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 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.)
deleted by creator
Can I delete the Chrome’s OptGuideOnDeviceModel safely? It’s taking up 4GB
. . .
I also founds mentions of bunch of various flags you can potentially disable to turn the whole feature off, e.g. chrome://flags/#optimization-guide-on-device-model - but I’ve seen at least 5 other ones mentioned in several sources, with various people claiming for each that they don’t work . . .
Now Chrome can hog your VRAM too. Yay
Don’t worry if you only have 8GB and need the other half for anything, Chrome will probably relinquish it. This is very intelligent, as all the browser has to do is simply load another 4GB file from disk the next time you do anything.
Somehow, HPMoR could have been even worse.
I ruled no intelligence enhancement magic in HPMOR because otherwise it turns into Project Lawful.
Ron reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of instant death potion (known to muggles as cyanide) and force fed it to Harry Potter. He was rewarded with accolades, wealth and fame and lived happily ever after.
Ron reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of potion that makes you talk like a conservative bullshit artist and said “Have you ever heard of Chesterton’s fence, Potter?” Harry, hearing a genetive case proper noun spoken as a part of two word noun phrase suddenly realized he was no longer talking to a strawman of a simpleton. “The burden of proof is in fact on you, the reformer, to first make a strong case for status quo to prove you understand why things are the way they are before you can even begin to challenge the state of things.” Harry was immediately convinced quidditch is good as is and voted Tory twice.
Harry takes a swig and immediately sees the truth: that he is the smartest specialest bestest boy in the universe. He spends the remaining 73 chapters celebrating and gloating about this fact while accomplishing nothing. So the story doesn’t meaningfully change at all.
Harry was immediately convinced quidditch is good as is
Fun fact: the Harry Potter fandom (when it still existed) turned Quidditch into an actual real-life sport back in 2003 (with the first game being played at HP fan-convention Nimbus 2003, fittingly enough).
The sport changed its name to Quadball in 2022, for Extremely Obvious Reasons.
So yes, there are people out there who thought it was good as is. (Mostly.)
Quadball is officially better than any sport that doesn’t let transgender people compete. There I said it.
Granted this is a particularly low bar nowadays.
@BlueMonday1984 @bitofhope fucking dweebs JFC
Heard it has a horrible injury rate, too
@o7___o7 I mean, good?
Paul Campos - The medium is the mob
Discusses the “reverse Flynn effect”, filter bubbles, and infopollution via GenAI
Just had a conversation about AI where I sent a link to Eddy Burback’s ChatGPT Made Me Delusional video. They clarified that no, it’s only smart people who are more productive with AI since they can filter out all the bad outputs, and only dumb people would suffer all the negative effects. I don’t know what to fucking say.
Show them the RationalWiki page where Scott Alexander promised that he could only absorb the smart racism from crazy bloggers and ignore the stupid stuff, Elizabeth Sandifer warned him this was like drinking sewer water with just one filter, and then Alexander posted about how all of a sudden he was feeling more conservative and maybe the things he was reading were connected to that
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander (also archive.is and other backups)
it sucks when you learn a thing like that about a person. it’s like blowing an efuse: generally one way, not easy to go back without a lot of work, and you may not want to bother
What you say is something on this note: Oh wow I have this amazing investment opportunity for someone like you, nobody has seen it yet, but with your intelligence and business acumen, we will get rich quick…
Assuming they have any amount of good faith, I would make the illustration that using AI is like dunning-kruger effect on steroids. It’s especially dangerous when you think know enough, but don’t know enough to know that you don’t.
Actually the emperor’s clothes look amazing if you’re smart enough to see them.
I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week.
