- 12 Posts
- 593 Comments
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026English
8Ā·22 hours agoVibenarok
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
6Ā·2 days ago3 and 10 look like the overconfident, amateurish poser villains whom Dr. Lecter kills by the end of the episode.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
5Ā·2 days agoAnd also, like, laptop bags exist? They come in basic black. You can use them for books, emergency chocolate, manila envelopes stuffed with studentsā homework that you need to grade⦠I bought one at a camping-goods store, and itās lasted about 20 years.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
5Ā·2 days agoIf, like some of my male housemates you object on principle to the concept of a bag
then you need to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade again. From there, you can graduate to the Tom Holland āUmbrellaā video, which is clinically proven to make cis het women ovulate.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
4Ā·2 days agoMy wild guess is that if you put a few lesswrongen into a room and told them to invent a āresearch instituteā, theyād write a book of procedure for the sake of having a lot of words about procedure, without any actual sense of how to allocate responsibilites properly.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
7Ā·3 days agoš¶ sing us a song youāre the nano man š¶
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Google is replacing search results with only the AIEnglish
7Ā·4 days agoThis is not debate club. Nor is it the room for gloating about how you, like, totally touched a nerve by providing facts and logic, bro.
Please enjoy your free trip to the egress.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
5Ā·4 days agoFrom elsewhere in the comments:
⦠I am constantly aware that having an angry outburst is massively socially unacceptable, to the point where if I let such things happen regularly I would lose my job / my standing in the community / all my friends / everyone close to me. This creates an extremely strong incentive for me to self-regulate at least my outward reactions, even when itās really hard. But because Nate is so high-status, he is allowed to make such outbursts without being faced with losing his job, his standing in the community, or his friends. This means he is insufficiently incentivized to self-regulate, and thus has been unable to learn.
High-status? Why?!! Jesus H. Fuck, I hope that if anyone ever gives me a get-out-of-social-consequences-free card, itās for a better reason than my blogging.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
8Ā·4 days agoFrom the post linked therein:
Thereās this thing Nate and Eliezer do where they proclaim some extremely nonobvious take about alignment, say it in the same tone they would use to declare that grass is green, and donāt really explain it.
Gambling? In this establishment?!
Nate thinks in a different ontology from everyone, and often communicates using weird analogies
This feels like a misuse of the word ontology, but what do I know?
when Nate thinks you donāt understand something or have a mistaken approach, he gets visibly distressed and sad. I think this conditioned us to express less disagreement with him. I have a bunch of disagreements from his world model, and could probably be convinced to his position on like 1/3 of them, but Iām too afraid to bring them all up and if I did heād probably stop talking to me out of despair anyway.
Wow, thatās a bad research supervisor.
The structure where we would talk to Nate 4h/day for one out of every ~6 weeks was pretty bad for feedback loops. A short meeting every week would have been better, but Nate said this would be more costly for him.
Wow, thatās a bad research supervisor.
(Every functional research group Iāve been part of has had weekly staff meetings. Even the undergrads were encouraged to participate and got at least that much talking time with the professor.)
In my frustration at the lack of concrete problems I asked Nate what research he would approve of outside of the main direction. We thought of two ideas [ā¦] I worked on these on and off for a few months without much progress, then went back to Nate to ask for advice. Nate clarified that he was not actually very excited about these directions himself, and it was more like āI donāt see the relevance here, but if you feel excited by these, I could see this not being totally uselessā.
Wow, thatās a bad research supervisor.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Google is replacing search results with only the AIEnglish
6Ā·4 days agoIt can be buffaloed by Buffalo buffalo.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Google is replacing search results with only the AIEnglish
1Ā·4 days agodeleted by creator
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
7Ā·5 days agoIn fairness, mathematicians here are like scientists at a magic show, i.e., ill suited to asking good critical questions. How much money did OpenAI burn to get what they say they got? How many false starts got quietly tossed in the circular file drawer? When, even, did their work start? It is easy for a company to say, for example, āWe spent only three weeks on thus problemā, casually eliding months of prior effort (all that was the testing phase, you see, before a specific task had been settled uponā¦). OpenAI has no reason to be honest about anything like this. Indeed, a company will naturally get regular practice being dishonest by careful omission at every opportunity.
ChatGPT, the most heavily used AI service, gave wrong information in 46% of its answers, including making up an expenses scandal, giving inaccurate replies on voter eligibility rules and getting the date of the election wrong by two months.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
4Ā·5 days agoBetter than the original (in that itās not a bad model of media literacy given slick packaging in order to support climate change denial)
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Somehow, I've been chosen to speak at my company's internal meeting on whether or not AI integration has actually been useful to us. I want feedback on my thoughts + inputs from you people too.English
2Ā·5 days agoI would have banned them for ending every comment with that praying-hands emoticon. Fuck out of here with performing obnoxiousness as a pious rite
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systemsā¢Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026English
5Ā·5 days agoI would expect both lobste.rs and LW to be open sewers of credulity here




Timnit Gebru: