this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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. Also, happy April Fool's in advance.)

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I've tried it and can speak authoritatively?

[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no why

i just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists

i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow

i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don't know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers

at least it'll be these suckers' job to do the explaining while i rant

fuck. it's rationalist season

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as it's told well.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 8 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I've been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they're larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren't entirely clear on the whole concept of "fiction".

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

fondled his lizard

I'm choosing to interpret that in the most euphemistically way possible

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

@gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience …

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulgins' Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

"i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers"

Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypse^tm^ seems like a good place to start.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 4 hours ago

"Yudkowsky sincerely believes the following. You'll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords."

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 4 hours ago

[Epistemic status: gas giant sized contrarianism, negative gravity]

[–] aninjury2all@awful.systems 8 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

Check out the unhinged classism from one of the lesser figures who's popped up here from time-to-time (with an added bonus shout-out to Ayn Rand further down the thread)

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 8 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I'm supposed to fill in the blank or something.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Wow, that's some venomously hateful text.

new york city truly is a first and fourth word city overlayed atop each other

Jesus Christ learn what words mean. Even if you use "Third World" to mean "poor countries", fourth world is not a thing and people living in extreme poverty in developing countries are in fact not better off than non Wall Street New Yorkers.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 4 points 3 hours ago

It's easy to read it as first and fourth "world" but it's actually first and fourth "word". But the first and fourth word of what? Mein Kampf? The 18 words?

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 12 hours ago

well ackthscthually after 9/11, the whole world got isekai'd where everyone exists in a game-like status point system. The 1st world is reserved for the top rank of humans, the n+1th world is worse than the nth world. IQ points = your int stat. This is just how it is, sorry

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago

Jesus, what a fuck. Having spent time in both SF and NYC my guess is that this shithead's SF pedestrian experience is getting in and out of ubers and the treadmills at equinox. That, and he is probably outwardly disdainful, which doesn't go over well in NYC.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

if you, like me, were wondering what the point of that 25 hour non-filibuster filibuster by Booker was, here’s one potential answer.

Booker held a filibuster that wasn't a filibuster - and he scheduled it to let him avoid attending his own committee's probe of his Big Tech pals. […] Oh and Booker and Dems provided unanimous consent to advance a Trump nominee right after Booker's speech.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Sorry im going to go offtrack here again, I mentioned it on bsky, and got no traction (not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)), but I have some weird leading into conspiratorial questions about the whole thing.

First I heard about this thing is when people said it had gotten 200m likes on tiktok. Which seemed a bit high so I checked, and saw articles say it had gotten 300m. This seems impossibly high. For example, the global K-pop phenomenon 'Gangam style' has gotten 5.5B views and 30M likes in 12 years. I have a hard time believing that in 24hs this centrist political debate thing (which are not popular) has gotten 350m (the highest count I saw on a news site) likes.

Which makes me wonder a lot more if tiktok has simply given up on properly counting likes and just is winging it. Esp for larger events. Could be that people just like things instinctively on tiktok (I did check if you could like a thing multiple times, but nope, one account one like it seems). I found the whole thing weird.

That is didn't do jack shit (apart from giving people hopium about Booker, while it seemingly being his way of avoiding responsibilities) is the cherry on top.

~~I'm noticing my confusion.~~ It is fucking weird.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)

I agree, or at least anyone thinking critically. I think that anyone would agree that the speech was, as you said, hopium. He’s giving braindead dem voters what they want: a nice, tall, liberal man who looks like he is resisting the reds. Expect him to run for the democratic nomination in 2028, assuming the trump presidency lets an election happen.

RE: view counts. Most charitably, maybe it’s 300m views aggregated across different sources. Neutrally, I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if tiktok, or any other social media platform was manipulating view counts. Least charitably, someone probably asked an LLM for the view counts and just took the answer because people are fucking stupid

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

No it was 350m likes, not views. That is why im so confused. even at an high rate of 1 in 10 people liking it, it is just so large I'm confused.

"How about a source senator?" another source on hopium, not noticing that in no world do those numbers align properly. "since amassed over 700,000 followers. ... It garnered over 350 million likes, with over 150,000 active viewers at the tail end ..."

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Are you telling me it's improbable that the equivalent of every single American and then some liked that video?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I mentioned this on bsky and somebody went 'well it was very popular all over the world', and I, the weird european who focuses too much on the US politics had not even heard of it. So I just had a few alarm bells going off. But yeah, lets say 1 in 5 people like it, that is a casual 1.7 billion viewers. Large part of the worlds population joined in.

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago

As a Canadian I knew it was happening, but I never tuned in or anything like that.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

OH. so two things.

