Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 12 May 2024

as previously discussed, the rabbit r1 turns out to be (gasp) just an android app.

in a twist no one saw coming, the servers running "rabbit os" report to just be running Ubuntu, and the "large action model" that was supposed to be able to watch humans use interfaces and learn how to use them, turns out to just be a series of hardcoded places to click in Playwright.

someone re-invented email-threading. It's billed as a way to have "long and complex discussions." Their prototypical example? Yud's utterly pointless thoughts on imaginary scenarios conjured up by his immense brain. Orange site is skeptical and yearns for 4chan instead.

Nick Bostrom's advertising his new book about what if AIs let us sleep until noon and wouldn't that be grand.

Also call me paranoid, but "A winter wonderland glittering with possibilities for discovery and play" sounds exactly like the sort of thing an LLM might generate.

Google has supplemented their AI customer service backend with a just as stupid AI front-end. They're pushing you to make refund claims with "Google AI". It's a chat bot, and you're pushed to use it to see the status of your refunds. Clicking a button and viewing a table of refund requests is apparently too Web 2.0, so instead you can ask a chatbot to pull up that status of your refunds one...by...one. It's the second least useful use of a chatbot I've ever seen personally, right behind the chatbot they put into my office's seating software.

This sneer sponsored by me getting surgery last Friday and being extremely sore

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of-memoryless-lucidity

Surgery is the perfect opportunity to test one's "Am I in the matrix?" mental sigils and other fun rationalist mind games!

Several years ago, I was thinking about worthwhile precautions to take against strange scenarios and wanted a way to defend against erasure of my short-term memory, e.g. by the CIA or alien abductions.

Of course someone made a follow up post encouraging readers to experiment with dangerously large drug dosages for giggles.

This is presumably the sort of thing which is tough to get past an institutional review board these days, but easy to do yourself over the weekend with a friend or two.

Little mention that this might be a terrible idea, but at least someone pointed it out in the comments

Important notice: benzodiazepines are serious business: benzo withdrawals are amongst the worst experiences a human can go through, and combinations of benzos with alcohol, barbiturates, opioids or tricyclic antidepressants are very dangerous: benzos played a role in 31% of the estimated 22,767 deaths from prescription drug overdose in the United States.

Lesswrong and drug abuse. A match made in heaven.

The slatestar subreddit is doing its regular so what's up with all the racists constantly crawling out of the woodwork around here surprised pikachu thread, in response to Scotty doing Hanania Week in the substack.

EA forum: Stock prices in a VC-forced bubble show that society will make trillions from AI!!!

first comment: "uh, wtf, that's not how anything works."

reply to this comment: "oh yeah? well DEBATE ME"

Ohio State commencement speaker was grifter Chris Pan, who tossed a suggestion to buy bitcoin into the middle of his speech, got audibly booed. Full speech (around 1:33:45)

Molly has some fun details on Musk's hell site.

More fun detail's from Ohio's The Rooster (definitely read this one!)

His speech notes.

From the notes, it starts with normal inspirational speech garbage-- life pro-tip: do not repeat stupid parables saying that blind people have limited perspectives to large audiences-- then bitcoin comes up in the middle:

I know this might feel polarizing but I encourage you to keep an open mind. Right now, I see Bitcoin as a very misunderstood asset class. It is decentralized and finite which means no government can print more at will. In the early days, the exchanges for Bitcoin were prone to hacks and fraud. But this issue has been solved with the recent launch of bitcoin ETFs backed by the world’s 2 largest asset managers, BlackRock and Fidelity. And you can hold these ETFs in your retirement accounts just like you hold the S&P 500.

I’d love to do a demo for you: So here are 4 quarters. Inflation after 4 years has turned this into 3 quarters of purchasing power. Now if we apply some innovation and open-mindedness… Investing in your financial literacy will unlock so much freedom and possibilities for you.

"Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies" - posted to HN

Another set of social darwinisms dark bio troofs feat. 2 year old accounts made by promptfondeling libertarians

Oh look, another company’s “we won’t data scrape against our users’ wishes to feed spicy autocomplete” mask has just crumbled. I am so surprised.

Let’s see how many of my comments I can delete or overwrite with garbage before they ban me.

Is the AI lying? wonders the Guardian and turns to this guy:

“As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research.

Who of course validates the sentient AI frame. They should have asked him if this means that we are closer to Terminator or Matrix.

Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational Fiction Classics

You know, sometimes I wish my words had touched more lives, but at least I can console myself with the discovery that nothing I've written has fucked people up that badly.

Orange Site denizen plays Dr. LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331850

Show NH [sic]: "data-to-paper" - autonomous stepwise LLM-driven research

data-to-paper is a framework for systematically navigating the power of AI to perform complete end-to-end scientific research, starting from raw data and concluding with comprehensive, transparent, and human-verifiable scientific papers

The example "research paper" was some useless fluff about diabetes, based off an existing data set (read: actual work produced by actual humans), and mad-libs.

The study identifies an inverse correlation between physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake with diabetes occurrence, while higher BMI is positively correlated

I'm too sleepy and statistics-impaired to check how nonsensical the regression "analysis" or findings are, so instead let's check out the references (read: the actual humans who were plagarized to make this fluff)!

Reference #5

[5] T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.

This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:

Hermina Jakupović, Germán D. Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild I. A. Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, Tuomas O. Kilpeläinen

I guess AI has an easier time advancing science than producing a PDF with non-ascii text in it

just reminded again of: What if the moon got mad?

https://less.online/ - they couldn't be bothered to write the 5 lines of js to do their karma discount automatically

Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd says the app could embrace AI

"Your dating concierge could go and date for you!" this woman actually said out of her mouth

• you each send your robots out to date
• they fuck, creating a nanobot plague that destroys the earth
• you both stay at home shitposting on bsky

previously both a Black Mirror and an Oglaf (highly NSFW)

I haven't read it yet (and I might not even bother) but Google's probably lying about their ML models again

can't wait to see how the felon musk stans try to excuse this one (archive)

The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data

ah yes, because the lost data is the problem, but the thing floating in someone’s brain after coming loose 3 months ago isn’t something to speak up about. totes fine.

and there's a certain kind of regularity to keeping the lid on that news. like it was a choice to take that action. if only there were words for something like a pattern? of behaviour? if only[0]

[0] - (with apologies to stealing the phrasing from mmfish)

So facebook (I’ll never call it the other name, get fucked zuckyboi) decided their LLM is so good that obviously they have to force it on everyone with an icon in your face you can never turn off[0].

Figured I’d give it a try via support channel/address, their response is even more insulting than you might guess:

[0] - of course when it doesn’t see enough adoption they’ll probably start trying to force use of it in even sneakier/controlling ways

Some rich investor/math nerd croaks (from old age), HN's resident mod team declines to add a black bar to the site, leading fans of licking rich boots to wonder if "the community" should decide which dead rich guys get commemorated:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40327812

Bonus for the dude still salty Terry Davis didn't get one.

https://x.com/louisanslow/status/1789751075026661855?s=46&t=nT1XIOTx9ax3_3I0GXvgVQ

Rat orgies reach stand up comedy circuit. (Sorry for no nitter)

Ah yes, tell me again about the novel useful things genML can do. I seem to remember something about it helping people?

from bsky: "It is now officially fair game to make fun of this little shit"

https://archive.ph/cVeWT

Sam Bankman-Fried interviewed by Puck News!

this has been going around to great publicity from all!

it's an insufferably vapid and self-serving rehash of Sam's late 2022 crime confession tour. i can see why Puck grabbed for the exclusive, but jesus fuck nobody needs to hear from this conman again. Anyway, this copy isn't paywalled.