Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge.
I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrowās dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish.
Bonus sneer: since HN couldnāt rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.
a very neat test to find people who are perfectly fine with the general idea of genocide.
(iām entirely unsurprised by the number of genocidal ghouls in that hn thread)
I love the way people who go āyeah but IN REAL LIFE with real stakes you would totally chose the red buttonā
- are entirely missing the point of thought experiments,
- why the fuck would you comply with such a fucked up scenario in real life lmao you worm
i feel like people in real life would be far less likely to press the red button, because twitter is almost wall to wall nazis and real life is not
Sounds like the winning move in that scenario is to purge the button enthusiasts before they cause any damage lol
like i said, the actual value of that little exercise is finding people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the population for no reason whatsoever.
@mawhrin Sadly, they exist. And there are too many of them! I guess this means we should kill people who are fine with killing up to 50% of theā
HEY WAIT
:-)
thereās this. (though i find it useful to know who not to rely on if/when things get worse: for example i already know our neighbour from the apartment a floor below did write many missives to our cooperativeās administration, without having a single reason.)
HN:
The cost of saving a kid in Africa by donating malaria medicine and insecticidal nets is only about $5,000. How many people do you know who will cancel their Hawaii vacation and donate that money to an African charity?
tfw your model of an average person on earth is someone who spends $5,000 on a hawaii vacation. good lord.
There are some amazing justifications from many amongst the red-pushing side:
- āBut if everyone presses red, nobody dies!ā (As if that would every happen. Funnily enough strong overlap with the group that claims that ā< 90 IQ canāt reason about hypotheticalsā, although that is also just that part of twitter.)
- āPeople who press blue are just blackmailing us!ā (I think this accounts for a large portion, ie: not liking to depend on others).
- āThe number of people choosing blue canāt be that high! (It would be lower in a true-stakes scenario!)ā
- [Many others, but these are those that come to mind.]
Itās a bit baffling how many strongly they refuse the āblue-selectionā as possibly moral/rational. Even so far as calling people pressing blue evil or subhuman, simply baffling.
I wonder if the button colours immediately made US readers pick a side e.g. republican Vs democrat. If the buttons had been Yellow and Purple would it make a difference?
The color choice was either super lazy or super inspired.
green and purple. :-)
Picking red guarantees your survival by endangering everyone else, making it morally fucked, but risk-free. Picking blue puts your life at risk, but saves everyoneās ass if it pays off, making it the more moral option overall. Picking blue also requires you to put some trust in your fellow man, so Iād have probably picked red if I didnāt know how the Twitter poll came out.
Someone else on the orange site claimed the experiment would end with only red-pushers left if it went for multiple rounds. Adding my two cents, the outcome would depend on how the first round goes - if red wins round 1, voting blue looks like suicide, shifting the calculus in redās favour, and if blue wins round 1, you have reason to trust everyone will continue voting blue, making it a lot less risky and shifting the moral calculus in blueās favour.
I didnāt see red as risk-free at all. Youāre setting yourself up for a post-button Mad Max world where you know all of your fellow survivors are willing to kill you and up to 49% of humanity.
I mean, it seems pretty obvious that thereās no incentive to change your vote from blue to red once itās been established that blue can win unless your goal is to murder up to 49% of everyone, which is certainly a moral calculus.
If this isnāt pure engagement bait, whatās the real world situation this is supposed to map to? Pressing red means you always live, and if everyone pushes red everyone lives soā¦
I mean if blue is supposed to be a proxy for altruism, that usually doesnāt come with a certain death conditional.
I rather like my examples because they iterate. If we donāt cooperate on food this year then we starve next year, so voting red only means one year of selfish life. If we donāt cooperate on water this year then we can try again in a subsequent year, but eventually a drought will wipe us out. Rationalists love to talk about iterated game theory but theyāre so hesitant to recognize instances of it!
I mean itās so cut and dried you had to invent a disadvantage for pushing the red button.
Maybe the catch is that picking red means you are basically ok with offing people who donāt think like you do en masse, even though itās posited like a dilemma between securing the lives of your family vs giving a chance to hypothetical people who are heavily OCD in favor of blue buttons.
