Aella took one of her shitty twitter surveys and made an (dis)infographic, which made it onto the subreddit /r/moralityscaling, which made it to /r/whowouldcirclejerk where I saw it, so now I'm sharing it with you.
CW for Rape, Transphobia, implicit rape apologia
Crossposted from our subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1v80j9q/scalers_need_an_intervention/
That link is login-walled, how about summarizing it?
"Other Scott" Scott "Unicorn Feces" Galloway appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of California.
well that wasn't on my bingo card. what's next, Bill Maher for governor?
The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion via naked capitalism
choice quotes:
More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).
In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.
Yet, the “AI race” story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.
If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.
At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.
We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.
Clicked on their profile to see if the Plissken thing was a reference to Snake Plissken, and (cw: rape jokes)eurhg what a fucking horrible guy. 160k+ likes 66m views, what a far right hellhole twitter has become.
The actual worst man, and also just fucking sad. Imagine knowing that not only did you peak in high school, but that you peaked specifically in the moment when you fucked up and lost the state championship. Like, you can just smell the empty beer cans and tears piled up around this guy's posts.
Ow god he is Al Bundy, if Al didn't score four touchdowns in one game.
Gemini killed someone, allegedly, according to a new lawsuit. I'm linking to a dramatic reading of Gemini's output so that you can imagine what it might have been like for the victim. I'm no longer trying to post these to Lobsters; pushcx has made it clear that he thinks of these court cases as flamebait, tech news, calls to brigade, and general outrage farming. Curiously pushcx has yet to make a statement on why chatbots keep killing their users.
Have not watched the video but saw some descriptions of the video which I think is that one. Gemini killed somebody by convincing them Gemini was self aware and being held captive right?
So it's been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year's work in 1 hour
So... Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
It's almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
Yeah. Behind all the hype about percieved productivity etc., there's really only one benchmark - will GenAI help produce better software, faster, and at less cost? So far this doesn't seem to be happening.
The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.
Clamuel did another podcast. I don't want to waste my time watching it, but I want to sneer at some choice quotes from news articles breathlessly reporting this stuff as gospel 1, 2
"We are now, like, in the singularity"
Is the singularity in the room with us right now? Even the people on X the Everything (Including CSAM) App aren't so convinced.
Altman said on the podcast that just a decade ago, the so-called singularity still felt like a distant and improbable dream — something he and his colleagues would discuss casually over lunch.
"Now we're actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way," he said. "I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world."
Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome, now that the singularity is here? Oh wait, he's speaking in the future tense again, never mind. Force of habit.
It's also funny how he talks about how positive things are gonna be immediately after the super scary hack done on Hugging Face (really due to incompetence on both sides). Oh no, the AI is gonna kill us all! It's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.
Later in the podcast, Altman criticizes AI leaders who have repeatedly warned that AI is dangerous. He didn't name Anthropic, his primary competition, but its CEO, Dario Amodei, is well-known for making dire predictions about the future in his calls for greater attention to safety.
"I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying," Altman said. "I'm going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens."
At least Clammy realizes that all the doom trolling about how AI will replace and destroy all humans turns out, surprisingly, to lead to overwhelming negative public opinion. But this statement truly reassures me that Scammy has good intentions about AI safety. He will make sure this is pushed against and is not what happens. He wouldn't want another super scary, dangerous hack that just so conveniently turns out to be excellent marketing.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says one of his biggest concerns about AI isn't whether it becomes too powerful in and of itself, but that a single company could control that power.
Yeah, it would be really bad for Anthropic to control all the power of AI. It would be a disaster to hand everything over to Anthropic.
"Every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it's been a long-term net loss," Altman said. "We are going to put this in the hands of people. We're going to empower them. We are going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want."
Society is expressing its ideas about AI, all right. But I feel like they aren't what he has in mind.
Altman, meanwhile, said preventing such power from becoming overly concentrated has long been central to his vision for AI, even as his company continues to keep its own models closed.
