(I get the feeling weāre close to this bubbleās end.)
Anyways, 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.)
why canāt Rats get laid, reason #12,906
Just remembered I had this piece of rationalist word salad saved for later
the context is that dude was arguing that anyone who understands the āpotential of the techā knows that it is an existential risk and that you only need a laymanās understanding to know that. (he specifically said that āa sufficiently intelligent five year oldā could figure it out) and when I argued against him this is what I got in reply
i donāt understand, are there trees or are there not? should we plant trees? is it futile? should we dig a ditch?
also am i a tree?
Quite clearly they have understood that planting trees (as in planting trees) is in direct opposition to the rolling boulder (as in slopbots). Therefore we should stop planting trees so that we may be more effectively crushed by the boulder (slopbot).
Nvidia Employees Are Pushing for a Sam Altman 2.0
Before Nvidiaās board of directors announced Thursday morning that Huang would be stepping aside, to be replaced by longtime company CFO Colette Kress, a veteran engineer at Nvidia submitted an internal post urging the board to take employee sentiment into account before making a final decision, Wired reported Thursday evening. It has since turned into a kind of petition for the disgraced ex-CEOās return, garnering more than 1,600 comments, many of which are reportedly supportive of Huangās reinstatement as CEO.
Not at Sam Altman return levels of backlash yet
the commerce secretary is also testifying about Nvidiaās chip exports before the banking committee
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has agreed to testify before the Senate banking committee on December 10 over questions involving Nvidiaās chip exports to China.
why donāt they make AI Jensen in the digital factory so itās like he never left and then they can kiss him each night and tuck him into bed.
Seriously, what the fuck is melting peopleās brains out there. Is everybody in the bay area poisoned by ergot?
A story of two halves
Yesterday
Today
Outlook was down for an entire day yesterday, which affected me since my school email uses it. I donāt remember any Outlook outage this bad before, and from what Iāve heard, Microsoft was cosplaying as a headless chicken in their attempts to fix it. Maybe getting rid of 60,000 employees to embrace the magic of AI isnāt working out so well.
Meanwhile I saw this AI panic post on Linkedin (warning: psychic damage). Apparently all the doomers are vindicated and all the critics are completely discredited because of ā¦ you guessed it, math problems! You see, one mathematician was very sad in an interview! (Letās also ignore the many nuanced statements like this that mathematicians have made about their own field.)
But somehow he hasnāt noticed AI affecting anything he actually understands. Well, you see, thatās because in the real world, the magic of AI does need to wait a few years before the puny humans understand how to wield its power (but of course the doomsday is coming on schedule in a few years). The argument sounds nice until you look at of software, where there should be no physical obstacles for adopting AI. Now, coding has been solved by AI on the planet of Earth Prime where he lives, where OpenAI and Anthropic have long monopolized every software market with products of much higher quality and reliability than what came before. Unfortunately, I live on Earth, where I have seen two major vibe-coding failures in the last two days (the Outlook outage and the Humble Store rewrite).
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Wonātcha look at that. Now that MAGA isnāt hot shit anymore, Alex Karp goes full āHow do you do, fellow Democratsā and says Palantir has basically always been a progressive company.
https://www.businessinsider.com/alex-karp-palantir-democrat-progressive-midterms-2026-11
In the style of āclaims to be pro-life, dies anywayā: claims to be a Democrat, dismantles democracy anyway
Alex Karp will say anything that will let him take coke and murder people.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7xJeaAKTKxbHL6F9a/a-new-kind-of-prediction-market-for-science
Got a problem of randos shitting AI-generated ARXIV preprints into existence faster than the scientific community can deal with it? SHOEHORN IN PREDICTION MARKETS!
(Incidentally, my boss has been complaining about the onslaught of low quality preprints that are shat out with the usual low-quality signifiers that let you filter things being harder to immediately see, and his conclusion is that he is sad to say science is going back towards and has to go back towards systems of reputation and patronage where you have to look at who lent their reputation to a work and who newcomers are being vouched for by to determine if it is worth looking at it at all.)
(And I am again reminded of our electronic information sphere becoming like the Earthās genetic information sphere in that it is full of selfish parasites looking to hijack you to use their nonproductive information, with productive cellular life jealously guarding its genomic nucleic acids and not letting it interact with the froth of selfish viral and mobile elements bouncing off it at all times.)
Math 3.0: exploiting Lean bugs to scam bettors on Kalshi
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KrFu7kGk3x8aZcCzu/there-is-no-such-thing-as-cosmophagous-ai
They are SO CLOSE to getting it. People get so crippled thinking of the possibilities of life and intelligence in the universe when they assume that the only possibilities are endless exponential expansion and destruction. and I abhor the discussion of abiogenesis in the comments SO MUCH.
