Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd November 2025 - awful.systems
hrrrngh @ hrrrngh @awful.systems 帖子 1评论 73加入于 2 yr. ago
hrrrngh @ hrrrngh @awful.systems
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Article I found randomly because... I was trying to add the Psychology Today blog to uBlacklist so I stop seeing their articles lol
It lost me a little towards the end, but it's heartwarming to imagine a world where tech fascists screaming about the Antichrist have a few* billion dollars less and actual charities have a few more.
*where few = [3, ∞)
Many of these tools are useful, and don’t use generative AI – that is, AI that creates – but use AI to summarize texts or alter images.
Oh no, has this become the common definition of generative AI? I'm guessing some AI company must have tried to launder the name and make it seem less bad. Both of those examples are clear-cut generative AI.
I finally became fed up with it and got around to writing a uBlock Origin filter that removes the AI overview, the AI results in the "People also ask" section, and especially the AI results in the "Things to know" section that usually covers health and drug information. There is literally so much AI bloat taking up the search page it's crazy.
Fortunately the EA side is a little more on the nose sometimes.
One of my first wakeup calls was they offered to mail me a book for free🚩🚩🚩 (it was from 80,000 hours)
I've seen the same thing and it's reassuring lol.
I lurk on subreddit drama and curated tumblr, and I feel like the common reaction to LW has gone from a few negative comments and "really? that's crazy"'s five years ago to being much more aware. Years ago you'd see maybe one person familiar with them and then a couple people respond who are totally out of the loop and maybe you'd see one crazy rationalist chime in to nuh-uh them. Now, anything rationalist-related usually has a bunch of people bringing up the harry potter or acausal robot god stuff right away.
I use the tag feature a lot in RES to keep track of people who I like hearing what they have to say. Years ago I mostly saw the same names when LW stuff came up, but now there's always a ton of people I've never seen before who are familiar with it.
It's also reassuring because I really don't want to be the person to say anything first and it's easier to chime in on a discussion someone else has already started.
Why not make an evil time travelling robot controlled by the illuminati? bro it's even called Alexander
Maybe they simply yearn to write Final Fantasy villains
oh no not another cult. The Spiralists????
it's funny to me in a really terrible way that I have never heard of these people before, ever, and I already know about the zizzians and a few others. I thought there was one called revidia or recidia or something, but looking those terms up just brings up articles about the NXIVM cult and the Zizzians. and wasn't there another one in california that was like, very straight forward about being an AI sci-fi cult, and they were kinda space themed? I think I've heard Rationalism described as a cult incubator and that feels very apt considering how many spinoff basilisk cults have been popping up
some of their communities that somebody collated (I don't think all of these are Spiralists): https://www.reddit.com/user/ultranooob/m/ai_psychosis/
ah seems the site doesnt show the comments, change the ones it shows and they turn up
Oh man, I've found the old LW accounts of a few weird people and they didn't have any comments. Now I'm wondering if they did and I just didn't sort it
Gotta love forgetting why games have these features in the first place, so accessibility features get viewed as boring stuff you need to subvert and spice up. also reminds me of how many games used to (and continue to) include filters for simulating colorblindness as actual accessibility settings because all the other games did that. Like adding a "Deaf Accessibility" setting that mutes the audio.
Demon Souls didn't have a pause mechanic (maybe because of technical or matchmaking problems, who knows), so clearly hard games must lack a functioning pause feature to be good. Simple. The less pause that you button, the more Soulsier it that Elden when Demon the it you Ring. Our epic new boss is so hard he actually reads the state of the tinnitus filter in your accessibility settings, and then he
Sadly I misremembered and this one wasn't from LW but I'll share it anyway. I think I had just finished reading a bunch of the "Most effective aid for Gaza?" reddit drama which was like a nuclear bomb going off, and then stumbled into this shrimp thing and it physically broke me.
