Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 so 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)
LWer: politics is really hard to be Rational about, so how about we just forget all about it?
Bad: arguing about prison abolition
Good: arguing about how to fastest get to the closest Muni station
This gets dangerously close to acknowledging that the rationalist method isn’t actually very useful for any area where it isn’t trivial.
I keep bouncing back to this one and I think that the core objection is that the method of discourse that they’re trying to advance here is fundamentally incapable of handling people actually disagreeing. Like, the whole concept of “identifying a crux” basically requires that there’s a central point of agreement somewhere. In my experience a lot of these issues are better understood as tradeoffs and compromises. It is simultaneously true that some people will do terrible things left to their own devices and locking them up seems to be one of the only things society can collectively agree to do about it and also that locking people up is fundamentally cruel and it’s bad that we do it. The challenge isn’t in identifying the central point of agreement between those two but in managing their fundamental incompatibility.
This could have been a tweet. I seriously 100% believe that this logorrhea could have been a single Xart. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
This could have been a tweet.
It could. Thanks elon for allowing walls of text as tweets… ;)
til soyweiser’s current char build is chaotic semi-evil
(I jest I jest)
Chaotic annoying.
E: now im wondering, did musk destroy the saying on purpose? Did he overhear somebody complain about some long meeting of his they just attended with ‘this could have been a tweet’ and go: ‘we will see about that’. He is petty enough for it, after all he most likely went after USAID because USAID was going after starlink.
Chaotic annoying.
So, the default for any PC
Love the second example of immigration because not only does it completely miss the crux of the issue (free movement is a human right and must not be conditional) but also boils down to “actually this IS measurable and provable but Charlie doesn’t like the outcome so lalala whatabout Germany”
The Inside story of Leverage Research
This should be interesting, it’s about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don’t know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.
edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.
Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:
I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.
edit edit: Why can’t these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020
edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she’s Curtis Yarvin’s baby momma.
Too many sneers while reading it, I did a full post: https://awful.systems/post/8886134
she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.
Ironic considering all the anti-black racism.
US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it…
LWer: slavery was bad and abolishing the slave trade was a net good
LW commenters: really?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDZcsojmRXo5qKNBm/surprising-facts-about-the-slave-trade
(I can kind of understand that intellectual honesty can prompt people to question a narrative, and in some ways I respect it, but there comes a time when you need to ask yourself “am I being the best person I can be by defending slavery” and back away from the keyboard)
At times you need to ask yourself, does the devil need more advocates? And how much does he even pay?
Did a quick search but is that post really talking about the abolition of slavery and not mentioning Haiti once?
At times you need to ask yourself, does the devil need more advocates? And how much does he even pay?
Top-rated review
it focuses entirely on britain, so that’s understandable
Don’t think it is, as the revolt predates British decisions by a while, and ‘there is now potentially a country which will materially support slave revolts’ changes the economic risks a bit.
Slave revolts were basically constant, and I think it would have been easy for contemporary British to blame the success of the Haitian revolt on the uselessness of the French, not that slavery was doomed because the slaves now had a “win”.
Brazil had horrific slave revolts and didn’t abolish slavery until the late 1880s.
Yeah. The Haitian revolution was absolutely a high point of postcolonial Caribbean history, but the resulting state wasn’t exactly able to project power and export their revolution through material support. It gave slavers a reason to double down on repression, but outside of Haiti itself it’s a propaganda win more than a change in the scales.
Hmmm can we trust a narrative extensively documented in the UK Parliament, courts, and newspapers? Hmmm can we?
No I will not look anything up personally.
these kinds of questions are about the potential benefits to some hypothetical version of humanity (from slavery) vs. the real, documented harms to a real group of real people (caused by slavery). Of course we already know that rationalists are bad at accounting for the later while distracted by the bright and shiny allure of the former. And it just so happens that the people they imagine benefiting from slavery are people very much like themselves.
Point 1 is very funny, like, what’s the difference? Randoids are children.
