Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 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.)
Love how the most recent post in the AI2027 blog starts with an admonition to please donāt do terrorism:
Most of the rest is run of the mill EA type fluff such as hereās a list of influential professions and positions you should insinuate yourself in, but failing that you can help immanentize the eschaton by spreading the word and giving us money.
Please, do not rid me of this troublesome priest despite me repeatedly saying that he was a troublesome priest, and somebody should do something. Unless you think it is ethical to do so.
Itās kind of telling that itās only been a couple months since that fan fic was published and there is already so much defensive posturing from the LW/EA community. I swear the people who were sharing it when it dropped and tacitly endorsing it as the vision of the future from certified prophet Daniel K are like, āoh itās directionally correct, but too aggressiveā Note that we are over halfway through 2025 and the earliest prediction of agents entering the work force is already fucked. So if you are a āsuper forecasterā (guru) you can do some sleight of hand now to come out against the model knowing the first goal post was already missed and the tower of conditional probabilities that rest on it is already breaking.
Funniest part is even one of authors themselves seem to be panicking too as even they can tell they are losing the crowd and is falling back on this āItās not the most likely future, itās the just the most probable.ā A truly meaningless statement if your goal is to guide policy since events with arbitrarily low probability density can still be the āmost probableā given enough different outcomes.
Also, thereās literally mass brain uploading in AI-2027. This strikes me as physically impossible in any meaningful way in the sense that the compute to model all molecular interactions in a brain would take a really, really, really big computer. But I understand if your religious beliefs and cultural convictions necessitate big snake š to upload you, then I will refrain from passing judgement.
https://www.wired.com/story/openworm-worm-simulator-biology-code/
Really interesting piece about how difficult it actually is to simulate āsimpleā biological structures in silicon.
One more comment, idk if yaāll remember that forecast that came out in April(? iirc ?) where the thesis was the ātime an AI can operate autonomously is doubling every 4-7 months.ā AI-2027 authors were like āthis is the smoking gun, it shows why are model is correct!!ā
They used some really sketchy metric where they asked SWEs to do a task, measured the time it took and then had the models do the task and said that the modelās performance was wherever it succeeded at 50% of the tasks based on the time it took the SWEs (wtf?) and then they drew an exponential curve through it. My gut feeling is that the reason they choose 50% is because other values totally ruin the exponential curve, but I digress.
Anyways they just did the metrics for Claude 4, the first FrOnTiEr model that came out since they made their chart andā¦ drum roll no improvementā¦ in fact it performed worse than O3 which was first announced last December (note instead of using the date O3 was announced in 2024, they used the date where it was released months later so on their chart it make āline go upā. A valid choice I guess, but a choice nonetheless.)
This world is a circus tent, and there still aint enough room for all these fucking clowns.