Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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 cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      8 months ago

      Jesus, that second post.

      [Benzos are] not only a great amnestic, it’s also apparently one of the most heavily prescribed drug classes historically, and used recreationally - which puts very strong lower bounds on the drug’s safety in practice, and means it’s probably readily available.

      Yeah, because no widely used drug has ever turned out to be harmful, right?! Right?! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to huff some glue. After all, glue huffing is widely practiced recreationally - by kids, even - so it’s probably safe, right?

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      9·
      8 months ago

      it sounds like what they’re trying to do is Wada test, for no particular reason, with zero knowledge what they’re trying to do or what tools do they need for that

      about everything what could they learn from that is already described in psychiatry and psychology textbooks, but it’s too hard for homeschooled first-principlers like them

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      8 months ago

      Nothing illustrates the difference between rational and Rationalist than ignoring the advice of trained professionals and instead roping in a SO to help perform ad-hoc personality tests. Dude’s gonna need to work to keep that girlfriend coz it’s unlikely he’s going to find someone else willing to put up with his shit.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      8·
      8 months ago

      we have mkultra at home

      on the other hand, that’s just speedrunning being jordan peterson

      on the third hand, our very good friend apparently never had been drunk

      on the fourth hand, our very good friend also didn’t clock that maybe his ability to assess his own mental state was disturbed (it was) (severely)

      on the fifth hand, this is an effect of many drugs, iv line suggests midazolam but maybe ketamine was an option. neither are exactly easily available for regular civilian (other benzos are)

      first principling that benzos are completely safe, yeah way to go, 10/10. also not their first rodeo, but lwers on drugs would be megaminds on adderal, at least that’s what could be noticed previously

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      8 months ago

      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.

      What…

      Makes you wonder if LW just attracts people with weird paranoid thoughts, or that you get more weird paranoid thoughts due to being a lot on lesswrong. Right

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        8 months ago

        This is another example of how LW is a cult, if some other commenter had replied like this you’d expect the reply to be ignored but the respondent is of the same tribe, so author has no problem exposing them (and himself, by extension) as cranks to an appreciative audience (us).

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    8 months ago

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

    A reddit ad: "What if things go right? A winter wonderland glittering with possibilities for discovery and play. Delve into the possibilities of artificial intelligence in Deep Utopia, by New York Times best selling authro Nick Bostrom. Available Now."

    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.

  • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      8 months ago

      You can like a thinker without endorsing all of their beliefs, even if their beliefs are evil. Why do people like Schmitt and Heidegger even though they were fascists? Or Foucault given his views on the age of consent? I agree that Hanania’s views are relevant context, but I think it’s fine to write a book review that doesn’t try to analyse the author’s motivations or the book’s place in a wider political context.

      Hanania is clearly analogous to Foucault and Heidegger, and also is it even wrong to completely divorce a work from all context.

      I think Scott was simply more interested in writing an article on arguments aginst civil rights law than an article on whether Hanania is engaged in an insidious project to smuggle rascist ideas into the mainstream via his legal arguments, and frankly I find that kind of review more interesting too. Perphaps this is irresponsible, but at the end of the day Scott is a modestly influential blogger that just likes to write about things he finds interesting.

      uwu smolbean blogger with absolutely no agenda besides the pursuit of truth and civility strikes again.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      8 months ago

      Scott is of the opinion that being able to maintain peaceable discourse with people who you deeply disagree with on political issues is an important feature of society which we shouldn’t readily make exceptions to.

      “Scott being nice to racists and reviewing their books positively actually means he’s less racist” is a good rhetorical trick.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        8 months ago

        HBD is a legit line of scientific inquiry you guys, it’s not just eugenics obsessed weirdoes and fascists trying to bring back birthright as the primary path to privilege.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        8 months ago

        It’s also a patently idiotic philosophy boiling down to basically negotiating with terrorists.

    • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      8 months ago

      So what exactly happens to people who get really into Scott et al. and then realize that they’re racist? I mean people like OP who genuinely seemed shocked by how buddy buddy their “unorthodox” intellectuals are with blatant racists.

      Do they slowly disengage from rationalist-spheres, or do they just become cryptoracists like all the other idw types?

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        8 months ago

        They start reading sneerclub and then see that the stereotypes about hwo horrible the place is are not true. Then they post, then they are lost.

      • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        8 months ago

        Also what the fuck?