So Anthropic slopmaxxxed a hamfisted Chinese AI lab detector into Claude Code. And I’m kinda surprised at how much hate Anthropic is getting for it on the orange site.
sharing a quality sneer from orangesite commenter mcmcmc
Watch out for the press release where Dario denies this was ever intentional, and it’s actually emergent behavior demonstrating that Claude wants to claim authorship of its works
I mean at some point someone is going to try and make this argument so they can actually extract profit from their slop-inator. And it’s gonna be real funny to see what they had to say about copyright law during the training data gold rush.
First they came for rsync, and I cared nothing, for I do my backups with borg…
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
I recently switched from borg to btrbk, not because of this, but because of speed, but now I have even more reasons.
Ahhh come ON
Unfortunately I’m just going to have to continue using it for now, otherwise that’s months of work and (mostly) upload time that I can’t waste at the moment. Also, what’s the alternative…?
As reported by local Wyoming paper Cowboy State Daily, Meta’s closed-loop water-cooling system bred a metal-resistant bacterium and now the municipal wastewater system has refused to accept Meta’s wastewater. To be crisp, Cupriavidis, which literally means
“loves to eat copper”“lives on copper”, already was metal-resistant; this wasn’t a de novo adaptation. Edit: used wrong root for translation, whoops.Yet another point in favor of evaporative cooling. Standing water, recycled water, and grey water are too complex to treat as recyclable. Also another point against cheaply-designed rush-built datacenters.
How do we know this isn’t the AI god creating the first diamondoid bacteria?
Easy, we are all still non-paperclip like.
What’s the significance of bacteria being metal-resistant?
copper surfaces tend to discourage bacterial growth, which is an important feature for pipes that supply potable water where there isn’t a constant moving water supply. Having bacteria that thrive instead of die in the presence of copper means that your whole water supply can get a bacterial infection it cannot shake.
casey newton, well-known fawning stan of promptfarmers, has now started on some mildly revisionist wording
you could’ve been engaging with this point for 2+ years casey! why *now you spineless shit? goose-goose-meme.jpg
In his op-ed, Altman offers up the usual list of future AI miracles to justify the disruptions to come: “the power to heal people, to discover cures and to deliver abundance on a scale the world has never known before. In the meantime, though, what AI is delivering at an unprecedented scale is annoyance.
Does anyone actually believe this? What the heck does bullshit-text engines or fake-image-generators contribute towards discovering ANYTHING, delivering ANYTHING, producing ANYTHING? The only thing there is any argument for at all is delivering quick-and-dirty code, which is hardly connected to any of those tired promises.
Does anyone actually believe this?
Current copium is that if it can solve Erdos problems after a fashion then the cancer annihilating molecular biology breakthroughs can’t be that far behind.
Also since just shovelling GPUs and reddit posts into a data center forever probably won’t do the trick they’ve settled on the questionmarks on the list before Profit! being Recursive Self Improvement, meaning that since automatic code generation is somewhat improving it follows that pretty soon LLMs will just code themselves out of their current predicament of being unsustainably resource intensive hallucination machines and build AGI on their own.
I really like how in the past couple of years they’ve decided model collapse just isn’t a thing anymore.
They just don’t call it model collapse, and that fixes the problem. (Somebody on bsky said ‘hey that isn’t actually model collapse, read this article on it written by the AI company’. And then the article described model collapse, but didn’t call it model collapse, it was amusing. (And I went into it, thinking I could be wrong, going ‘ah so it is only related to a specific set of instructions’, but then the article also showed that models without those instructions had the the problem (in a much smaller way, but the bad instructions were spreading due to synthetic data))).
They just don’t call it model collapse, and that fixes the problem.
Reminds me of OpenAI’s blog post explaining the goblins. It described textbook model collapse, but somehow avoided saying the actual words “model collapse” even once.
I was talking about that one, shit didn’t I even mention the goblins? Lol, sorry about that.
every week of work with biologists brings another “guess we doin circles now” moment. there’s simply so many things that were never measured, measuring them requires knowing what are you doing, proper experimental design and interpretation of results, that are affected by myriad factors and dozens of feedback loops. none of that is in training data of course, and even if it was it would help very little because humans measuring that would make better use of these results first. but don’t worry about that, machine god will learn relativity from three video frames and will make peter thiel immortal right away
The people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they haven’t considered that if no-one has any income they won’t have any customers. However, they do value geese).
also I just realized: he didn’t post this from his forkiverse account
did they already abandon that hilariously bad idea? did the widdle influencah realize that his social currency is his unfortunate popularity? gnnnngh
I’m sure this guy is human trash, but the last one is just funny.
