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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)
I saw a slop ad hanging on a fence today, and I’m in half a mind to buy some spray paint just so I can write “SLOP” over it
A big marker also works, think that is how people tag things going by the smell I one noticed when some 30 year old guy tagged a table in the train I was in. (It was an odd moment).
Oh here’s a fun scenario: FAANG stocks are correcting down and now there’s concern Anthropic will have timed their IPO perfectly such that the investors make out great and the employees have to deal with very much less liquid stock than when it triggered (leading to a massive tax bill they might not be able to cover)
So…
Roko’s Taxilisk.
https://www.todayintabs.com/p/eternal-black-october
The problem with A.I. defense is the same asymmetry attackers have always had against defenders. After a hotel bombing in Brighton, England in October, 1984 that failed to kill Margaret Thatcher, the Irish Republican Army put out a statement that said “Today, we were unlucky. But remember we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.“ As it turned out, Margaret Thatcher was lucky always, but there’s no reason to believe the rest of us will be. If an A.I. hack attempt works one time out of a thousand, that’s a fantastic success rate. If your A.I. sysop “secures” your server by deleting the production database and all the backups one time out of a thousand… well. Who’s gonna be first to sign up for those odds? Roll the dice! Apparently they always come up four.
The author of More Everything Forever: A timely exposé of the ludicrous and cruel obsessions of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs cybersquatted eilezeryudkowsky.com, which i think is delightful.
Oh this will go well: Tom’s Hardware story about someone at Cisco committing to rewriting “98%” of legacy code using AI in 24 months.
Likely Pivot candidate just dropped:
VRChat refused to add an AI label despite 95% of respondents on their own survey supporting it.
Uh-oh, renowned everyman Sam Altman opened his mouth again.
Local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources.
A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data centre
but from a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time
you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment, somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that
Much better for RAM to be sitting behind a network hop with 100 milliseconds of latency amirite?
if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,
We’re all trying to find the guy who did this .jpg
Edit: also lol at the unstated implication that no one should ever want to use RAM for anything besides getting blathered at by a chatbot.
The CEO claimed that AI will potentially be able to create something as important as the transistor, or discover major efficiency gains
Did anyone ever fall for this ridiculous argument when it was used for “uhmm actually the massive datacenter buildout is great for global warming because chatbots will chat at us how to make better solar panels or something”?
It’s inefficient allocation of resources for every town to have their own library. The space sits unused a lot of the time and every library needs to allocate space to walls/doors/cpunters etc. Plus duplicate books.
Instead everyone should have one megalibrary per country.
This is good, I am smart, invest in bookly: 5he startup for buying all the books in the world
no, the most optimal way for it is to sit unused in some warehouse in taiwan, because dc isn’t built for it yet but nvidia has to get money
@sailor_sega_saturn @techtakes Much better for everyone if Salesman Sam owns all your RAM and leases it back to you by the refresh cycle!
@cstross @sailor_sega_saturn @techtakes
It is also terribly inefficient to have everyone keep a fraction of the world’s money when it could all be concentrated instead in the hands of Sam Altman, benevolent dictator-god-king for life.@cstross @sailor_sega_saturn @techtakes
And he is working on the “for life” problem…
@sailor_sega_saturn Whenever someone says “But someday AI will cure cancer/make us all rich/solve global warming,” the only possible response should be "why aren’t you using it for that already?”
@sailor_sega_saturn @Architeuthis <literally republishes papers about fundamental transistor design with authors scrubbed off>
“See it invented the transistor!”
@Architeuthis @BlueMonday1984 Now let’s talk about privately owned cars versus public transport, Sam.
YOU CAN TAKE MY LOCAL COMPUTE FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS
I’ll donate my RAM to SAlty if he comes to collect it in person, and only if I can deliver it straight to his dome
Not that Altman’s company is ahead in the AI coding race, but everyone’s PCs will still need increasing amounts of DRAM to be able to run the next generation of slop-coded JavaScript apps.
5%? Mister I run firefox.
Notable customers who run Claude Code and Cursor on laptops include Binance, amongst thousands of others.
That would be soooooo funny.
Now all it needs is that the engineer at Binance who reportedly got hacked also got his NFTs stolen.
Excuse me? What happened to the mythical cybersecurity abilities of Claude Mythos? Physician, cure thyself!
Anthropic has not informed customers, and the malicious version was silently deleted the backdoored version without telling anybody.
Now we see Anthropic’s attitude towards security when the incident does not make for good marketing. Also, considering Binance was just hacked for a massive $3B in stablecoins, and this backdoor allowed remote access to developer laptops, I have a feeling these things are connected. If that is true, then this is by far the worst cybersecurity incident involving AI, worse than even the much ballyhooed PHP2Shell.
Edit: From Molly White’s article
Binance later wrote that their “initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop”, which allowed an attacker to “submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.”
Okay, now I am really suspicious that these things are connected.
Imagine being a NK hacker rooting machines via Claude and then you discover you are on an Binance engineers machine.
North Korea gets away with stealing $3 billion from Binance
Nature is healing.
LW adds Grok(!!!) support (as in “@Grok, destroy this loser with facts and logic”) and for some reason the denizens are Not Happy
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fSaxGFMysTTeKxoMF/you-can-now-grok-on-lesswrong#comments
The article called Grok “a neutral fact checker”. I stopped reading at that point.
the website famously against AI integrates the AI famous for being evil
Did someone put too much ketamine in Yud’s coffee or are the chatbots all friendly and safe now?
