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, and happy 4th July in advance.)


oops i forgot what I was even going to post in the first place.
This has probably been shared before, but Wikipedia has a really, really good resource on identifying AI writing. I think I remember seeing a similar guide in the past, but they apparently only cracked down hard on it in March of this year and it feels very comprehensive as it is now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
They have some examples, like this crashout (the second part is from them replying to themselves):
But really I feel awful about how cruel and accusatory people are with AI responses to other users. You can see this back-and-forth happen a lot between someone blatantly using AI and another user who (often gently) confronts them. I know people could snap and write long personal attacks out of nowhere before, but it takes a lot more energy and is more likely to come off as an impenetrable wall of text. Now, you can industrially produce harassment while gaslighting people that theyāve violated obscure rules on Wikipedia.
Somebody wrote part of an article about some billionaire mining baron Iāve never heard of and they got chewed out by the person the article was about, who kept reverting all their edits and wrote a fake, AI-generated account warning on their user page. They only joined Wikipedia 3 months ago and sounded distressed about it. It really sucks.
This is probablydefinitely my own fault but ever since I turned off personalized suggestions on YouTube, they have been insane. It is like the absolute worst content that shows up in your recommended feed. This is only when youāre looking at a video, as the home page is completely blank if you turn this on.
If itās not the most antisemitic thing Iāve ever seen in my life with 150 views, itās AI safetyslop with 1 million views and the channel will be called like āAGI Unleashedā or āAGI Secretsā or āAlignment Labsā (Iām making these up, I tried to find some old screenshots of the ultra crazy ones Iāve seen over the years but I couldnā;t find them). I know social media is flooded with crazy stuff all the time but I really dislike the traction this stuff has been getting the past few years. These AI safety videos get recommended next to anything even remotely tech adjacent, itās nuts.
also: what happened here? https://x.com/EffectvAltruism
That used to be a parody account and now itās been creepily amalgamated into another EA twitter account. It made fun of them pretty viciously, I donāt think it was secretly run by EAs but maybe it was? Did somebody break into it???
oh and one more fun addition.
Iāve seen an opinion around that we shouldnāt make fun of the āthinkingā tokens used by LLMs. when it spirals into a loop over literally nothing, all that text it generates isnāt supposed to be part of the final answer, so youāre not supposed to judge the quality or usefulness of it. itās because we donāt understand how a model thinks (???) and therefore, we shouldnāt judge it as long as the thinking leads to better responses. even if itās āThe user said āhelloā, a simple greeting. But wait⸻⸻whatās the meaning of this? Let me consider [ā¦]ā
hopefully Iāve explained that deranged perspective in enough detail that itās believable because I donāt remember where I found the whole discussion. itās just such a emperor-has-no-clothes kind of thing. You can see how much processing power is wasted on completely inane slop in the thinking block, but youāre not supposed to question it? It is literally dragging out the āAI models are a black boxā perspective that gets misused so often to anthropomorphize them or shut down criticism.
I did see some company tried to make their model think faster by stripping all the grammatical articles while thinking, and thatās kind of funny to me
I studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags
<thinking> </thinking>to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are ānormalā output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like āwhat a human would expect to see in a thinking blockā but itās still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met withlethal forceincredulous cynicism.Just like any claim that āwe donāt know how they workā - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we canāt comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observerās belief is anything other than āyou just got very luckyā most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin godā¦
God I remember having to explain to dozens of people that āreasoningā models just exude a lot of text ātalking to themselvesā and then summarize it. They were all just āIt CANT be that sillyā and many outright would not believe me, because that was not āreasoningā
Sometimes they also glue a bunch of ātoolsā to help the model reason. The model can call by extruding tokens with the right syntax and then get back information from the ātoolā shoved in its context! That way, the model can at least handle stuff like basic arithmetic correctly! Except only sometimes, because the models frequently screw up calling the tools correctly or skip using the tool or any number of other completely dumb mistakes. Oh, and if the tool connects the model to the internet (or any insecure source of text) in any way, shape, or form, congratulations, youāve now got a massive security vulnerability!
If you delete account on twitter it doesnāt stay marked as deleted, anyone can register that name later. But this would have had to happen before 2015, if they were EA mockers after that then some kind of takeover seems more likely (who knows how many people posted from there, maybe one of them changed sides for whatever reason and locked out others)
also, āstealth pandemicsā lol try to say nanobot plague without saying nanobot plague