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.)
In case you needed more evidence that the Atlantic is a shitty rag.
The implication that Soares / MIRI were doing serious research before is frankly journalist malpractice. Matteo Wong can go pound sand.
It immediately made me wonder about his background. He's quite young and looks to be just out of college. If I had to guess, I'd say he was probably a member of the EA club at Harvard.
His group chats with Kevin Roose must be epic.
He was writing less dumb shit a coupla years ago
Just earlier this month, he was brushing off all the problems with GPT-5 and saying that "OpenAI is learning from its greatest success." He wrapped up a whole story with the following:
Weaselly little promptfucker.
The phrase "adorned with academic ornamentation" sounds like damning with faint praise, but apparently they just mean it as actual praise, because the rot has reached their brains.
The Atlantic puts the "shit" in "shitlib"
also, they misspelled "Eliezer", lol
I've created a new godlike AI model. Its the Eliziest yet.
My copy of "the singularity is near" also does that btw.
(E: Still looking to confirm that this isn't just my copy, or it if is common, but when I'm in a library I never think to look for the book, and I don't think I have ever seen the book anywhere anyway. It is the 'our sole responsibility...' quote, no idea which page, but it was early on in the book. 'Yudnowsky').
Image and transcript
Transcript: Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve....[T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from "impossible" to "obvious." Move a substantial degree upwards and all of them will become obvious.
—ELIEZER S. YUDNOWSKY, STARING INTO THE SINGULARITY, 1996
Transcript end.
How little has changed, he has always believed intelligence is magic. Also lol on the 'smallest bit'. Not totally fair to sneer at this as he wrote this when he was 17, but oof being quoted in a book like this will not have been good for Yudkowskys ego.