        In your mind, is a racist who “possesses strong animus towards non-whites” a special category of person with which we should not engage in any kind of discussion? Or if we should not be casual towards them, how should we act? Why?

        • 200fifty@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          8 months ago

          is this trying to say “discrimination against racists is the real racism”? … Would that be “racismism”?

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            8 months ago

            “should we really treat violent racists any differently from how we would casually treat a neighbour? what is it really you expect me to do do? why are you so ridiculous?”

            just some casual afternoon reframing of violent racism and dehumanising anyone that isn’t like themselves, no biggie

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    8 months ago

    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.

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        8 months ago

        Imagine going to university only to learn that the president falls for grifters that 10 year olds can detect.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        I often thing back about the smug coiners mocking the TSA agent looking for physical bitcoins on a pro bitcoin person, when they do stuff like put bitcoin data in actual coins or make bitcoin coins.

        (It does amaze me a little bit none of them seem to got that this was actually bad for bitcoin, as this just shows how hard to understand it all is for normal people, and them doing it themselves is just confusing more people intentionally)

    • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      8 months ago

      i couldn’t delete the one question i had on stackoverflow, so i used a text generator to overwrite the body and title of the question. fight garbage with garbage

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      8 months ago

      I swear to god, starting a nature vs. nurture debate in a place leaning even slightly libertarian just breaks my brain because I never understand what point they’re even trying to make.

      Half of them seem to argue that this is proof rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor (although I fail to see from which side they’re coming) while the other half uses it as thin-veiled excuses to be racist without mentioning race.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      in the last couple of years I’ve gotten back into sound (used to work live/tv sound ages back, been trying to learn more production and shit) and as a result of that I’ve gotten to know a looooooot of synth/production/effect/… related things

      and christ it hurts to listen to that

      • carlitoscohones@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        8 months ago

        I thought that the overproduction and heavy autotune was appropriate to the subject.

        On topic:

        “Tape machines ought to be big and cumbersome and difficult to use, if only to keep the riff-raff out.”

        –Steve Albini

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          8 months ago

          The obvious weird pauses (between superhuman and AI and the halfway part where suddenly nothing happens) because the AI used to made this doesn’t really understand music are also very appropriate.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          gonna have to read that piece to get the context of the remark. also have a nuanced position on both the things you point to, but you’re definitely correct about the use of this in this context

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        That is not the only bad thing, check the right side of the moons opening image, why is the moon hairy?

  • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    7 months ago

    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

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      7 months ago

      The fact that actual engineers have been trying to educate newcomers on Unicode for at least 20 years and not only is it still pervasively ignored but the hottest, newest, cutting edge AI that Will Change Everything™ with billions of dollars and so many manhours behind it gets absolutely dumbfounded when it sees é is the exact combination of funny and sad that will eventually result in me turning into a Butlerian Jihad Joker.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        7 months ago

        Every respectable programming language has functionality in its standard library that recognises letter characters

        As a C++ programmer I’ve never been so offended by something I so entirely agree with.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

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

      hmm. I can guess at a few reasons this could be happening: model coders “normalizing” everything to flat-ascii in training, or similar happening at training stage (because of the previously-referenced RLHF datamills employing only people with specific localized dialects, instead of wider context-local languages), etc.

      wonder if this particular thing is a confluence of those, or just one specific set

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        have you ever met an English-native dev who didn’t need to be trained out of the world being 7-bit ascii

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          I got lucky and largely missed out on having to deal with those, at a guess largely because of location and age. the type I got to deal with instead were the php-/perl-brained “everything is just a string” types

          hell, (circa 2010) I had beers with someone once who was really into Tcl and Second Life, and wanted to be uploaded as a digital consciousness. way before I knew about the other nutjobs, but in retrospect I now have a couple other questions I might’ve wanted to ask at the time…

          • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            7 months ago

            First efforts at bible digitization seems incredibly poorly documented online, and from a casual inspection in google scholar, not very well referenced. It’s a pity it sounds like a fascinating topic, though 7 bits is likely for the first english versions yes (And according to this there are horrid 7-bits encodings for the ancient greek)

          • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
            2·
            7 months ago

            My Jesus wanted characters for drawing borders and playing card suits, which is why He handed down to us Code Page 437. Using the upper 128 characters for things like vowels with funny marks on them is catholic heresy (nuts to Latin 1, down with Unicode).