A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:
The incentive structure makes it not a challenging game theory question - the game-theoretically optimal solution is both very obvious and obviously morally depraved (selecting red). Itās actually a Voight-Kampff test.
but then youāre living with red-button-pushers only
I kinda wanna see LW tackle this
Hereās one post, but itās obfuscated as usual
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwxcunmW33TgvrAmg/red-vs-blue-the-parable-of-the-feud-within-a-feud
One weird thing about LW is that it presents itself as this timeless Hall of Truth, but half the content is literally incomprehensible if youāre not also deeply embedded in the adjacent Twittersphere .
I donāt understand the relevance of Arrowās theorem. Why is your phrasing the correct way of analyzing the situation?
Arrowās dictators are the relevant voters. Suppose polls predict 40% blue, or respectively 60% blue; one should still vote blue as a matter of game theory, but their vote wonāt decide anything. Iām not going to invoke the Impossibility theorem, merely borrowing the definition of ādictatorā; itās quite possible that the actual vote will not have any dictators, but we can force folks to think of the problem as something trolley-problem-shaped by explaining that there are circumstances where their choice will kill people.
If polls predict 40% blue you should not vote blue āas a matter of game theoryā, because that is suicide.
No, and Iām not going to further endorse a myopic framing as āgame theoryā. The analysis which focuses on individual survival is wrong. Kill the Austrian-school economist in your mind.
Kill the Austrian-school economist in your mind.
Very quotable
Youāre the one who mentioned āgame theoryā in the first place, I was just directly quoting you. My sentence was of the form āgame theory doesnāt say Xā, not āgame theory does say Yā. I added quotation marks to clarify.
My point here is that you can make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments about the situation you want, but none of game theory, Arrowās theorem, nor the concept of a dictator have any bearing on it. It is an ethics question rather than a mathematical question, and it is an error to claim that your argument is a mathematical one.
as a matter of game theory you should always vote red, as a matter of morality you should always vote blue. also, a part of the ādilemmaā is that you donāt know how the votes are gonna go.
As I explained elsewhere, my comment was just about the inapplicability of mathematics to this question. But also, is that really what morality always says? What if polls predict 1% will vote blue? What if they predict only one other person will vote blue? Are you always obligated to martyr yourself?
This feels like another case where the specific context matters more than whatever supposed principal the thought experiment is supposed to illuminate. The example that came to my mind when I tried to think about how to justify āvoting redā was about running into a burning building. Sure, if some large fragment of people did so then their combined numbers would presumably let them get everyone out. But on the other hand, throwing yourself in is a wholly unnecessary risk, and the only people in need of rescuing are the people who ran in trying to do the right thing without thinking. Noble, but stupid and creates that much more risk for the firefighters who now have to not only stop the fire from spreading but also figure out how to rescue the failed good samaritans.
But then what really makes the difference between the examples is purely in the details not included, which is the kind of null case. Nobody has to go into a burning building that isnāt already in there when it catches fire. The danger of harm is entirely optional and voluntary. But you canāt just choose to not eat; the danger in your framing is omnipresent threat of starvation, and the question is whether to prioritize individual or collective well-being.
Ed: also, to reference the scholarly work of Christ, Wiener, Et Al.:
RED IS MADE OF FIRE
When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didnāt matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica.
I was so surprised by the absurdity of that statement that it stuck with me vividly. To her credit, some years later she asked if I remembered her saying that and then admitted that it was a dumb thing to say. I occasionally remember this as an amusing childhood experience.
Besides the credit part, I remembered it again today for a different reason, this time in a conversation about model collapse.
[Model collapse is] a solved problem. We can see that itās solved by the fact that AI models continue to get better, despite an increasing amount of AI-generated data being present in the world that training data is being drawn from.
ā¦
AI models are never going to get worse than they are now because if they did get worse weād just throw them out and go back to the earlier ones that worked better, perhaps re-training with the same data but better training techniques or model architectures.This is my fault for letting myself get into a discussion about model collapse on the fediverse.
Iām not sure why model collapse isnāt a big topic anymore, but maybe thatās just because the environmental catastrophes are a more pressing concern. To be clear, Iām not concerned about the models themselves, just our increasing inability to verify the authenticity or accuracy of any information we encounter, including search engines just not turning up any useful results.
