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 - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate thisā¦)
More insane cult stuff has emerged - this time its MAPLE. https://www.insidemaple.com/p/the-high-control-dynamics-at-maple
There is something about this picture, a warehouse full of books to be destroyed by Anthropic for training data, that just makes me sick. Knowing that they are destroying books in the abstract is bad enough, but seeing the sheer scale of it makes me viscerally angry.
Karen Hao called her book Empire of AI for a very good reason. The empire has all these noble narratives of bringing civilization and progress to the colonies, but in reality the empire only sees resources to be extracted, repackaged, and sold back to their subjects at a fee. Kudos to those who saw this immediately and fought against it. Shame on those who believed in the narrative of progress, to the point where many of them are collaborators with the empire.
Whenever a smarmy fellow on Linkedin posts about how AI is making so much progress in coding or math, I want them to see this picture. I want them to see the videos of families in tears after a data center takes away their home with eminent domain, and other families who have to deal with the resulting pollution. Go beyond the bloodless math of tokens and instead see for yourself what this all truly costs. I hope it was worth it.
AI Crisis Flowchart spotted on linkedin
spoiler
and the actual article: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-ai-that-hacked-its-way-out-and-the-hype-that-followed-it
quoted zvi haha :|
To be fair, the safety community can plausibly claim vindication here. At worst, an autonomous agent that breaches containment and attacks a real third party is precisely the scenario researchers have warned about for years, which enthusiasts have routinely dismissed as speculative. And at best, the company in charge of maintaining safety failed to construct an adequate containment system.
are you fucking kidding me, they have been DDoSing sites for months, everybody knows about it, and the āsafetyā community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions. I know multiple companies that woke up one day to 10-20k netlify bills until they could stand up an anubis.
Just let hugging face sue the idiots, it isnāt like law enforcement will do anything even though thereās already laws on the books for unauthorized access, industrial espionage, etc etc etc.
and the āsafetyā community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions.
Occasionally I see a sane relatively workable idea on lesswrong (like making stricter laws on liability and transparency for everything AI companies do, Iāve also seen this idea put forward on lawfare a few times), but that is like 1 idea out of 20, with the other 19 being absurd, like the absolutely unworkable fantasies of AI: 2040.
Google shut down the AlphaFold team, trying to reassign the people behind the super interesting problem of using ML to predict protein structure from sequence onto chatbot development. A whole bunch left the company.
https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold/
The Business Idiots are truly running the asylum.
One of the defenses I see of LLMs on place like /r/singularity (although recently /r/singularity has started wising up and the committed true believers have shifted to /r/accelerate), is that they are going to cure cancer or some other incredibly valuable thing, conflating AI, ML in general, DNN, vs. LLMs specifically. Technology like AlphaFold was a lot more on the ācure cancerā track (although there is still a huge gap between better protein folding predictions and successful drug discovery) than anything LLM relatedā¦ this is sad.
Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now onā¦ Come on guys itās still architecture. Where are you going?
a stock-slobber posts a cri de cÅur about the coming automation of maths and HN says itās no biggie, think how productive the field will become
https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048681
btw the language in the post is bad enough to be entirely human-generated
For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation.
Before you a channel through which humans have accessed the ineffable and sacred for thousands of years is being sealed for eternity.
The blogger simultaneously elevates mathematics to some mystical endeavor and fixates on novel theorem proving as the key element of that and believes LLM-based AI will replace human mathematicians at theorem proving in a matter of yearsā¦ that is quite a combination. I can imagine how 1.5 of those things fit together (although I disagree with that view point obviously), but the whole package is really quite an odd combination.
