(I get the feeling weāre close to this bubbleās end.)
Anyways, 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.)
Showing sloperators that using an LLM makes their brain power shrink over time has had little effect; they all think that they are big brain bois with extra capacity to spare.
What if they heard that LLM usage shrinks their penis by a micron every so many million tokens?
Think that would just drive them to incel style rhetoric. With a helping of āno you are right to worry, but it doesnāt look like your penis has shrunk sirā from the bots. (poor third world workers who then have to process that shit. āwhy are all these people suddenly uploading their penis in grok?ā).
Itās true: sloperators have vast amounts of grey matter sitting neglected
theyād just start buying overpriced leather jackets to compensate. thereās a worked example in the press right now
Leather blocks the Chat-5GPT rays
Jet fuel canāt melt leather
I donāt really want to just put someoneās /u/ on blast, but Iāve found an account on Lemmy that appears to be posting nothing but anti-AI posts with LLM titles and top level comments. What a world.
do it, alert mods and or admins of respective communities, itās not the first time it happens and one at least was banned before
Kinds funny to make propaganda against llms and bill the llm companies for it tho
The second affair has hit Nvidia stock
I want this to matter but stock market stuff is all fake anyway.
People say something like ā1.2 trillion wiped outā but stocks arenāt actually tied to anything anywhere near their actual value (dividends) and itās only ever a tiny volume being traded anyway. Most stock trading is indistinguishable from meme coins.
NVIDIA has enough control over actually valuable technology that they donāt particularly need to be able to raise additional funding to continue turning the worldās chips into stacked boxes in a Taiwanese warehouse.
I mean if it keeps going down its going to be pretty bad news for Anthropicās IPO
I think anthropicās business model is bad news for their IPO. Nvida stocks be damned the filing is fucking hilarious.
putting āwe dont know if weāll ever be profitableā in the IPO filing was definitely a brave move, Iāll give them that
Sorry I have to vent, but looks like the humblebundle site did an AI powered redesign as the site (while looking like it works) is now a total mess. Iām a bit in slow motion trainwreck watching mode. Sucks I do have a list of unclaimed keys still at the site which I paid for (some of which are now gone, as in I know I still had a key as I kept a list of some of the keys in a file (I was worried something like this happening for a while) but the keys are no longer in the list of games I got, this is just one of the many many bugs or just plain weird things I noticed (The reddit is filled with people having a lot more complaints, somebody bought a ā4 for 1, play with your friendsā pack, and only got one key, if you made a āgift a key linkā yday the link now is dead, but the game counts as claimed, etc etc).
The UI does have nice rounded corners now however.
E: additional funny moment, so I know people who have subscribed to humble choice (a monthly thing) an basically have forgotten about it, but during the creation of the new site they messed something up and they no longer have the information on file to complete the transaction for that, so a lot of subscriptions will likely auto cancel, what a foot shot).
E2: It also removed 2FA, made it possible to change passwords without the old password, and switch emails without access to the old email. Amazing work.
Yeah, I have also been amazed. Like there is so much wrong. (love the 2022 and earlier games on the ānew releasesā page for example).
Ah, the dev on main and push on Friday school of development.
Complaint driven development if you will.
God bless linkedin lunatics
Transcription of the image below
People often forget that Jensen is the hero who brought the light of modern AI to every household. He is also one of the most technical and charismatic CEOs in tech. He single handedly contributed more to the US and global economy than 80% of all other tech execs combined. Jensen is the heart and mind of Nvidia and one small mistake on the personal level only shows that he is human. Do not judge. ā„ļø Jensen ā„ļø
Yes just a small personal mistake like blowing up your marriage and committing treason ššš
Treason is cool and good. Cheaters can walk into a fire.
calling what jensen did ātreasonā accepts far too much of both the AI boostersā and the corrupt imperialist US governmentās worldview, in my opinion
This is true, but given how so many other AI boosters have committed hard to being hawkish towards China to justify throwing more money into the AI money hole I think itās worth using the ātreasonā angle as a wedge issue. I donāt personally think itās that big a deal apart from the rank hypocrisy of it, but it feels like a far stronger push against Nvidia and the bubble as a whole than focusing on Jensenās personal relationships.
yeah 100% but like he could have rounded up all us politicians into one room and sold the GPS coordinates to China who then bombed it and itād still be awesome.
