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.)
i read this and my brain started leaking out my ears
i want to slap each and every one of the people of X replying with something about autism
bad faith is actually incredibly easy to detect with a little practice if you’re not a bad faith idiot yourself
see why i never hang out in berkeley these days
Aella last seen shouting ‘but it is in the dictionary, I dont understand why yall keep telling me it isnt!?’
when your skulls are both packed solid with wet cat food
“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
aww, look at the little collaborators trying to pretend they both got duped instead of both having been active and enthusiastic enablers
b-but i thought they hated women rationally
I’d swear I’ve seen that exact same “realization” from Aella before, when she posted something like “I got really into tradcath practices for [the writer’s barely disguised fetish] reasons, and now I’m shocked that they really actually do hate sex work.”
Edit to add:
ok what the FUCK is goin on with the neo-trads? I was just over here enjoying this free life, individualism, subversive, unwoke cultural movement and I thought everybody was on board but suddenly BAM we’ve got a a bunch of them spawning into sex-negative tradcaths or whatever […] i’m just sad cause i thought this section of culture were my allies. we both were like ‘leave me alone, authoritarian government/culture’, and were appropriately skeptical of novel identity movements, willing to say the weirdo things.
Over on Bluesky, Mike Drucker sneers this as “German scientists in 1945 filling out their job application for Operation Paperclip”.
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Hackernews woke up feeling like fascism ( make sure to enable dead + flagged comments if you hate yourself):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696
(Two comment threads about the CDC purging “woke” research, the comments are bad even by HN standards)
Gee given a forum full of hackers you’d expect them to be against arbitrary removal of scientific studies. What happened to “information wants to be free”?
Bonus US terribleness: the NTSB suddenly thinks Twitter* is the bee’s knees and way better than email! What coincidental timing https://xcancel.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1885734974298435943
Also I know I know, more US politics. It turns out silicon valley fascists have gained power so expect this to keep happening for the forseeable future 🙃.
These past two weeks have made me very uncomfortable working in Silicon Valley, I know last time I said I was planning to get out; but now it feels urgent both for my own well being, and to stop contributing to this industry. In trans communities we immediately saw coupy stuff** for the attempted transgender genocide that it is, the wider public and media is waking up to this very slowly.
* An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool.
** If there’s interest I could try turning all of this into a top level post on morewrite or techtakes. I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
I posted this on masto just before reading this
https://mathstodon.xyz/@sc_griffith/113935375805048449
and honestly reading what you wrote here, I’m tearing up. the constant downplaying for almost a decade has really worn me down, and it’s getting worse and worse. that I see more and more people plainly describing the situation is so cathartic, such a relief
Not clicking those HN links, decided years ago already that site should not be part of my life anymore at all. The few times I have deviated from that rule since, I regretted it.
As for the more general topic, I feel so bad for all trans people with everything that is unfolding. It’s horrible. But be assured that there are many peope in this world who are on your side on this. Wish I could say something more useful, but I’m at a loss of words.
An account-only platform that sometimes bans US citizens for being cool
Not just that, but a site that, if you are bot logged in shows an accounts posts not chronologically, but most popular first. Making it totally incapable to be used as a gov communication platform. Imagine looking at a gov storm warning system for your area and seeing the list of most virally named storms first, and nothing about how you should evacuate right now.
Amd yes it is quite horrible that the usa is in the book burning and building (more) concentration camps stages of the gearing up for genocide stages. Up next, taking away passports (which they are already not issuing anymore) and any guns (not that these help, historically speaking, iirc the Jewish people had guns in Germany at first).
I’ve been trying to avoid inundating people with US politics, but it’s extremely bad. Like constitutional crisis, rise of techno-fascism, dismantling of the administrative state, transgender extermination, put career roadblocks in front of minorities bad.
yep. haven’t been posting about it here because not sure where here we’d put it (while a lot of it is well within the orbit of regular content and posters) and it’s not quite entirely anything I can do anything about but offer words of comfort and keeping watch on the nasty shit, but been speaking a lot with friends in places (signal generally, or some other spaces we actually control (i.e. not discord, etc))
I feel moderately confident that at least for a bit of the foreseeable future we’ll be okay this side of the world, but I also know enough history and context to know how vacuous that is by itself. these fuckers won’t stop.