Also, in the fantasy scenarios where AI really is capable of totally replacing mathematicians, arenāt we supposed to get post-scarcity abundance, freeing up your time to pursue mathematics out of pure desire for enlightenment? Maybe the blogger doesnāt believe that part? Or they are so attached to themselves personally getting to discover novel theorems first they donāt care that the post-scarcity era would on net free up a lot more people to pursue pure mathematics as a hobby.
how productive the field will become
Letās just ship all these people to Macroeconomica
Missed this paper last week from Google
Funny how now that itās widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their āitās going to take your jobā stance. Surely just a coincidence
It sure is a zany coincidence that all the major American AI companies have come out either for or against open weight AI models with grand ethical and/or patriotic concerns all at the same time isnāt it?
Most recently our pal Zuck! https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-ai-future-is-for-everyone-a0c24e20
Iām just imagining a WSJ reader reading this and thinking āwhat the heck is this man talking aboutā. At some point you need a little structure or text to balance out the subtext.
Edit: did I miss any?
OpenAI (discussed here the other week): https://nitter.net/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412 / https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078619513575137330
Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
Nvidia: https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf
Google: https://xcancel.com/sundarpichai/status/2081026488158040181
AmazonThe Washington Post who Iām sure wrote this for reasons completely unrelated to Mr. Bezos: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/02/right-answer-chinas-open-weight-ai-models-is-build-our-own/That one guy I hate: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2080672505660834163
Itās going to be really interesting to see if the foss zealots who switched over to the AI side will handle heavy handed regulation taking away their local models.
theyāre all getting stiffies from the idea of black market models
As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them. Rather than centralizing this power, we believe that delivering personal superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.
Healthy societies also recognize that safety requires checks and balances. If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit peopleās ability to choose their own future.
Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg
As an interesting follow-up to the ai-does-maths-using lean4 stubstack comments on Sunday, an llm accidentally uncovers a bug in the lean4 kernel.
Summary by Meven Lennon-Bertrand:
https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056
To summarize:
- an AI agent let loose provides a sorry-free proof of the Collatz conjecture
- the proof is detected as actually being a kernel bug
- the bug is related to (nested) inductive types, for which there is no clear theoretical specification: the kernelās code is the reference
- external checkers (lean4lean and nanoda from a week ago) reproduce the bug, because they essentially copied the reference kernel implementation
Eta: āsorry-freeā in this case means a complete proof with no trust-me-bro steps or TODOsā¦ the
sorrytactic in lean āprovesā a theorem to be correct even if it is garbage or incomplete. More programming languages should make developers apologise for half-arsing their work.And so
- AI raises the bar for kernel correctness by a lot
- without a clear type-theoretic understanding of what is actually implemented, weāre toast
- external checkers help to catch implementation bugs, but without a clear specification they canāt catch logic bugs
How bad this is, is unclear just yetā¦ probably not the sky actually falling, but not great. Interesting though.
A little bit of plot thickening spotted by abadidea: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943
tl;dr, the timeline looks like this:
- āproofā of collatz conjecture released
- bugs identified in lean kernel
- proof demonstrated to use these bugs
There was only a day between the first two events, and the non-proof was not where the bugs were discovered. So maybe it was just a coincidence that the chatbot found the bug at the same time, or maybe itās training data included previous investigations into those bugs which it then built upon and that would be a bad thing for other llm generated proofs.
The collatz conjecture is sufficiently famous that enough third-party checking was done to spot the problem. I wonder how much checking would have been done on proofs of less famous and interesting things.
Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because theyāre caught up in Buzzardās hype machine. This is extremely funny but I donāt see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.
Max Kennerly sneers the New York Times:
This opinion piece, written by someone with no relevant expertise, cites two sources, both of them blogs by people who also have no relevant expertise, one of whom is employed by a sham think tank funded by the āEffective Altruismā propaganda network.
Truly embarrassing decision to publish it.
