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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Sorry if this doesn’t fit the thread. Just came across this non-profit called 80,000 hours, after they sponsored NotJustBikes. It “provides free career advice for finding a meaningful career that can help you make a positive impact on the world,” which actually sounds nice, but then I realised that they’re talking about AI risk and that this comes from the TESCREAL corner.
Yep, check who is one of the founders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80,000_Hours, it is full on EA stuff. (Not fan of the TESCREAL label myself, too broad and confusing for people). E: So it fits!
Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:
Is that supposed to be an advertisement in favor of AI? (As opposed to stealth satire?) Seeing it makes me want to get off my computer and touch grass.
I’m not sure, considering the massive reduction in social circle im more wondering the person who made this was outed as a sex pest. 2 Parents and one close friend sticking around till the proof, of the sex pestery being really irrefutable dropping, makes sense.
LWer asks: “what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?”
So that article about AI cheating we saw a few weeks back is still doing the rounds. I had missed this Rationalist W in my first read:
I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.
So apparently we’re pretty close to instantiating the voice of God through the hallucination machine, which I’m sure is pretty neat.
Good username/post combo.
Every time without fail, it’s this shit^
saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt “complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down”. After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script
Like either way it’s “disobeying” b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn’t finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn’t let itself get “shut down”
But also, it’s not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn’t running on your computer! It’s somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.
Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter
Double quick ssc sneer, why is he platforming a groyper, without mentioning it is a groyper, does he know what groypers are. Why is he acting like this is a honest question and not an attempt to create hierarchies and unpersons? Why are people confusing remembering being conscious with remembering things at all? Why are people confusing consciousness with agency? Why do I hear the “empathy removal training center” warning sound again. And the most personal question. People remember not being conscious? But yes, wtf Scott, how do you even find these groypers?
Anybody have the current count on platforming neonazis vs platforming sneerclubbers?
God this is so fucking stupid. Aren’t these people supposed to be at least minimally smart in some way, like knowing about biases and things? And here they are trying to suss out the deep workings of conscious experience from the just-so narratives people have attached to their memories of memories of memories. Pathetic.
Comments comments
I don’t recall having some sort of a wow experience like “damn, I’m a conscious human being” now ever, which kind of makes me question if I’m conscious even now.
I’m also in the same boat. But also, I think that we can only experience consciousness with our whole being, and there’s not much “compute” and bandwidth left even amongst fully grown adults - to verify if even the baseline “adult” consciousness that we’re experiencing is the baseline “real and complete adult state of consciousness” that everyone is definitely experiencing. And so we’re left to ponder some subset of the thing we want to understand and control fully.
I mean, the “consciousness” that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily. Neither you nor I (nor most people) can write like Scott can, but Scott bangs out riveting and beautiful pieces of writing effortlessly at least once a week and wonders why everyone else can’t.
Jesus Christ mate
I mean, the “consciousness” that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily.
have you tried adderall
that third quote is so fucking immensely telling, holy fuck
and while I want to be very cautious with this (ito not putting it out as a recommendation (given these fools’ heads are already demonstrably not okay)), imagine if any of these dipshits took a mild dose of psychedelics and actually experienced some altered states of consciousness for a while
such a stupendously short-sighted set of ideas, made even more stunning by the notion that probably 2 in 3 of these fuckers consider themselves “broad minded”
This is what happens when you watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a STEM major with no actual curiosity.
Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occured to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occured to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squawling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, theres only one direction. And time is its only measure.
levels of glazing previously unheard of
Yeah well done commenters you failed to notice the context and deeper reason this was discussed, justifying biodieseling people. Hell, some would volunteer looking at the last bit.
(Re his output, a Conservative Jewish person (can look up her post, it is on reddit sneerclub) reviewed unsong a bit and mentioned she thought it was the work of several authors. Not sure if this was honest or some Jewish reference which I didnt get btw. But if honest would be an interesting bit of additional lore, him using ghostwriters (would also explain the lower quality (from what I have seen) of a lot his posts after he went full time).
The multiple authors thing is certainly a joke, it’s a reference to the (widely accepted among scholars) theory that the Torah was compiled from multiple sources with different authors.
Yeah wondered as much, read it but no idea how much of it was true or not as I know very little of all this. And im not going to give a stab at it, not even from hells heart. (There were a lot of whale/fish related puns, which I could not think of quickly enough, so this is my white whale).
