Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 12 May 2024

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

saucerwizard,

x.com/louisanslow/status/1789751075026661855?s=46…

Rat orgies reach stand up comedy circuit. (Sorry for no nitter)

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

came here to post that, amazing

carlitoscohones,

This is the greatest ad for Twitter ever, hosting content like this. God damn that is amazing.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

Sam Bankman-Fried interviewed by Puck News!

this has been going around to great publicity from all!

it’s an insufferably vapid and self-serving rehash of Sam’s late 2022 crime confession tour. i can see why Puck grabbed for the exclusive, but jesus fuck nobody needs to hear from this conman again. Anyway, this copy isn’t paywalled.

saucerwizard,

I’m sure the prison rice arbitrage thing will end well.

froztbyte,

that’s definitely not a set of words I thought I’d read today

so we learn, I guess

sailor_sega_saturn,
@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

Orange Site denizen plays Dr. LLM: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331850

Show NH [sic]: “data-to-paper” - autonomous stepwise LLM-driven research

data-to-paper is a framework for systematically navigating the power of AI to perform complete end-to-end scientific research, starting from raw data and concluding with comprehensive, transparent, and human-verifiable scientific papers

The example “research paper” was some useless fluff about diabetes, based off an existing data set (read: actual work produced by actual humans), and mad-libs.

The study identifies an inverse correlation between physical activity and fruit and vegetable intake with diabetes occurrence, while higher BMI is positively correlated

I’m too sleepy and statistics-impaired to check how nonsensical the regression “analysis” or findings are, so instead let’s check out the references (read: the actual humans who were plagarized to make this fluff)!

Reference #5

[5] T. Schnurr, Hermina Jakupovi, Germn D. Carrasquilla, L. ngquist, N. Grarup, T. Srensen, A. Tjnneland, K. Overvad, O. Pedersen, T. Hansen, and T. Kilpelinen. Obesity, unfavourable lifestyle and genetic risk of type 2 diabetes: a case-cohort study. Diabetologia, 63:1324–1332, 2020.

This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:

Hermina Jakupović, Germán D. Carrasquilla, Lars Ängquist, Thorkild I. A. Sørensen, Anne Tjønneland, Tuomas O. Kilpeläinen

I guess AI has an easier time advancing science than producing a PDF with non-ascii text in it

V0ldek,

The fact that actual engineers have been trying to educate newcomers on Unicode for at least 20 years and not only is it still pervasively ignored but the hottest, newest, cutting edge AI that Will Change Everything™ with billions of dollars and so many manhours behind it gets absolutely dumbfounded when it sees é is the exact combination of funny and sad that will eventually result in me turning into a Butlerian Jihad Joker.

sailor_sega_saturn,
@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

Every respectable programming language has functionality in its standard library that recognises letter characters

As a C++ programmer I’ve never been so offended by something I so entirely agree with.

froztbyte,

This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:

hmm. I can guess at a few reasons this could be happening: model coders “normalizing” everything to flat-ascii in training, or similar happening at training stage (because of the previously-referenced RLHF datamills employing only people with specific localized dialects, instead of wider context-local languages), etc.

wonder if this particular thing is a confluence of those, or just one specific set

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

have you ever met an English-native dev who didn’t need to be trained out of the world being 7-bit ascii

jonhendry,
@jonhendry@iosdev.space avatar

@dgerard

7 bits were good enough for Jesus.

zogwarg,
@zogwarg@awful.systems avatar

First efforts at bible digitization seems incredibly poorly documented online, and from a casual inspection in google scholar, not very well referenced. It’s a pity it sounds like a fascinating topic, though 7 bits is likely for the first english versions yes (And according to this there are horrid 7-bits encodings for the ancient greek)

BurgersMcSlopshot,

My Jesus wanted characters for drawing borders and playing card suits, which is why He handed down to us Code Page 437. Using the upper 128 characters for things like vowels with funny marks on them is catholic heresy (nuts to Latin 1, down with Unicode).

froztbyte,

I got lucky and largely missed out on having to deal with those, at a guess largely because of location and age. the type I got to deal with instead were the php-/perl-brained “everything is just a string” types

hell, (circa 2010) I had beers with someone once who was really into Tcl and Second Life, and wanted to be uploaded as a digital consciousness. way before I knew about the other nutjobs, but in retrospect I now have a couple other questions I might’ve wanted to ask at the time…

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

Some rich investor/math nerd croaks (from old age), HN’s resident mod team declines to add a black bar to the site, leading fans of licking rich boots to wonder if “the community” should decide which dead rich guys get commemorated:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40327812

Bonus for the dude still salty Terry Davis didn’t get one.

carlitoscohones,

Their comments section just never fails to deliver … something.

