The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
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 soo 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.)
Some descriptors for ādemocratisedā software that people can slop for themselves:
Slop as single-use software
Slop as fast fashionbow before the true champion of the working class, s e gyges:
a lot of opposition to AI is rent seeking, and the material incentives of being a rentier, even a small time one, lead you towards fascist conclusions from first principles
between him saying this, and other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious and being enslaved (and being actually fine with helping promulgating what they truly believe is slavery, because hey, you need to pay the rent), i am afraid something worse than usual entered the californian drinking water.
(not linking to the skeet on purpose).
I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My āVery Sane AI Newsletterā has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.
other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious
Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness out since early spring (tldr: currently not really conscious, but itās inevitable because I really want it to, so donāt be on the wrong side of history when it happens).
He seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI stance as an unforgivable moral failing.
just yesterday that motherfucker posted allegation that āslopā is a word from nazi vocabulary. so that bitch says that any criticism of ai is far right signifier actually. as in, the product being sold on a promise of displacing all labour and redirecting all wealth to five sfba dipshits, and cooking brains of maga boomers worldwide as we speak
Really hope the people outside of our little forum paid attention when warned Gyges was also an AI doomer.
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for speaking english
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for using slop jar to mean the vessel into which chamber pots are poured, in 1855
āSlopā as we use it to describe AI outputs came into the discourse via left-wing twitter and podcasts using āslopā as a term for mass entertainment media (like Marvel movies ā cape slop). Used negatively but also self deprecatingly: I canāt wait for the new episode of āStranger Thingsā, because I need my slop. The explicit metaphor is pigs happily eating buckets of food waste from a trough. Itās just slop. Nothing nefarious.
I think this may have been a case of the ādirtbag leftā types using slang that originated on 4chan, I did a search with date restrictions on the 4plebs archive site and found posts using it for mindless entertainment going back to 2012 at least
Hereās an example from an 1897 book review I found in the google books corpus: āThere never was anything in all this world quite so provincial as American literature. When we over here are not reading slop we read the books that bear the approval of London.ā Or this doggerel from the October 1920 issue of Farm Journal: āI read all kinds of printed junk / the good, the noble and the punk / the ancient and the new / and men who see me reading slop / predict that if I do not stop / my head will go askew.ā
These both seem like wiktionaryās current sense 8 (āContent or entertainment which is worthless, or produced and consumed mindlesslyā), so I donāt see any need to credit 4chan or 21st-century anti-Semites in general.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73708#comment-1642217
Sadly I think the popularization does owe a lot to the intermediate stage where 4chan started calling mass entertainment media āgoyslop,ā but even the Protocols types switched to tacking on specific descriptors before it made it out into the mainstream and got picked up as a term for genAI output.
theyāre collectively spiraling.
TFG: Everything I donāt like is rent seeking. Checkmate, anyone ideologically to the left of me
Look he is right, if you redefine ārentā to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.
In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).
He points out that mathematicians are also rent-seekers (though only 20% rent-seeking). You know, those famously capital-extractive mathematicians.
Oh my god heās doing fandom gatekeeping discourse
yeah it like. infuriates me that āfully automated luxury communismā was named in a way to specifically pay homage to the past. the word ācommunismā itself is some sort of vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things
https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3my3letkpbc2b
Lol dorkus
Itās āfully automated luxury gay space communismā, and every adjective is a pithy critique of the past.
what never having seen a left-wing person in real life does to a slopper
vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things
The āvicious traditionalismā that develops among his fellow travelers, who insist that some form of autonomous, inscrutable AI has to be the next step in technological progress, will be something to see. Religious movements donāt just stop when their central prophecy disappoints.
āLol dorkusā is an idiomatic translation of Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur (more literally āWhat is freely asserted is freely deniedā), and if you call that āHitchensās razorā I will fucking cut you.
I just wonder if he means āthey are looking to pay their rentā or āthey are holding on the ācapital of being able to do mathā and want to be paid for itā.
Damn, I was raking in so much cash from my mathematical theorems. Pretty good source of passive income, came with nice tax benefits too. Too bad itās all gone now. Maybe I should put my money in REITs.
ā¦ the fuck?
Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his oppositionās obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?
I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. Iām sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.
So far Iāve come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and ārent seekingā. If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it ābetterā, and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldnāt stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.
And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.
Yeah, I mean you could twist it to say labour unions do nothing but let workers rent-seek on their human capital instead of getting paid the only true god-given market rate. USian brainworms all the way.
another ai pusher recently generated a slop image, where she and the chairman xi are fighting the united forces of darkness, which include the ai companies, people opposing the LLM embrace and american conservatives. the thing theyāre fighting over? āopen technologyā.
say hello to the TankAIs
ā¦and all of them are working for one or another californian ai company or a slopware house.
q: is an image derivative of a slop image still a slop image if the process of creating the derivative did not involve Sloppy Babobots? Asking for a friend, who is me, also this question is not intended to be philosophical.
What do you have in mind specifically? Parody? It depends a little on intent but I would say not a problem at all, others might disagree.