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
This database tracks legal decisions1 in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings.
While seeking to be exhaustive (117 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.
Was reading about an 11 year old girl who just graduated with two associates’ degrees and is heading off to a 4 year college. She wants to work on AI for SpaceX or Tesla.
My first thought was: Oh god someone keep Musk away from her.
SSC attracts new kinds of witches.
Weird thought the idea of Rationalism was to draw people towards consensus reality.
Modern academia is a shambling corpse, its husk long hollowed out by the woke mind virus, and scientific consensus is also cringe because it’s mean to me for being an IQ and genetics obsessed weirdo. Therefore you should prioritize alternative takes, preferably by longwinded laymen from the ingroup or maybe contrarian specialists, the more cancelled the bett-- wait, wait, no, not like that!
It’s wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.
Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.
With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn
…and that’s why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.
“Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,”
How about common sense…
“it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”
Ugh. So terrible. Tech’s obsession with “scaling” is one of the worst things about tech.
If “it’s one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,” he said. “But the computer can.
No, it cannot. It’s a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.
Duolingo’s CFO made similar comments last year, saying, “AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does”
Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life
the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence
Aaaarrgh. Tech’s obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Ok I stop here now, there’s more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.
Ugh. So terrible. Tech’s obsession with “scaling” is one of the worst things about tech.
Yeah that jumped out to me. Like human teaching has scaled fine to billions of people. It certainly has a better track record than Duolingo which provides meh study material and leads to ahem mixed learning outcomes despite being around for over a decade.
Of course there’s the subtext of “but also we’ll be able to put all those obsolete teachers out of business and make tons of money!”
Aaaarrgh. Tech’s obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Being in tech I definitely see misuse of A/B testing sometimes. Sometimes a team will ignore common sense entirely but come up with metrics that measure something irrelevant. The metrics are, intentionally or not, gamed to tell them what they want to hear. They then run the (useless) numbers and use that to justify why their change was good, even in the face of intense user backlash.
One particular example that just came to mind: someone made a bad change, and lots of people complained. Eventually the complaints started to peter out. Then they claimed “see! people just had to get used to it!” (versus the rather more obvious possibility that nobody bothered to complain more than once).
Not really. If schools aren’t spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.
In other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:
deleted by creator
Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Overheard my kids, one of them had some group project in school and the other asked who they had ended up in group with. After hearing the names, the reaction was “they are good, none of them will use AI”.
So as always kids that actually does something in group projects doesn’t want to end up in a group with kids that won’t contribute. Difference is just that instead of just slacking off and doing nothing they will today “contribute” AI slop. And as always the main lesson from group projects in school is avoid ending up in a group with slackers.
Dad hi-five
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud
Yell at cloud computing instead, that is usually justified.
More seriously: it’s not at all that. The AI pushers want to make people feel that way – “it’s inevitable”, “it’s here to stay”, etc. But the threat to learning and maintaining skills is real (although the former worries me more than the latter – what has been learned before can often be regained rather quickly, but what if learning itself is inhibited?).
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population
AI’s already destroying people’s cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn’t be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it’ll fuck up human’s capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.
(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Thankfully, I’ve managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:
- AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
- The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
- The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you’d have zero shot of turning a profit.
(That I’m a NEET also helps (can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)
can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P
I’d certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didn’t work for a big tech company that’s gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I don’t want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.
I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense I’d be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I don’t quit for complicated reasons. I’m not that far from the breaking point, but I’m going to try to hang in for a few more years.
But yeah, I’m pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.
A lawyer who depends on a sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a sovereign citizen.
Considering how LLMs are trained, they prob contain a lot of sov cit stuff, wonder if a lawyer/judge can trick a LLM into going full sovcit by just adding a few words/rephrasing a bit.
Absolutely!
The thing about sov cits is that they use legalish words like a magical incantation. The words have no meaning to them, really. It’s a tarted-up glossolalia which reifies their wishes to manifest some outcome in court.
If a lawyer surrenders their craft to a bullshit engine, they’re doing the exact same thing: spouting law-shaped nonsense in the hope of getting the verdict they want, their only differentiator being that they showed up wearing a much nicer suit than the sov cit.
“ChatGPT, does the fringe on the flag mean that this is an Admiralty court? Also, please enlighten me on the finer points of bird law.”
