Welcome to November, and welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Found another āinterestingā website: aidoomsdaycountdown.com
one of the options predicts AGI just barely by the end of the year. lmfaooooo
the midterms made Scammy A loopy
"OpenAI is against the notion that it would be acceptable for people to be relegated to a role of doing things that āAI systems think makes sense to reward in humans,'ā he wrote. āPeople should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress.ā
I hope heās pissing his pants.
Looks like Brodie Robertson (one of the many weird Linux adjacent Youtubers) isnāt able to get any guests for his podcast anymore. Every episode since he invited DHH is a solo episode.
wait oh god thereās more than just Lunduke???
He plays the enlightened centrist and keeps platforming fascists, racists and homophobes. His fan club is also notorious for harassing developers.
just a quick note that our very favourite mr. musk spent half a bil in us dollars on election shenanigans and all he got is blue texas, and i mean it, texas is now blue across the whole slate, including the governor and the u.s. senator.
the very effective mr. musk!
Although my district wasnāt very contested, I am still happy that I voted. For the past two years, the oligarchs have operated under the assumption that they are immune from consequences. The AI bros believed that politics was an irrelevant pastime beneath their notice. If anything, I am happy knowing that they now feel fear.
I have more hope for putting serious pressure on my middle-of-the-road Dem rep. The district here only really turned Dem around 20 years ago thanks to the influx of Bay Area bedroom-community commuters, but there are still plenty of families around who immigrated as ag workers. So he already felt a degree of pressure, but now I feel like urging him to get on board with properly punishing the very worst Trump excesses might (might!) not be an empty gesture anymore.
Does that mean Musk is now legally obligated to transition or was it just the children?
Trans people continue to be very worried about US politics despite the blue wave. In Washington and Colorado the trans sports ban is ahead. In Colorado the trans youth healthcare ban is ahead. A lot of the transphobic democrats are doing OK vote wise.
The very real risk here is that trans rights continue to backslide even under a democratic congress or, two years from now, a democratic congress and executive branch.
So while the transgender for everyone memes are appreciated, weāre not out of the woods yet. Liberals are also susceptible to anti-trans propaganda and boy howdy there has been a lot of it.
All that said: the trans council does not bestow the honor of transition on Musk. He must remain cis and miserable.
While I have absolutely no hope in democrats or liberals for meaningfully supporting trans people, I would love to be proven wrong.
I am at least glad that hunting down trans people and burning down any place where people (especially kids) can get gender affirming care is probably not going to be an active priority up and down the various levels and branches of government the way it seemed to be for a while there. Iām not entirely convinced itās a step in the right direction yet, but it should at least be a temporary halt in most areas.
This is a pattern, with the exceptions of AFD and Trump, every time he supports a guy they lose. The guy has the moneybags of death.
Anyway well done US voters. Yall won a decisive battle now win the war.
@Soyweiser @mawhrin his principal problem is that heās an utterly repellent loser and everybody hates him š¤·
Yep, and no amount of building toys can change that. Lets hope blue Texas is going to take taxing him a bit more seriously.
hopefully also a lot of accountability and secrets opened up
congratulations to the us voters for the blue tidal wave!!
Also, with such a big blue wave theres no way in hell JD Vance is becoming president like AI 2027 predicted (that was already suspect before all this)
The rationalist attitude towards politics really is something else. Either politics is a pointless sideshow compared to the machine god, or they are the ultimate politics understanders. I could not come up with a worse way to market AI than they did.
Iām not the most politically astute person, but even I know that AI is a perfect symbol of the hated oligarchy. AI is a tool for the rich to plunder the labor and resources of the poor, all while dehumanizing them in favor of the machine. Of course AI is politically toxic. The rationalists are so far up their own asses that they canāt even think of this basic viewpoint.
I used to dislike when Bernie Sanders would take the warnings of the AI doom prophets too seriously, but now I realize that it is still a shrewd strategy, because the outcome is good in the end (bad for the AI companies). If they start talking about how AI will cause human extinction, it is bad either way if they are sincere or if they are grifting. Jon Ossoff even referenced the human extinction narrative in his victory speech. The political reaction was not āplease help the AI companies figure out AI safety,ā but āshut that shit down right now.ā And that is the right thing to do.
or they are the ultimate politics understanders.
