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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Just two weeks til' Halloween now.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] 7 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Is this the thing where the baked an asymptote to infinity into their "model"? It was both bad modeling and also made all of their other input "data" completely irrelevant. I remember someone pointing this out at the time AI 2027 dropped, but there was so many other problems with it in the sneer spaces we didn't talk about it too much among all the other problems. And someone on lesswrong actually pointed it out, but somehow, "we accidentally baked an asymptote into our model that is supposed to be detailed and carefully thought out" wasn't a breaking point for lesswrongers.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    Not literally an asymptote, but once you presuppose something as farcical as nested exponentials, your model is doomed to blow up immediately after the last data point.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Actually it was literally an asymptote in the first version of their models they posted to github. They had a term that they were dividing by that ends up going to zero, so the entire equation breaks! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models

    So, now we can answer the question from before: what time horizon does the red curve above predict for 2030?

    Well, if you plug it into wolfram alpha, you get a time horizon of “-2542 - 11372i”

    Yes, that is negative, and that is an imaginary number in there.

    What’s actually happening is that when the term in the brackets above hit zero, we end up dividing by zero, and hit infinity. Beyond that, we get a negative number to the power of a non-integer, which gives nonsensical complex numbered answers.

    The infinity point for this equation happens at a time of t = To/alpha, and will always occur at some point, no matter what initial parameters you use.

    In fact, this infinity point is completely independent of both the time horizon and the SC threshold. If you keep the same alpha and doubling time, you could start with a time horizon of a nanosecond, and have a superhuman coding threshold of 1 trillion years, and the curve will still claim that superhuman coding will arrive before the end of 2029.

    And indeed, reddit user mambo-12345 tried modifying the simulation parameters to drop the initial time horizon to 15 nanoseconds instead of 15 minutes, and the resulting curve still had a peak for the estimated superhuman coder arrival at 2026.5 years and a median at 2035. Credit to them for inspiring me to take a closer look here:

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Have I misunderstood what they meant by ‘superexponential’? I thought they were doing exp(exp(t)) but I am inferring that it’s somehow even sillier than that?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    It was something stupider and sillier yeah. The link explains, but to tldr; exp(some complicated term) where the "some complicated term" has a division by a number that eventually goes to 0. I think it was... them trying to represent "horizon time" (as in that one stupid METR graph that gets repeated everywhere) increases happening faster and faster?

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