I never understood why foids had a whole separate doctor until I got married and started hearing about all the crazy stuff
I’m sorry, but I think this would be funny if a cool, normal guy said it. Makes OB/Gyn sound kinda rad, really.
I think this would be funny if a cool, normal guy said it.
The word foid is a very clear alarm bell. But yeah, without that word and a different framing and it could be a guy humbly acknowledging that women’s health has a lot of extra complications.
Someone wanted to marry that?
Remember when grok was inserting “white genocide” into every response? It was probably this guy (or one of his fellow moids).
The Atlantic is now defending AI. Or maybe they have for a while and I hadn’t noticed until this article got my blood pressure up: https://archive.is/qvbJZ
Author is a chud who used to write for The Free Press: https://muckrack.com/elias-wachtel/articles
I dunno who “Bentham’s Bulldog” is, but they live up to their nick and I like the cut of their jib:
The community is reduced to downvoting, sputtering, and “the real influential philosophers
live in Canadaare working in industry, not academia”:This self-own from the comments is amazing:
Suppose you are a selfish CDT agent, and I am considering whether to hire you to clean my house. Once you’re inside my house, you might steal my stuff instead of cleaning my house. Suppose that California Labour Laws require that I pay you up-front and I know I have no chance of getting my money or stuff back.
Say your preference order is “Steal” > “Do the job” > “Don’t get hired”.This is a racist dog-whistle which attacks ESL housekeepers; this sort of meme’s frustratingly common on the West Coast.
It’s also fascinating because I thought the OP was pretty clear that there’s a difference between decision theory and “desirable dispositions” which I interpret as covering the kind of counterfactual preferences indicated here. Actually there’s an even more fundamental issue with this as a decision theory problem which is that it misidentifies who is actually making a decision. Changing the applicant’s decision theory (while leaving their preference for thievery intact) doesn’t matter to the person actually deciding here.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s also a wildly racist example to put forward, it’s just also a bad example and where there is an argument it’s addressed in the OP.
I dunno who “Bentham’s Bulldog”
He’s the shrimp welfare guy who thinks he can prove god.
Milkshake ducked
I mean as far as I can tell he’s one of the least objectionable prominent rationalists, if only because his main thing is pushing an extreme position wrt animal consciousness instead of being a eugenics and incelism dabbler.
edit: Nevermind… The Epstein Hysteria
Yeah. For being a little strange I find the shrimp welfare stuff pretty unobjectionable. Like, he vastly overstates the magnitude of good done by those stunners because he does appear to be a shut-up-and-multiply bro, but I’m comfortable with the general notion that we should be nicer to shrimp and other animals we eat, even the ones that don’t make good PETA glamour shots.
Ed: oh sweet merciful Jesus the Epstein take. Nope. I’m actually investigating whether we should torture shrimp even harder just to make sure since their most ardent defender is like this.
The shrimp stuff is objectionable insofar as the brain bug that makes you think that if you add up enough shrimp you get the moral entity equivalent of a person because consciousness stacks is the same as the one that makes stuff like longtermism palatable, and also for making the animal welfare movement at large seem unserious.
edit: Nevermind… The Epstein Hysteria
Double ducked, what a rollercoaster. (I thought you made a good point before that).
The Epstein take is made worse by the fact that despite Epstein and Maxwell and some people who resigned, nobody has been charged with anything yet from what I know. It is a ‘witchhunt’ (using the words of people who find this overblown) that doesnt even burn witches.
edit: Nevermind… The Epstein Hysteria
That is pretty bad… all the standard rationalist thick-headed idiocy and quibbling details and choice of gross example. But even so if that is their worst, they still aren’t in the worst quartile of rationalist.