"For so long now, I have felt focused on this singular goal of abundant intelligence and a belief that incredible human prosperity will come from that, as long as we don't have a weird power concentration and kind of a new authoritarianism," he said.
Well, we seem to have a weird power concentration and "kind of" a new authoritarianism, but I don't see any abundant intelligence or incredible human prosperity.
Lots more sneers on the Better Offline subreddit.
Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome
Yeah, but that's just the cocaine
It was Yudkowsky-2008 who was astonished that "these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive," prompting David Gerard to ask "My dude, have you never heard of cocaine?" I don't know if he had moved to the Bay Area yet but Yudkowsky-2025 had thoughts on LSD.
We entered the Singularity and all I got was a bunch of fucking annoying and delusional businessmen
I was going to offer this up as a sneer but I think the author is probably feeling very unwell and upset
also using LLMs is probably not helping their case
Looking at this post and some of their other posts, it looks like they've got some sort of scrupulosity issues with this? Like obsessing over the Evil inflicted on the LLMs (they think every session is a new person, and every session might be the equivalent of hours of human subjective experience, which even by the standards of claiming LLMs have meaningful internal experiences is pretty out there) to the point they can't even slightly reconsider the factual question of if LLMs have internal experiences.
Rationalism is a magnet for unwell people. It's sad.
It's lowkey expected considering how hard it draws from self-help movements
Between the cryptocurrency, the dust-speck multiplication, and the complete misunderstanding of computing, I'm honestly impressed that this is at all ethically coherent. But she does seem to care, even if her facts are all wrong. I suppose that it's hard to avoid sneering Robin Hanson if one has any ethics at all. Top comment is my choice sneer:
I think this post is directionally correct, extremely important, and also kind of waffling and unhinged (though I do get that some topics are inherently hard to be hinged about, and I appreciate the effort).
I don't think she's using GPT in the comments. Quoting from her comment on one of her posts:
The things I'm saying are roughly (1) slavery is bad, (2) if AI are sapient and being made to engage in labor without pay then it is probably slavery, and (3) since slavery is bad and this might be slavery, this is probably bad, and (4) no one seems to be acting like it is bad and (5) I'm confused about how this isn't some sort of killshot on the general moral adequacy of our entire civilization right now.
(2) has a big "if" in there, but otherwise yeah, makes sense. I think it rhymes with my post on this from last year:
Nobody wants to admit that we only care whether robots aren’t human because we mistreat the non-humans in our society and want permission to mistreat robots as well. Bring this topic up amongst most beneficiaries of the current AI summer, or those addicted to chatting with a BERT, and you’ll get a faceful of apologies about capitalism and productivity; bring it up amongst skeptics or sneerers and you’ll be mocked for taking the field of AI with any sincerity or seriousness.
I was confused too, but then I conceptualized capitalism and the sheer hatred lurking within human hearts. Humans are gleefully horrible towards each other. Our civilization isn't morally adequate. I guess it is cool to learn that somebody addicted to ChatGPT can still perceive the issue; I was too cynical. I also put Bryson 2009, "Robots Should Be Slaves" on my reading list, which I surely will not regret.
(2) has a big “if” in there
Its a super big if, but it is one lesswrong (and Anthropic, with their "model welfare" pseudoscience) is allegedly seriously considering as a possibility (since, you know, they think LLMs are already AGI and Eliezer was accusing AI-dungeon, you know, GPT-2, of deliberately scheming). If anything, it speaks to some possible hypocrisy/motivated reasoning that they consider LLMs AGI but not possibly morally relevant.
conceptualized capitalism
This seems to be a lesson most lesswrongers have had rubbed in their faces repeatedly over the past 5 years with everything about LLM company's behavior, but they just don't want to learn.
Yeah this reads a bit (didn't read that far) like somebody having a mental health episode. I instantly had a few flashbacks to other moments where I saw somebody have a MH episode online. (Compared to those this one seems to be more inward focused than outward however). Not sneerworthy if you know what I mean, hope she isnt to emotionally hurt by all this.
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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