Online communities with reasonable debate are under attack by state actors, HN is no exception. In this context, no matter how well meaning the proposal is, opening an avenue for acrimony here is not something we can afford.

At least this dead hedge fund guy has a wikipedia “controversies” section as a legacy. I wonder if a genius mathematician could figure out a way to enrich his friends and family while the markets took a dump.

According to The Wall Street Journal in May 2009, Simons was questioned by investors on the dramatic performance gap of Renaissance Technologies’ portfolios. The Medallion Fund, which has been available exclusively to current and past employees and their families, surged 80% in 2008 in spite of hefty fees; the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF), owned by outsiders, lost money in both 2008 and 2009; RIEF declined 16% in 2008.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd says the app could embrace AI

“Your dating concierge could go and date for you!” this woman actually said out of her mouth

  • you each send your robots out to date
  • they fuck, creating a nanobot plague that destroys the earth
  • you both stay at home shitposting on bsky

previously both a Black Mirror and an Oglaf (highly NSFW)

mountainriver,

Is the AI lying? wonders the Guardian and turns to this guy:

“As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” said Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research.

Who of course validates the sentient AI frame. They should have asked him if this means that we are closer to Terminator or Matrix.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

just reminded again of: What if the moon got mad?

Architeuthis,
@Architeuthis@awful.systems avatar

This is almost the plot of The Fifth Season, a hugo winner from a while back.

Soyweiser,

Also I think a final fantasy, where the moon drops monsters on the planet, and a zelda game.

zogwarg,
@zogwarg@awful.systems avatar

I read this as The Fifth Element, but it also (almost) works!

froztbyte,

in the last couple of years I’ve gotten back into sound (used to work live/tv sound ages back, been trying to learn more production and shit) and as a result of that I’ve gotten to know a looooooot of synth/production/effect/… related things

and christ it hurts to listen to that

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

sorry bro, maximum good across the quantum wave function of the universe

Soyweiser,

That is not the only bad thing, check the right side of the moons opening image, why is the moon hairy?

carlitoscohones,

I thought that the overproduction and heavy autotune was appropriate to the subject.

On topic:

“Tape machines ought to be big and cumbersome and difficult to use, if only to keep the riff-raff out.”

–Steve Albini

Soyweiser,

The obvious weird pauses (between superhuman and AI and the halfway part where suddenly nothing happens) because the AI used to made this doesn’t really understand music are also very appropriate.

froztbyte,

gonna have to read that piece to get the context of the remark. also have a nuanced position on both the things you point to, but you’re definitely correct about the use of this in this context

saucerwizard,

I think it would be better as a faux-Hillsong bop.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

THE BASILISK IS MY SU-PER-HE-RO

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

why yes, the kid went to a C of E primary for a bit and they fucking loved that one

nfultz,

less.online - they couldn’t be bothered to write the 5 lines of js to do their karma discount automatically

Soyweiser,

That ‘only show authors confirmed coming’ button. Wtf lol.

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

Surprised and a bit disappointed to see patio11 attending. Gwern isn’t though, lol.

slopjockey,

I’m a bit surprised to see his name. I read “Seeing like a bank” and snippets of a few other blogposts, he didn’t come off as a ghoul

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

it’ll be interesting to see his reaction to the room full of race scientists. I wonder how well they can hide their power level.

froztbyte,

suspicion: this is a recruitment event, and a lot of people might try to be on their best obfuscatory behaviour

froztbyte,

I have my own thoughts on the guy, but I figured I’d send a mail and ask about his reasons. let’s see I guess

mlen,

A phrase that gains a completely different meaning once one notices that aella is attending.

Soyweiser,

Wait what she is also attending? Wait, no of course she is, and also lol.

mawhrin,
@mawhrin@awful.systems avatar

preview:

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/584fcfcf-ec17-4a1e-99d6-8c90c3834e44.png

reality:

https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/1bc749f0-9270-4aa5-895e-bfd1940c6dc2.png

“how to inflate your event by pretending there’s more to it” (tbh i wouldn’t mind if esr would inflict his pleasant personality on that crowd; and of course the renowned philosopher agnes callard will attend)

Soyweiser,

Yeah that was exactly what I meant amazing bullshit

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

Wildbow: “you know the Empire 88 and the biotinkers were bad guys in Worm right”

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

ESR hasn’t blogged for ages,no? I believe his old blog was offline for a long time because lack of TLS/backup or something.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

It got a malware infection and nobody bothered fixing it. By the end its commenters were enjoying long threads entirely composed of dogwhistles.

carlitoscohones,

Why is Patrick McKenzie attending this, I wonder?

