The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
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.)
Some descriptors for ‘democratised’ software that people can slop for themselves:
Slop as single-use software
Slop as fast fashionbow before the true champion of the working class, s e gyges:
a lot of opposition to AI is rent seeking, and the material incentives of being a rentier, even a small time one, lead you towards fascist conclusions from first principles
between him saying this, and other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious and being enslaved (and being actually fine with helping promulgating what they truly believe is slavery, because hey, you need to pay the rent), i am afraid something worse than usual entered the californian drinking water.
(not linking to the skeet on purpose).
I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My “Very Sane AI Newsletter” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.
TFG: Everything I don’t like is rent seeking. Checkmate, anyone ideologically to the left of me
other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious
Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness since early spring (tldr: currently not really, but it’s inevitable because I really want it to, so don’t be on the wrong side of history when it happens).
He’s seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI sentiment as an unforgivable moral failing.
just yesterday that motherfucker posted allegation that “slop” is a word from nazi vocabulary. so that bitch says that any criticism of ai is far right signifier actually. as in, the product being sold on a promise of displacing all labour and redirecting all wealth to five sfba dipshits, and cooking brains of maga boomers worldwide as we speak
Really hope the people outside of our little forum paid attention when warned Gyges was also an AI doomer.
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for speaking english
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for using slop jar to mean the vessel into which chamber pots are poured, in 1855
“Slop” as we use it to describe AI outputs came into the discourse via left-wing twitter and podcasts using “slop” as a term for mass entertainment media (like Marvel movies — cape slop). Used negatively but also self deprecatingly: I can’t wait for the new episode of “Stranger Things”, because I need my slop. The explicit metaphor is pigs happily eating buckets of food waste from a trough. It’s just slop. Nothing nefarious.
they’re collectively spiraling.
Look he is right, if you redefine ‘rent’ to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.
In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).
He points out that mathematicians are also rent-seekers (though only 20% rent-seeking). You know, those famously capital-extractive mathematicians.
Oh my god he’s doing fandom gatekeeping discourse
yeah it like. infuriates me that “fully automated luxury communism” was named in a way to specifically pay homage to the past. the word “communism” itself is some sort of vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things
https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3my3letkpbc2b
Lol dorkus
It’s “fully automated luxury gay space communism”, and every adjective is a pithy critique of the past.
vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things
The “vicious traditionalism” that develops among his fellow travelers, who insist that some form of autonomous, inscrutable AI has to be the next step in technological progress, will be something to see. Religious movements don’t just stop when their central prophecy disappoints.
“Lol dorkus” is an idiomatic translation of Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur (more literally “What is freely asserted is freely denied”), and if you call that “Hitchens’s razor” I will fucking cut you.
I just wonder if he means ‘they are looking to pay their rent’ or ‘they are holding on the ‘capital of being able to do math’ and want to be paid for it’.
Damn, I was raking in so much cash from my mathematical theorems. Pretty good source of passive income, came with nice tax benefits too. Too bad it’s all gone now. Maybe I should put my money in REITs.
… the fuck?
Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition’s obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?
I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I’m sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.
So far I’ve come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and “rent seeking”. If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it “better”, and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn’t stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.
And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.
Yeah, I mean you could twist it to say labour unions do nothing but let workers rent-seek on their human capital instead of getting paid the only true god-given market rate. USian brainworms all the way.
another ai pusher recently generated a slop image, where she and the chairman xi are fighting the united forces of darkness, which include the ai companies, people opposing the LLM embrace and american conservatives. the thing they’re fighting over? “open technology”.
say hello to the TankAIs
…and all of them are working for one or another californian ai company or a slopware house.
q: is an image derivative of a slop image still a slop image if the process of creating the derivative did not involve Sloppy Babobots? Asking for a friend, who is me, also this question is not intended to be philosophical.
What do you have in mind specifically? Parody? It depends a little on intent but I would say not a problem at all, others might disagree.
Found another booster graph about AI 2027
wonder why ‘absolute horizons depend on calibration’ is written in the smallest text at the bottom of the page…
I have unfortunately stumbled upon some nonsense from r/singularity
shockingly, the top comments are calling bs:
”I’m sorry but I think this time line is a load of bull. “Human task duration at 80% success”. How exactly do you put a millenium prize puzzle on such an axis? It doesn’t even make any sense. Whoever is making this chart is just trying to stay relevant but his analysis holds little predictive power.”