FUCKIN
In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn’t take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don’t know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know? That belief eventually led him to make a public challenge that he could beat Magnus Carlsen in chess after a month of practice. The WSJ picked up on this, and decided to sponsor an actual match with him and Carlsen. They wrote a fawning article about it, but it did little to stop his enormous public humiliation in the chess community. Here’s a reddit thread discussing that incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nb5b1k/chess_one_month_to_beat_magnus_how_an_obsessive/
As a sidenote, I found it really funny that he thought his best strategy was literally to train a neural network and … memorize all the weights and run inference with mental calculations during the game. Of course, on the day of the match, the strategy was not successful because his algorithm “ran out of time calculating”. How are so many techbros not even good at tech? Come on, that’s the one thing you’re supposed to know!
Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.
alt text
A screenshot of a tweet by yougov, a uk-based organisation, showing the results of a survey which say
One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams
Include in the screenshot is a response by longwall26,
Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She’d be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly
Yea good luck, I am a mediocre white man and the providence didn’t even grant me the confidence.
He will train a neural network on GM games, then memorize the algorithm and compute the moves in his head.
The Rationalists.
So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?
This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know?
lmao, what’s his lesswrong username?
Is there already a term for the extreme opposite of impostor syndrome? Techbro syndrome maybe?
“Techbro syndrome” would be a perfect name for it, honestly.
Hey, remember Grokipedia?
Its article on Newton’s law of gravity is, like, 50% rendering errors by weight.
I saw (because for some reason grokipedia is now high in google search) that grok calls Roko (from rokos basilisk) pseudo anonymous, but isnt he just using full name and face on twitter? Such a weird small error (and change to the Wikipedia page). Didnt click the link obv.
interesting writeup on detecting ai music (newgrounds bans ai content)
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-moderation/how-to-detect-ai-audio
The Audio Mods are doing God’s work keeping the portal slop-free. Its good to know there’s at least one place where human-made work is still valued.
Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms
Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation “feature”, guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didn’t get him or didn’t deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! It’s such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.
Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:
It’s indeed the case that I haven’t been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it’d had Twitter’s options for turning off commenting entirely.
So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven’t been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.
Uh, considering his recent twitter post… this sure is something. Also" “it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience” no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).
From this (indirectly) I learned that they got wordpress.com to sponsor their “Inkhaven Residency”. Feh.
ooooh photographic matthew embarking upon his f*shtech turn out loud at last?
Maybe? Or maybe they just had the right social connections to sell “blogging residency” as a thing that should be supported for some unspecified amount? I couldn’t find any more details.
Automattic has a budget for sponsoring events https://automattic.com/events/ but a web host based in San Francisco does not sponsor Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, and Gwern by accident.
Small forum tyrants
Meanwhile in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, they published a deluxe illustrated version of A Feast for Crows which is blatantly obviously “AI” “art”, Like it’s bad generic souless fantasy “art” where you often can’t even recognise which character it’s meant to depict. And now the responsible art director is in damage control mode, claiming that they’d ever use “AI” and unsubtly blaming the hired “artist” (one Jeffrey R. McDonald), even though it takes like 15 seconds to spot that these illustrations are completely inappropriate for the book. It feels like they hired the cheapest they could and didn’t care about anything else than cost-cutting.
And behold, the publisher is on record saying they’d do exactly that:
Mr. Malaviya’s primary goal is growth. After the collapse of the Simon & Schuster deal, it became clear Penguin Random House could not buy its way out of the decline, so much of its growth will have to come organically — by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees … Last year, the company laid off about 60 people and offered voluntary buyouts for longtime employees.
Some of the fan backlash with samples of the “art”, if you must hurt your eyes: thread 1, thread 2.
Other than warped architecture, wonky perspectives, Escherian objects etc., the characters don’t even look like or dress in the colours of the chapters they’re “Illustrating”. Those who know the fandom know how important heraldry is for the series, there’s no sigils in the illustrations and people wear the wrong colours, etc. This is the series were a noblewoman showing up to a party in a green dress rather than black was a declaration of war. Tywin Lannister, famously bald, is depicted in his funeral with long hair and wearing a crown, you know, to illustrate the passage that says he never wore a crown in his life. He also looks identical to King Viserys from the House of the Dragon TV series. His daughter Cersei is shown mourning him with a blue dress, as in the same character whose house colours are red-gold, in the same chapter that states she’s wearing funeral black.
