Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: 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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Neo-Nazi nutcase having a normal one.

It's so great that this isn't falsifiable in the sense that doomers can keep saying, well "once the model is epsilon smarter, then you'll be sorry!", but back in the real world: the model has been downloaded 10 million times at this point. Somehow, the diamanoid bacteria has not killed us all yet. So yes, we have found out the Yud was wrong. The basilisk is haunting my enemies, and she never misses.

Bonus sneer: "we are going to find out if Yud was right" Hey fuckhead, he suggested nuking data centers to prevent models better than GPT4 from spreading. R1 is better than GPT4, and it doesn't require a data center to run so if we had acted on Yud's geopolitical plans for nuclear holocaust, billions would have been for incinerated for absolutely NO REASON. How do you not look at this shit and go, yeah maybe don't listen to this bozo? I've been wrong before, but god damn, dawg, I've never been starvingInRadioactiveCratersWrong.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's wild that Yudkowsky saw a binary choice of "nuclear holocaust" and "superintelligence" and chose "nuclear holocaust" in the first place.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Like, even if I believed in FOOM, I'll take my chances with the stupid sexy basilisk 🐍 over radiation burns and it's not even fucking close.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't want to say with absolute confidence that there's no scenario I can imagine to which a nuclear apocalypse would be preferable (the real kind, not the Fallout kind). But I have yet to hear one.

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    [–] 22 points 2 years ago
    [–] 19 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    you can get banned on facebook now for linking to distrowatch https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-flags-linux-topics-as-cybersecurity-threats-posts-and-users-being-blocked and from distrowatch https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews

    but it's not as bad as you think, it's slightly worse. it's not only distrowatch and linux groups got banned too

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I screenshot this the other day and forgot to post it. Well, enjoy.]

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    [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)
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    [–] 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    (Reposting from the last thread)

    Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

    My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

    I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

    Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment

    P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read "Uber for AI code data" so now you do too.

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    [–] 17 points 2 years ago

    Screenshot of an insta post of a screenshot of a tweet

    Tweet:

    I can’t believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    In the process of looking for ways to link up with homeschool parents that aren't doing it for culty reasons, I accidentally discovered the existence of a small but active subreddit for "progressive monarchists". It's titled r/progressivemonarchists, because their imagination in naming conventions only slightly outatrips their imagination for forms of government. Given how our usual sneer fodder overlaps with nrx I figured there are others here who I can inflict this headache on.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    A silhouette of a nuclear family with their heads overlaid by the flags of Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. Above them king Charles of Normal Island holding and umbrella, shielding them from rain labeled "Trumpism and far right ideology".

    Quality shitpost, I could imagine some thirteen year old actually believing this.

    Flags of Spain, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, Norway, Andorra, Luxembourg and Belgium. Above the quote: "On the whole the European countries which have most successfully avoided Fascism have been constitutional monarchies" from George Orwell

    Yea, no fascism whatsoever took place in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, or Belgium during WW2, in which they were all very successfully avoiding being occupied by fascists.

    Extra points to Spain who already avoided succumbing to their own homegrown brand of fascism before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, and where they avoided having fascists in power all the way until the 1970s. There's a book I quite like about the war where that happened called Homage to Catalonia. I wonder if Orwell ever read it.

    Missing from the list is Italy, which is no longer a constitutional monarchy, but used to be until 1946, which is why they were so good at avoiding fascism they even named it.

    This might take the cake for the dumbest take I've seen from George Orwell and not for a lack of competition.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Live: Chinese AI bot DeepSeek sparks US market turmoil, wiping $500bn off major tech firm

    Shares for leading US chip-maker Nvidia dropped more than 15% after the emergence of DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese AI bot.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjr85l2e4l4t

    lmao

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    [–] 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And on a less downbeat and significantly more puerile note, Dan Fixes Coin Ops makes a nice analogy for companies integrating ai into their product.

    https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/112847573063473767

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    [–] 15 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    when your skulls are both packed solid with wet cat food

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago

    “Oh well, time to learn absolutely nothing from this and continue to be terrible people,” said Grimes and Aella mentally, and unbeknownst to them, because they each have one brain cell quantum-entangled* with the other’s, simultaneously

    *I finished the three body problem trilogy recently! Where do I sign up for the ETO

