this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
22 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2118 readers
111 users here now

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

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

also, they misspelled "Eliezer", lol

I've created a new godlike AI model. Its the Eliziest yet.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.