A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are. Others have ideas that are extremely simplistic, like there are lots of lesswrong post proposing one cool trick to get trump on their side or get normies to understand AI doomerism.
The political reaction was not āplease help the AI companies figure out AI safety,ā but āshut that shit down right now.ā
Yeah, they have all these big brain plans for research programs into aligning AI, not getting that if they actually get the public or any major political figures to really believe their doomer ideas āshut that shit downā with maybe a side of āthrow some people in jailā is the common sense response.
A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are.
When I first encountered people trying to expand upon the Mark Fisher interpretation of hauntology, a few years ago, I thought they were perhaps overreaching. But after a few more years of observation, now I no longer think so. The rationalist project isnāt really about predicting the future, and perhaps never really has been. Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like, and events are now passing that framework by. It only gets stranger from here.
*wishcasted
deleted by creator
If only the media would report it as āAltman is yapping some shit againā instead of breathlessly repeating his words like heās a holy prophet
Iām sure that treating people like a dog that was tricked by wrapping medicine in a bit of bologna will go over well.
Death comes for XSLT(article about google killing XSLT, or gunning for it, not my usual fair but it is bad, and I didnāt see much attention pointed at it so far).
XSLT is basically used for one thing - styline RSS feeds so they look like HTML
(yes I know the XSLT lovers point to data sources that went all in on XML in the early 2000s then never got the budget to update, but in the first approximation thatās the use case)
Seeing as RSS is basically as popular/well known as XML, I doubt this tantrum will move the needle in any way.
Mostly people are mad at Google, which is fine by me
Hereās the relevant WHATWG issue, and itās not just Google. Leaving aside the merits of ādonāt break the webā vs āitās barely usedā, I think largely weāve ended up here because browser vendors depended on a library (libxml2) to which they gave ~zero time or money.
Oh and, of course, in that issue the most recent comments are from a Mozilla employee saying āI asked Claudeā¦ā.
LW and the more credulous parts of the general techsphere are going gaga over this
https://rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-space-programming/
Is this the long foretold, mythical RSI???
RSI = recursive self-improvement, not repetitive strain injury
Took one look at the post, āthis is all slop isnāt itā, and sure enough the authors couldnāt even do the traditional academicās single-commit dump without āco-authored by: Claudeā.
The ārecursive self-improvementā nonsense really baffles me. Excluding those who have a financial motive to talk about it, I donāt understand why anyone would think this would ever be possible for LLMs.
I donāt understand why anyone would think this would ever be possible for LLMs.
Yes, as I understand it, inference requires strictly less computational capacity than training; itās just that a training setup can be turned around and run inference sessions massively in parallel. Just because you can run inference doesnāt mean you can accomplish a training run. Unless thereās some rationalist super-computer-science Iāve been missing this whole timeā¦
The ārecursive self-improvementā nonsense really baffles me.
Thatās always been the magic sauce that gives the AI supernatural abilities in rationalist lore, I think they cribbed it from the early singularitarians who had a thing about how when we got our shit together intelligence studying intelligence would lead to an āintelligence explosionā, except they replaced the humanity-fuck-yeah aspect with robot fetishism.
lol, I saw that going aflame among the promptfondlers nearest me, too
model auto-tune. theyāre getting hype for model auto-tune. I expect weāll little outside breathless tests of autotuned models for a few days
At least weāve moved past
classifiers that weāve had for 15 yearsJev
He links to comments on the orange site which are pretty predictable
Author believes we need to be more reasonable about child labour
More seriously, to save you the bother of reading it, he objects to comparisons between anti-slop sentiment and the actual Luddites, because slop haters are tooā¦ centralised? And then cites our friend SE Gyges in an update.