At some point a character has a crucifix on the wall
The silver lining is that the swift fan backlash, even the very unconvincing attempt at denial, are further evidence of how “AI” “art” has firmly established itself as synonymous with bad/lazy/inadequate/cheating the public. Which means actual artists are far from obsolete, If you can draw for real you’ll be in demand whenever someone wants actual quality in anything.
Since we’re never getting Winds of Winter anyway and they’ll have to keep cashing on calendars and guides and new illustrated editions, hopefully the backlash was big enough that they learned their lesson and will pay for actual art next time.
I expect her methodology was great but I don’t actually know what it was.
Science!
As background: the Kaufmann report that prompted all this is a load of absolute garbage. As discussed fairly extensively on social media (example).
As for Aella’s addition: oh god why did I read this?
The methodology was apparently running a “Big Kink Survey” which was “trending on TikTok” and had “very good SEO”. I suppose this is the right data needed to draw conclusions about what rate 14 year olds are transgender.
The whole this is also full of weird gender essentialism (I never want to read the word “biofemales” again).
I think this is evidence for an increasing split between afabs and amabs
But don’t worry she’s very pro trans (JK Rowling sense):
Despite having been cancelled by the more radical subgroups of trans people, I’m nevertheless very pro trans.
Which is why she wants to make a massive reach and be concerned that maybe trans people are getting too much healthcare:
I think it’s unlikely that 11.5% of afabs are actually trans men in a way that would last through adulthood. If my data is measuring any real trend in the world, and if that trend meaningfully increases permanent changes to bodies, then this high percentage might actually be quite bad.
… Nevermind that her data doesn’t even touch on stuff like rate of HRT, or regret rate; these “concerns” are all pulled out of thin air.
(I also lament that this makes things really rough for the trans men for whom this is not a fad, and for whom earlier transitioning would be a huge quality of life improvement.)
Like dear cis people are you OK? Is society not transphobic enough for you? :'(
Are you worried that if a teenager is allowed to explore their gender a little that it will cause a bunch of precocious little cis girls to accidentally glance at a vial of testosterone the wrong way and grow a fantastic beard overnight?
When I started estrogen (later than I should have and fuck you Idaho) I was absolutely 100% sure that it was the right thing to try, and that I’d stop if I didn’t like it. Never looked back (estrogen is tasty and I encourage everyone to try it at least once), and I had years before there was much you could call permanent.
But of course it’s not the “permanent changes to bodies” that made me a 6ft tall amazonian beauty that people like Aella are concerned about. “What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??” fundamentally assumes it is OK to accidentally withhold critical medicine from countless trans people just to be “safe”.
“What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??”
They always like to dress up these statements as medical concern. But it shines through that, despite whatever the person may express otherwise, deep down they think being trans is not really acceptable. Maybe partially acceptable at best, but should be avoided if possible. Very similar thought model to classics like “oh I’m fine with gay people, but what if my child sees two men holding hands and then wants to try it too??”
cursed thought
…is that yud for “she’s refused to fuck me”?
cursed corollary to Poe's Law
Yud being secretly contemptuous of Aella is indistinguishable from Yud being horny for Aella
Many such cases
Aella in the comments: I’m just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work
I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.
Woman good at science? Must have a man brain. Send tweet.
Oops forgot to be weird about jews lemme amend that white jews can also be smart even if they have girl brains.
Pepper
That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.
not a single serious person in that thread lol. also is rationalist castle’s isp blocking scihub? weird that that libertarian crowd didn’t hear about it
Why am I getting James Somerton flashbacks
She can’t tell the difference between “the people who wrote the paper” and “the group that runs the website that hosts a copy of the abstract of the paper”. This speaks to a plentiful lack of curiosity. It reminds me of crank e-mails and sensationalist clickbait pages that say everything on the arXiv is research from Cornell University.
yeah and I’m a brain surgeon because sometimes when I pick my nose I go a little too deep
second take from me. Here’s the full tweet:
one of Earth’s top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work, open for all to read in a widely read venue on that science topic, where it will receive far more peer scrutiny than any lesser forum provides
I’m going to read this as a joke because he didn’t end it with a period, and he is secretly beefing with aella
Yud, Aella and Hossenfelder make me want to defend modern academic institutions. Granted, that’s not nearly as impressive as Scott Aaronson getting me to sympathize with a cop, but it’s still an achievement.
