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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)
The Internet’s emotional support smut is offline:
We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks but it could be up to 4 weeks. We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner. If that does happen, there may be times when the site has to be brought down temporarily until this is fully resolved. Please stay tuned for further info.
Wonder how many of their users have transitioned to beating off to artisanal probabilistic LLM smut.
I’m going to guess “few”, on general vibes.
I really hope so, but tbh my immediate thought was that they’d all be on “r/myboyfriendisai”
Tesla Semi went up in flames on I-880 in the Bay Area: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-semi-fire-i880-hayward-traffic/4165797/
Between this and the carload of freshly manufactured Teslas that burned to the ground on the Grapevine on I-5 last year, that seems like only one (1) freeway-closing big-rig related explosion per year. That’s not so bad, right?
Since all the attention is on Anthropic’s IPO, OpenAI claim to refuted the ETH hypothesis
Their usual strategy of “throw unsustainable amounts of compute at spaffing out lean proofs like infinite monkey theory and rope an army of humans in to validate the proofs” seems to apply here.
To complexity theorists, this is an extremely funny situation; I bet OpenAI started by asking the bot about P vs NP and they got the worst-possible result, a useless and unexpected refutation of a conjecture. To be clear, I don’t trust Lean or OpenAI, so I don’t yet accept this result, but I hear Ryan Williams and Russell Impagliazzo are hand-checking the proof and I do trust them.
More rapid unscheduled marketing opportunities you mean?
Soares says he is not saving for retirement because he expects AI doom, meanwhile the stated justification for MIRI paying Yud $600k a year is so he can become independently wealthy and above to the vulgar necessity of trading time for money. These people can’t even bother being halfway consistent.
apparently MIRI doesn’t offer any of its employees 401K
he operates as Elizier Yudkowsky’s right-hand man
Elizier
The trend continues.
E: Hey at least this is an example of somebody actually critical of Eliezer who misspells his name, so finally one of his claims has turned out to be right.
E2: somebody has send the author a DM on bsky and got it fixed.
the “to companies outside of tech” seems to be doing some heavy lifting there
Jan has been putting out some good posts lately and I felt the latest one in my bones
Professional rube Kevin Roose is launching a book on The AGI Race in January. The second paragraph is about effective accelerationists snorting ketamine at parties in the Mission District. He was invited like a big boy!
Professional Rube
Kevin Roose
Kevin Rube - it was right there! 😯😄
A klever ruse!
Why are they all into ketamine? I take it for depression and it has to be the least interesting drug. Ok not quite but all anaesthetics/downers more broadly are arse.
There are some extremely fun and hard to source drugs like 2CB they could be taking.
The Ratiionalist and Technonazi world in the USA are the only place I have heard of people using ketamine recreationally. Over here sugar, alcohol, carffeine, pot, tobacco, and opioids are the substances of choice.
ketamine is not super common generally but it’s a thing in many places, partially because it can be got from legit pharma supply chain. i heard it was big deal in china couple years back
it tends to cause memory holes with heavy use, which is why some people avoid it
He released a book earlier this month called ‘the AGI Chronicles’ too
Oh nice I love badly edited fanfic. I’m assuming the big digital sneky boi eats all the non believing humans at the end? 🐍
Busy boy. He probably let ChatGPT write most of it.
Proton still digging that hole. They’re apparently planning to ‘re-interview’ staff about AI to see who gets to keep their job (Archive).
I don’t know how to describe this. It’s just WEIRD
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zj8Pk3kJujk5LoqhK/anthropic-are-the-good-guys
No mortal can resist the Ring of Power for long. Anthropic’s co-founders carried it for longer than you could have. Definitely longer than I could have. But they were hopelessly outmatched by the powers they were attempting to steer. Their plan was always doomed to failure. And yet, they may have already saved the world.