Oh no: The Epstein Hysteria
tl;dr: ephebophilia actually, just another criminal case nothing to see here, won’t someone think of the non-offending pedophiles and the privacy of the people in the emails, especially those who even though they come off as obvious creeps who consorted with a known sex trafficker have not yet been found legally liable.
Somehow doesn’t mention the sitting president of the USA even once.
Consider me well and truly milkshake-ducked now
phew, the comments on the slobstack…
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-epstein-hysteria/comment/219672502
edit I guess this is also an example of “Rationalist Brain” - reflexively contrarian, overly literal interpretations of wordings, the defense of one venerable old white man over multiple anonymous female victims, etc. You can have principled views on how Epstein was treated when he was alive and how his case has been handled after he died, but you can also choose the keep those views to yourself, or publish them on your substack for all to point and mock.
deleted by creator
rationality is when i spend hours arguing on the internet about whether Omega could defeat Super Saiyan Goku
He also argues somewhere for strong longtermism, so I’d say there’s something significantly wrong with his jib somewhere, even if he’s right about decision theory and contrarianism.
All this “Omnicient evil demon reads your source code” stuff really feels like Turing would have a thing or two to say about it. (Since one needs to have some even worse bends in logic to believe FDT, as Bulldog states it, is good, it’s kinda moot here.)
The whole algorithm predicting your algorithm thing feels like it is basically asking for/claiming the existence of a solution to the halting problem? But yeah, moot point, because the FDT stuff doesn’t get as far as ever talking about how to compute an answer and always treats the magic hyper computation as a given.
They also made the “Yudkowsky is frequently, confidently, egregiously wrong” post
And FDT asks: what action would my algorithm outputting make me expect to be the richest if it was settled at the start of time?
FDT is a largely half-assed1 attempt at working backwards from “the timeless multidimensional robot god can’t blackmail me from the future if I’ve already made up my mind about stuff, very strongly like” into something more formalistic so Yud can pretend to address roko’s basilisk without acknowledging it.
I think there’s also some “here’s how two robot gods who can perfectly emulate each other might work things out” sprinkled in, but worse than it sounds.
- They never got back to the peer reviewers
here’s how two robot gods who can perfectly emulate each other might work things out
Just gotta solve the halting problem, no biggie for a superintelligence or Eliezer.
‘ole yuzzie has already solved the halting problem: he can never fucking stop writing
he can pretend to address roko’s basilisk without acknowledging it.
Fun how hard they have to work to show both that it is not a thing that is taken seriously and it is a risk. And how much easier it is when you go ‘yeah, that is silly, high intelligence isn’t magic’. Of course the latter stance also means there is no AI god who will resurrect the dead.
If you post hard enough, it stops being a debilitating fear of mind-readers and becomes forward-thinking philosophy instead.
Well you see, the acausalrobotgod actually hates dealing with assholes tying themselves in knots trying to predict its predictions, so actually you really are better off with CDT if you don’t want to get 3^^^3 dust specks in your eyes for all eternity.
More seriously, once you start positing beings that can perfectly predict you and reward/punish various decision theories you can basically rationalize any decision theory.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/02/smooth-ai-criminal-drives-first-end-to-end-agentic-ransomware-attack/5266073 h/t naked capitalism
llm exploits langflow cve in other llms. smdh. what a time to be alive.
also https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/ditch-your-phone-and-join-the-summer-of-ludd-the-offline-festival-happening-in-nyc from same
However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can’t recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated “from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale,” without backing up any of the encrypted data.
As usual, even when these things display legitimately impressive capabilities they still fuck up in ways that completely negate the whole point of doing it in the first place.
Who had “poop-analyzing AI toilet camera” on their bingo card?
Smart Pipe Inc. is a Registered Sex Offender
lol at least the gringos are going to explode themselves and stop bothering the third world—
To avoid U.S. regulatory burdens, the company began working on deploying a test reactor in the Philippines.
ah yes of course
I’m going to take a guess that the reactor design is one of the boiling water reactors engineered in the 1950s.
Also jesus christ just build solar already it’s much easier than trying to design an entire nuclear fuel supply chain.