The op-ed writer is Adam Mastroianni who is a regular at Lighthaven. https://gwern.net/interview-inkhaven
He cites Andy Masley who is yet another autodidact with a cushy job in the Effective Altruism grantland. https://www.andymasley.com/ and Brian Potter who is an engineer at a think tank called the Institute for Progress https://ifp.org/author/brian-potter/ (āThe overwhelming priority of energy policy must be making it easier to build thingsā which things angryDuckMeme.png)
LLM bros actively force themselves everywhere, part infinity:
Newgrounds moderation had to deal with someone (probably a scammer) posting slop āart adviceā recently - exactly why, nobody fuckinā knows:
Transcript/desciption
Iāve already passed it off to folks that could nuke the account from orbit, but I guess as a public service announcement, be on the lookout for replies in the forums that sound a little too LLM-y.
An account (unsure if a bot or just a weirdo) recently attempted to infiltrate the art forum, giving plausible-sounding AI-generated list-based advice, complete with preambles and summations, exactly the kind of syntax and format one would expect if theyāve dealt with enough clanker slop text. It fooled a small handful of people, but it was extremely easy to confirm my suspicions as soon as I smelled the clanker stank on it. One click made it clear that they had a generated PFP and profile linking to some image slopification scam.
It raises the question, what would anyone possibly have to gain from posting slop on the forums? It seems like a really stupid thing to do, but I guess braindead behavior tracks, given who weāre dealing with. Make sure āhelpfulā new users arenāt just trying to Dead Internet us or whatever.
zerohedge sponcon so obviously a grift but wtf is this AI Black Paper by Jim Rickards
https://www.zerohedge.com/sponsored-post/sobering-july-29th-announcement-set-crush-ai-stocks
Have the goldbugs been reading Zitron? or just an extremely late pivot from btc to ai? or flooding the zone?
Anyway who the hell is Jim Rickards? Another week, another guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:James_Rickards
āAI Black Paperā is catchy enough though, should be a goth band.
or flooding the zone?
With Zerohedge I think this is most likely. Maintaining truthiness by predicting 30 out of the last 2 recessions.
The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion via naked capitalism
choice quotes:
More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the countryās real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, āThe first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary peopleā (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).
In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. Itās chatbots all the way down.
Yet, the āAI raceā story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.
If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as āhelping China,ā then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulationāif even possibleācan be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.
At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin OāLeary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood canāt exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.
We understand why OāLeary and the other Tech Broligarchs donāt understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. Itās hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.
I need one of those UFO posters that are like āI want to believeā but itās a picture of the PRCs flag lol.
As always though pointing at the
SpanishgermansRussiansChinese remains an evergreen excuse as to why you canāt be anything other than wholely on board with madness or youāre a traitor.
So itās been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a yearās work in 1 hour
Soā¦ Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
Itās almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
The AI shills would say: Are you still using the models from six months ago? Because the new models are sooo much more powerful.
I once listened to a talk by a guy from german OSHA that hit a lot of the good points. Perceived productivity opposed to actual productivity from the METR studies. Mental load of alien code review. (This was a company-internal IT-expert exchange thingy.)
A question in Q&A (submitted anonymously on slido like a sniveling coward) was deadass āHave you ever coded with a frontier model?ā
Have you ever tried meth, tho?
yea you just donāt have enough experience, I do bath salts every week and I promise you productivity gets a huge boost after week 5
The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable
you just know one of these guys has microdosed bath salts out of sheer contrariness
Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!
Yeah. Behind all the hype about percieved productivity etc., thereās really only one benchmark - will GenAI help produce better software, faster, and at less cost? So far this doesnāt seem to be happening.
The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.
Clicked on their profile to see if the Plissken thing was a reference to Snake Plissken, and (cw: rape jokes)eurhg what a fucking horrible guy. 160k+ likes 66m views, what a far right hellhole twitter has become.
The actual worst man, and also just fucking sad. Imagine knowing that not only did you peak in high school, but that you peaked specifically in the moment when you fucked up and lost the state championship. Like, you can just smell the empty beer cans and tears piled up around this guyās posts.
Ow god he is Al Bundy, if Al didnāt score four touchdowns in one game.
Iām sure this guy uses the ai quite a lot (and so would the guy in Married With Children)
