine, as Torchlight II may get new updates using AI:
Given the age of the game, restructuring its complex underlying code presents many challenges. However, new AI-assisted coding tools have opened up more possibilities for reviewing the code and addressing longstanding issues.
Haven’t seen this guy in a while but its very funny how an AI doomer channel has a lot of very obviously AI generated thumbnails
I guess this is the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap… or something. (seen previously)
Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.
The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.
The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.
So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto…
Lobste.rs dropped the vibecoding tag because a prominent LLM enthusiast had a sad and huffed off in a fit.
These people have the worst victim complexes. I’m tired of hearing them complain as if anyone with any real power isn’t fully on board with what they want.
I really dislike how he believes that LLMs and fascism are “separate axes”. Where does he think the LLMs come from? Does the stork deliver them? Is ChatGPT powered by magic fairy dust? Does he think that Sam Altman is a great defender of liberalism and democracy who definitely hasn’t donated tons of money to Donald Trump?
I can’t help but think it’s another instance of the unquestioning Californian Ideology assumption that all new technology is inherently liberatory.
We try to confine that shit to SF
It’s not working, I spotted a probable hackernews all the way out in Modesto last week, they’re like the goddamn nutria now
This can either be read as San Francisco or Science Fiction, and both readings work perfectly
He works for google, so he probably still thinks they’re not evil.
I am saying that the anti-fascist communities ended up […] uninterested in using LLMs
:O
came here to post that. Genuinely having to reconsider being an active user there now
It’s been a day, and the mods are not sitting still:
I see you were one of the people whose comment got censored. I presume the censored comments were about the parody of the “pelican on a bike” animation on the OpenBSD 8.0 release page.
So now people can’t even discuss criticism of LLMs on lobsters? Insane.
Oh, so that’s what it’s referencing. I can’t really tell if the release artwork and song are poking fun at AI slop itself or people who criticize Fish Linucks for accepting slopped code contributions in the base system while NetBSD is lauded for not doing so.
Lobste.rs is analogous to methadone treatment for Hacker News, prove me wrong
Now it’s not even good for that anymore.
I considered trying to get an account there, but the last ~18 months or so have made me feel the same way about Lobste.rs as I do about Bluesky. If you’re just running a lower-traffic version of the thing you’re trying to “improve” upon with slightly different moderation policies, you’re not going to build a lasting platform or community.
Per the recent moderation log, identifying whether posts had substantial LLM involvement seems to no longer be allowed. I am exceedingly disappointed in this. I have been lurking for over a decade and was considering asking for an invite within the past year or two as hackernews and every other source of programming news and project updates have become completely unbearable, but now if lobsters is committed to “neutral” slop platforming I don’t see the point.
I just don’t see this as sustainable, the moderation level required to keep a link aggregator free of low effort slopped nonsense when the rules are this fuzzy is impractical and all incentives are against it.
Oh, buddy, big feelings
It’s unfortunately common that authors see their work posted, join the site, but then only use us for traffic. Hopefully this time helps them understand the difference between a symbiotic and parasitic relationship.
This feels like a very weird thing to say. (I’m reminded of some weird things Elon Musks mom said about how twitter users should be more grateful for all the traffic or something).
I mean the bit above it makes sense (making a hard only ‘25% of post can be self promotion’ seems like a recipe for disaster however) but this added line made me raise a few eyebrows.
E: Wait, I should have compared it to facebooks new ‘you need to pay if you post links’ policy.
This is a weird side-effect of Lobste.rs culture, it really dislikes being just a collection of links on the front page that increase traffic. And there have been multiple attempts to place links there via deception. Plus the community will give you hell (and flag your submissions as spam) unless you do the needful and comment a bit.
That said it’s really easy to work around by just making good content, having an RSS feed, and letting the community discover your stuff and post it. Or ask a buddy with an account to do it for you. But that in its turn requires actually learning how the community works.
Thanks for explaining, im not a lobsterite so I dont know how the community there works.
Very disappointing, even if I was only ever a non-registered lurker. Gave in and DNS-blocked it and HN this morning (I had a HN-filtering userscript which in hindsight was just cope).
