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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this, and happy 4th July in advance.)
New Odium Symposium episode. We talk about /r/fuckingfascists, a fascist domination roleplay subreddit intended for good liberals, which instead ended up getting eaten alive by nazis.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/20-death-of-162994026
The future is so strange (I got this in my youtube suggestions)
like, try explaining this to someone from 20 years ago and theyād look at you like you were off your rocker
āOkay, so it starts with a doomsday cult which formed around GameStopā¦ā
AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism.
hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk.
The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network.
If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations.
This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things.
So half-right that itās almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.
I hadnāt thought of Ribbon Farm in like 5 years, but when I googled it today I found this:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ribbonfarm-resurrected
For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably wonāt notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest itās no longer a standard WordPress blog.
It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months.
It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.
The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. Itās fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.
?O kay?
wget -rwasnāt good enough for a static copy?Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp.
This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora ā ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters.
wat
I suspect Iām going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self.
why canāt you just make a tulpa like a normal person.
well whatever, Iāll ask about the harari.
Harariās framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that itās the suit itself ā and the person wearing it has already left the building.
what even the fuck is this word salad saying. at least upgrade to the one that isnāt em dash trigger happy.
now Iām afraid to google farnam street.
I could just bundle everything Iāve ever written into a ZIP file, and then it would be losslessly compressed. Just saying.
Harariās framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that itās the suit itself ā and the person wearing it has already left the building.
I donāt necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systemsā lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what itās going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesnāt do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.
I believe that ML training is basically an evolutionary process. What does evolution produce most reliably?
Parasites.
You have created things that simulate the social signals of humans, getting us to care about things all out of proportion to what it actually does. Itās like those beetles that live in ant colonies, hacking the smell and social signals of ants so they get babied while providing nothing.
Harari is an open transhumanist from when I did some research into him when I found him on this interview so this seems in character
More ai stuff, this time from flathub: Democratizing Abandonware.
Flathub has a fairly relaxed ai policy that both ai bros and strongly anti ai people are unhappy with. It was brought in to try and deal with the review burden of slop submissions where no human is involved, and a chatbot fields review comments.
Turns out that ~75% of submissions that got a slop tag were abandonedā¦ not just the submission, but the entire git repo behind it, too. The author is quick to point out that this is far from a representative study, but I can certainly believe that a) people who have invested little time or effort into their slopware will abandon it without much concern, and b) things like openclaw could definitely submit bullshit packages that are immediately forgotten as its internal state moves on. Thereās no malice in the same way thereās no intent, just shitty tools being left running and polluting everything around them.
Via (she also predicted it): Bryan Johnson gave himself a incurable disease.
Welcome to the age of Oceangatelikes.
E: He blames it on eating sugar as a kid. AI will fix it.
The right to bodily autonomy includes doing incredibly dangerous/untested shit to your body that will hurt you until you die; but it does not include posting through it (that is that secondary right to free expression, which also allows us to point and laugh).
Anyway, gg Johnson, maybe one day youāll realize we are all tiny sparks trapped in decaying bags of flesh and the only thing that matters is what we do with that.
iām sure this guy will have a sane, healthy and self-compassionate attitude to disability and long-term illness.
that could be any of who knows how many untested things he tried over years
ādonāt dieā - famous last words
e: this is also sorta why clinical trials are a thing, and why so often thereās recommendation to not treat disease at all, and why you leave that call to a professional, not decide on your own. especially when your own education is MBA from BYU
update 2: bluesky people say he also ate rapamycin then stopped; also dried cow thyroid; got some unapproved āanti-aging gene therapyā in honduras; probably among many other unusual things. he wonāt be even useful as a case study because deconvoluting all this nonsense would be impossible. maybe as an example
man they really do like reinventing alchemy, did anyone suggested cinnabar yet? i guess him blaming sugar for it might be beginning of new grift
I guess the silver lining here is that āhis teamā might accidentally discover some actual way to help sufferers of this disease? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
Between this and Elonās sad AI birthday party pics, I came to the conclusion that the default consensus for anything someone whoās wealth exceeds a certain amount says should be ruled horseshit with no further verification needed. Yeah, occasionally there will be a pony under all that shit but it aināt worth digging for when itās there.
Anyways, calling horseshit on this because even if parts of it arenāt, they arenāt important compared to the greater horseshit coming from a guy who has an autoimmune disease like Bryan Johnson, that disease being āeverything out of Bryan Johnsonās mouth is horseshitā
I missed those pics.
Me too. Saved future readers a search
A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasnāt come across them already:
Bosses Horrified as āAI Nativeā College Graduates Hit the Workplace
new hires who were seen as āAI nativesā are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
āWe want critical thinking, not just AI,ā the financier told the FT.
I canāt help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. Theyāre not all going to be grifters, after all.
Metaās Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected
This is brilliant. Theyāre making so many mistakes theyāre actually having to admit it. Itās amazing how incompetent zuckerberg isā¦ late to every fad heās tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
In retrospect, he said, the ātrajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasnāt really accelerated in the way that we expected,ā and āthat the companyās bets on the new structure āhavenāt come to fruition yet.ā Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can āexecute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having āwith our top peopleā when they started planning the restructuring in January and February āwere that they āwere ā worried that we werenāt going to move fast enough to adapt,ā Zuckerberg said.
Iām sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I canāt remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.
Itās amazing how incompetent zuckerberg isā¦ late to every fad heās tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
He is the voxday of the billionaire tech bros.
(Voxday is a whitenat far right alt right figure who also does that with every alt right culture war topic. He makes the plausible deniable, undeniable. For example he claimed he was big in the alt right movement and just went out and said āwe want the 14 wordsā).
Iām more familiar with vox day than Iād really like. He hasnāt pivoted from the culture war stuff that heās known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.
The main thing I knew him for is his failed attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards back in 2015.
(Thereās a r/HobbyDrama post about the whole debacle, which I recommend checking out)
Vox Day, the living embodiment of Dashiell Hammettās line, āThe cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patterā.
HA, and people thought the whole āAI generation is the tool of fascismā was a joke.
@rook I am immensely proud that some years ago I made a list VD blogged of āten SF publishing people whose chromed skulls I want as desk ornamentsā.
Itās good to be hated by the *worst* people. And itās totes on brand for him to be filling his empty mind with AI slop.
deleted by creator
new hires who were seen as āAI nativesā are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
So not only are STEM graduates (mainly compsci grads) struggling to get jobs as it is, employers are explicitly passing them over for āāāuselessāāā humanities degrees instead. Iām not sure whether to laugh at the irony of the situation, or crash out at the fact my own compsci/cybersec degrees may have become a liability.
Iām hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that Iād be safe from that particular filter, so Iāll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.
Your qualifications predate the LLM rot by fucking ages, and your position against them is crystal clear. Given both of those, bypassing that filter should be easy enough.
Iām thinking about going back to school and seeking a manufacturing job because even though I have been doing software professionally for 22 years, the entire industry is fucked by short term thinking and ignoring consequences.
Whilst I try and remember, thereās this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning childrenās schoolwork.
Which was then followed in the real world by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall) because satire is impossible now, I guess? I canāt find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.
because satire is impossible now
It is because they have basically run out of ideas to try, or the ability to see the difference between good and bad ideas in the gold rush. You saw the same with cryptocurrencies, where every joke you made was already a shitcoin somewhere.
Move fast and break things taken as a religious decree.
