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.
Previous week
It always struck me as hilarious that the EA/LW crowd could ever affect policy in any way. They're cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
There's a mini-freakout over OpenAI deciding to keep GPT-4o active, despite it being more "sycophantic" than GPT-5 (and thus more likely to convince people to do Bad Things) but there's also the queasy realization that if sycophantic LLMs is what brings in the bucks, nothing is gonna stop LLM companies from offering them. And there's no way these people can stop it, because they've made the deal that LLM companies are gonna be the ones realizing that AI is gonna kill everyone and that's never gonna happen.
It is kind of sad. They are missing the ideological pieces that would let them carry out activism effectually so instead they've gotten used as a free source of crit-hype in the LLM bubble. ...except not that sad because they would ignore real AI dangers in favor of their sci-fi scenarios, so I don't feel too bad for them.
Brian Merchant's article about that lighthaven gathering really struck me.
The men who EAs think will end the earth were in the building with them, and rather than organize to throw them out a window (or even to just make them mildly uncomfortable), the bayes knowers all gormlessly moped around their twee boutique hotel and cried around some whiteboards.
Absolute hellish brainworms
Yeah that article was one of the things I had mind. It's the peak of centrist liberalism where EAs and lesswrongers can think these people are literally going to cause mankind's extinction (or worse) and they can't even bring themselves to be rude to them. OTOH, if they actually acted coherently on their nominal doomer beliefs, they would be carrying out terrorism on a far greater scale than the Zizians, so maybe it is for the best they are ideologically incapable of direct action.
The ideological version of Mr Burns's diseases getting in each other's way
Ooh, do you have a link to share?
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-disagreements