Off all the chatbots they can pick they get csam megahitler, guess kimi wasnt an option.
Apparently they mean @grok as in you tag the chatbot to use your post as a prompt which I guess is a thing the nazi site pioneered, other bots are also available.
Thanks for the correction.
other bots are also available.
Does that include Kimi? Or Deepseek?
new 404 media article casts proton, the administrators of protonmail, in a somewhat unflattering light
Understatement!
The Internet’s emotional support smut is offline:
We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks. We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info.
Holy shit, that’s a long downtime. Hoping everything will be fine. The internet would be a worse place without the Archive.
An update at the same URL:
Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3. We are still in the early stages of response to this security incident and determining its scope. AO3 will remain down while we continue investigating and addressing what has been found so far. However, we want to make some things clear:
First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe.
Second, while we currently don’t believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password.
We use industry-standard techniques for storing passwords in a scrambled form that cannot easily be reversed. Even so, no hashing method can fully protect a weak or reused password from being cracked. As a precaution, we recommend that you change your passwords on any other sites where you use the same password as on AO3.
AO3 does not collect real names, so none could be exposed. Additionally, our donor information is held in an entirely separate system and is never linked to AO3, so that data has also not been exposed.
We will update everyone as our investigation continues; we may be unable to respond to individual inquiries from users. Please keep an eye on our official outlets for updates. Our next update will be posted when we have further information available.
Our current expectation is that AO3 will be down for a minimum of two weeks; however, it could take up to four weeks. During that time, we may be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state, meaning that not all features will be available and/or the site may be read-only. If we are able to do that, please be aware that we might have to bring the site back down unexpectedly as part of our recovery efforts. We will keep you in the loop for any developments
Wonder how many of their users have transitioned to beating off to artisanal probabilistic LLM smut.
I’m going to guess “few”, on general vibes.
Yeah, I’ve read a few stories in the past year or two that updated suspiciously rapidly and weren’t terribly well written. But overall the culture there is against AI generation.
Speaking in very general terms, the combination of wanting a community, writing out of abstruse passion and appreciating writing done out of abstruse passion make for an anti-AI blend. The balance of inevitable slop and hostility against inevitable slop tilts towards the latter.
I really hope so, but tbh my immediate thought was that they’d all be on “r/myboyfriendisai”
there’s no need to be condescending towards a cultural phenomenon one doesn’t understand.
Yes that’s fair, I apologise.
There have been a tragically large number of generated fics uploaded this year, but at least they’re tagged…
I imagine they’re running into the same issue that github is, just on a lesser scale.
Tesla Semi went up in flames on I-880 in the Bay Area: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-semi-fire-i880-hayward-traffic/4165797/
Between this and the carload of freshly manufactured Teslas that burned to the ground on the Grapevine on I-5 last year, that seems like only one (1) freeway-closing big-rig related explosion per year. That’s not so bad, right?
Since all the attention is on Anthropic’s IPO, OpenAI claim to refuted the ETH hypothesis
Their usual strategy of “throw unsustainable amounts of compute at spaffing out lean proofs like infinite monkey theory and rope an army of humans in to validate the proofs” seems to apply here.
The boosters hope that the AI will replace mathematicians, but they are running into an awfully inconvenient fact: theorems and proofs are useless without people who care enough to understand them and make meaning from them.
I think we will find out the hard way this also applies to software, and just about everything else they have been pushing the Great Confabulation Machine for.
Nah, my computer can totally do math on its own. Wanna see?
cos(4)
Bam!
72
Get mathed on!
4E183
See, your human brain can’t even do math like that.
To complexity theorists, this is an extremely funny situation; I bet OpenAI started by asking the bot about P vs NP and they got the worst-possible result, a useless and unexpected refutation of a conjecture. To be clear, I don’t trust Lean or OpenAI, so I don’t yet accept this result, but I hear Ryan Williams and Russell Impagliazzo are hand-checking the proof and I do trust them.
Professional rube Kevin Roose is launching a book on The AGI Race in January. The second paragraph is about effective accelerationists snorting ketamine at parties in the Mission District. He was invited like a big boy!
Why are they all into ketamine? I take it for depression and it has to be the least interesting drug. Ok not quite but all anaesthetics/downers more broadly are arse.
There are some extremely fun and hard to source drugs like 2CB they could be taking.
The Ratiionalist and Technonazi world in the USA are the only place I have heard of people using ketamine recreationally. Over here sugar, alcohol, carffeine, pot, tobacco, and opioids are the substances of choice.
ketamine is not super common generally but it’s a thing in many places, partially because it can be got from legit pharma supply chain. i heard it was big deal in china couple years back
it tends to cause memory holes with heavy use, which is why some people avoid it
It is also very common that people in traumatizing social environments self-medicate, whether secret police who are ordered to beat protestors to a pulp or the victims of a California guru. The Substack blogger who quit Anthropic in 2023 talked about how bad if felt to feel there was something wrong with what he was being asked to do and how his bosses treated him but not feel allowed to express it if he could not make a 100,000 word blog post that would never threaten the Good Works.
Professional Rube
Kevin Roose
Kevin Rube - it was right there! 😯😄
A klever ruse!
He released a book earlier this month called ‘the AGI Chronicles’ too
Oh nice I love badly edited fanfic. I’m assuming the big digital sneky boi eats all the non believing humans at the end? 🐍
Busy boy. He probably let ChatGPT write most of it.