You canāt betray people that impose themselves on. Treason is fake bullshit
The Git project has put its current LLM policy (which currently blocks some AI use) up to a vote. An easily manipulated vote, like the kind Debian did. For the version control software used by the vast majority of software projects across the world.
Why donāt they just vibe code their own implementation of anthropic Scion and leave git to us āludditesā - especially since git isnāt fit for purpose any more when youāre slopping out 30k changes a day
Cathartic venting, tangential to the ordure du jour: in high school everyone I had a crush on had a crush on Joseph Gordon Levitt. It brings me great joy to know that he is now alignment brainrotted, and I am not.
The AI 2027 authors are back: Q3.5 Timelines Update: Looks Like the Intelligence Explosion Will Happen in 2027 After All
Itās all about that new METR data. Took a quick scroll and the whole thing is about forecasting and modelling. Its pretty lengthy so if anyones willing to take the plunge and read it all youll have my thanks
METR recently estimated that Anthropic is now making AI progress about twice as fast as its historical rate (they would not be surprised by anything from 1.3x to 3x), and guessed that āperhaps ā80%ā of the current acceleration is due to AI. If theyāre right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario.
Going down a little bit:
A 1.7x pace of progress is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. AI 2027 predicted 2x AI R&D uplift in Dec 2026; as argued above, this would imply a substantially lower pace of progress than the 1.7x AI-attributable pace of progress that METRās estimates imply for Nov. So when exactly did AI 2027 predict a 1.7x pace of progress over baseline? We created this trajectory by modifying a few key parameters until it roughly matched AI 2027. In that trajectory, 1.7x acceleration over the 2024.0ā2025.5 rate of progress happens in roughly April 2027. So by this metric, we are ~5 months ahead of schedule.
And a chart of their predictions to end it all off:
(Only one person above 50%?)
Mark your calendars everybody!
yeah but wen fuckable digital jesus.
I have had to explain to my boss that METR are cultists
I vaguely remember it being mentioned that one of the METR staff was married to a rationalist (it was either an Anthropic employee or Paul Christiano, I forgot who)
Itās all about that new METR data.
Yeah, they seem to have moved on from multiplying sufficiently large matrixes is magic to thinking itās actually the code writing thatāll get mystical any time now.
One more if statement bro
So I went all the way down to the appendix, and found a gem:
Appendix: Ambiguity in ā80% of current acceleration is due to AIā. Claude Opus 5.5 gives the following possible interpretations of METRās claim that āwe guess that a majority (perhaps ā80%) of the current (October 2026) acceleration is due to AI.ā
Claude Opus 5.5 gives the follow possible interpretations
Didā¦did they just say they used Claude for this?? (Ironic, because METR also used a bunch of Claude in the source article)
Also, this is the median value. No mean value and doesnāt seem much modal value. Only one paragraph where they mention that the acceleration was only on well-specified tasks (in the section titled āHow large is the (AI-attributable) acceleration in the current pace of progress, really?ā)
reposting this r/BetterOffline post for further context on the METR data
For years the LW types have just been saying āi asked claudeā about EVERYTHING
TED-AI as in the meaninglessly distilled and contrived ted-talk idea of AI
Broke: āit is AGI when it makes A BILLION DOLLARSā
Woke: āit is AGI when it does a ted talkā
by that definition we already have AGI. Not because itās that good but rather because TED was already brainrot slop well before LLMs.
If AI will not come closer to AGI, the definition of AGI will come closer to AI.