Found another booster graph about AI 2027
wonder why āabsolute horizons depend on calibrationā is written in the smallest text at the bottom of the pageā¦
I have unfortunately stumbled upon some nonsense from r/singularity
shockingly, the top comments are calling bs:
āIām sorry but I think this time line is a load of bull. āHuman task duration at 80% successā. How exactly do you put a millenium prize puzzle on such an axis? It doesnāt even make any sense. Whoever is making this chart is just trying to stay relevant but his analysis holds little predictive power.ā
They also missed how that graph is measuring software/coding tasks, while the OP was estimating based off math ability, which are two wildly different fields
i also like how they skipped the part where it was 10k (or whatever) instances running in parallel
The y axis is also incredibly misleading-everything under 56h is squashed down so that the gap looks bigger
If they wanted to show exponential relationship, then exponential scale would work better, but i think it was just a ceiling on former benchmarks
Slop foundries solved the āslop is uncopyrightableā problem by making the output so awful that nobody would want to pinch it
IMF bearish on AI.
Anyway hereās my character, South Korean AI booster Bob Vylan: āDeath, death to the IMF!ā
The IMF is basically always saying get ready to fuck the poors with a rusty chainsaw.
Thatās like their whole thing, their raisin dough etcetera as they say.
Looks like AI can be everyoneās reason for everything. The rich can use it to get richer and make the poors poorer.
Lesswrongers go full panpsychism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wCY4oNHpH2HGYGSoP/the-user-in-the-llm-might-be-a-moral-patient-too-a-strange
To try to TLDR this multilayered bit of crazyā¦ lesswrongers already theorize LLMs might be sapient and/or have morally meaningful internal experiences. Exceptā¦ LLMs obviously ābehaveā wildly differently when prompted differently and especially when put into different āagent harnessesāā¦ so the big brain follow-up thought is what if the different personas an LLM can exhibit are all different āpeopleā (for the purposes of utilitarian accounting and/or what their internal experiences are likeā¦ the exact ātheoryā can vary by lesswronger). The even more insane full galaxy brain follow-up thought: what if the userās input to the LLM is forming yet another āpersonā, like a copy/reflection/simulacrum of the user!
TLDR for the TLDR: What if not only the LLM was sentient/sapient, but also held a sentient/sapient simulacrum of the user inside!
Can we just revoke these peoplesā internet loicense please? Increasingly I empathize with the award winning and erudite medical doctors who get wheeled out on talk shows to argue with āBob, 57, drinks his own piss dailyā as a peer.
Jonny took a look at Metaās āWonderā model they just released. Hereās how the thread starts:
The hourly history backup just failed in a way you should hear about plainly: the backup worker accidentally deleted the backup repo itself mid-run. The repoās entire git history and all the DB sidecar files up to watermark 330145 are gone ā that deletion was the workerās own mistake, not a platform event.
guys what if AI makes something really really good wonāt that make people not want to kill it???
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=5GqafvboceJ7phYLj
releasing something like a room-temperature superconductor could be beneficial
[ā¦]
Other tech breakthroughs - an amazing video game
Okay.
And it canāt even make proper video games. (A lot of companies do use AI tools (and experience a backlash) it seems quite bad at making video games, in fact there was a remake (? I think could also be a remaster) of the older game shogun 2 which used a lot lf AI to remake it, and it was so bad it has been pulled from sale, this was last/this week btw).
If the world was really different I guess it would be.
āIf only the fuckable stupor computer would cure cancer so that people would stop calling us sloperatorsā
Is there a history of how the cult of prediction markets spread to Silicon Valley? Its an old idea but since the 1990s is especially popular with Libertarians and hard neoliberals like Robin Hanson. When did it get on LessWrong? By 2013 or so, rationalists were telling strangers at social events that the only way to know if a healthcare system worked was to bet on it, and not just, you know, risk your life and health on it.
Well I think the history is just how LW started, with Hansonās blog and LW being intertwined. They are largely the same space. See also how Hanson spawned the great filter idea.
I think a major influence was āWisdom of the Crowdsā which was discussed in the SF / Berkeley tech community quite a bit back then. At some point that got combined with gambling. Thereās an old reference here dated 2007: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how_and_when_tohtml
There was the Cathedral and Bazaar stuff too, although that was less about markets and more about collective wisdom. Early FOSS culture was anticapitalist so the Libertarians had to frame things carefully.
Cyberlibertarianism covers it relatively well.
CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie
Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?
He is a close associate of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who formerly co-blogged with Hanson on Hansonās blog, Overcoming Bias, before starting LessWrong.
RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.
The futarchy paper is funny because Hanson had the idea in 2000 but took 13 years to publish it. That is a good sign that he kept getting a desk reject or ārevise and resubmit.ā But were people reading his blog, a mix of Libertarian fringe writing, or specifically something by Yudkowsky or SlateScott?
Phil Tetlock started his career and the Expert Political Judgement project at the University of California Berkeley although he moved to PA in 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock
futarchy
Once upon a time it would take just one piece of art and a hashtag to completely derail the meaning of this
I am sure Robin Hanson knows about Japanese hermaphrodites because he hates women and hangs out with bad crowds online. He is just a bit more discreet than Yud.