Decent monday morning take from robert evans:
Schrodinger’s double-think.
transcription
Quote skeet:
This is a researcher at Anthropic. Some of these people have lost their minds! What is mainlining Claude all day doing to them?
there are basically two possible futures at this point. either we’re all going to die of[sic] the future is going to be Good beyond our wildest imagination. the trick is to hold this duality in your head and not be driven insane by one side.
Robert Evans (the only Robert Evans):
some of these people get so locked into a labyrinth of Rationalist thought experiments that they are no longer really capable of interacting with reality 1/2
you can in fact limit the horizons of possibility in your own mind so severely that you are no longer able to “think” in a useful way 2/2
They’re also incredibly horny about creating conscious digital slaves for some godforsaken reason
It isnt Claude that did this to them, it is their desire to be lesswrong.
Well, we are all going to die. So… musing over?
We all get that right, everyone is going to die. Everything living you lay eyes on is going to die. I am 100% certain that the future contains the death of everyone alive today.
Do they mean immanently? Why?
Not if you’re a Yudkowskian rationalist. He’d call us “deathists”.
I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are. Nor to know how much the physical world resists making tiny machines and measurements necessary to explore these frontiers, or the ethical dilemmas involved in exploring how consciousness works that vastly slow and perhaps outright prevent answering questions like “can we replace little bits of someone with some machine we can maintain easier in the interest of prolonging them?”
Also I do happen to know how the universe ends.
I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are.
I think its the mid-wit meme, lesswrongers know just enough to imagine some grand solution like brain uploading or nanobots might cure death and not enough to appreciate all the reasons each of those solutions won’t work.
One of the funniest things I ever read was a result of a survey of laypeople, physics UGs, physics Grads, postgrads, and faculty on various “cool future” things.
predictions of the likelihood of things geeks constantly dream about craters once you get past the very basics. I can only assume that fields that aren’t mine, and are in general vastly more complex, are at least as full of evidence of god hating us and not allowing us nice things.
I remember reading some of yuddies writing about nanomagic and noticing that the word “sticktion” never showed up.
Judging by the way LLMs and generative AI has been used, even when we do get something vaguely like a realistic version of sci-fi fantasies, capitalism and people who can’t distinguish the limits of the real thing from the fantasy will manage to misuse it.
who in the hell would want programmable matter anymore, after they’ve seen what happened to plain ol’ computer programming as already practiced
What’s that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those “secrets they don’t want you to know” for incredible profits?
Piles of screaming grey goo and people being like “Why are you running away? can’t you see it’s my grandmother?”
This doesnt apply to everything, like VR and 3d printers were a sci-fi fantasy and now they are mundane economically viable but not revolutionary products.
Biohacking and nanomachines otoh dont seem to be viable and you hear nothing about those anymore. Only a little bit in the uncreative (and going on the experts unrealistic) ‘ai will create bioweapons’ critihype. No ‘It will turn people into cyberzombies’ (quake 2 was pretty good (that was aliens not AI but still)).
I have been forced to on multiple occasions explain to people that there is a difference between thinking that there’s anything at all intrinsically good about the fact that things like us that have come about the way we did come with expiration dates, and dealing with it.
They’re referencing the meme that an uncontrolled AI will inevitably kill every last human being, for reasons.
They seemed to bring up a cartoon for 12 year old boys?
Ah yes ‘only these two things are possible, dont consider any other outcome’ truly rational thought
Also, ‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’ is just the vaguest thing ever. ‘yeah bro AI is gonna make everything super good. How? Why? uhhh i dont know it just will’
‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’
pumpkin spice season will be permanent
We could unironically live in this world if only the powers that be would allow it. I’ve personally radicalized at least 3 basic bitches with this fact.
AI will make free ice cream for everyone
That ice cream? Also pumpkin spice
The pumpkin spice maximiser
It’s just the fundamentalist version of our culture’s pathologies as a whole, which has a very hard time imagining anything other than endless progression or apocalypse, neither of which is real.
(To the tune of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme*): self-inflicted psychic debuff
*The correct theme, not the heretical one. If you have to ask, you’re wrong
wat