I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake, none of this is these fuckers just finding some shit they disagree with under the seat cushions. I wish I could make them understand the depth and extent of planning and preparation that went into this, the sheer commitment behind it all. but too often such concerns would all be received as this toot put it
there’s so much more I could say but I guess I’ll leave it there for now
I also wish I could just make people understand that none of this is by mistake
I keep seeing US people go “a lot of Trumps plans were stopped at rhe courts last time”, and I keep worrying this is people fighting the last war again, not realizing that the opposition are active intelligent (as in baseline human beings not as in high IQ) people who prob are not going to be stopped by the same things as last time. Dont worry the Maginot line will stop them from invading too fast, cant get through the Ardennes sort of thinking if that makes sense.
While companies seem to be betting on anti discrimination laws being gone (why else take the legal risk of shuttering dei programs). (I have written reactions like this before and often deleted it because it feels just too doomer, but it keeps coming back to me).
I saw (via Stross) a mention that passport issuance was already starting to hit weirdness too
e: this one
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sT5MX8jK9tHiBM5NK/re-taste
A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.
No it doesn’t, you fools, you absolute rubes
If you consider your normative values to be true, then everything looks like progress.
wat
Scott Alexander was a founding though-leader behind the Lightcone salon.
Your future region of the spacetime diagram is inside a locker, nerd
Aaaah my eyes
The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.
This future doesn’t have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.
I mean, we tried the whole “fuck yeah grids fuck local geography” thing. That was fucking Le Corbusier and friends’ whole deal. And it created dead cities and/or places in cities that people hated to live in.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, if he wanted to transcend geography then he would have used heptagons!
Hexagons are great, would love to see some hexagon based city plans. Especially if they have designed for walkability and public transport!
Heck yeah walkability!
Also note how the author said the city transcends geography, as if geography was something useless or to be overcome by an advanced civilization (except for a bunch of artsy folks tucked away in a corner I guess?). But humans need variety. I would get so antsy if I lived in a perfect grid city with nothing out of order (or even a perfect hexagon city, no offense hexagons). There need to be paths and trails and rivers. There need to be trees and mountains in the distance.
Yeah weird thing to eliminate from a city, or weird thing to see without context. Basically: Wrongers try and envision a better world without deleting the parts of human experience that make it meaningful or worthwhile challenge (impossible)
But think of how high the number can go!
The ideal wronger future after all is a simulation where human experience is deleted altogether!
To be fair, im not sure how much the story intends it to be a positive development. (But considering the dada reference by the author in the comments, not sure how much is intentional at all, the whole story feels like it is retreading very tired themes in the intentional parts).
A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.
I aint clicking on LW links on my day off (ty for your service though). I am trying to reverse engineer wtf this poster is possibly saying though. My best guess: If we have a random walk in Z_2, with X_i being a random var with 2 outcomes, -1 or +1 (50% chance left at every step, 50% chance for a step to the right), then the expected squared distance from the origin after n steps E[ (Σ_{i=1}^n X_i)^2 ] = E[Σ_{i=1}^n X_i^2}] + E[Σ_{i not = j, i,j both in {1,2,…n}} X_i X_j}]. The expectation of any product E[X_i X_j] with i not = j is 0, (again 50% -1, 50% +1), so the 2nd expectation is 0, and (X_i)^2 is always 1, hence the whole expectation of the squared distance is equal to n => the expectation of the nonsquared distance should be on the order of root(n). (I confess this rather straightforward argument comes from the wikipedia page on simple random walks, though I swear I must have seen it before decades ago.)
Now of course, to actually get the expected 1-norm distance, we need to compute E[Σ_{i=1}^n |X_i| ]. More exciting discussion here if you are interested! https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RandomWalk1-Dimensional.html
But back to the original posters point… the whole point of this evaluation is that it is directionLESS, we are looking at expected distance from the origin without a preference for left or right. Like I kind of see what they are trying to say? If afterwards I ignored any intermediate steps of the walker and just looked at the final location (but why tho), I could say "the walker started at the origin and now is approx root(2n/pi) distance away in the minus direction, so only looking at the start and end of the walk I would say the average velocity is d(position)/(d(time)) = ( - root(2n/pi) - 0) /( n ) -> the walker had directional movement in the minus direction at a speed of root(2/(pi*n)) "
wait, so the “speed” would be O(1/root(n)), not root(n)… am I fucking crazy?