V0ldek,

“A Festival of Writers Who are Wrong on the Internet”

How is it possible to be so thoroughly immune to self-reflection.

o7___o7,
@o7___o7@awful.systems avatar

Vampires?

slopjockey,

Wtf? It’s like they made a sex offenders list, just nothing but libertarians and racists

Amoeba_Girl,
@Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems avatar

Seeing Cremieux Recueil will be there, does anyone know who’s behind it, what’s the deal with it, etc? I’m always seeing it pop up on these freaks’ timelines and I imagine it’s eugenics shit but I can never be bothered to dig enough to find the really incriminating stuff. It’s well creepy though.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

frequent ACX commenter, Here he is on IQ and genes Very into citing OpenPsych as solid gold scientific fact. Race scientist, yes.

Amoeba_Girl,
@Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems avatar

Wow, I knew what I was in for but god that’s unpleasant.

There’s no clearly-articulated theory of cultural regression to the mean, but there is a genetic one, and it is consistent with the results.

Ahh, see, racism is just more intellectually convenient.

froztbyte,

Hosting entity appears to be at the bottom:

Ben Pace & the team at Lightcone Infrastructure.

Could start digging from there

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

Lightcone are the guys convinced they will save the future of humanity by writing and hosting the LessWrong/EA forum code.

froztbyte,

I am still curious about how well that belief will hold up under a couple hundred bucks of darknet services

dgerard, (edited )
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

Aha! It turns out Cremieux is the r/slatestarcodex poster formerly known as /u/Tr–yPorn0 (slur dashed out), or TP0 for those who don’t even want the slur in dashed-out form. A really persistent race scientist with a habit of (a) misrepresenting the papers he spammed as links (b) misrepresenting himself. He used to run a tiny blog as “Cremieux” when he was claiming to be an economist from Liechtenstein. Then he got pumped by the other race scientists. So I expect this to very much be Racist Fest.

some past hits from TP0:

his style is gish gallops and paywalled papers that turn out not to support his claims, and citing Emil Kirkegaard’s pseudojournals a lot

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

Googling the blog name brings up this delightful interview

jollyheretic.com/…/bad-science-vs-based-science-c…

Crémieux was kind enough to grant me a podcast, where we covered all manor of things Based, from the IQ of the Ashkenazis, why the Vikings were violent, the effect of selection events, and the need for anonymity in Based science.

Ah yes, anonymity, a cornerstone of the scientific method.

Amoeba_Girl,
@Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems avatar

Wow amazing, thank you. What a sicko.

slopjockey,

Here’s another good one: old.reddit.com/…/tpo_has_joined_twitter_been_twee…

paywalled papers that turn out not to support his claims

My favorite tp0 moment was when someone pointed out the identical twins in an adoption study he cited were barely separated, and tp0 blocked him and left the original chart using data from the study up.

old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/…/jgr8sxv/

froztbyte,

can’t wait to see how the felon musk stans try to excuse this one (archive)

The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data

ah yes, because the lost data is the problem, but the thing floating in someone’s brain after coming loose 3 months ago isn’t something to speak up about. totes fine.

and there’s a certain kind of regularity to keeping the lid on that news. like it was a choice to take that action. if only there were words for something like a pattern? of behaviour? if only[0]

[0] - (with apologies to stealing the phrasing from mmfish)

Soyweiser,

I just feel bad for the guy they implanted this in. Going to join the list of people who had a short term working piece of tech implanted and now are walking around with scrap. (It isn’t that far yet for this guy, but Musk doesn’t have the best track record).

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar
froztbyte,

yeah I mean not to dismiss that, it’s not the hardest of predictions. the thing i’m pointing at here is more that another felon musk company lies and misdirects, in the pattern of culture set by the fucking turd-in-chief.

dgerard,
@dgerard@awful.systems avatar

from bsky: “It is now officially fair game to make fun of this little shit”

archive.ph/cVeWT

carlitoscohones,

Don’t forget Tiffany. Chick got a 13 carat diamond engagement ring from her fellow lucky sperm club member billionaire husband.

slopjockey,

Familial Transmission of Personality Is Higher Than Shown in Typical Studies” - posted to HN

Another set of social darwinisms dark bio troofs feat. 2 year old accounts made by promptfondeling libertarians

mii,

I swear to god, starting a nature vs. nurture debate in a place leaning even slightly libertarian just breaks my brain because I never understand what point they’re even trying to make.