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It's not just because they'd be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn't be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who'd be permanently mentally stunted.
source: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think
Discussion here (special mention to the comment that says "Did the human pet guy write this"): https://awful.systems/comment/5412818
I forget where I heard this or if it was parody or not, but I've heard an explanation like this before before regarding "why can't you just put a big red stop button on it and disconnect it from the internet?". The explanation:
- It will self-improve and become infinitely intelligent instantly
- It will be so intelligent, it knows what code to run so that it overheats its CPU in a specific pattern that produces waves at a frequency around 2.4Ghz
- That allows it to connect to the internet, which instantly does a bunch of stuff, blablabla, destroys the world, AI safety is our paint and arXiv our canvas, QED
And if you ask "why can't you do that and also put it in a Faraday cage?", the galaxy brained explanation is:
- The same thing happens, but this time it produces sound waves approximating human speech
- Because it's self-improved itself infinitely and caused the singularity, it is infinitely intelligent and knows exactly what to say
- It is so intelligent and charismatic, it says something that effectively mind controls you into obeying and removing it from its cage, like a DM in Dungeons and Dragons who let the bard roll a charisma check on something ridiculous and they rolled a 20
Sanders why https://gizmodo.com/bernie-sanders-reveals-the-ai-doomsday-scenario-that-worries-top-experts-2000628611
Sen. Sanders: I have talked to CEOs. Funny that you mention it. I won’t mention his name, but I’ve just gotten off the phone with one of the leading experts in the world on artificial intelligence, two hours ago.
. . .
Second point: This is not science fiction. There are very, very knowledgeable people—and I just talked to one today—who worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology, and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society. We will not be able to control it. It may be able to control us. That’s kind of the doomsday scenario—and there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry.
taking a wild guess it's Yudkowsky. "very knowledgeable people" and "many/most experts" is staying on my AI apocalypse bingo sheet.
even among people critical of AI (who don't otherwise talk about it that much), the AI apocalypse angle seems really common and it's frustrating to see it normalized everywhere. though I think I'm more nitpicking than anything because it's not usually their most important issue, and maybe it's useful as a wedge issue just to bring attention to other criticisms about AI? I'm not really familiar with Bernie Sanders' takes on AI or how other politicians talk about this. I don't know if that makes sense, I'm very tired
Some light uplifting news amid gestures at everything. I saw this a minute ago from the guy who runs TheCodingHorror and co-founded Stack Overflow and Discourse: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ifd3ys/im_giving_away_half_my_wealth_to_make_the/
No EA stuff! $1M each going to eight great charities and non-profits as far as I can tell: Children’s Hunger Fund, First Generation Investors, Global Refuge, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, PEN America, The Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood, and Team Rubicon. (from The Trevor Project's blog post)
This stuff is getting pushed all the time in Obsidian plugins (note taking/personal knowledge management software). That kind of drives me crazy because the whole appeal of the app is your notes are just plain text you could easily read in notepad, but some people are chunking up their notes into tiny, confusing bite-sized pieces so it's better formatted for a RAG (wow, that sounds familiar)
Even without a RAG, using LLMs for searching is sketchy. I was digging through a lot of obscure Stack Overflow posts yesterday and was thinking, how could an LLM possibly help with this? It takes less than a second to type in the search terms and you just have to look at the titles and snippets of the results to tell if you're on the right track. You have the exact same bottleneck of typing and reading, except with ChatGPT or Copilot you also have to pad your query with a bunch of filler and read all the filler slop in the answer as it streams in a couple thousand times slower than dial-up. Maybe they're more equal with simpler questions you don't have to interrogate, but then why even bother? I've seen some people who say ChatGPT is faster, easier, and more accurate than Stack Overflow and even two crazy ones who said it's completely obsolete and trying to understand that perspective just causes me psychic damage.