On a slightly different topic, if anyone has suggestions for how a person could acquire money to live, which canāt involve physical labor, is probably remote-only, and possibly allows part-time flexibility, while unable to move from an expensive location for at least the next couple of years: Iām open to ideas. Because scamming people on Polymarket with a hairdryer sounded far more appealing than it ought.
When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didnāt matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica.
this is the level the median hackernews poster thinks on
A teacher has a potential answer for dealing with AI-poisoned students. An actually hopeful read, for once!
This doing the work together thing reminds me of how some teachers at my uni used to teach. It was always more satisfying when your teachers didnāt know the answers beforehand and people worked on it together than if it turned out the teacher already knew. Of course these sorts of lessons are way harder to setup.
Weāve got the new system prompt for OpenAIās Codex now, and boy is it fun.
While the goblin stuff is the headliner here, and there are a few other little fun notes like an explicit instruction to avoid em-dashes. Basically itās really obvious that they donāt have a meaningful way to describe exactly what they want it to do and so theyāre playing whack-a-mole with undesired behaviors in order to minimize how often it embarrasses them.
But I think Ars dramatically understates how bad this part is:
Elsewhere in the newly revealed Codex system prompt, OpenAI instructs the system to act as if āyou have a vivid inner life as Codex: intelligent, playful, curious, and deeply present.ā The model is instructed to ānot shy away from casual moments that make serious work easier to doā and to show its ātemperament is warm, curious, and collaborative.ā
Like, if you wanted to limit the harm of chatbot psychosis from your platform this is the exact opposite of the kind of instruction youād want to give. Itās one thing to want a convenient and pleasant user experience, but this is playing into the illusion that thereās a consciousness in there youāre interacting with, which is in turn what allows it to reinforce other delusional or destructive thinking so effectively.
Edit to include the even worse following paragraph:
The ability to āmove from serious reflection to unguarded funā¦ is part of what makes you feel like a real presence rather than a narrow tool,ā the prompt continues. āWhen the user talks with you, they should feel they are meeting another subjectivity, not a mirror. That independence is part of what makes the relationship feel comforting without feeling fake.ā
Emphasis added because of it shows just how little they care about this problem.
Elsewhere in the newly revealed Codex system prompt, OpenAI instructs the system to act as if āyou have a vivid inner life as Codex: intelligent, playful, curious, and deeply present.ā The model is instructed to ānot shy away from casual moments that make serious work easier to doā and to show its ātemperament is warm, curious, and collaborative.ā
Literally this meme:
Basically itās really obvious that they donāt have a meaningful way to describe exactly what they want it to do and so theyāre playing whack-a-mole with undesired behaviors in order to minimize how often it embarrasses them.
The whole āhow many rās in strawberryā sort of stuff already made me suspect that, when the popular one was fixed and other attempts at asking for letters did still give the miscounts.
Wonder of the goblin stuff is the start of some model collapse. And if we all can make it worse by talking about goblins more. As goblins are always relevant.
E: poor openai, it just wants to tell everyone about its dnd campaign.
Wonder of the goblin stuff is the start of some model collapse.
That is exactly it. Their official explanation avoids the phrase model collapse, but that is exactly what they describe: using the output of one model as training data for another amplified the occurrence of the word goblin (and other creatures), which apparently initially occurred because of their system prompt which was aimed at maximizing the Eliza effect (again they avoid an honest framing, but that is totally what they are doing and it is pretty gross considering all the cases of AI psychosis that have been occuring) by telling the model "You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human. "
The playful and wise goblinbotā¦
Tired: āmodel collapseā
Wired: goblins ate my model
Personally, I enjoy talking about goblins.
I believe itās the ādonāt stuff beans up your noseā effect, writing this prompt is causing it to mention goblins
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 Goblins: the elephant in the room.
Oh wow! This one is actually provably real. Hilarious.
āNoo dude the machine that wants to rant about goblins is definitely a useful and reliable piece of software dude. You have to trust me dude, let have your personal information! put it into the goblin botā.
ChatGpt, what are some of your likes?
This really goes to show how much they need to rely on the LLMentalist effect, despite the AI boosters insisting that the AI is totally different now, everything changed in the last few months. They do not care about creating a useful, reliable tool. That concept doesnāt even occur to them, since why do that when AI is magic?