Half of them seem to argue that this is proof rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor (although I fail to see from which side they’re coming) while the other half uses it as thin-veiled excuses to be racist without mentioning race.

saucerwizard,

They’re just cowardly racists really.

ebu,

[as previously discussed[(awful.systems/comment/3164768), the rabbit r1 turns out to be (gasp) just an android app.

in a twist no one saw coming, the servers running “rabbit os” report to just be running Ubuntu, and the “large action model” that was supposed to be able to watch humans use interfaces and learn how to use them, turns out to just be a series of hardcoded places to click in Playwright.

mii,

Oh look, another company’s “we won’t data scrape against our users’ wishes to feed spicy autocomplete” mask has just crumbled. I am so surprised.

Let’s see how many of my comments I can delete or overwrite with garbage before they ban me.

ebu,

i couldn’t delete the one question i had on stackoverflow, so i used a text generator to overwrite the body and title of the question. fight garbage with garbage

Architeuthis,
@Architeuthis@awful.systems avatar

The slatestar subreddit is doing its regular so what’s up with all the racists constantly crawling out of the woodwork around here surprised pikachu thread, in response to Scotty doing Hanania Week in the substack.

Soyweiser,

Amazing how much they memoryholed the Scott emails.

gerikson,
@gerikson@awful.systems avatar

Scott is of the opinion that being able to maintain peaceable discourse with people who you deeply disagree with on political issues is an important feature of society which we shouldn’t readily make exceptions to.

“Scott being nice to racists and reviewing their books positively actually means he’s less racist” is a good rhetorical trick.

Architeuthis,
@Architeuthis@awful.systems avatar

HBD is a legit line of scientific inquiry you guys, it’s not just eugenics obsessed weirdoes and fascists trying to bring back birthright as the primary path to privilege.

V0ldek,

It’s also a patently idiotic philosophy boiling down to basically negotiating with terrorists.

slopjockey,

So what exactly happens to people who get really into Scott et al. and then realize that they’re racist? I mean people like OP who genuinely seemed shocked by how buddy buddy their “unorthodox” intellectuals are with blatant racists.

Do they slowly disengage from rationalist-spheres, or do they just become cryptoracists like all the other idw types?

slopjockey,

Also what the fuck?

In your mind, is a racist who “possesses strong animus towards non-whites” a special category of person with which we should not engage in any kind of discussion? Or if we should not be casual towards them, how should we act? Why?

200fifty,
@200fifty@awful.systems avatar

is this trying to say “discrimination against racists is the real racism”? … Would that be “racismism”?

froztbyte,

“should we really treat violent racists any differently from how we would casually treat a neighbour? what is it really you expect me to do do? why are you so ridiculous?”

just some casual afternoon reframing of violent racism and dehumanising anyone that isn’t like themselves, no biggie

froztbyte,

at least one vein of this goes off into the vibes cluster that is TPOT

Soyweiser,

They start reading sneerclub and then see that the stereotypes about hwo horrible the place is are not true. Then they post, then they are lost.

V0ldek,

Trapped in Acausal Robot God’s maze forever

Soyweiser,

We just cut out the middleman, no fancy simulation needed, we can torture ourselves well enough.

Architeuthis, (edited )
@Architeuthis@awful.systems avatar

You can like a thinker without endorsing all of their beliefs, even if their beliefs are evil. Why do people like Schmitt and Heidegger even though they were fascists? Or Foucault given his views on the age of consent? I agree that Hanania’s views are relevant context, but I think it’s fine to write a book review that doesn’t try to analyse the author’s motivations or the book’s place in a wider political context.

Hanania is clearly analogous to Foucault and Heidegger, and also is it even wrong to completely divorce a work from all context.

I think Scott was simply more interested in writing an article on arguments aginst civil rights law than an article on whether Hanania is engaged in an insidious project to smuggle rascist ideas into the mainstream via his legal arguments, and frankly I find that kind of review more interesting too. Perphaps this is irresponsible, but at the end of the day Scott is a modestly influential blogger that just likes to write about things he finds interesting.

uwu smolbean blogger with absolutely no agenda besides the pursuit of truth and civility strikes again.

sailor_sega_saturn,
@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems avatar

Nick Bostrom’s advertising his new book about what if AIs let us sleep until noon and wouldn’t that be grand.

A reddit ad: “What if things go right? A winter wonderland glittering with possibilities for discovery and play. Delve into the possibilities of artificial intelligence in Deep Utopia, by New York Times best selling authro Nick Bostrom. Available Now.”

Also call me paranoid, but “A winter wonderland glittering with possibilities for discovery and play” sounds exactly like the sort of thing an LLM might generate.

saucerwizard,

Outright millenarianism

Architeuthis,
@Architeuthis@awful.systems avatar

Also there was a whole thing about how CGTP tends to use ‘delve’ a lot because it’s been RLHF’d by speakers of nigerian english, so yeah.

Soyweiser,

Bostrom yearns for retirement/unemployment the book.

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