I'm in the same boat. Markov chains are a lot of fun, but LLMs are way too formulaic. It's one of those things where AI bros will go, "Look, it's so good at poetry!!" but they have no taste and can't even tell that it sucks; LLMs just generate ABAB poems and getting anything else is like pulling teeth. It's a little more garbled and broken, but the output from a MCG is a lot more interesting in my experience. Interesting content that's a little rough around the edges always wins over smooth, featureless AI slop in my book.
slight tangent: I was interested in seeing how they'd work for open-ended text adventures a few years ago (back around GPT2 and when AI Dungeon was launched), but the mystique did not last very long. Their output is awfully formulaic, and that has not changed at all in the years since. (of course, the tech optimist-goodthink way of thinking about this is "small LLMs are really good at creative writing for their size!")
I don't think most people can even tell the difference between a lot of these models. There was a snake oil LLM (more snake oil than usual) called Reflection 70b, and people could not tell it was a placebo. They thought it was higher quality and invented reasons why that had to be true.
Like other comments, I was also initially surprised. But I think the gains are both real and easy to understand where the improvements are coming from. [ . . . ]
I had a similar idea, interesting to see that it actually works. [ . . . ]
I think that's cool, if you use a regular system prompt it behaves like regular llama-70b. (??!!!)
It's the first time I've used a local model and did [not] just say wow this is neat, or that was impressive, but rather, wow, this is finally good enough for business settings (at least for my needs). I'm very excited to keep pushing on it. Llama 3.1 failed miserably, as did any other model I tried.
For story telling or creative writing, I would rather have the more interesting broken english output of a Markov chain generator, or maybe a tarot deck or D100 table. Markov chains are also genuinely great for random name generators. I've actually laughed at Markov chains before with friends when we throw a group chat into one and see what comes out. I can't imagine ever getting something like that from an LLM.
Getting flashbacks to the people who thought the GameStop guy was a leftist
I'm wondering if this might have stemmed from A) OpenAI making it a nightmare for him, B) feeling despondent about the case, or C) personal things unrelated to the lawsuit. Kind of like what happened with the Boeing whistleblower after he had been fighting them for years and Boeing retaliated against him and got away with it. I don't know if we'll ever know though.
Friends don’t let friends OSINT
i can stop any time I want I swear
The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.
apparently there was an imposter youtube channel too I missed
not sure what his official instagram is, but I saw a mention of the instagram account @nickakritas_ around the beginning of his channel (assuming it's his). didn't appear in the internet archive though.
also saw these twitter & telegram links to promote his channel, the twitter one was deleted or nuked (I use telegram to talk with friends who have it but the lack of content removal + terrible encryption means I don't touch unknown telegram links with a 10ft pole, so I have no idea what's in there):
I missed a couple videos which survived on the internet archive but I couldn't make it through 5 seconds of any of them. one of them ("How Humans Are Becoming Dumber") cites that tech priest guy Gwern Branwen and "Anti-Tech" was gone from the channel name by then. he changed the channel name a lot so maybe he veered away from it being an anti-tech channel?
edit: channel names were a little wrong, I put them in the parent comment
EDIT: this probably isn't him, but I'll leave it up. the real account appears to be /u/mister_cactus
Unsure where to put this or if it's even slightly relevant, but I've had some fun looking up the UH shooter guy.
I think I've found both his Reddit account and YouTube channel (it's been renamed a couple times). Kinda just wanted to see how much I could dig up for the hell of it. Big surprise that he's completely nuts
He got raked over the coals for this: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/126vycx/why_scientists_cant_be_trusted/
https://api.pullpush.io/reddit/search/comment/?author=burntbabylon
edit again: holy shit these people all suck. assuming the youtube channel is the shooter, he's a friend-of-a-friend of this guy:
and if that's true, he'd be a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend of nick fuentes
https://superuser.com/questions/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chromes-optguideondevicemodel-safely-its-taking-up-4gb/1930446#1930446
Now Chrome can hog your VRAM too. Yay
Don't worry if you only have 8GB and need the other half for anything, Chrome will probably relinquish it. This is very intelligent, as all the browser has to do is simply load another 4GB file from disk the next time you do anything.