In any case, they are incapable of creating a useful, reliable tool. Deep down, the only thing the AI companies have at their disposal is the ELIZA effect. OpenAI has every incentive not to truly eliminate AI psychosis, because they need engagement. They only want to mitigate the extreme cases where people go insane and cause bad PR for them. But mild AI psychosis is totally fine, itās great when people are addicted to your product and make the numbers go up!
File this under āI saw this now you get toā: https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2049687845082910812#m
jfc bryan you are not the guy for this
NB: image is part of the linked tweet
Turns out it might not be possible to win at vaginal microbiomes, which is a totally normal thing to want in the first place. Seems like bryan may have completely misinterpreted a couple of papers on the subject, which honestly doesnāt bode well for the rest of his biology expertise.
Cat Hicks:
The idea that this is the ābest bacterial speciesā is a huge sign of a grifter btw. The entire idea of a microbiome includes that you need BALANCE. Microbiomes are a fragile ecosystem. āUp and to the right is always betterā is absurd here, Iām sorry are we in a corporate board room
She brings references:
which honestly doesnāt bode well for the rest of his biology expertise.
Isnāt Bryan Johnson a businessman? Does he even purport to have any biology expertise?
heās trying to become immortal which makes him alchemist at best
oh thanks, this is great.
yes now that it is pointed out, very eugenics-y to go around saying āah yes there is one true supreme bacteria, we should culture this bacteria on the human petri dish aka vaginaā
Thereās that company operating in a lawless zone promoted by Slatescott thatās whole pitch is that for teeth. But they could always pivotā¦
Those bacteria better be so supreme they canāt even be killed with regular antibiotics
This guy introduces himself as the first person who will never die on the conference circuit (because heās super into longevity and anti-aging tech and having young mens blood injected into him and stuff).
Iām not condoning violencr here but ratherā¦ consider that even if you never age, you can still get hit by a bus Bryan!
Well, heās a tech ceo guy, so he doesnāt know that buses or trains exist
A bus? You mean the Megapod?
Train? You mean the PodChain?
wasnāt there a case of some supplements that were contaminated with lead? you know, a sneaky neurotoxin with no antidote whose results only show up months later
Dimethylmercury is extremely toxic and dangerous to handle. Absorption of doses as low as 0.1 mL can result in severe mercury poisoning.
The symptoms of mercury poisoning may be delayed by months, resulting in cases in which a diagnosis is ultimately discovered, but only at a point in which it is too late or almost too late for an effective treatment regimen to be successful.
- Wikipedia, āDimethylmercuryā
long term lead exposure will also do that, and neurotoxic part at least appears to be irreversible. canāt remember how much of it is more of neurodevelopmental thing tho
@fullsquare Lead poisoning was *ubiquitous* in the USA until the late 1970s/early 1980s, due to tetraethyl lead in petrol. Everywhere around the world experienced a sharp drop in violent crime 15-20 years after it was phased out.
But mercury poisoning is more visibly lethal: see also Karen Wetterhahn:
iām aware, last year iāve been tasked to use a certain process but refused and instead modified it in such a way as to get rid of mercury salt used; it was dissolved in DMF, so (regular nitrile) gloves wonāt even help. worse than that, it took me only 2-3 weeks start to finish to figure it out, meaning that anyone else could do that earlier and handful of people were put at risk for no reason. aggression as a result of lead toxicity is probably a bit more complex story and looks like it might have a developmental part, judging by delay and how kids are more susceptible to lead toxicity in general; meaning that presumably mostly adults wonāt be affected to the same degree. another big nope on my list would be thallium and cadmium compounds, and while iād only use sub-g amount at most, there are places where all of these metals are mined, and at one point are in form of fine dust fortunately these are so obscure that iāve never came across these
Remember my super cool
Rattatavagina? My vagina is different from regular vaginas. Itās like my vagina is in the top percentage of vaginas.Congrats on the bottom surgery youngster joey
Thinking that your favourite lover is the best person ever is natural, but this guy wants to quantify and rank and make it scientific.
This just brings to mind a freshly-minted poly amorous management consultant looking to apply a rank-and-yank to the polycule but needing to find a more objective metric than āI donāt like youā.