They also missed how that graph is measuring software/coding tasks, while the OP was estimating based off math ability, which are two wildly different fields
i also like how they skipped the part where it was 10k (or whatever) instances running in parallel
Lesswrongers go full panpsychism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wCY4oNHpH2HGYGSoP/the-user-in-the-llm-might-be-a-moral-patient-too-a-strange
To try to TLDR this multilayered bit of crazy… lesswrongers already theorize LLMs might be sapient and/or have morally meaningful internal experiences. Except… LLMs obviously “behave” wildly differently when prompted differently and especially when put into different “agent harnesses”… so the big brain follow-up thought is what if the different personas an LLM can exhibit are all different “people” (for the purposes of utilitarian accounting and/or what their internal experiences are like… the exact “theory” can vary by lesswronger). The even more insane full galaxy brain follow-up thought: what if the user’s input to the LLM is forming yet another “person”, like a copy/reflection/simulacrum of the user!
TLDR for the TLDR: What if not only the LLM was sentient/sapient, but also held a sentient/sapient simulacrum of the user inside!
Can we just revoke these peoples’ internet loicense please? Increasingly I empathize with the award winning and erudite medical doctors who get wheeled out on talk shows to argue with “Bob, 57, drinks his own piss daily” as a peer.
IMF bearish on AI.
Anyway here’s my character, South Korean AI booster Bob Vylan: “Death, death to the IMF!”
The IMF is basically always saying get ready to fuck the poors with a rusty chainsaw.
That’s like their whole thing, their raisin dough etcetera as they say.
Looks like AI can be everyone’s reason for everything. The rich can use it to get richer and make the poors poorer.
Slop foundries solved the “slop is uncopyrightable” problem by making the output so awful that nobody would want to pinch it
Is there a history of how the cult of prediction markets spread to Silicon Valley? Its an old idea but since the 1990s is especially popular with Libertarians and hard neoliberals like Robin Hanson. When did it get on LessWrong? By 2013 or so, rationalists were telling strangers at social events that the only way to know if a healthcare system worked was to bet on it, and not just, you know, risk your life and health on it.
Well I think the history is just how LW started, with Hanson’s blog and LW being intertwined. They are largely the same space. See also how Hanson spawned the great filter idea.
Cyberlibertarianism covers it relatively well.
I think a major influence was “Wisdom of the Crowds” which was discussed in the SF / Berkeley tech community quite a bit back then. At some point that got combined with gambling. There’s an old reference here dated 2007: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how_and_when_tohtml
There was the Cathedral and Bazaar stuff too, although that was less about markets and more about collective wisdom. Early FOSS culture was anticapitalist so the Libertarians had to frame things carefully.
Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?
He is a close associate of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who formerly co-blogged with Hanson on Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias, before starting LessWrong.
RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.
I can’t find much about prediction markets on SlatStarCodex except a 2016 review of Superforecasters which takes the view that :
Maybe all this stuff about probability calibration, inside vs. outside view, willingness to change your mind, and fighting cognitive biases is starting to sound familiar? Yeah, this is pretty much the same stuff as in the Less Wrong Sequences and a lot of CFAR work. They’re both drawing from the same tradition of cognitive science and rationality studies.
So maybe it was Hanson > Yud > Rationalist / EA culture, but Hanson likes to take credit for ideas much older than him. And we know the Rats rely on pop science and podcasts much more than research literature.
The futarchy paper is funny because Hanson had the idea in 2000 but took 13 years to publish it. That is a good sign that he kept getting a desk reject or “revise and resubmit.” But were people reading his blog, a mix of Libertarian fringe writing, or specifically something by Yudkowsky or SlateScott?
Phil Tetlock started his career and the Expert Political Judgement project at the University of California Berkeley although he moved to PA in 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock
futarchy
Once upon a time it would take just one piece of art and a hashtag to completely derail the meaning of this
I am sure Robin Hanson knows about Japanese hermaphrodites because he hates women and hangs out with bad crowds online. He is just a bit more discreet than Yud.
CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie
guys what if AI makes something really really good won’t that make people not want to kill it???
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=5GqafvboceJ7phYLj
releasing something like a room-temperature superconductor could be beneficial
[…]
Other tech breakthroughs - an amazing video game
Okay.
