Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 July 2024

presented without comment:

(via @Colophonscrawl)

imagine one day buying some shitpost novelty stickers from that one site you heard a friend mention sometime, and then getting them and laughing about it and forgetting it

all too rapidly the years pass: young trees shoot up, older trees start boughing their way past electrical lines, the oldest all already in their position of maximum comfort. whole generations of memes have been born and died. you no longer even get to make fun of your weird aunt for still sending the dancing baby gif (these days it’s all about the autotune clips of a decade ago..)

and then one day you get reminded that the shitpost novelty sticker web store exists by receiving an email from them

what the fuck.

Proton, who I use for mail and various other services, has gone against the wishes of the majority of their userbase as measured by their own survey and implemented an LLM writing assistant in protonmail, which is a real laugh given Proton’s main hook is its services are end-to-end encrypted

(supposedly this piece of shit will run locally if you meet these incredibly high system requirements including a high end GPU or recent, high end Apple M chipset and a privacy-violating Chromium-based browser. otherwise it breaks e2e by sending your emails unencrypted to Proton’s servers, and they do a lot to try to talk over that fact)

In the spirit of the fondly-remembered "Cloud-to-Butt" plugin, I propose a new tool that transforms mentions of AI and LLMs to something else. But what shape should our word transformer take? While scatology is good shit, I bet we can come up with something more clever than "ChatGPT-to-Poop"

BTW, take 1d6 psychic damage when you realize that Cloud-to-Butt was released more than ten years ago

Edit: Favorite suggestions so far:

• AI-to-Bob @sc_griffith

• AI-to-DFE (Dumpster Fire Elemental) @YourNetworkIsHaunted

• AI-to-Statistics (HN user bitwize - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40024452)

maybe we should have a social/off topic thread too

AI Maxers Thrilled with Trump’s Vice President Pick JD Vance

This isn't really too interesting yet; but something to keep an eye on. As things like blockchain and AI alignment becomes weirdly political it's likely that sneering will get unpleasantly close to politics at times. And yet sneer we must.

Other self-titled techno-optimists highlighted Vance’s ties to venture capital, Thiel, and Andreessen, saying the “Gray Tribe [is] in control.” Gray Tribe is a reference to a term originating from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog, which points to a group that is neither red (Republican) or Blue (Democrat), but a libertarian, tech savvy alternative.

Possibly the worst misunderstanding of quantum mechanics I've ever seen. I have no idea how anyone managed to convince themselves that the laws of physics are somehow different for conscious observers.

speaking of technofascism, we’re at the stage where supposed Democrat billionaires like the Andreesen Horowitz fuckers suddenly come out in support of Trump:

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, says he’s been a Democrat most of his life. He says he has endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

However, he says he’s no longer loyal to the Democratic Party. In the 2024 presidential race, he is supporting and voting for former President Donald Trump. The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech, specifically for the startup ecosystem.

none of this should be surprising, but it should be called out every time it happens, and we’re gonna see it happen a lot in the days ahead. these fuckers finally feel secure in taking their masks off, and that’s not good.

Hey, good news for a change: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/the-workers-at-bethesda-game-studios-have-fully-unionized-163024914.html

Insert the Sickos meme

Mumsnet becomes the latest company to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.

Why AI bros are scraping TERF Island's Finest I'm not sure, but it'll be fun to watch the two of them slapfight each other.

"Learning Nate Silver works for Peter Thiel is one of those things that would have shocked me in 2016 and made me wonder why I hadn't already been assuming it in 2024." He now works for the betting market polymarket (using cryptocurrencies of course).

xcancel, twitter

comment from friend:

Slightly related: now I know when the AI crash is going to happen. Every bottomfeeder recruiter company on LinkedIn is suddenly pushing 2-month contract technical writer positions with AI companies with no product, no strategy, and no idea of how to proceed other than “CEO cashes out.” I suspect the idea is to get all of their documentation together so they can sell their bags of magic beans before the beginning of the holiday season.

sickos.jpg

I have asked if he can send me links to a few of these, I'll see what I can do with 'em

HN: I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.

Their goal: robo-feynman:

For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world's languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable.

NGL though mostly just sharing this link for the concept art concept fart which features a three-armed many fingered woman smiling at an invisible camera.

https://xcancel.com/creatine_cycle/status/1814711919171014997#m

It is happening again.

Not a sneer, but an observation on the tech industry from Baldur Bjarnason, plus some of my own thoughts:

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience.

Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.

Baldur has pointed that part out before, and noted how its kneecapping the consumer side of the entire bubble, but I suspect the phrase "AI" will retain that meaning well past the bubble's bursting. "AI slop", or just "slop", will likely also stick around, for those who wish to differentiate gen-AI garbage from more genuine uses of machine learning.

To many, “AI” seems to have become a tech asshole signifier: the “tech asshole” is a person who works in tech, only cares about bullshit tech trends, and doesn’t care about the larger consequences of their work or their industry. Or, even worse, aspires to become a person who gets rich from working in a harmful industry.

For example, my sister helps manage a book store as a day job. They hire a lot of teenagers as summer employees and at least those teens use “he’s a big fan of AI” as a red flag. (Obviously a book store is a biased sample. The ones that seek out a book store summer job are generally going to be good kids.)

I don’t think I’ve experienced a sentiment disconnect this massive in tech before, even during the dot-com bubble.

Part of me suspects that the AI bubble's spread that "tech asshole" stench to the rest of the industry, with some help from the widely-mocked NFT craze and Elon Musk becoming a punching bag par excellence for his public breaking-down of Twitter.

(Fuck, now I'm tempted to try and cook up something for MoreWrite discussing how I expect the bubble to play out...)

Does anyone here know what Justine Tunney’s deal is? I’d been following her redbean project for a time but came across an article that left me rather startled

In the land down under, the ABC continues to feed us with golden tech takes: Australia might be snoozing through the AI 'gold rush'

"This is the largest gold rush in the history of capitalism and Australia is missing out," said Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh, from the University of New South Wales.

It's even bigger than the actual gold rush! Buy your pans now folks!

One option Professor Van Den Hengel suggests is building our own Large Language Model like OpenAI's ChatGPT from the ground up, rather than being content to import the tech for decades to come.

lol, but also please god no

"The only way to have a say in what happens globally in this critical space is to be an active participant," he said.

mate, I think that ship might have already sailed

We should neoligise "NASB" for our community as shorthand for "Not a sneer, but"

EU funding cuts to OSS programs in the wake of popularity of Copyright-Unsafe Clippy field

they just really need those GPU hours more than you need to pay for developers or maintainers. I’m sure you understand.

"I'm sick of Google putting gratuitous LLMs everywhere"
(finger curls on monkey paw)

"[A]cademic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year."

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai

This isn't a sneer, just want to share this enjoyable presentation about tech and nihilism by Assoc Professor Nolen Gertz at the University of Twente here in the Netherlands https://iai.tv/video/nihilism-and-the-meaning-of-life-nolen-gertz

a hackernews excitedly states that a new LLM version can in fact determine that 9.11 is smaller than 9.9, only to be informed in the comments that the model actually doesn't do that at all. But hey, it's correct if it's version numbers!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011228

NSFW, as NSAB, I know that anti-environmentalists shout a lot about 'what about china china should go green first!' while not knowing china is in fact doing a lot to try and go green (at least on the co2 energy front, I'm not asking here to go point out all the bad things china does to fuck up the environment). I see 'we should develop AI before china does so' be a big pro AI argument, so here is my question. Is china even working on massive A(G)I like the people claim?

https://xcancel.com/jrawson/status/1814232925967089808

The fuck.

surprising absolutely nobody who’s been paying attention, Fedora has signaled its intent to use generative AI and an LLM in its packaging software

and I wouldn’t give a fuck what IBM’s pet distro does, but Red Hat’s developers have a high amount of control over what ends up in the userland… and bootloader… and pretty much every part of the system but the kernel cause they got told to fuck off, of every Linux distro but the obscure ones

LessWrong doesn't let you download if your user agent isn't a browser. Did y'all know about this?

$ curl https://www.lesswrong.com
<html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>

$ curl https://www.lesswrong.com -A "Mozilla"
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>

"Behold! The official, canonical, Tetraspace approved, LGBTESCREAL pride flag!"