I think they took the rather elementary fact about random walks that the variance grows linearly with time and, in trying to make a profundity, got the math wrong and invented a silly meaning for “in retrospect”.
hundo p.
My understanding was that 21st-century psychiatrists didn’t speak Baseline nor thought that precisely
Ah a dystopian story. (Not sure if it is intended as much bte, but for me ‘ha the past was foolish, as we now have a perfect way of talking/thinking that uses math! (No you are not allowed to see it dear reader)’ is quite dystopian coded. Prob why I read Starship Troopers not as it was intended. (E: and yes prob the intention here, in this science fiction story which hypes up the writings of Scott)
https://xcancel.com/tsarnick/status/1882927003508359242
Eliezer Yudkowsky says he would like to be a post-human some day, but the way to get there is by experimenting on augmenting biological intelligence through adult gene therapy targeting the human brain with suicide volunteers who may end up schizophrenic rather than taking a “leap of death” into unconstrained AI development
(found via flipping through LW for sneerable posts/comments)
Am I reading this right? Is he suggesting doing experiments on the suicidally depressed?
L. Ron Hubbard says new “high-voltage” e-meters set to enter testing with Sea Org volunteers, possibly capable of purging body thetans at an unlimited rate
Project Gutenberg has AI generated summaries?? How the mighty have fallen.
I was researching a bizarre old sci-fi book I once read (don’t judge; bad old sci-fi is a trip), and Gutenberg’s summary claims it was written in the 21st century. There’s actually no accurate information about this book online, as far as I can tell the earliest reference is Project Gutenberg typing it up into a text file in 2003.
Given that it’s in the public domain, no one has any idea where it came from, and it has old sci-fi vibes; I strongly suspect it was written in the 20th century*; making that misinformation. It’s also just a bad summary that, while not wrong, doesn’t really reflect the (amusingly weird) themes of the book.
Anyway someone needs to tell them that no information is leagues better than misinformation.
* maybe the '70s give or take but I’m not a professional date guesser
That is indeed troubling, casts a shadow on Project Gutenberg’s judgement. Now I wonder how long until Wikipedia falls too :( Gosh, I miss being excited about new tech. Now new tech is just making things worse.
About that book, so it is more “good bad” instead of “bad bad”? Maybe I’ll take a look, some light/weird reading might be better than doomscrolling (and these days there’s so much doom to scroll).
I don’t remember (reading it was a bit like a fever dream) but there’s a non-zero chance it has racist vibes in parts you have been warned.
But oh so quotable:
We have been treating the trees on a ten mile radius with an anti-flammatory solution for several years as well, and it is quite impossible to set them on fire.
Okay thanks for the heads-up, I will give it a try. The “Note to the reader” it starts with is already pretty wild… (unless that’s just part of the fiction. Edit: I assume it’s part of the fiction)
Edit: okay… a few pages in, I don’t think I can do this… not my thing.
I myself have a collection of dutch science fiction from the 70s (doubt any of it was ever translated) and wow does it get wild at times. At least that is what I remembered from reading it when younger (the books came from my parents), the thing i remember the most was about a dude having some weird sexual relation with a spider alien. (Out of wtf factor, not out of “this awakened something” factor, not that there is something wrong with that, just eurgh spiders). Often thought about that story in relation to the puppies saying they wanted to go back to their imagined past science fiction. Bunch of reactionaries
Is there anything written up anywhere about these AI book summaries? I know they were doing “AI” audiobooks.
(After sleeping on it it’s possible the book I was thinking of was written in the earliest 21st century).
There was an announcement on their mailing list here: https://lists.pglaf.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/MTHHI3TD7YXD3EHLKVBBA57KRBBWRI72/
We then worked with the same programmers [as AI generated categories] to provide automated summaries of nearly every book in the collection. You can find those summaries on book landing pages. These summaries are intended to be helpful for people trying to decide what book to read, or to get an idea of what a book is about.