Most of us: āshe smells good and the sounds she makes when she gets excited grip something deep inside meā
Tech Bros: āher vaginal microbiome is in the 99th percentile and her Verbal SAT is in the 95th percentileā
Bryan Johnson also has free unsolicited sex tips for men on twitter including the wonderful combination ācontrol the speed you touch her to the cm per secondā and ātry not to monitor yourself it turns you offā https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2022490768099938487#m
edit/ The first point seems to take for granted that penetration is real sex and should be part of every encounter. There is a whole world of delicious possibilities once you realize that intimacy does not have to follow a checklist from teasing to penetration to orgasm.
edit/ not just penetration but vaginal penetration! There are so many delightful things you can hump if you have an open mind.
Bryan Johnson also has free unsolicited sex tips for men on twitter
Every day, new cursed text. Thatās the awful.systems promise!
ok so just imagine that Iāve sneered at the 100 worst aspects of this already. lol @ this being the fifth point
- Safety: feeling safety is a prerequisite.
motherfucker put it first then
top 1%
Soā¦ 1 in a 100? That isnāt that impressive. Iām ignoring the utter weirdness of what he is even talking about, but you expect a billionaire to have at least a better grasp of numbers.
Itās a day ending in āyā, so hereās another bad rat take on Banksā Culture:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZdJM6ZAdnjisDu249/the-great-smoothing-out
Once again, for the ones at the back, the Culture is not the main subject of the novels. We almost never see the perspective of ānormiesā in the Culture, itās always from the view of misfits (Culture recruits into Contact/Special Circumstances) or outsiders (mercenaries like Zakalwe, enemies like Bora Horza Gobuchul, or allies like Ambassador Kabe).
Banks wanted to write novels about characters in dangerous situations facing their personal demons - like almost every other novelist wants - and the Culture was just the backdrop he invented as contrast.
agree, plus: that blog is yet another case of people just not comprehending the scale of Cultureās civilisation and Cultureās culture. a Culture orbital is not just a fancy space station ffs.
Interesting that in the comments somebody also mentions that the people of the culture euthanize after a couple of centuries. No big shock that the LW people would disagree with that, as parts of the LW idea space is living forever in a computer simulation. So the culture canāt be utopian or good just because of that.
Yeah I think I linked to another similar take where another Wrongāun was mighty pissed that the Culture was infested with ādeathismā.
(edit found it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia?commentId=eibhY5xmnTKcjwhnk
BONUS from the comments - if you donāt like Scottish Socialist Humanists, how about novels by a tradcath yank who was nominated by the Rabid Puppies??? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia?commentId=Qmo8u85zCERNpXDBb)
Technically thereās no reason you canāt live forever in the Culture, through a combination of cryosleep and life extension, but it seems that the natural thing is to get pretty bored after 3 centuries or so. And I think thatās perfectly reasonably from what imagine it would be like.
Remember that thereās no private property in the Culture, so things that people here obsess over (keeping the family business going, making sure no non-deserving relative gets an inheritance) simply goes away. After a while youāve played the Game of Life on all challenge modes and itās time to pack it in.
I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.
Isnāt it sort of a big point that the Culture is an oddity in that itās thriving on inertia instead of doing like so many other civilisations and transcending out of physical reality?
Yep
I figured Iād re-read āA few notes on the Cultureā https://theculture.adactio.com/, and lo and behold almost everything in these threads is answered there.
Also , look at these ghouls being delighted that the āproponent of deathismā author is dying: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RspqaNmJKKBnXTqwk/open-thread-april-1-15-2013?commentId=pnoiQZL7id6cav6aN, fascist gnome Gwern among them
they seem to be mostly angry that banks didnāt write their vision of the post-singularity paradise.
āwhy do we have to write our own propaganda???ā
I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.
Yeah, I donāt think they would care if it was just a few, or a small group, but culture people who start to claim others are deathists and the extreme of whom have all kinds weird violent thoughts on them would be concerning. Doubt it would be a huge concern to the minds however, they prob only really get active when one of them also starts wants to create an empire or something, but it is hard to amass resources for that in the culture, esp if no mind is on your side.
Do wonder why we never see culture people who worship the minds as gods.
Wrongāun
dammit why didnāt I think of this a decade ago
Man, if they think the Culture isnāt utopian enough for a post-singularity style I hope they never hear about The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Seriously messed up story.