And it can’t even make proper video games. (A lot of companies do use AI tools (and experience a backlash) it seems quite bad at making video games, in fact there was a remake (? I think could also be a remaster) of the older game shogun 2 which used a lot lf AI to remake it, and it was so bad it has been pulled from sale, this was last/this week btw).
If the world was really different I guess it would be.
“If only the fuckable stupor computer would cure cancer so that people would stop calling us sloperators”
Jonny took a look at Meta’s “Wonder” model they just released. Here’s how the thread starts:
The hourly history backup just failed in a way you should hear about plainly: the backup worker accidentally deleted the backup repo itself mid-run. The repo’s entire git history and all the DB sidecar files up to watermark 330145 are gone — that deletion was the worker’s own mistake, not a platform event.
So I got bored and for some reason decided to look at the AI 2027 prediction grading doc again…and its Claude Mythos rank is just straight up wrong?
To quote the doc: “ The current best 80% time horizon is Mythos Preview at 186 minutes (version 1.1; there is no measurement for version 1.0). The methodology change from TH1.0 to TH1.1 drops the best model as of AI 2027 publication (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) by 2/3 from 15 to 10 minutes. Because we care more about the pace of progress rather than the absolute values, we look at when the AI 2027 trajectory reaches 186*(3/2)=279 minutes. In a central AI-2027-speed trajectory from our AI 2027 timelines model, 279 minutes is achieved in May 2026.”
Except Claude Sonnet wasn’t dropped to 10 minutes, it was dropped to 12. to play devil’s advocate maybe it was updated between then and now? but it doesnt seem like it.
Kind of fascinated by how this guy has gone into reddit threads about this to complain about being bullied, including complaining that people are sharing this screenshot with his full name and face unredacted. Buddy, I don’t know what to tell you about who’s responsible for that one.
Plot twist: he just told the chatbot to put in a screen about slop usage, didn’t look at the result, and it dug up a photo portrait from his photos without him noticing
I recognise that the sloperator is pretty damn insecure about their AI usage. [YES][NO]
Feel like this blog must have made the rounds but today is the first time I’m actually reading it and it’s sharp enough to cut with:
Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer out the window of a passing Kia.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 “… sharp enough to cut with” is brilliant, I want to steal it!
My mother, who paid for Haverford, says she didn’t raise a drug dealer. That’s accurate. She raised a quant, and the quant made a lateral move.
🤌🤌🤌 Chef’s fucking kiss
.I thought GPT 2 had already hit the point of “Writing better than Aella”
Nah I think it was earlier than that… Markov chain models!
In fact you could probably do better by building script that pseudo-randomly picks words from categories containing “intelligent sounding” words and “lewd” words and “edgelord” words
As if insufficient volume of text output was ever a problem among lesswrongers
Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?
I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me “wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies” I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.
Edit: thanks everyone for responses, I’ll get my friend started with Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse and then point him at rational wiki for any further questions.
What type of documentation are you looking for? The big picture is easily googleable and wikipediable: EY got a few of the super-rich excited enough about doomer drama to bankroll the founding of OpenAI, whose governing body was mostly EAs (until the Altman-Nadella counter-coup) while Anthropic were the people who bailed because they though OAI weren’t serious enough about alignment, and suddenly getting dicked in a rationalist
compoundgroup house has immense career implications in the burgeoning AI sector.Also terms like AGI, ASI, AI alignment, existential risk et al started out as lesswrong shibboleths, and so-called alignment research is almost completely a rationalist circlejerk.
Pinning the EA/rats down as a cult is where it gets murkier because it’s mostly them telling on themselves in social media and blog post implications, like how they foster a culture of zero personal boundaries, ingroup overdependence and rigid hierarchies stratified around claimed IQ and proximity to the Great Work of not messing up the robot god incantation that ends the world.
You could do worse than the Behind the Bastards episode on the Zizians, mostly because unlike Leverage or MAPLE who kind of did their own thing but with rationalist funding and human capital, the Zizians can be fairly described as what happens if you actually take the more esoteric aspects of rationalism seriously.
Also, the really powerful people keep the details mercifully secret. My elevator pitch is “remember how the exec team at FTX were living in a penthouse apartment, sleeping together, and posting harem fantasies? People who have met them say the Rationalists and AI company staff live like that.”
There is always RationalWiki but its not really equipped to deal with the polycule and abuse of sexual power stuff (or all the giant institutiions taking Internet cranks seriously). https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
