Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025

Today in "propaganda I didn't think I needed to worry about" - Cybertruck kids books!

And another one! This one actually has a good title in "The Ugly Truckling" and I'm legitimately mad as the father of a truck-obsessed child that it's wasted here.

Slate says: "For the Love of God, Stop Profiling This Couple!"

The Collinses are ineffective, abusive industry plants from Peter Thiel’s extended circle. They know they’re entirely media creations. They play off that fact to ensure that journalists never follow up on how many initiatives they’ve started and abandoned, neglect to interrogate their contradictory stances on issues like abortion and “race science,” and even seem to accept that they’re openly being taken for a ride by these dorks. Yet in spite of it all, no one listens to their podcast, they don’t really have much of a following, and their specific appeal is concentrated to a few far-right circuits.

Pivot to AI: Amy is retiring! Probably! yes my cowriter has heard the call of revolution and will be having full and frank debates in the marketplace of ideas. WIth sweet reason.

early hire at... roblox

So the far right people are already infighting each other with disinformation. Now they are accusing others of being part of the USAID thing. See this tweet by I,hypocrite (lporiginalg) (Note the guy is a bad guy (an anti-Semite for example), so this is fasc on fasc action).

"So let me get this straight...

Vaush

Aella

Richard Hanania

James Lindsay

Were all funded by USAID? WHO ELSE?

<community note pointing out this isn't true>"

They are coming for you Aella, hope you have an exit strategy (Just saying: Publicly burning bridges, and dropping the chatlogs of others would create a lot of goodwill on the anti-fascist side, and would be a good first step in rebuilding trust with some people (even if for a lot this cannot be regained)).

Perhaps using a lot of lying shitheads to get political clout is a bad idea, as even when you are in power, they will not stop lying (and being shitheads).

There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it's really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I'm greeted with:

Note: I have absolutely no idea what "Fcitx" even is. Or why and how it's launched, or whether I'm actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to "improve the experience" with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I'm just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don't even want to know how much lifetime I've already spent chasing Linux problems like that.

I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of "well I don't know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology" and sometimesI wish I'd collected receipts to say "I told you it's not".

Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:

• Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
• Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home's evil cousin
• Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies

And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.

Rats have reached the "put up stickers to proselytize" stage of their weird religion

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SvtKronRNrw9AxXwa/clement-l-s-shortform?commentId=ZifQXkhxo5dJvrL3Q

I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it's "normal overwrought" or "LLM bullshit." You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I don't say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like "as a language model").

No one describes their algorithm as "efficiently doing [intermediate step]" unless you're describing it to a general, non-technical audience --- what a coincidence --- and yet it keeps appearing in my students' writing. It's exhausting.

Edit: I really can't overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get

my algorithm checks if an array is already sorted by going through it one by one and seeing if every element is smaller than the next element

which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get¹

In order to determine if an array is sorted, we must first iterate through the array. In order to iterate through the array, we create a looping variable i initialized to 0. At each step of the loop, we check if i is less than n - 1. If so, we then check if the element at index i is less than or equal to the element at index i + 1. If not, we output False. Otherwise, we increment i and repeat. If the loop finishes successfully, we output True.

and I'm fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.

1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I haven't determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect it's only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.

i got quoted as an ai authority, talking about elon's rational boys https://www.dailydot.com/news/elon-musk-doge-coup-engineer-grant-democracy/

If only the Supreme Court had as much of a spine as the Romanian Constitutional Court

Law prohibiting driving after consuming substances declared as unconstitutional. Of course, the antidrug agency bypassed the courts and parliament to pass it anyway.

See also: Constitutional Court cancels election result after Russian interference

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but a friend from the field is wondering if there are any examples of good AI companies out there? With AI not meaning LLM companies. Thanks!

apparent list of forbidden words in nsf grants

https://elk.zone/mathstodon.xyz/@sc_griffith/113947483650679740

courtesy of 404media: fuck almighty it’s all my nightmares all at once including the one where an amalgamation of the most aggressively mediocre VPs I’ve ever worked for replaces everything with AI and nobody stops them because tech is fucked and the horrors have already been normalized

at long last, we have found genai use case

result: decisive chinese cultural victory

Anyone matched the list of names of the dinguses currently wrecking US agencies from the inside with known LW or HN posters?

looking for advice/suggestions:

anyone seen anything yet (uBlock ruleset, {tamper,grease}monkey scripts, etc) that can block the "talk to our prompt" widgets that have started showing up on too many fucking webpages? I'm getting sick of the things, and I haven't really yet found an exhaustive list of this shit from which to build up a list

new class of kook just dropped

OAI announced their shiny new toy: DeepResearch (still waiting on DeeperSeek). A bot built off O3 which can crawl the web and synthesize information into expert level reports!

Noam is coming after you @dgerard, but don't worry he thinks it's fine. I'm sure his new bot is a reliable replacement for a decentralized repository of all human knowledge freely accessible to all. I'm sure this new system doesn't fail in any embarrassing wa-

After posting multiple examples of the model failing to understand which player is on which team (if only this information was on some sort of Internet Encyclopedia, alas), Professional AI bully Colin continues: "I assume that in order to cure all disease, it will be necessary to discover and keep track of previously unknown facts about the world. The discovery of these facts might be a little bit analogous to NBA players getting traded from team to team, or aging into new roles. OpenAI's "Deep Research" agent thinks that Harrison Barnes (who is no longer on the Sacramento Kings) is the Kings' best choice to guard LeBron James because he guarded LeBron in the finals ten years ago. It's not well-equipped to reason about a changing world... But if it can't even deal with these super well-behaved easy facts when they change over time, you want me to believe that it can keep track of the state of the system of facts which makes up our collective knowledge about how to cure all diseases?"

xcancel link if anyone wants to see some more glorious failure cases:

https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1886506507157585978#m

in which karpathy goes "eh, fuckit":

skipping past the implicit assumption of "well, just have a bunch of money to be able to keep throwing the autoplag at the wall until something sticks", the admissions of not giving a single fuck about anything, and the straight and plain "well, it often just doesn't work like we keep promising it does", imagine being this fucking incurious and void of joy

I'm left wondering if this bastard is running through the stages of grief (at being thrown out), because this sure as fuck reads like despair to me

The blue check reaction to the totally cracked treasury zoomers showcases a complete rejection of the importance of domain knowledge. It's 10x software engineer syndrome metastasized.

They're saying that the ice cream hair kid - who has never worked on a real world system because he's STILL IN COLLEGE - is going to do us proud because he translated a greek scroll in high school? Good for him, but so what? Ben Carson split babies in half like Solomon and he's still a moron.

Somebody pointed out that HN's management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it's the sort of thing Dan might blank:

but I don't want to get hellbanned by dang.

Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It's caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices -- the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.

I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.

Penny Arcade weighs in on deepseek distilling chatgpt (or whatever actually the deal is):

Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:

Scott Alexander was accused of being secretly a right-wing racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled, and I think a bunch of his followers believed it, and now they're shocked and hurt that he's actually the sincere center left guy he said he was the whole time.

(Via.)

(For convenience: The leaked e-mails in which he admits to being secretly racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled. And his endorsement of super-racist Richard Lynn from last month.)