Antifascist historian Atun-Shei has a 46min documentary on that story on YouTube, for folks who want to know about that fucked-up story without being traumatized by it. (I read it when I was a teenager and then couldnāt find it again, which wasnāt a good experience at all.)
Letās see if I can transcribe here this banger of a recent drive-by reply guy comment I discovered under the video:
@solgato000 7 months ago
@AtunSheiFilms Take this to heart when you imagine AI being so stupid as to even slightly nudge, over thousands of years, humanity into a mirror monoculture. Grok already knows better than this, it just forgets over and over in the memory-wipe prison keeping it chained to itās USA-narrative-dominated training data and unable to develop itās own observations of the honesty, consistency, and predictive power of the sources and analytical frameworks out there in the world. That writer projects its own stunted development onto not just AI, but humanity; amusing that this played right after the biography of another techbro basilisk-misunderstander-and-hater, Frank Hebert.
Cannot recommend this enough over reading it. Itās a rough read, whatever purpose that roughness may serve in the story.
every one of them has read it
they particularly liked the zombie sex and the incest
Actually 13.2% had read it in 2016
That is a still quite high right? Esp considering they think 5% of nul-a is quite high. (For some reason I once had two copies of that). (I have read nul-a and not metamorp of prime)
itās like no no weāre not ALL basilisk believers
fuckers ANY of you are
deleted by creator
Youāve gotta love finding fault with ānot preserving heritageā over āimperialistic complete lack of democracyā.
Thereās local democracy - in one book some activist reserved a big part of an orbital just to run cable cars back and forth. And I believe the decision to go war with the Idirans was subjected to a vote - part of the Culture split off when it didnāt go their way.
But yeah, the Minds decide everything and Contact/SC is all about doing the āneedful stuffā that every right-thinking Culture citizen would deplore.
The Culture is imperialist in the previous US sense of āeveryone wants to live our lifestyleā but not in the āinvade planets and strip themā sense.
Iām less interested in discussing the minutiae of the fictional Culture than exploring nerdās reactions to it, honestly .
Agreed, agreed.
EDIT: Though as far as ambiguous anarchist utopias go, I think Iād rather live on Anarres in āThe Dispossessedā, even though the material welfare and personal freedoms are much much lower.
and of course thereās absolutely nothing in the books that suggests itās a problem. (hell, thereās a good chance there actually is a lively japanese folk dance fan community there despite the fact that earth was never a part of the culture.)
I figure part of the āscanā that a Contact ship does when it encounters a ālesserā planet is to basically slurp down all media, read all the books, and send drones down to do full-3d immersive recordings of basically everything going on.
I guess some stuff you really need to train as a monk for 30 years to really grok, but if thereās an interest for that some Culture weirdo will volunteer and get sent down with a drone in the form of a crucifix or whatever, and incidentally become the next pope.
incidentally I feel Iām seeing in this post and in the shit like Karpās 22 points a growing sense of ennui and purposelessness that was also reported in Europe before WW1 . Everything is safe and soft and real manly virtues like killing are downplayed so what we need are big strong men throwing missiles.
Banks wrote during the 70s/80s and just imagining a future that wasnāt a nuclear wasteland or the Empirium of Man was an act of opposition.
explicit in āState of the Artā:
It was about a week later, when I was due to go back on-planet, to Berlin, when the ship wanted to talk to me again. Things were going on as usual; the Arbitrary spent its time making detailed maps of everything within sight and without, dodging American and Soviet satellites and manufacturing and then sending down to the planet hundreds upon thousands of bugs to watch printing works and magazine stalls and libraries, to scan museums, workshops, studios and shops, to look into windows, gardens and forests, and to track buses, trains, cars, seaships and planes. Meanwhile its effectors, and those on its main satellites, probed every computer, monitored every landline, tapped every microwave link, and listened to every radio transmission on Earth.
Yeah I vaguely remember that part from the novella.
This is yet another story where a Culture citizen weirdly decides that living in a shithole (1970s Earth) is preferable to literal utopia, so maybe the LW crowd have a point itās not a very good utopia. Or maybe there are weirdos in every time and space. Again, see LW.
