self @ self @awful.systems

Posts

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

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hey so I got this letter from OSHA saying you’re no longer qualified to post here? please step away from the forklift

no it isn’t, your posts are still shit

this is the happy honeymoon phase?

this marriage is fucked

Yudkowsky got wind of his skepticism, and reached out to Ross to do a discussion with him about the topic. He also requested that Ross not do any research on him.

I pinky promise I’m an expert! no you’re not allowed to check my credentials, the fuck?

you know, even knowing who and what Altman really is, that “politically homeless” tweet really is shockingly fascist. it’s got all my favorites!

• nationalism in every paragraph
• large capitalism will make me rich, and so can you!
• small government (but only the parts that Sam doesn’t like)
• we can return to a fictional, bright past

so countdown until Altman goes full-throated MAGA and in spite of how choreographed and obvious it is, it somehow still comes to a surprise to the people in our industry desperately clinging to the idea that software can’t be political

Race pseudoscience is racist

yes, V0ldek said this

but not all racism is racial pseudoscience

they didn’t say this though, you did. race science is an excuse made up by racists to legitimize their own horseshit, just like how fascists invent a thousand different names to avoid being called what they are. call a spade a fucking spade.

why are you playing bullshit linguistic games in a discussion about racism? this is the exact same crap the “you can’t call everyone a nazi you know, that just waters down the term” tone police would pull when I’d talk about people who, shockingly, turned out to be fucking nazis.

“all nazis are fascists but not all fascists are nazis” who gives a shit, really. fascists and racists are whatever’s convenient for them at the time. a racist will and won’t believe in race science at any given time because it’s all just a convenient justification for the racist to do awful shit.

Alternately I guess I could like, ask for an instance ban or something, if that doesnt make the instance un-viewable from my account

hey no problem, we’ve got systems in place for this kind of thing. happy trails.

(though for the record, re the idea that right-wing posters are allowed in here without being told to go fuck themselves: lol)

no problem! I don’t mean to give you homework, just threads to read that might be of interest.

yeah, a few of us are Philosophy Tube fans, and I remember they’ve done a couple of good videos about parts of TESCREAL — their Effective Altruism and AI videos specifically come to mind.

if you’re familiar with Behind the Bastards, they’ve done a few videos I can recommend dissecting TESCREAL topics too:

• their episodes about the Zizians are definitely worth a listen; they explore and critique the group as a cult offshoot of LessWrong Rationalism.
• they did a couple of older videos on AI cults and their origins that are very good too.

also fair enough. you might still enjoy a scroll through our back archive of threads if you’ve got time for it — there is a historical context to transhumanism that people like Musk exploit to further their own goals, and that’s definitely something to be aware of, especially as TESCREAL elements gain overt political power. there are positive versions of transhumanism and the article calls one of them out — the Culture is effectively a model for socialist transhumanism — but one must be familiar with the historical baggage of the philosophy or risk giving cover to people currently looking to cause harm under transhumanism’s name.

let them eat prompts

fair enough!

but I don’t actually enjoy arguing and don’t have the skills for formalized “debate” anyway.

it’s ok, nobody does. that’s why we ban it unless it’s amusing (which effectively bans debate for everyone unless they know their audience well enough to not fuck up) — shitty debatelords take up a lot of thread space and mental energy and give essentially nothing back.

wherever “here” is

SneerClub is a fairly old community if you count in its Reddit origins; part of what we do here is sneering at technofascists and other adherents to the TESCREAL belief package, though SneerClub itself tends to focus on the LessWrong Rationalists. that’s the context we tend to apply to articles like the OP.

There is a certain irony to everyone involved in this argument, if it can be called that.

don’t do this debatefan here crap here, thanks

This, and similar writing I’ve seen, seems to make a fundamental mistake in treating time like only the next few, decades maybe, exist, that any objective that takes longer than that is impossible and not even worth trying, and that any problem that emerges after a longer period of time may be ignored.

this isn’t the article you’re thinking of. this article is about Silicon Valley technofascists making promises rooted in Golden Age science fiction as a manipulation tactic. at no point does the article state that, uh, long-term objectives aren’t worth trying because they’d take a long time??? and you had to ignore a lot of the text of the article, including a brief exploration of the techno-optimists and their fascist ties (and contrasting cases where futurism specifically isn’t fascist-adjacent), to come to the wrong conclusion about what the article’s about.

unless you think the debunked physics and unrealistic crap in Golden Age science fiction will come true if only we wish long and hard enough in which case, aw, precious, this article is about you!

it’s appropriate that you think your brain works like an LLM, because you regurgitated this shitty opinion from somewhere else without giving it any thought at all

it can’t be that stupid, you must be using yesterday’s model

nobody asked you to come in here and advertise for perplexity, but you couldn’t fucking help yourself could you

you seem really fucking annoying

imagine discussing a topic

if you’re considering pasting the output of an LLM into this thread in order to fail to make a point: reconsider

we didn’t ask for LLM slop, thx

I knew you were a lying promptfondler the instant you came into the thread, but I didn’t expect you to start acting like a gymbro trying to justify their black market steroid habit. new type of AI booster unlocked!

now fuck off