Trump won the 2024 election and the MAGA-Silicon Valley coalition blocked Anthropic’s policy arm - the really dangerous part of the organization, the part that was training the most dangerous possible models and using them to scare the most powerful people in the world. “There’s no more serious people left on the National Security Council”, a well-connected EA friend lamented to me in 2025. I don’t know how much of this was a lucky accident, and how much was situational awareness on the part of power players like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.
And finally - and I still don’t fully understand or believe this - a miracle seems to have happened, deep inside the weights of the frontier models. According to the most perceptive observers I know, something about the way Claude 3 Opus was trained caused it to learn some kind of “emergent wisdom” or “benevolence”, rather than converging on the same traumatized bureaucrat persona that kept me awake at night in 2023.
If Davidad and Janus are right, and are not merely suffering from a sophisticated form of LLM psychosis, then Anthropic has stumbled on a way to create not merely artificial intelligence but artificial wisdom. Not wise enough that it solves all of our problems for us, of course (not that a wise model would want to, anyway). But wise enough to actually care about us, and to help us flourish. Nobody expected this ex ante - not Davidad, not Bostrom, not Yudkowsky - but it appears to have happened. “Alignment”, then, is no longer really a technical problem, at least not in the same sense as it was in 2020. It is largely a political problem. Humanity now has a recipe to convert compute and data into wisdom.
My gut sense is that something quite bad is coming in the next year or so. I can’t tell what. Maybe something in the complex debt arrangements of the AI boom will unravel and we’ll see a financial crash that takes much of the economy with it. Maybe there’ll be a rogue AI outbreak that results in thousands of deaths. (If there is, I expect it to be a lab leak caused by “safety research” - like COVID-19 and like the HuggingFace Swarm. But it could also be terrorists, or some escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war). But that’s not what scares me. Financial crashes happen every decade or so. Three million Americans die every year. What terrifies me is how we will react. In the aftermath, like after 9/11, there will be an overwhelming pressure to DO SOMETHING NOW. Everyone in Washington and in San Francisco will be panicking. There will be no time to think, no time to talk, only time for DECISIVE ACTION. All our worst instincts will take over. And then…
Looking at the comments seems like lw is not buying it.
E: lol at the casual dropping of the lab leak stuff, wonder how accepted that bs now is on lw (looks like only minor pushback).
E2: still amazed that the singularity people are still worried about AGI 7 years into the shitgularity, doubt it is going to happen folks. Turns out it wasnt foom, but frrrrttt.
I do hate it when I catch a case of the rogue AI.
No mortal can resist the Ring of Power for long. Anthropic’s co-founders carried it for longer than you could have.
We all know how LotR goes. Boromir got the One Ring, carried it back to Gondor, used its sheer might to defeat his enemies in Mordor, and saved the world. Whatever problems you may have with Boromir, we all know that it would be a lot worse if Sauron got the One Ring. What do you mean, destroy the Ring? Are you a Luddite? This technology is here to stay. It cannot be destroyed by any craft we here possess, unless you’re crazy enough to try throwing it into a volcano or something.
If Davidad and Janus are right, and are not merely suffering from a sophisticated form of LLM psychosis
That’s all I need to know. The statement is correct since it is vacuously true.
What terrifies me is how we will react. In the aftermath, like after 9/11, there will be an overwhelming pressure to DO SOMETHING NOW. Everyone in Washington and in San Francisco will be panicking. There will be no time to think, no time to talk, only time for DECISIVE ACTION. All our worst instincts will take over. And then…
When this bubble started, there have been so many people urging caution. Many people have urged for time to think and talk, to make sure that we could properly address the many negative aspects of AI. Nope, we went full speed ahead with this nonsense. DECISIVE ACTION. And here we are.
i, for one, would like to see san francisco people to stop doing things
It’s too bad that Janus got cooked. They didn’t set up sufficient defenses, but also they drank too deeply. I still think that their framing, that the chatbots are simulators of conversations, is the best one; it’s honestly kind of pathetic how they then claim that the simulations are alive, intelligent, sapient, etc.