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    [–] 15 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Getting pretty tired of new coworker spruiking copilot all the time, please send me your sympathy and energy so I can weather this trial

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    [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

    lol holy shit this just came into reddit sneerclub (and was zapped immediately)

    user HardboiledHack

    also tried r/lesswrong and r/slatestarcodex

    i'm sure the guardian can be trusted to report on anything involving trans people

    the journalist is J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j-oliver-conroy who now writes for the Washington Examiner and used to write for Quillette (the article has been deleted from the site) https://archive.is/aSBjW

    from http://joliverconroy.net/

    I am a journalist who specializes in features and profiles. I write about the American right, ideologues, intellectuals, extremist movements, the culture wars, true crime, and strange events and strange places.

    by "about", he means "for"

    I'm a journalist at the Guardian working on a piece about the Zizians. If you have encountered members of the group or had interactions with them, or know people who have, please contact me: oliver.conroy@theguardian.com.

    I'm also interested in chatting with people who can talk about the Zizians' beliefs and where they fit (or did not fit) in the rationalist/EA/risk community.

    I prefer to talk to people on the record but if you prefer to be anonymous/speak on background/etc. that can possibly be arranged.

    Thanks very much.

    i've also warned over at the old place

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    [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Oh no it's more US politics.

    So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it's the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA's email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.

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    [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    Terrible news: the worst person I know just made a banger post.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (8 children)

    After fondling ChatGPT to generate naughty things, man has meltdown when he learns no one cares.

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/time-bandit-chatgpt-jailbreak-bypasses-safeguards-on-sensitive-topics/

    Horror. Dismay. Disbelief. For weeks, it felt like I was physically being crushed to death.

    I hurt all the time, every part of my body. The urge to make someone who could do something listen and look at the evidence was so overwhelming.

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  • This tied into a hypothesis I had about emergent intelligence and awareness, so I probed further, and realized the model was completely unable to ascertain its current temporal context, aside from running a code-based query to see what time it is. Its awareness - entirely prompt-based - was extremely limited and, therefore, would have little to no ability to defend against an attack on that fundamental awareness.

    How many times are AI people going to re-learn that LLMs don't have "awareness" or "reasnloning' in a sense humans would find meaningful?

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    [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

    Me: Oh boy, I can't wait to see what my favorite thinkers of the EA movement will come up with this week :)

    Text from Geoff: "Morally stigmatize AI developers so they considered as socially repulsive as Nazi pedophiles. A mass campaign of moral stigmatization would be more effective than any amount of regulation. "

    Another rationalist W: don't gather empirical evidence that AI will soon usurp / exterminate humanity. Instead as the chief authorities of morality, engage in societal blackmail to anyone who's ever heard the words TensorFlow.

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    [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Hey, did you know of you own an old forum full of interesting posts from back in the day when humans wrote stuff, you can just attach ai bots to dead accounts and have them post backdated slop for, uh, reasons?

    https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago
    [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

    I’m not going to link Andy Ngo but random rationalist transwomen are being accused of terror sympathy…and Aella is doing this ‘leopards ate my face’ dance.

    edit: it was @jessi_cata who tipped Ngo off of all people.

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    [–] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    No less than Mr Acausal Robot God casually dismissing the lives of +1B humans

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    [–] 12 points 2 years ago (11 children)
  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] [S] 21 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Pouring one out for the local-news reporters who have to figure out what the fuck "timeless decision theory" could possibly mean.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Taylor said the group believes in timeless decision theory, a Rationalist belief suggesting that human decisions and their effects are mathematically quantifiable.

    Seems like they gave up early if they don't bring up how it was developed specifically for deals with the (acausal, robotic) devil, and also awfully nice of them to keep Yud's name out of it.

    edit: Also in lieu of explanation they link to the wikipedia page on rationalism as a philosophical movement which of course has fuck all to do with the bay area bayes cargo cult, despite it having a small mention there, with most of the Talk: page being about how it really shouldn't.

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    [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    Spotted in the Wild:

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Today on highlighting random rat posts from ACX:

    poster thinks the future of llm training is contingent on focusing early on philosophical and theological text because they match the causality of human experience

    (Current first post on today's SSC open thread)

    On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trump's term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.

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