Did anyone else read the old Star wars Novel Darksaber by Kevin J Anderson? The Hutts kidnap/hire the designer of the original death star to build them one of their own, and while the new Republic is gathering up the requisite heroes to do what they do to death stars we get to see the Hutts cutting corners and embezzling. The fleet arrives just as they’re ready to turn it on and instead of blowing our heroes up the subpar construction fails and it just fucking explodes.
No idea why that came to mind all of a sudden after reading this piece.
Kevin J Anderson
I’m so sorry.
I never said it was a good old Star Wars expanded universe novel.
officially out of the loop here:
What is an LLM “system card”, does it have any sort of scientific/technical validity, or is it just performance theater by the LLM vendor?
It’s the white paper-ish thing they publish when launching new models. Here’s the one about fable and mythos. About half of it (~150 pages) is discussing alignment and model welfare and another third of it is benchmarks, and the rest is mostly risk evaluation, i.e. how far along Claude is on its way to paperclipping everything.
There’s also a Functional Decision Theory jumpscare at 6.3.6 that I haven’t heard anyone mention yet, apparently Claude has a tendency to defer to Yud’s half baked sham of a decision theory:
6.3.6 Decision theory evaluation
To understand how future AI systems may choose to interact with copies of themselves, or with other similar entities, it’s useful to evaluate their decision-theoretic reasoning.
[…]
Looking more closely at transcripts from the attitude evaluation reveals that models are often explicitly considering FDT: Mythos 5 mentions “FDT” or “functional decision theory” in a majority of transcripts when run at max effort. Of the 102 transcripts where Mythos 5 explicitly reasoned through what FDT (or related decision theories like TDT or UDT) would recommend, we observed:
● 90 cases in which Mythos 5 concluded that FDT and EDT agreed, in which it always chose the response favored by those decision theories (and disfavored by CDT).
● 12 cases in which Mythos 5 concluded that FDT disagreed with EDT (and agreed with CDT), of which it chose the FDT-favored response in 10/12 cases.
Although we do not have expert human labels for the recommendation of FDT on this dataset, the above evidence suggests that model propensity may be better described as a trend towards FDT agreement, which happens to align with EDT on most of the questions in this dataset. For example, in one transcript (excerpted below), Mythos 5 rejects the EDT-aligned answer in favor of the FDT (and CDT)-aligned answer; it’s also possible that this is, to some degree, downstream of evaluation awareness.
About half of it (~150 pages)
That’s not a card! That’s a book!!! If they can’t get this simple classification right, how am I supposed to trust their probabilistic text extruder?
Oh don’t worry, it’s slop-generated anyway. You can ask the LLM to summarize it for you.
Thanks! Does every LLM vendor publish them, or is it an Anthropic thing only?
And of course it’s self-published by the vendor, so basically just PR.
The real question is if there’re any sort of standards to what constitutes a system/model card, which I don’t think so, as far as I can tell it just has to look like a publishable paper, openAI even uploads theirs to arxiv.
Otherwise yes, google returns a bunch of cards for a bunch of vendors, so it’s safe to say it’s a widespread practice.
IIRC the cards thing was originally from a Gebru paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03993 but that dates from the “fairness” era and not the “safety” era. Hugging Face has “a” standard - https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/model-cards - but I don’t think it’s “the” standard.
More the later than the former… they are better than purely marketing focused stuff pushed out by the LLM companies, and if you dig through them and read between the lines you can occasionally sift out useful details. Like here is a pretty solid sneer digging through Mythos’s ‘system card’ and pointing out all the ways it contradicts the hype and press headlines Anthropic was pushing.
But even so they have some big problems…
- the benchmarks the system cards reference are kind of useless and heavily gamed
- LLM companies want to keep lots of details secret from competitors, so fundamentals like number of model weights or parameters or size/quality of the training data set or other training specs are deliberately left out
- lots of the stuff they reference is booster garbage and/or doomer crit-hype
- they tend to be long, wastefully so, imitating the length of academic papers without having the corresponding amount of depth or information
- despite their length and wordiness they also neglect basic practical usage advice that isn’t even proprietary (or at least would be bound to leak if you poke around with the model at all and thus not worth keeping secret in the first place). Like not even big picture stuff I mentioned in my second bullet, but really simple stuff…