I canāt find much about prediction markets on SlatStarCodex except a 2016 review of Superforecasters which takes the view that :
Maybe all this stuff about probability calibration, inside vs. outside view, willingness to change your mind, and fighting cognitive biases is starting to sound familiar? Yeah, this is pretty much the same stuff as in the Less Wrong Sequences and a lot of CFAR work. Theyāre both drawing from the same tradition of cognitive science and rationality studies.
So maybe it was Hanson > Yud > Rationalist / EA culture, but Hanson likes to take credit for ideas much older than him. And we know the Rats rely on pop science and podcasts much more than research literature.
Kind of fascinated by how this guy has gone into reddit threads about this to complain about being bullied, including complaining that people are sharing this screenshot with his full name and face unredacted. Buddy, I donāt know what to tell you about whoās responsible for that one.
Plot twist: he just told the chatbot to put in a screen about slop usage, didnāt look at the result, and it dug up a photo portrait from his photos without him noticing
I recognise that the sloperator is pretty damn insecure about their AI usage. [YES][NO]
Iāve actually met this person in a different context some years ago, and yes, his ego has always been extremely fragile.
what in the fuck
and I presume the answers default to
yesRight on buddy, I too want to live in a future where my diamonds are judged by their brilliance and my passion as a magnate, not by the child labor I employ to produce them.
Feel like this blog must have made the rounds but today is the first time Iām actually reading it and itās sharp enough to cut with:
Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and Iād like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer out the window of a passing Kia.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 āā¦ sharp enough to cut withā is brilliant, I want to steal it!
My mother, who paid for Haverford, says she didnāt raise a drug dealer. Thatās accurate. She raised a quant, and the quant made a lateral move.
š¤š¤š¤ Chefās fucking kiss
The comments have some real gems too.
Fair. Iāve reweighted in DALYs. The net goes up, because my customersā remaining DALYs are low. Thanks for the push.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 lol, good parody of that cult.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 Firefox throws me TLS errors over that link.
Weird, itās a regular Google trust services issued cert here; my Firefox doesnāt complain about it.
Same here, Chrome works, but I am also behind some weird corporate network.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 The comments are amazing
So I got bored and for some reason decided to look at the AI 2027 prediction grading doc againā¦and its Claude Mythos rank is just straight up wrong?
To quote the doc: ā The current best 80% time horizon is Mythos Preview at 186 minutes (version 1.1; there is no measurement for version 1.0). The methodology change from TH1.0 to TH1.1 drops the best model as of AI 2027 publication (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) by 2/3 from 15 to 10 minutes. Because we care more about the pace of progress rather than the absolute values, we look at when the AI 2027 trajectory reaches 186*(3/2)=279 minutes. In a central AI-2027-speed trajectory from our AI 2027 timelines model, 279 minutes is achieved in May 2026.ā
Except Claude Sonnet wasnāt dropped to 10 minutes, it was dropped to 12. to play devilās advocate maybe it was updated between then and now? but it doesnt seem like it.
.As if insufficient volume of text output was ever a problem among lesswrongers
Im just surprised they have even more ideas they have not written up, surely we are missing out on some quality content.
Butlerian Jihad now.
Iām some random shitposter from TERF Island and I can definitely write better than Aella
I thought GPT 2 had already hit the point of āWriting better than Aellaā
Nah I think it was earlier than thatā¦ Markov chain models!
In fact you could probably do better by building script that pseudo-randomly picks words from categories containing āintelligent soundingā words and ālewdā words and āedgelordā words
Aella was homeschooled by fundies. I donāt think anyone ever sat her down and explained that first and foremost you write to figure out what you think about something. She must know the OnlyFans model of a celebrity and dozens of underlings in a call center answering āherā texts in āherā voice and selling her smut.
Pray tell, how is the chatbot going to know what you want to say if you wonāt write it out? This feels a little too obvious.
as soon as AI is good enough to discharge feces out of my butt as good as I would if I had enough fiber in my diet, I intend to use AI to do so. I know how I want to poop, and I could poop so much more if I didnāt need to manual labor little clumps out one by one
obligatory apology for the foregoing
sorry not sorry
Cognitive surrender illustrated.
Previously, on Awful, Gutsick Gibbon spent an hour ripping apart T. Bealeās (VDās) anti-evolution book. She was still angry though, so she got her prior collaborator and four friends to join her for a complete dissection of VDās bullshit claims. Content warning for literally everything awful we discuss here, including sex crimes, neo-Nazis, Silicon Valley bullshit, and remarkably bad arithmetic. My choice sneer is her chosen video title, āSix Scientists Roast One Racist Loser (Heartwarming) (Four Hours) (Hopecore)ā. GGās requested that we not give VD any attention other than reminding him that heās such a pathetic loser that even white nationalists disavow him as too boring and insipid, so Iām not posting this to a top-level topic, but Iām getting a lot of household chores done while listening to it in the background and maybe you will too.