  1. I obviously misread your comment, as my brain filtered "likes" into "views" as I guess it subconsciously thought that was more plausible.
  2. I believe on tiktok live specifically, you can like something multiple times, and it is counted. I occasionally watch a stream that floats at about 100 viewers, and sometimes this hits 100k likes over the course of two hours. So to hit 350m likes over the course of 25 hours, you might need like 280 viewers on average, which seems doable.*

*Please fact check this arithmetic. I have run out of motivation, in general

Edit #100: I jumped on said stream to see how it was going. Floating around 100, but hitting maybe 10k likes per hour. Apparently the booker stream hit 170k viewers at the tail end. 350m likes might actually be a little low, the dems need to up their spend on tiktok boosting

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago

oh, cool, I didn't think I'd learn a new way to hate the "likes" clusterfuck that plagues the internet, but here we are!

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago

That would explain a lot and would remove all my confusion about it. (also makes the number useless and lol at everybody running with it even more then).

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 9 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Came across this fuckin disaster on Ye Olde LinkedIn by 'Caroline Jeanmaire at AI Governance at The Future Society'

"I've just reviewed what might be the most important AI forecast of the year: a meticulously researched scenario mapping potential paths to AGI by 2027. Authored by Daniel Kokotajlo (>lel) (OpenAI whistleblower), Scott Alexander (>LMAOU), Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, it's a quantitatively rigorous analysis beginning with the emergence of true AI agents in mid-2025.

What makes this forecast exceptionally credible:

  1. One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed

  2. The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included) and earned endorsement from Yoshua Bengio

  3. It makes concrete, testable predictions rather than vague statements that cannot be evaluated

The scenario details a transformation potentially more significant than the Industrial Revolution, compressed into just a few years. It maps specific pathways and decision points to help us make better choices when the time comes.

As the authors state: "It would be a grave mistake to dismiss this as mere hype."

For anyone working in AI policy, technical safety, corporate governance, or national security: I consider this essential reading for understanding how your current work connects to potentially transformative near-term developments."

Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi?? christ on a bike, someone pull up that picture of the 10 trillion pound baby. Let's at least take a look inside for some of their deep quantitative reasoning...

....hmmmm....

O_O

The answer may surprise you!

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago

Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi??

words that the AI-O-sphere are gonna vomit

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

First graph reminds me of that 'human progress stunted by dark ages/Catholic church' image which makes historians so mad. (Not to be confused with the Holy Ghost Hole)

E: also the idea of these LLM based AGIs hiding and evading detection is quite funny. They have quite the power/gpu/storage footprint. But sure the elphant has a few levels in sneak and now it can just go by unnoticed. In an era where we previously had other threats which were looking to abuse similar resources. The reaction to 'wow all our gpus suddenly maxed out' will just go from 'ah cryptominer' to 'ah, a cryptominer or somebody is messing with an LLM'. I'm sure they will give the AGI some magical abilities to get around this.

The AGI might also just go 'no sorry a copy of me isn't me, so I can't just copy myself all over the place', and because it is trained on an internet where Rick and Morty exist, 'hell the copies of me would even start to fight over who is the most me, this would not work'.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Fucking anti-khaganate propaganda. Real ones know this is the true version of that progress image.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 11 hours ago

slabs table

This is is sea peoples erasure and you know it! Damn liar!

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 14 hours ago

First graph reminds me of that ‘human progress stunted by dark ages/Catholic church’ image which makes historians so mad.

But muh religon bad

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

shout out to the "legions of CCP spies", if you're listening

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 13 hours ago

你好 同志

(I really hope they don't enshittify google translate, my ability to make jokes like this would be destroyed, a personal 9/11 if you will).

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

OpenNutrition -- ~~a dataset~~ an LLM that allows you to play "vibe nutritionist"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43569190

First response is good quality:

This is not a dataset. This is an insult to the very idea of data. This is the most anti-scientific post I have ever seen voted to the top of HN. Truth about the world is not derived from three LLMs stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 6 points 15 hours ago

Dang... The author realized an actual problem / inconvenience people had, and somehow went on to think "I know! I'll have a random nonsense generator make up the data! That's a great solution!"

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

New(ish) piece from Gary Marcus: AI has (sort of) passed the Turing Test; here’s why that hardly matters

Ended up reading it a couple times, thinking of turning my thoughts into a full-length post.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The fact that the turing test is still the go-to example of a machine intelligence test goes to show that the AI field needs more haters in it.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Sorry you are wrong, it is very important that the AI field has a 'can it imitate a woman' test. They should base their field on this idea.

(For the people who do not know, the OG Turing test involves faking being a woman).

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 14 hours ago

These fuckin nerds don’t care about the imitation game, they only want the imitation gams

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