I clicked around the blog a bit and the guyās definitely a slopfondler. But a reasonable sloperator, of course
Addendum: so this guy has apparently read all the literature on Luddites, yet still believes their concerns had anything to do with people being ādisplacedā by āautomationā. Fun reminder: āautomationā as a word literally did not exist until 1948.
itās not RSI because OpenAI told me they already achieved RSI on the WSJ podcast
(Iām trying to find it again but there was also an article on here about AI having none of the traits needed for RSI)
Wait will this mean that poisoning LLMs will be even harder to detect and prevent?
so thereās a new nber econometrics paper out, covering our favourite industry
it has some bangers in it
Paid adoption is substantially more common among younger and higher-income consumers: those earning more than $200,000 per year are 1.7 times as likely to pay as those earning less than $50,000, and those younger than 55 are 1.8 times as likely as those aged 55 or older
starting strong!
This force creates a dynamic incentive to set lower prices today: lower prices attract more users, improving future model quality and raising future demand
I donāt entirely follow how setting lower prices today improves future model quality but sure Iāll go along with the ride
Despite this limited horizontal differentiation, we find some degree of vertical differentiation across providers, consistent with observed market shares. At the end of our sample, the average consumer was willing to pay a $10 monthly premium for OpenAI products relative to Anthropic products. Part of this difference reflects model quality: our estimates indicate that consumers are willing to pay more for higher-quality models. For instance, moving from GPT-4ās capability level to GPT-5.5 Proās raises average willingness to pay for OpenAI products by approximately $25 per month
We also use the model to examine how consumer preferences for AI services shape competition. We begin by considering substitutability across services. By the end of our sample, all pairs of AI services are substitutes on average
ādo you want tea or coffee?ā āyesā
OpenAI has the highest retention of all AI products we study, with 77% of people still paying after one month, 65% after three months, and 55% after six months. Anthropic and xAI are lower, but similar to each other: around 65%, 50%, and 40% after one, three, and six months,
in the words of basement jaxx, down down downdown down downdown downdown
chat is it good when your world changing ai god keeps not getting picked for anyoneās team during lunch football
I donāt entirely follow how setting lower prices today improves future model quality but sure Iāll go along with the ride
More people using it, more training data fed into it.
77% of people still paying after one month
That seems a bit low.
More people using it, more training data fed into it
yes but thatās not actually the hard and costly part. the hard and costly part is the actual training action, which runs in the hundred of millions if not more
which, yāknow, when lower pricesā¦ā¦
Well, theyāve also reached model sizes where scrapes of the entire internet arenāt sufficiently large enough to train the model, so they also need more data. But yeah, they compute cost of actually training the models are prohibitively large.
subscriptions that are less sticky than a YMCA membership
this combined with the anthropic amended s-1 (which I very briefly dug into here, will dig more later), the numbers are all just about as bad as Iāve been thinking theyād be
Anthropic released amended IPO-aaand its even worse!
The artificial intelligence company said it generated $33.24 billion in revenue for the nine months ended Sept. 30, up roughly 1,200% from the same period last year. It reported a $104 billion net loss during the period, after losing $25.1 billion over the same stretch in 2025.
āb-but the convertible notes!!!ā
Remember the episode of DS9 where the authors agree that creating a holographic simulation of someone without their permission for sexual purposes is shameful? Ten years later in The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil seems to say that in the glorious virtual future this will be routine and accepted (its a section with a lot of dialogue between characters with years in their names, not digging out a copy and checking the page).
Does Kurzweil also have a bad take about people getting Tuvixād
Kurzweil actually liked the warp 10 lizard sex episode ā pass it on
Does he dance with the devil In The Pale Moonlight?
Hey wait a minute that episode was iconic for being actually good.
Yeah but imagine the crazy bad takes some of our friends could be capable of having about it!
I find it so so funny that the Proton AI manifesto asks why the productivity is not increasing despite LLM usage, and then itās all likeā¦ youāre not prompting hard enough!
I take it as a positive sign when even the biggest AI pushers realize itās not working and turn to denial.
I am not a Proton customer. My impression is that they offer semi-secure/private email and VPN access.
What the fuck do they need GenAI for??