The probability of life spontaneously forming is related as inverse exponential to the complexity of the chemical reactions required to spontaneously generate that life. The simplest living organism we know of has a HEAVILY compressed DNA sequence of about 50,000 base pairs, all of which are most likely load-bearing. Back of the envelope, this means the spontaneous generation of this organism is less likely than 1 in 4^50,000, or about 1 in 1e30000, to say nothing of the machinery required for actually transcribing the DNA and synthesizing proteins
This is PRECISELY analogous to being freaked out that a hillside where it rains can develop a river channel when you would need to move all the sediment in a branching network of ditches all at once for it to still transport water.
Back of the envelope, this means the spontaneous generation of this organism is less likely than 1 in 4^50,000, or about 1 in 1e30000, to say nothing of the machinery required for actually transcribing the DNA and synthesizing proteins
Are the Wrongers using their Powers of Rationality to literally rediscover creationist talking points?
I remember during my first year of undergrad, I saw some dumbass creationist with a big poster in the middle of a courtyard. I was so dumbfounded that I decided to take a picture of the poster (I didnāt grow up around creationist types so I found it shocking). One of the talking points on that poster was that the probability that 18000 base pairs randomly happen to be correct is around 10^-10000. Quite funny that this Wronger offers even worse odds.
Are the Wrongers using their Powers of Rationality to literally rediscover creationist talking points?
Given the āload-bearingā in the quote, itās entirely possible itās simply regurgitating creationist talking points in a different context, because itās written by a slop-bot.
Yeah it is interesting how much the LW space recreates these sorts of ideas from first principles, the combination of overfocus on math, disdain for non-lw experts, disdain for softer sciences, insider hero worship, and contrarianism creates a perfect cult incubator.
Thatās the simplest way that this is wrong. But itās also wrong in a much more interesting way that even a bunch of scientists I interact with donāt quite get sometimes.
You can talk about the current complex system that has built up a bunch of internal dependencies over time, and wrongly talk about the odds of the specific sequence with all that embedded history appearing all at once.
But you can also talk about canalization, and the metaphors from erosion are very apt and very intentional. If you have a hillside where it rains, there are a huge number of drainage networks that can transfer water down the hill, and any one of them is only a tiny subset of the huge of possibilities. But also, if you take a hillside and bulldoze it, you WILL get one of those valid networks back again, and it does not have to happen all at once. Instead, small changes to the inert starting point will be driven into existence by the pressures of the flowing water, causing the flow to slightly increase. Those highly contingent starting points will then drive an accelerating process of secondary changes that pushes the hillside towards an efficient drainage network, regardless of the starting point. The system is driven very predictably into a tiny corner of parameter space, from a huge number of initial starting points.
There are very persuasive arguments that abiogenesis and evolution are very similar. That instead of talking about the random convergence of rare events, you should think of the process as a runaway, tiny initial changes making future ones more likely in a chain reaction that drives you towards function. Initially inert chemistry subject to disequilibrium being driven into becoming an efficient metabolic channel, and an efficient information channel, pushing you towards the living state in an initial environment that has enough disequlibrium and chemistry that can support structure. In this school of thought, the forces that drive life into existence are basically the same forces that sustain it once it exists.
EDIT This is even relevant to machine learning! You literally initialize synthetic neural network with random numbers, and apply the training process, trying to push it towards having the output given an input match the ground truth. Regardless of the random inert starting point, you reliably drive the network into a state that produces something like the ground truth output from the training input, provided there is sufficient information in the input in the first place. You donāt have to initialize it with the perfect starting weights, almost every starting point is canalized towards some state that produces the relevant type of outputs.
I recommend looking for the work of one particular guy, Dr. Eric Smith. Thereās an old talk of his somewhere on youtube, where to roughly paraphrase, he says that you shouldnāt be wondering about the very specific chemical events at the origin of life, but instead, you should āask what was so wrong with the dead Earth that it had to spontaneously break down into the living Earthā which is the stable state, the resting point that it is canalized towards.
canalized is now my word of the day, very evocative!
Oh look, bicameral mind is in the spotlight again.
I posit that farts were odorless until some time after the invention of writing. This is not a hypothesis. You canāt falsify it. Therefore itās true. White people invented smelling farts.
In Homerās Iliad, we rarely encounter the Greek word for āIā or much that refers to internal thought or decision-making.
Something rarely encountered is still something encountered.
Is this like the time when people who had never been at sea in the late afternoon decided that ancient greeks couldnāt tell red from blue?
In Homerās Iliad, we rarely encounter the Greek word for āIā
Greek in general tends to omit the first person pronoun since the corresponding conjugation is both pretty distinct and also rimes with said pronoun, so why say āI amā when āamā do trick is usually how it goes.