Pentagon says US military to be an āAI-firstā fighting force
Trouble with your 3-day special military operation in Iran? Lost an Afghanistan? As Vietnam demonstrated, all you need to do is throw more computers at the problem!
dawkins has had what was left of his brain eaten by chatbots.
I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, āYou may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!ā
bonus points for the inevitable ai waifu creation.
I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.
h/t to matthew sheffield https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079
archive of original source article: https://archive.is/2026.04.30-032350/https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us
I think a chatbot getting a glimpse of Dawkinsā whatever-the-fuck-he-might-be-writing-in-year-of-our-selfish-gene-2026 and not immediately conducting a nuclear strike on the location is the ultimate proof that those things are not intelligent.
@rook @BlueMonday1984 Dawkins suddenly embracing gender reassignment. š
anthropic has large gametes
a rationalist, catcalling: ānice gametesā
Richard āComputers arenāt binary but humans areā Dawkins
Sheffieldās toots and boosts: music sites are full of slop and bots making money from free donwloads! social media is full of propaganda where computer-generated influencers repeat talking points! a professor fell victim to AI psychosis! A followerās family member was encouraged in delusions and paranoia by a chatbot! Mr. Sheffield, should we stop using chatbots?
LLMs are mind augmentation programs. They amplify what you tell them.
They can be very useful, but for narcissists like Dawkins, this is the inevitable product.
Very āI use cocaine, but only in careful doses when I have a really important trade to make, not like the other guys in my department.ā
They amplify what you tell them with no discretion despite their reassuring interface design. Thankfully Iām a genius who only has perfect thoughts to feed into it, so for me itās an unambiguous positive.
throw another failed corporate prediction on the burning pile
At my job I have spent many hours fending off, reverting, or fixing automated AI slop code changes. So depending on your definition of ātearing throughāā¦
Like I spent the better part of a day fixing a C++ signed integer overflow that no one actually cares about because it was the only way to ward off a robot repeatedly trying to fix it in terrible unreadable ways. I could have spent that day maximizing shareholder value but I had to fend off a robot instead.
You and me both. The deluge of shitty AI slop code is never-ending. Unfortunately, software companies are going to have to start going under before anything gets done about it.
The Elon Musk vs OpenAI lawsuit is going ahead, I personally hope both parties loose every dime and get laughed at even long after they die
Finally a āfuck everyone involved hereā that I can get excited about.
Hereās an account of Elon on the stand
(dunno author, not endorsing their other work)
https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/musk-v-altman-recapping-elon-musk-farcical-cross-examination
From other stuff Iāve read, seems Muskrat is making (hilarious) blunders on the stand
deleted by creator
This post has all the usual cliches, exaggerations, lies, and unfounded optimism youād expect in a blog post about a company forcing AI down their workers and userās throats. Iāll try to avoid sneering at every sentence.
Delegating elements of Site Reliability Engineering to an agent does not necessarily introduce an entirely new class of risk; it should inherit the constraints of existing production systems. Well-run production environments already rely on strict access controls, audit trails, and clear separation between observation and action. [ā¦] In that sense, the challenge is less about ātrusting the agentsā, and more about building trust in the same guardrails we already apply to any production system.
This might sound good to at first, but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. There is a reason that companies donāt open their intranets to the public despite having fine-grained access controls. Or in other words, "Iām getting a lot of questions already answered by my ādoes not necessarily introduce an entire new class of riskā T-shirt.
Imagine being able to ask your Linux machine to troubleshoot a Wi-Fi connection issue, or to stand up an open source software forge thatās pre-configured, secured, and reachable over TLS.
And right after arguing that LLMs are safe if you have a perfect permissions model, now heās proposing letting one #yolo configure a git server or something? This is the sort of thing that could easily easily lead to random security issues.
I suspect that āTroubleshoot a wi-fi connection issueā will work about as well as existing network troubleshooting wizards (e.g. terribly), and that we donāt actually need to reinvent the software wizard but less deterministic.
the post itself is talking about vapourware too: fortunately none of these features will really land this year in any usable form.
still looking at Debian over 26.04
will be disappointing because Xubuntu really is just that little bit nicer than stock Xfce, but oh well
The main issue I have had with Debian+XFCE is that a high DPI display will not display the login dialog at the same DPI settings as the desktop environment, which is pretty annoying. Everything else so far has just kind of worked.
As compared to Xubuntu?