After moving out at 17, Aella briefly attended college in northern Idaho but ran out of money after a semester.
Aella already has better credentials than EY
How briefly do you have to attend college to still be this clueless about how citations work?
well it’ll become apparent during first attempts at writing a paper that requires them, but it can be a very long time if subject is dense enough
Ah more anti-intellectualism from the proto cult leader.
This does mean, as the standards are so low, that we all have a phd on Rationalism.
Ahh the missing period, an even worse tone indicator compared to /hj (youtube).
Both follow-up tweets end in periods, so I guess he transitioned to being completely serious 1/3 of the way through? Or maybe a missing period means a joke, a present period means he’s serious, and partial periodization means that he’s typing with one hand.
Glad I clicked the link, I was pretty sure hj meant handjob.
I am still avoiding YouTube, so I guess “hj” will mean handjob forever.
It’s clearly meant to mean /HalleluJah
I’m not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And “no worse than the average psychology paper” is not high praise.
The statistics back up his unease. Buy-now-pay-later services have exploded to 91.5 million users in the United States
with the rapidly checked population number I found (340.1m), that’s 26.9%
…, with 25% using the services to finance their groceries as of earlier this year
perfectly normal, I’m sure nothing can go wrong here. and this won’t be tied in with just the recent SNAP shit, either
what’s the german word for “the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up”?
most BNPL loans aren’t reported to credit bureaus, creating what regulators call “phantom debt.” That means other lenders can’t see when someone has taken out five different BNPL loans across multiple platforms. The credit system is flying blind.
Only good things can come of this.
right? for like 18~24mo now, the autoplag “boom” and the fucked up neo-credit-arrangements in real estate (again) have been my primary guesses for how this shit is all going to up in vapour
and then suddenly a surprise third entrant!
what’s the german word for “the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up”?
The word you are looking for is “Tja”.
I was mostly riffing on the Internet Meme of “what’s the german word for…” but you are not wrong
It’s so weird to see Klarna on that list, because I keep forgetting Klarna is now a huge juggernaut, not the little service that every etailer here in Sweden uses for checkout services
let’s hope that the outcomes of this helps them become a weeeee teensy l’il curious financial service again 😶
Achterbahnschraubeninkrementallösungsaußerplanmäßigedekonstruktionsgefühl
no bolts!
but otherwise? I mean, pretty close.
(yes I did upvote this post)
wasn’t sure if it was “schrauben” or “bolzen” that were used in roller coasters 😁
I’d be lying if I told you I knew! my most interesting interaction with technisch-mechanisch deutsche has been through the lens of shorthand column names in an oracle db (where truncated col name length limit caused applied). no, not kidding. that was an interesting project more ways than one!
(very Choose Your Own Adventure db schema too, and I suspect I’m still among the only in country who have strong knowledge about it today)
it’s worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it’s 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i’ve found, so it’s closer to 34%
from what i understand, american anomaly is that they take debt like that even when not strictly necessary in order to pump up their credit scores which might be useful later, but even then, 9% of population relies on going to loan shark the app in order to get food, absolutely nothing to look at here, move along,
And most stats are flying under the radar because the Trump administration has made it impossible to get reliable data on things. But at least we live in a rational market system that optimally allocates resources, so I’m sure the decision-makers will handle this situation wisely and—
Not wanting to be left behind, more established finance companies are racing toward BNPL now, too … What started as a niche checkout option is becoming embedded financial infrastructure.