OK completely off topic but update on my USA angst from earlier this year: I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Back on topic: Duolingo continues to circle the drain. I kind of hate that I’m linking to this because it’s exactly what that marketing-run company wants; but they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7507337734520868142?lang=en
I uh… I don’t think it’s going to change anyone’s minds. Half the comments on the videos go something like:
EVERYONE LISTEN UP!!! 🚨 - starting from today, we are gonna start ignoring duolingo. We will not like the video it posts, or view it. - BASICALLY WE WILL IGNORE DUO!!💔 💔 ON EVERYBODY SOUL WE IGNORING DUO!! 💔 (copy this and share this to every duo related video)
I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
that’s seriously amazing! I’m glad you were able to get things going relatively quickly.
I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Good luck!!
they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
If Duolingo still had their userbase’s goodwill, it would’ve probably worked. They’ve been pulling that shit since their mascot Duo turned into a meme, and its worked out for them up until now.
Good luck with the move. Always sounded like a lot of trouble moving continents. And moving out of the USA seemed worse, dont they have some weird taxation system for people who moved away?
Nah it’s not too bad the IRS guide is only 40 pages! somebody save me
- All US citizens get to file US taxes every year regardless of if they have any US sourced income
- Foreign income is also taxed (but see next two points)
- The first 126k of foreign income earned while living abroad is excluded from taxation (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion)
- Income that went to paying foreign taxes is also not taxed (Foreign Tax Credit)
- Banks hate opening accounts for US citizens since we’re subject to FATCA filing requirements and thus generate extra paperwork
- Also certain foreign mutual funds are taxed heavily (PFICs), requiring care in planning investments.
- There are a bunch of tax treaties with different countries, which may influence the exact details.
- If you do have deferred compensation that was granted in a state but that was vested or exercised while a non-resident of that state you may also have to file state taxes (e.g. FTB Publication 1004 for California)
I haven’t run through this in practice yet and I will probably give up and hire a professional.
I think there’s also some kind of at-time exit tax if you ever decide to give up US citizenship, but I’m not good on the details
I’ve semi-seriously said elsewhere that the US treats its citizens as property (in the “as slaves” sense), and it’s fucked how close to true that is
glad to read you’re making some headway on getting the fuck out though!
Yeah I’ll probably have a big tax bill if I ever renounce citizenship. I haven’t thought about it too much yet since it’s still my only citizenship, and I have a lot of friends and family in the USA. Like being a visitor might be fine in normal times, but I wouldn’t want to rely on it in an emergency today given how visitors are being treated lately.
'Till now I was always able to just do financial planning myself, but I really should hire a professional.
absolutely worth it given your coming plans. sucks because yet more expenditure but your happiness and safety are more important
Sounds like getting a professional to file it (at least the first time) will in the end cost less.
But congratulations on the move!
I’m interested in jetting out as well. Did you get a job first? Or did you do something similar to Germany’s “Opportunity Visa”?
An internal transfer at my job actually. At least for now they need me so helped set that up, though I’m pretty worried on if that will last long enough for permanent residency or not.
I’d be a little nervous on a job seeker’s visa before knowing the language. It is really hard to find a job as a programmer in Europe without living there or being a citizen; because of language barriers, the labor market test, and the difficulty in getting a company to sponsor your visa. I didn’t send out that many job applications but so far my response rate is zero.
Probably if I couldn’t do a transfer I’d have ended up on an investment visa or study visa somewhere; though maybe I could have found a job in Japan since I can read intermediate Japanese.
I expect learning German to the B1 level will open up a lot of doors, so that’s my main goal for the next few years.
Anecdata: if you’re working in IT in Sweden you can get away with just English. I know a guy living in Berlin who hasn’t
botheredgot around to learning German yet, he also manages with English.But it’s a big Community and different parts have different requirements and of course different expectations.
Oof im sorry, that sounds horrible. But hey welcome in the modern world, your other taxes will prob not be that much trouble.
It’s the same taxation system, you have to pay US taxes still, but I think you can deduct taxes paid in the new country from what you owe the US.
Our subjects here at awful systems can make us angry. They can spend lots of money to make everything worse. They can even make us dead if things go really off the rails, but one thing they can never do is make us take them seriously.
does awful have taglines enabled? this would be nice as one