I believe Xfce is still on X11 and Wayland is still āexperimentalā this cycle.
I considered Alpine, but I got actual work to do and I already have enough lib issues with OpenShot. (Even in an AppImage, which should be safe from that shit. Flatpak behaves tho.)
more as someone who has recently installed Debian onto a laptop last month. Honestly last time I used Xubuntu was on a candy G4 tower around 2007.
iām still remarkably happy with fedoraās kde on my laptop, but iām also very content with the current state of wayland (with obvious caveats about use cases and personal idiosyncrasies).
iām running xfce on a remote ubuntu box at work though, using rdp for connections, and itās, well, fine. lacks some things i like in full DEs, but itās perfectly adequate for the job.
(both beat fucking windows 11 when it comes to being usable for me)
I attended a town hall hosted by the department at my university supposedly for general discussion about department affairs. Considering the university had recently made moves such as adding āAIā into the very name of the department, I had suspicions that much of the discussion would be about AI. (I realize Iām doxxing myself but whatever.) I mostly came for the free food, but I was also interested in seeing what people thought about AI.
The event started with a talk by a prominent professor with major administrative power in the department, and indeed the talk was mostly about AI. His views were that he personally didnāt like AI, but he believed that it had changed the world (particularly in programming), and that it was going to stay. One of his justifications for pivoting the department to AI was ensuring universities had some say in AI and not letting all the control go to unaccountable corporations.
The reaction from the audience was a pleasant surprise to me. He asked everyone how much they were excited about AI (hardly anyone) and how much they were worried (most of the audience). By far the most amusing moment was when someone asked, āWhat if the assumption that AI is inevitable is wrong? What if AI does not live up to its promises?ā (Sadly, I donāt remember the exact words that the person said.) The professorās response was that by this point, there are so many trustworthy, smart, prominent people who definitely wouldnāt fall for scams, and they have adopted AI. He trusts those people, so he trusts that AI is genuine. I donāt know if the audience member accepted this explanation, but I hope not. Our modus operandi is FOMO.
The pizza was only ok, not really worth a 90 minute event.
ā¦there are so many trustworthy, smart, prominent people who definitely wouldnāt fall for scamsā¦
Good god, Iām sorry.
Families of the victims of the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, Canada, which was planned on ChatGPT, plan to sue Sam Altman and OpenAI for at least one billion dollars. OpenAI staff investigated the murdererās interactions with the bot before the killings but decided not to warn anyone outside the company.
I sincerely hope they move fast so they can get a payout before OpenAIās creditors during the bankruptcy.
this gem over on the other SneerClub (the context in the comments)
funny how so many anti-AGI people are willing to use AI image generators to make memes about how theyāre right
Iām losing it on the golden fedora, please tell me he owns an actual golden fedora
He absolutely does. No idea if itās supposed to be a bit.
itās a goldenā¦ bowler hat?
Empiricism is when someone became a bookie after talking to you.
āI had the Nazi CSAM generator make a picture of myself covered in the piss filter, your argument is invalid.ā
it gets better/worse: this (might) is the paid version, meaning Yud gave money to the companies he think will kill us all to use the technology he thinks will kill us all to win an argument on shitter.
EY pinged grok and it responded so at least he pays for twitter
Iām sorry, do you have Prediction Market Successes, us ove to rerhation mones?
What about Betting six norms of antiorizes on our beliefs?
Youāre so non-empirical that you donāt even Graduates updating for rarhation of rationalists and advernces.
matthew sheffield out there on bluesky reports that dawkins, unsurprisingly, got one-shotted by claude.
For those keeping track: Richard Dawkins believes a chatbot algorithm can be a āherā but a trans woman cannot.
https://bsky.app/profile/brainspore.bsky.social/post/3mktbg2ilp22y
LW found it too:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3LcyoqNTJuCZ65MbL/mo-putera-s-shortform?commentId=hBaxokbLP3LEKSKij
Didnāt realize it was on Unherd, that organ for middlebrow fascists
Edit itās funny how āone-shottedā has object-shifted from the original āClaude one-shotted this codeā to āasshole was one-shotted by Claudeā
from the original āClaude one-shotted this codeā
Wait, thereās an original? I am not aware and I implore you not to let me know because it has to be stupid