To extract more value from their engineers. The controversy is about the CEO having AI psychosis and wanting to forego stuff like pen testing to speed up feature delivery, not over anything customer facing.
Oh my god
So why, at Proton, does it not feel like the revolution has come? Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?
The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the AI revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 ā using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place.
The third reason is a collective action problem. Using LLMs effectively to write code is something an individual engineer can do for themselvesā¦ But to retool the company at large requires amounts of both organization and resourcing that we simply have not invested in yet.
Itās always vague talk about how they need to rearchitect their workflows to better integrate blah blah blah. Thereās never a specific model they want to move to or a specific plan or even a single detail about what this should look like other than āmore LLMs!ā
I propose the reason for this is that weāve already seen what this kind of model looks like with Gas Town or whatever heās calling it now and itās both blatantly stupid and incredibly expensive so any CTO who honestly tried to move a real company towards that model would laughed out of the room or sued for breach of fiduciary duty.
Why has productivity not increased dramatically if everyone is using LLMs all the time already?
Honestly, the manifesto should have stopped here. They admitted defeat right out of the gate. But the manifesto must continue, because the LLM cannot fail, it can only be failed. I wonder if this report is starting to get under their skin.
The first is a change in engineering culture and engineer mentality. Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
This is not even a meaningful distinction. If I use an IDE command to change the name of a method everywhere itās used, did I change all the names or did the IDE change all the names? What difference does it make?
I can only see this as them ordering engineers to use the AI more and go faster. The manifesto talks a good game about how āexpertiseā and āgood engineering practicesā are not dying, but telling engineers to offload more of their work to AI has the unavoidable tradeoff of making these things worse.
As a side question, how is it that all of these fuckers always want to use the precious gift of AI to go faster, not to, say, give their engineers more time to improve the quality of their software? Almost like they donāt actually give a shit about good engineering practices!
The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the AI revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 ā using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place.
At least theyāre realizing that maybe one of the anti-AI talking points has some merit to it. But they donāt seem to realize why they need stuff like code review and CI/CD: the AI is unreliable and these processes are needed to reduce the probability of a major fuckup reaching production. All they think is, hey, more opportunities to use AI!
(āAnother takes it is place.ā I had to look at the original text to make sure. At least we know the CTO wrote this himself after many drinks at 3 am. Damn, why are all those people on the internet so mean to us? Iām gonna show them!)
The third reason is a collective action problem. Using LLMs effectively to write code is something an individual engineer can do for themselvesā¦ But to retool the company at large requires amounts of both organization and resourcing that we simply have not invested in yet.
What do I even say to this? Once again the problem is that there isnāt enough AI, and the solution is to buy more AI. Weāre gonna buy so much more AI that weāre retooling the entire company and shoving it up every bodily orifice.
If you know there are always new bottlenecks tha keep slowing things down why try at all? When do you go āwow none of this helped and we wasted a lot of energy on spinning our wheelsā
(Or perhaps you dont know what the actual bottlenecks are, a manager should know better).
Get into the Cheesecake Factory or get left behind!
If you donāt eat cheesecake youāll be left behind, Luddite
Like it or not, the cheesecake is here to stay
I left the cheesecake in the fridge and it looks like it is trying to take over my fridge and creating bioweapons.
Please fund my cheescake institute.
And no obv this is too dangerous to let out of the fridge.
Please join me on the Cheesecake Truck
Man, Cheesecake no longer sounds like a real word and Iām real hungry now. Clearly the cheesecakes are too powerful and simply thinking about them or talking about them for too long will allow them to tempt even the most stout-hearted to open the fridge.
Will it crash if the white house gets de-Baghdad-ified?
Iām looking it up and they have locations internationally, including in China. So I would say they are fairly regime tolerant. We just have to hope that Cheesecake Factory Alignment is solvable if not already solved
I am just now putting together that this was a reference to obamaās recent remarks. Well, given how democrats usually operate, the cheesecake will continue thriving, and theyāll just make the white house look like a cheesecake factory designed by martha stewart
de-Baāathified. Baghdad (or any city) is larger than a single notorious denizen.