Pretty sure its just a fancier term for AGI (Top Expert Dominating AI)
āTop Expert Dominatingā is when someone with a lot of experience makes someone else discover that theyāre a switch after all.
I intended it as a sneer lol. Aka I donāt see a difference in meanings here
ohhhh
Wholesome indie Darling about human connection actually slopgobbled https://aftermath.site/big-walk-ai-igf-jurors-controversy/
discloses now rather than at launch because theyāre just so wholesome and committed to ethics.
Arguing over homeopathic doses of AI misses the point like with actual homeopathy. They used it.
Developers House House told Aftermath via email that āLLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugsā, and that they āestimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walkās code had anything to do with this usageā. They also stress that āgenerative AI was not used in any other context when making the gameā.
Not to get all doctorow on this, but I generally donāt think we should concede this approach to using LLMs to the yooooooo I just vibecoded an FIFA 2027 cloen for android watch WITH MY DICK!!!11!! people.
If/when a time comes when genAI isnāt actively ruining everything and doesnāt need all the RAM and hard drive space in the world to be useful, using it like that seems a far cry better than even what torvalds is currently doing.
Can you trust that figure, though? Theyāre already in trouble for being deceitful about slop usage, and 0.1% is close enough to zero that it could have literally been zero if anyone cared about minimising anything.
Yeah, itās definitely an open question if they are being honest for honestyās sake or just trying to get ahead of people realising that the game is slop-infested in obvious ways.
Assuming the first, the number is definitely based on vibes, but 0.1% of say ten million lines of code is still a lot of code, and the way LLMs have been shoved into every nook and cranny of the major IDEs, demanding proof of zero tokens spent during development puts enterprise devs in a weird spot, especially with stack overflow all but defunct and the various tool vendors increasingly assuming youāll be using them in LLM-first dev scenarios and skimping on providing in-depth guidelines, or slopping them out.
It sucks.
Build a machine that isnāt made of trust violations, controiled by the worst people in the world, and actively making climate change worse potentially killing millions first slopper.
Sure seems that AI usage more and more has the stink of āyou can trust people who use this at allā.
Unrelated to that this is also very odd:
Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasnāt possible.
Unity jumped on the slop train some time ago, so Iām chalking that up to the codebase being flooded with slop.
I feel like Iāve seen more than one person around the Interwebs make the joke, āItās a brutal betrayal to discover that Big Walk uses Unity.ā
What advantage does unity have over godot these days anyway?
Nevermind my suggestion, of course they also use AI shit now.
Iāve been waiting for this
top quality sneer from ā@1techuptopiaplsā on X the fascism app:
āman proves AI improvements are not economically viable as new Anthropic model successfully cures cancer"
is the cure to cancer in the room with us right now
This guy probably thinks that outputting sloppily written proofs to math problems is the same thing as curing cancer because both of them are done by super smart scientific brain geniuses and the AI is an even bigger brain genius.
most of the other replies are all āwell yeah we knew sustaining AI progress would need exponentially more resources but its like definitely worth itā
When children go to sleep, the Sandman shows them dreams. When AI boosters go to sleep, the Smiling Man shows them nightmares.
And that gets us back to istewart and Dave Karpfās point that these companies sell a narrative about what the future will be and who controls it, because they can not build that future.
Itās just āwell the financials donāt make any sense and these companies are not looking profitable anytime soon but like AI models are super duper good and AGI is right around the corner so you need to investā
A number of responses (like, 2 out of the 3 that it shows) refer to āthe scaling lawsā without elaboration. Is this some jargon special to AI bros?
yeah essentially
the scaling laws are basically that AGI/ASI can be created by just scaling up the current LLMs
But they really arenāt! The actually interesting scaling laws from about 5-7 years ago that opened up machine learning to more applications all show that everything about machine learning is power-law diminishing returns with linear improvements in any metric requiring exponential increases in numbers of parameters / amounts of data / number of backprop cycles applied.