For example, here is the automated summary from book #1, the US Declaration of Independence (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1): […]
If you spot errors in summaries, let us know. Summaries of most books are based only on the first 12,000 characters, because the costs would have been too high for if we included all of every book.
We have also been corresponding with another programmer seeking to instruct AI technologies to “read” books from Project Gutenberg, summarize them, and answer questions about them. We hope this might be described further in a future newsletter.
Based off Wayback Machine poking around it looks like they were added sometime between September 20th to October 1st.
It definitely has that old sci-fi weirdness to it, but the earliest edition I’m seeing on goodreads was in '03.
The file metadata of the oldest copy on the gutenberg webserver says 2003 – and the document itself says Gutenberg created it in 2003 and published it in 2005 (whatever that means, maybe they were delaying ebook releases to ensure a steady stream)
Anyway this 2003 copy had their public domain boilerplate; it was described as a book in the public domain.
There are indeed a lot of websites about this, but none with any more information that Project Gutenberg so I’m guessing they all trace back to the Gutenberg release. Probably you’d have to find some physical information about it in an actual library to trace it further.
But I’m not like a professional book researcher or anything, that’s just my opinion!
Ick.
Some light uplifting news amid *gestures at everything*. I saw this a minute ago from the guy who runs TheCodingHorror and co-founded Stack Overflow and Discourse: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ifd3ys/im_giving_away_half_my_wealth_to_make_the/
No EA stuff! $1M each going to eight great charities and non-profits as far as I can tell: Children’s Hunger Fund, First Generation Investors, Global Refuge, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, PEN America, The Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood, and Team Rubicon. (from The Trevor Project’s blog post)
Days since tech bro tried to reinvent religion so they could javascript faster: 0. We have sold the 1 sign and donated the money.
on a side note I found out what “agile” is a few months ago and I think I’d rather go back to working retail than do the little morning circlejerk thing. dehumanizing
Rituals can be good, but yeah, agile standup meetings are not the good kind. Luckily I don’t have them daily… several times a week is already draining enough. If they were daily, I would just burn out. And the standups are IMO not even the worst part of agile…
deepseek goes wild https://www.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/1iehx5f/what_the_fuck/
I have to keep reminding myself that this is the technology that they all claim will soon do all our work, our arts, our science, everything.
oh well done, you’ve gone and made logorrhea a feature
these chatbots are billed by token, so it only makes sense
73 might be overrepresented because it’s used by radioamateurs as a signoff. you can see it in old forums in comment footers as 73 [callsign]
you’d think that $200+ entertainment would be better
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.
Finally a thing Musk prob did all by himself, after the printout your code thing I assume his technical knowledge is firmly stuck in 1999.
People have worked out how to cram DeepSeek onto a Raspberry Pi
Anyways, here’s a quasi-related sidenote:
Part of me suspects DeepSeek is gonna quickly carve out a good chunk of the market for itself - for SaaS services looking for spicy autocomplete or a slop generator to bolt on to their products, DeepSeek’s high efficiency gives them a way to do it that doesn’t immediately blow a massive hole in their finances.
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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.
It’s wild that Yudkowsky saw a binary choice of “nuclear holocaust” and “superintelligence” and chose “nuclear holocaust” in the first place.
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.
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.
The upcoming firestorms of climate change, while patrolling the Mohave desert almost make you wish for nuclear winter. Ow wait not like fallout you said
nuclear winter is not a thing that can possibly happen, from what i understand
sagan et al overstated amount of soot put in upper atmosphere over 10x, for no particular reason other than trying to make a point
notice how no one talked about it after desert storm? oilfield fires provided negative evidence
They still do nuclear war climate modelling. Its still bad.
Another dream shattered. Not sure if the oilfield fires were big enough. Volcanoes can cause some cooling right? pokes old yeller
yellowstone caldera erupting during Trump II would be fitting somehow
We’ve had recent eruptions in all be big categories, so we’re not due another one for a while and trying to cheat by setting one off early won’t allow sufficient pressure for a proper bang.
Not that I want to discourage you, but don’t be sad if you try for a year without summer and get a couple of weeks without flights instead.
The advanced sinophobia where the Chinese are so much better at everything than the west that even when they make better and cheaper bullshit machines than the Americans do and hand them out for free, it has apocalyptic consequences.