Now Iām not saying their entire methodology was open iliad.pdf, ctrl+f į¼Ī³Ļ and be surprised at the result count, but if they landed on the authors of the Iliad being p-zombies for their conclusion, disregarding such an assumption might be premature.
The ego!
Let me introduce another related concept: olfactory zombies. Imagine if there are people who canāt actually smell farts. These O-zombies physiologically have the nerves to detect the volatile chemicals responsible for fart smell, but they donāt actually feel the experience of smelling a fart. They may react to farts in the same way as non-O-zombies who smell a fart, but itās a non-conscious programmed response and they are not aware of how it feels to actually smell a fart.
Thereās no reason not to assume O-zombies are real. Thereās also no reason not to assume thereās a good reason to care even if they were.
You better believe that Iām appropriating this for the next time some dweeb comes at me with p-zombies
I formally dedicate this to public domain wherever possible, CC0 where not possible and heartily discourage attribution and royalties.
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Apparently there are rumours going around that Dario had a hand in Jensenās ousting. Iād suppose its because heās one of those āwe canāt loose to Chinaā folks. But also wouldnāt that be a seriously stupid move with the IPO around the corner? Then again, Anthropic are not exactly the smartest bunch (and these are just rumours)
Very āsawing off the branch youāre perched uponā behavior, wouldnāt put it past them
Could also be RADICAL AI SAFETYISTS
What would the play there be? Working against someone who makes money from people buying hardware to locally run open source models?
My best guess is that it would be something about āstopping China from making AGIā
Showing sloperators that using an LLM makes their brain power shrink over time has had little effect; they all think that they are big brain bois with extra capacity to spare.
What if they heard that LLM usage shrinks their penis by a micron every so many million tokens?
theyād just start buying overpriced leather jackets to compensate. thereās a worked example in the press right now
Leather blocks the Chat-5GPT rays
Jet fuel canāt melt leather
Itās true: sloperators have vast amounts of grey matter sitting neglected
Think that would just drive them to incel style rhetoric. With a helping of āno you are right to worry, but it doesnāt look like your penis has shrunk sirā from the bots. (poor third world workers who then have to process that shit. āwhy are all these people suddenly uploading their penis in grok?ā).
The second affair has hit Nvidia stock
I want this to matter but stock market stuff is all fake anyway.
People say something like ā1.2 trillion wiped outā but stocks arenāt actually tied to anything anywhere near their actual value (dividends) and itās only ever a tiny volume being traded anyway. Most stock trading is indistinguishable from meme coins.
NVIDIA has enough control over actually valuable technology that they donāt particularly need to be able to raise additional funding to continue turning the worldās chips into stacked boxes in a Taiwanese warehouse.
I mean if it keeps going down its going to be pretty bad news for Anthropicās IPO
I think anthropicās business model is bad news for their IPO. Nvida stocks be damned the filing is fucking hilarious.
putting āwe dont know if weāll ever be profitableā in the IPO filing was definitely a brave move, Iāll give them that
I donāt really want to just put someoneās /u/ on blast, but Iāve found an account on Lemmy that appears to be posting nothing but anti-AI posts with LLM titles and top level comments. What a world.
do it, alert mods and or admins of respective communities, itās not the first time it happens and one at least was banned before
Apparently checks out. Guess itās just a block from me.
Kinds funny to make propaganda against llms and bill the llm companies for it tho
Sorry I have to vent, but looks like the humblebundle site did an AI powered redesign as the site (while looking like it works) is now a total mess. Iām a bit in slow motion trainwreck watching mode. Sucks I do have a list of unclaimed keys still at the site which I paid for (some of which are now gone, as in I know I still had a key as I kept a list of some of the keys in a file (I was worried something like this happening for a while) but the keys are no longer in the list of games I got, this is just one of the many many bugs or just plain weird things I noticed (The reddit is filled with people having a lot more complaints, somebody bought a ā4 for 1, play with your friendsā pack, and only got one key, if you made a āgift a key linkā yday the link now is dead, but the game counts as claimed, etc etc).
The UI does have nice rounded corners now however.
E: additional funny moment, so I know people who have subscribed to humble choice (a monthly thing) an basically have forgotten about it, but during the creation of the new site they messed something up and they no longer have the information on file to complete the transaction for that, so a lot of subscriptions will likely auto cancel, what a foot shot).
E2: It also removed 2FA, made it possible to change passwords without the old password, and switch emails without access to the old email. Amazing work.
Yeah, I have also been amazed. Like there is so much wrong. (love the 2022 and earlier games on the ānew releasesā page for example).
Ah, the dev on main and push on Friday school of development.
Complaint driven development if you will.