uh but have you considered unbounded recursive self-improvement? itās how it works in books and in my imagination
The scaling laws maxed out around mid 2023 with the release of GPT-4 - that was around the time that everyone got excited about ātest time inferenceā which is where LLMs spit out reasoning streams to convince you they are āthinkingā. If you look at where LLMs have improved since then itās mainly in tasks where they can be strapped into a harness and given concrete feedback like āyour program didnāt compileā which are also coincidentally use cases where data from gpt and Claude users can easily be harvested and new training data can be squeezed out of underpaid third world mturkers.
In other words theyāve improved their training data in the specific domains they are operating in like weāve been doing in machine learning since the mid 90sā¦
The big labs have just been doing an incredible job of marketing (and particularly in Anthropicās case, brain damaging themselves into believing their own marketing)
These scaling laws are even funnier than that, as are more recent ones.
I continue to be extremely amused by the fact that you can take a LLM āreasoningā trace, replace all the āreasoningā with dashes or spaces, re-run the attention mechanism, and have what comes out the other end improve by a significant fraction as much as if you let it exude text that has the appearance of having to do with the topic at hand. Itās just more opportunity for the embedding vectors to dance against each other before you translate the abstract vectors back into natural language. Hence recent frontier models doing a thing where instead of doing a long reasoning trace, they build the attention matrix, allow the vectors to push each other aroundā¦ then let those new vectors push each other around again, and again, and again, multiple rounds, before you start decoding.
More recently, I have seen some vague math into the scaling of the speed with which running many parallel systems with access to a common pool of text produce a legible result. If I recall, it comes to roughly:
N parallel systems
Finish in ~1/N^0.5 as much time
At ~N^0.5x the cost
So 16 parallel systems crosstalking finish complex tasks in 1/4 the time at 4x the cost (and 16x the instantaneous rate of operation per second)
new odium symposium episode. we talk about Lawrence Mead, the NYU professor who advanced much of the theory behind the US welfare reform of the 90s, and his more recent project of inventing a newer, better racism. https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/28-racism-2-174814488 or any podcast app
Total System Failure: U.S. Government Networks Will Need To Be Torched And Rebuilt
Interesting if you want a rundown of US gov IT security fuckups, so far, in light of nvidiaās Jansen being recently revealed to have been compromised by Chinese intelligence.
Iāve noted repeatedly in my writing that the Trump administrationās cybersecurity policy has been indistinguishable from a foreign attack.
I have wondered for a long time what sorts of clandestine messages are going over the newly installed Starlink terminals, bypassing the normal firewalls and logs between sensitive systems and the terrestrial internet backboneā¦
very gendered and heteronormative (and it admits it), but might be interesting?
A Scandal at the Center of the Economy
This scandal holds an irony thatās especially befitting of the AI moment. Huang seemingly has cozied up to his industryās No. 1 foe, China, the boogeyman that, by the professed logic of Silicon Valleyās AI executives, is forcing many of his peers to build a product that they fear. Instead of denouncing him, Washington and Silicon Valley are motivated to circle the wagons around Huang, in part because doing so keeps the system moving and the money flowing. The build at all costs rationale that dictates treating Chinaās AI prowess as an existential threat is also driving the same people to brush past an egregious dalliance with that enemy.
This is the type of warped incentives that the AI race produces. Playing the game necessitates embracing preposterous risk to justify an idealized future outcome. To run this race requires its participants to withstand intense cognitive dissonance and behave in ways that make them appear ever more inscrutable and reckless to those who are not involved. If nothing else, Huang is a useful example to understand what happens when the fortunes of countries and many of its most powerful citizens are all tied up in one progressively intricate technological and financial bet. In this way, Huang is the AI boom personified, a hyperobject of a man who has wound his way into the center of the economy and whose influence, depending on how you look at it, may usher in either prosperity or untold doom.