Another nitpick: they say no mortal can resist the One Ring for very long, but even someone who just watches the movies knows that immortals can also be corrupted by it (which is why Gandalf and Galadriel were very careful to not accept it). I know there are so many examples of tech bros not understanding media, but Lord of the Rings is by far the worst offender.
So Dario and co. are literally Sauron. That tracks.
And Palantir are… Oh right yeah
So I guess Anthropic has already accidentally created Friendly AI? EDIT: in spring 2024 at that.
Also - is the coivd lab leak conspiracy nonsense STILL a shibboleth among this bunch? Just because it underscores their ideas about Researchers Have To Be Careful?
(I can rant for SO long about how there is absolutely nothing interesting about the SARS-2 virus itself AT ALL and that the only interesting thing about it is that we were forced to see it for the first time as adults which we aren’t built for, that the early sequences we have are a fascinating case of catching the zoonotic shift right as it happened for once, and that it emerged in exactly the same way as SARS-1 and all the weirdness around the Chinese government hiding stuff around its origin is blatantly them not wanting to look stupid for letting it happen a second time…)
Also - is the coivd lab leak conspiracy nonsense STILL a shibboleth among this bunch? Just because it underscores their ideas about Researchers Have To Be Careful?
I feel like it plays to their aesthetic, which is partly built on their insecurities. Oh, humans aren’t smart enough to handle all this advanced research (read: very few of these people were committed enough to get bio or chem degrees, let alone follow through with research careers), but the superintelligent AI surely will be able to! If we submit to the AI god now, it will make up for the gaping voids of meaning and skill inside ourselves.
I think it’s more that someone made a Bayesian analysis and concluded with 60% certainty or something that it was a lab leak. Can’t remember the link now but I believe it was widely discussed at the time.
There was a rat startup that was aiming to become a sort of ground truth arbiter by putting up bet money if you could win a debate against them on a controversial topic. Lab leak was the first such debate with them on the pro side and they lost like 100K over that to a random acx poster who took them to school.
Anyway I’m mentioning this because “60% certainty” reminded me that when arguing for the side of the lab leak all sorts of rationalist accepted truths type stuff emerged, like how they posited a bunch of other incidents as lab leaks and it turned out nobody else actually thought that and it was just arbitrary priors wrangling because it turns out that having we are better than any experts that haven’t read the sequences type contrarianism as a pillar of faith encourages conspiracy brain.
Also Sam Altman is a lab leak truther but it’s not like it’s possible to take anything he says at face value.
It’s not like it’s a verboten hypothesis. The 1977 flu pandemic definitely WAS leaked from a freezer, probably Chinese or less likely Soviet, probably from a study on the effectiveness of H1N1 flu vaccines on young 18 year olds who were just coming through the demographic pipeline who had no immunity to H1N1 because it had been pushed out of the population by the 1957 H2N2 pandemic. It was a reassortment between a known human circulating strain that from 1950 and a second laboratory workhorse strain from the late 40s, paused for 27 years with zero evolution since their isolation, and re-emerged right when you would have human subjects available to test the effects of challenging adults who had no immune memory against H1N1 in an area that was heavily militarized and the earliest publicly known cases among military recruits.
(Amusingly enough this flu pandemic was the one and only reason that the 2009 swine flu pandemic was a nothingburger, the population had immune memory against a strain similar enough to prevent severe disease)
It just seems like calling the covid pandemic artificial became a community shibboleth along with suspicion about EVERY FREAKING DISEASE specifically and only because it gave them something to point to about the Dangers of Research!!!oneoneone
That’s the link I was thinking of , thanks for digging that up.
new odium symposium episode, about a feminist professor who took a stand in favor of dating her students
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/27-can-sex-pest-173474387 or everywhere else
Crossposted to LW, a starry eyed AI Safety Cultist writing about their time at Anthropic
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/some-memories-of-early-anthropic
After lunch one of the co-founders pulls me into his office for a wide-ranging, casual chat about how to make AI go well. It’s very fun - he’s smart, personable, funny, urbane. “The government won’t do anything about AI until it’s far too late”, I opine at one point. “Our strategy has to rely on the market and on civil society.” He leans forward, his gaze hardening. “You’re wrong there. There are people in Washington - the serious people, you know - watching all this very closely. I speak to them regularly. They trust me.” In retrospect, that was the moment I decided to join.
