Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
Both the rationalists and chatbots in delusion mode offer people the chance to be the main characters in a story and not just part of a team. Organizing lawyers and lobbyists to make chatbot companies’ lives hell over years is much more effective than firebombing an office or stalking a random vehicle which the bot says has a team of corporate assassins inside.
Taka in Japan is a neurologist which I think is a type of MD.
a hackernews vibe-codes their entire desktop environment, half in rust and half in … x86 assembly. I’m thinking why waste the tokens on assembly and not just get the LLM to spit out machine code? Maybe also invent some kind of standardized way of telling the LLM what sequence of machine code instructions to spit out based on the behavior of the software I want, you know, to save tokens. We can call it “GCC”, the “generalized computer controller”.
Showed up first on Lobste.rs (by 42 min by my stats) with the author themselves as a submitter:
most of the discussion is about whether they’re a spammer or a promptfondler.
HN seems more enthusiastic
A year ago, a local Vermont reporter summarized the manifesto of Zajko the Zizian. She seemed to blame what went wrong on Rationalists + the government + Maximilian Snyder who is accused of killing their former landlord. She denied murdering her parents and wanted the world to know that she and her friends never called themselves Zizians.
A few details that remind us of the horrors we are skirting around. Imprimis:
(The landlord’s friend Thomas) Young said he searched the property after the attack and found used surgical equipment, more than a dozen laptops, and expensive electronics stashed inside the cargo trucks where the alleged assailants lived, which were registered in Vermont.
“It was actually very uncomfortable,” Young said about walking into the trucks. “You kinda wanted to put on a hazmat suit before going into it. It was really just creepy in the extreme.”
II. Another local story about a court appearance.
(A Zizian’s lawyer) Stelzig raised specific concerns that Youngblut’s confidential medical records would be incorrectly opened as part of the case. “Our client was shot and is still receiving frequent medical treatment” in jail, she said, referring to injuries Youngblut sustained in the shootout.
III. Ziz Lasota asked a rhetorical question about what might have happened to missing people who got too close to her:
Did I drive them to suicide by whistling komm susser tod (sic)? Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetic since that’s against my religion, in an improvised medical facility? (Evan Ratliff, Wired)
The medical records might just mention trans stuff or an Asperger’s diagnosis. Sneering has not felt adequate for a while but I don’t know what else to write.
Another review of Yudkowsky and Soares: if anyone reads it, everyone laughs (sadly, Substack). This one gestures to the whole university of academic fields that a book like this touches on.
The reviewer mentions “The wickedly smart Scott Aaronson” and maybe he means Aaronson’s academic publications because his general blogging is not impressive.
a world where lots of matter and energy was spent on its weird and alien needs, rather than on human beings staying alive and happy and free
Good thing we don’t live in a world like that right guys?
Wow, that’s probably one of the most in-depth critiques of the book I’ve read. Kudos to the OP
I nearly bounced off when I couldn’t tell if his praise of Kissinger (spit) was ironic, but it was ultimately a very well-rounded examination.
He does seem to list Kissinger as one of several “smart people” which is odd for a US military veteran. Lots of nonagenarians with PhDs say stupid shit.
came here to react from the same sentence
Starting this Stubsack off with a double bill from the tech world.
First, Blender accepted cash and slop commits from Anthropic, and Adobe’d their public image in the process. They put out some corpo-speak to try and quell the mob, but it isn’t working.
Second, FFmpeg put out a showcase of AI’s coding prowess:
