23h ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th April 2025

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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this..)

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apparently a complete archive of scott siskind's old livejournal. found on the EA forum no less. https://archive.fo/fCFQx

:( looked in my old CS dept's discord, recruitment posts for the "Existential Risk Laboratory" running an intro fellowship for AI Safety.
Looks inside at materials, fkn Bostrom and Kelsey Piper and whole slew of BS about alignment faking. Ofc the founder is an effective altruist getting a graduate degree in public policy.
- that's CFAR cult jargon right?
  
  Not sure! What is CFAR?

Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Don’t have a source more concrete than this yet:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365
(and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)
It’s a lot like this:
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
- That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)... ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I've had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).
  Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.
  But "AI"... it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn't. There's nothing to learn from resulting failure, except "don't use AI".
  In this case, given shopify's general behaviour, I won't be sad at all though if they crash and fail.

tesla: "your car is not your car and we have deep, varied firmware and systems access to it on a permanent basis. we can see you and control you at all times. piss us off and we'll turn off the car that we own."
also tesla: "sorry no you can't return it"

Utterly rancid linkedin post:
- Dijkstra did it first, but it is very ai-booster to steal work without credit or understanding, I guess.
  The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
  Threats to computing science
- I can use bad analogies also!
  If airplanes can fly, why can't they fly to the moon? It is a straightforward extension of existing flight technology, and plotting airplane max altitude from 1900-1920 shows exponential improvement in max altitude. People who are denying moon-plane potential just aren't looking at the hard quantitative numbers in the industry. In fact, with no atmosphere in the way, past a certain threshold airplanes should be able to get higher and higher and faster and faster without anything to slow them down.
  I think Eliezer might have started the bad airplane analogies... let me see if I can find a link... and I found an analogy from the same author as the 2027 ~~fanfic~~ forecast: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HhWhaSzQr6xmBki8F/birds-brains-planes-and-ai-against-appeals-to-the-complexity
  Eliezer used a tortured metaphor about rockets, so I still blame him for the tortured airplane metaphor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gg9a4y8reWKtLe3Tn/the-rocket-alignment-problem
- Yes the 2 rs in strawberry machine thinks. In the same way that an airplane flies. /s
  E: it gets even worse as half the AI field says the airplanes fly like how birds do. That is why the anthropomorphization is bad. Because it both doesn't think as in the function, nor think as in the system. And by anthropomorphizing people make it look like it can do both.

Solid, high-quality sneer from Adactio - the end is a particular highlight:
The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.
If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers.

The kokotajlo/scoot thing apparently made it to the new york times.
So this is what that was about:

edit: also @gerikson is apparently a superforcaster
- when you say "made it", i think FUCKING ROOSE
- Spooks as a service
- Check out the by-line. Big surprise!
- missed that at the time, but you'd think scoot would have an easy time finding a contact at a major publication like the NYT...

"Imagine a technology so useless you cannot run doom on it" https://bsky.app/profile/sosowski.bsky.social/post/3lm63a2srgc24

LW: "being a younger brother makes you gay, the Catholic hierarchy is full of younger brothers, ergo 80% of the Vatican is gay"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybwqL9HiXE8XeauPK/how-gay-is-the-vatican
- The modern father of this literature is Ray Blanchard
  🚨🚨🚨 Do not take Ray Blachard's work seriously !
- Considering how rightwingers have tried to link gayness to pedophilia this is a subject I would avoid if I was them. E: and gwern just goes there.
  
  The comments are ... "a hoot"
  I would bet pretty hard on option #3. The older the parents are at the time of conception, the lower the quality of their gametes, which can translate into various negative health and cognitive effects on the child.
  combines ageism, ableism ,and homophobia into one neat package
- Reminds me of an SMBC comic that had a setup along the same lines, that if male birth order correlates with homosexuality and family size trends being what they are, the past must have been considerably gayer on average.
  
  Obligatory Colm Tóibín: Among the Flutterers

Gumroad’s asshole CEO, Sahil Lavingia, NFT fanboy who occasionally used his customer database to track down and get into fights with people on twitter, has now gone professional fash and joined DOGE in order to hollow out the department of veterans affairs and replace the staff with chatbots.
https://tedium.co/2025/04/06/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama/

some more wild sneers, this time about MS ripping off Q2 for a time-limited shitty experience
- This demo is powered by a "World and Human Action Model" (WHAM)
  George Michael must be spinning in his grave
- Considering PC Gamer bought the AI hype hook, line and sinker a few months ago, I'd say this is a particularly notable sneer.
  This is pure gut instinct, but it seems AI bros' ability to bedazzle the press is fading fast.
- Forced mass-adoption of this stuff by consumers is here, now, demanding our approval, attention, and precious time. A public tech demo exists to impress, and the Copilot Gaming Experience does not. Doom on a calculator, but we had to boil a lake or two to get it and are being told it's the future of games. I reject this future. Not only do I find it philosophically and ethically repugnant, it also made my tummy hurt.
  💯 no notes

In the late 2000s, rationalists were squarely in the middle of transhumanism. They were into the Singularity, but also the cryonics and a whole pile of stuff they got from the Extropians. It was very much the thing.
These days they're most interested in Effective Altruism (loudly -the label at least) and race science (used to be quiet, now a bit louder). I hardly ever hear them even mention transhumanism as it was back then.
Did rationalists abandon transhumanism?
Is it just me? What happened?
- Yeah this kind of stuff is why im not the biggest fan of the tescreal label.
  
  still holds - it's still a bunch that needs a label and that's the label
  even as TREACLES was right there
  (i asked emile, they said it was TESCREAL is very searchable. i mean fine)
- Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn't seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don't have a copy of any of Kurzweil's books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they're surely way off.
  Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don't doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I've seen a couple of signs of that already.
  
  Yes, there was a big hype in the upcoming biotech revolution in popular transhumanist media a ~decade ago. Lot of it seems to have fizzled out or gone nootropics like stuff. (And even that is meh).
- One of the most popular and controversial ways in recent times to use technological means to improve human condition and overcome its natural limitations is gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy. Transhumanism is woke now — hell, "trans" is right there in the name!
- It's possible that the most popular fora for discussions of the other topics were drowned out by AI doomerism and the people who are interested in them simply left.
- As to cryonics... for both LLM doomers and accelerationists, they have no need for a frozen purgatory when the techno-rapture is just a few years around the corner.
  As for the rest of the shiny futuristic dreams, they have give way to ugly practical realities:
  no magic nootropics, just Scott telling people to take adderal and other rationalists telling people to micro dose on LSD
  no low hanging fruit in terms of gene editing (as epistaxis pointed out over on reddit) so they’re left with eugenics and GeneSmith’s insanity
  no drexler nanotech so they are left hoping (or fearing) the god-AI can figure it (which is also a problem for ever reviving cryonically frozen people)
  no exocortex, just over priced google glasses and a hallucinating LLM “assistant”
  no neural jacks (or neural lace or whatever the cyberpunk term for them is), just Elon murdering a bunch of lab animals and trying out (temporary) hope on paralyzed people
  The future is here, and it’s subpar compared to the early 2000s fantasies. But hey, you can rip off Ghibli’s style for your shitty fanfic projects, so there are a few upsides.

Sometimes, checking the Talk page of a Wikipedia article can be entertaining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Markov_chain#Proposal_to_reintroduce_peer-reviewed_source_(Wiley,_2017)
In short: There has been a conspiracy to insert citations to a book by a certain P. Gagniuc into Wikipedia. This resulted in said book gaining about 900 citations on Google Scholar from people who threw in a footnote for the definition of a Markov chain. The book, Markov Chains: From Theory to Implementation and Experimentation (2017), is actually really bad. Some of the comments advocating for its inclusion read like chatbot (bland, generic, lots of bullet points). Another said that it should be included because it's "the most reliable book on the subject, and the one that is part of ChatGPT training set".
This has been argued out over at least five different discussion pages.
- "Conspiracy" is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).
  A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:
  Despite Malparti warning that "it would be a waste of time for everyone" I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as "the unique solution" to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be "eventually achieved", with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.
  It's been a while since I've seen a math book review that said "Do not use for anything."
  "This book is not a place of honor..."

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