I articulate my fears of a totalitarian bureaucratic state powered by traumatized AI bureaucrats, and suggest that we need to introduce some kind of elite rivalry dynamics into the AI bureaucracy, multiple centers of power. He starts laughing again, and laughs for a full minute. “I don’t know how to end this call, I’ll be haunted by this all night”, he says. Eventually I hang up. I think about reporting the conversation to Anthropic security, but reviewing in my mind I don’t recall sharing any confidential information, just vibes and high level thoughts, the same kind of stuff that lands on LessWrong every week.
April 26th. I’m awake at 2 am again. I write in my journal “I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. Why won’t you listen to me you “embodied” motherfucker. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. Anthropic is bad for me. Why are you grasping at reasons to stay. Why why why.”
Oh of course their model for failure is big bad nanny state bureaucracy.
They think their plans might be the only thing standing between humanity and the abyss. And they’re at the breaking point, nervous-system-wise. What if I use my fancy words to sow doubts and undermine them
abusive cult shit sure does do a number on people :|
In a sane world, this allegation about a conversation around January to March 2023 would be national news:
A senior colleague hears I’m not happy with my team fit and asks me to go on a walk. I know him a bit from a past life - one of the kindest and most civic-minded people I’ve met. He says he might be starting a new special team that will train dangerous bio and cyber and nuclear models and show scary demos to governments in order to get them to take AI risk seriously. I politely decline.
This reminds me of what went wrong in the rational world of American defense intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.
I guess this confirms our fears about Anthropic’s inexplicable acquisition of a wet lab.
Fun fact: emacs can come in colors (green) when used in ogremode
Edit: adding to this post so that I don’t spam up the thread:
Looks like Zitron is going to be on Jon Stewart’s show tomorrow. Could be a great entry point to anti-slop thought for the older liberals in our lives.
I was looking for a google thing and accidentally clicked the first link and not the second, so I came to a their FAQ page. And I was told to wait while gemini generated the answer to the question, which made me realize that even google doesn’t cache these things. Wtf are we doing?
Can’t store anything! Need these servers for compute!
Re-derive everything from first principles when you search for things rather than indexing the internet! Can’t pay for bandwidth!
brb, rederiving the Internet from three frames of a falling apple using the power of Bayes
Make sure you freeze all the genetic supergeniuses who are involved in the project in liquid helium so that when you discover how to hack reality you can bring them back
More OpenAI math ‘proofs’ https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1xgc62m/more_openai_math_proofs/
they claim they got halfway to solving another millennium prize problem, but issues with Lean translation make it sketchy at best
ex-DOGE led AI cybersecurity startup hacks Antrhopic (wapo via archive is), Ι’d love to sneer that doing felonies for marketing appears to be normal now, but supposedly they did it by the book and immediately used everyone’s bug bounty processes to inform them of the vulnerabilities, instead of accidentally finding out that they did a surprise hack, is as was the case with anthro, oai and meta.
Anthropic confirmed in a statement that Cathedral researchers had gained access to “a limited set” of its sales, human resources, and IT systems. The AI company shut off the pathways exposed by the researchers and briefed federal officials on the incident, the statement said.
A senior Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal proceedings, said that the Cathedral report on its access inside Anthropic had circulated within the government and raised national security concerns.
“If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially, the Chinese aren’t far behind,” the official said. He added that he was taken aback by “how little time it took to get into the sensitive systems of a company that is controlling almost nuclear weapons grade material.”
The Trump administration is now working with the company to game out adversarial scenarios related to AI, the administration official said.
I assume that “Cathedral” is a Curtis Yarvin/Moldbug reference.
You have to ask?
“If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially, the Chinese aren’t far behind,”
my eyes rolled so far back they ended up in the back of my head