Morris sees this shift happening everywhere. “When I talk to some of these software companies that are now embedding payments, lending and insurance,” he told me, “and you say, ‘Okay, five years from now, where are you going to make your money?’” the answer surprises even veteran investors like him. “They say, ‘You know what, I think I’m going to make more money in embedded finance than I am in my core software.’”
Continued Morris: “It starts off as a nice little add-on, but when the powers of the marketplace drive down the returns in the core business, it’s often these financing businesses that have the greatest longevity and market power.
“I’ve made a self-licking lollipop so the fun times will never end and I see no way this could ever go wrong.”
it’s worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it’s 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i’ve found, so it’s closer to 34%
yep, entirely correct. and the numbers will also only reflect for those that are loantakers/account holders (which implies an even smaller number), because only one person needs to take out the bnpl to groceries it up for family support
I just didn’t have the time to dig into the numbers properly this morning when I posted
it’s all bad. just every single fucking part.
My clients’ billing systems now send me invoice factoring spam every month, which is basically the same trade as a payday loan or bnpl. I worry how many other freelancers are clicking that button and how this has become so normalized, it’s bad enough out there already, without paying 2.5% per month.
jesus, that seems insidious
and unfortunately I speak enough ghoul that I suspect I know how that’s being sold, too! a way for companies to “manage outflow”? and perhaps a dash of “cultivating a reputable $x base” in there too?
nvm that these intermediation fuckers are going the standard Bridgetroll[0] route too, which is also a problem
[0] - rentseeker
invoice factoring
Is that somewhat new in the US? I recall seeing ads for it here in Sweden for 15 years or more.
For me, I started noticing Taulia spam via a clients SAP last Jan, and Bill.com started doing similar a few months after. I think the new part is that these are now integrated into the platforms, like how Klarna bnpl is directly integrated into the ecom storefronts.
PR for AI slop generated DWARF support for ocaml. Expectation: doesn’t work
Reality: replicates existing support from another project including attribution to the author.
Wow highly recommend reading all his comments where he doubles down on how everyone else is in the wrong (for wanting maintainable code that isn’t a legal liability) while he is in the right (for being brave and bold enough to type prompts into an LLM to create code that he won’t stand behind).
It’s almost as if he went in there looking for a fight.
Lool, look at these two quotes next to eachother:
One caveat, though: even if I didn’t type the code myself, I own it — and it’s my responsibility now.
vs.
Beats me. AI decided to do so [write the copyright as someone else] and I didn’t question it.
Ah yes, the classic open source guy stance of “you get to praise me publicly but direct criticism or problems to [over there]”
The purpose of AI is theft, exhibit ∞
It’s not where I obtained this PR but how.
the inability to follow a through b through c here is….something
at://did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/app.bsky.feed.post/3m5z5da4mvk24
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/post/3m5z5da4mvk24
Windscribe’s twitter account being transphobic.
Free speech can he expensive for dipshits.
I wanted to highlight this post from our own @self: https://mas.to/@zzt/115545758401562713
the feeling of launching an unreal tournament 2004 server by telling ucc-bin, the unrealscript compilation environment that knows itself as UnrealOS, to evaluate the editable scripts that made up the core of unreal tournament, its rich web admin interface, and the ecosystem of tools and facilities that make it nicer to host than quake, and remembering that unrealscript and self-hosted servers are both long dead and all this tech is used to make kids gamble in fortnite now
betrayal, that’s it
I hardly ever ran a server, as during the era I lived out in the country and could only get barely-capable rural wireless broadband, but it is galling what Epic threw away, especially now that they’ve memory-holed UT2K3/2K4 off of storefronts like GOG. It was perhaps the first commercial game I remember having a completely seamless cross-platform experience with, including Linux. As long as I had my CD key and the data files handy, it didn’t matter what OS I was installing on, just download the installer and go. I remember provisioning entire LAN parties and having a blast (and then reusing the CD key didn’t matter because we were partying out in the country with no chance of a good online experience anyway). Glad I was able to snag it from GOG before delisting, because I don’t know what happen to my original Mac DVD.
