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
gwern: It's not "AI slop" if I wasted hours dicking around with MidJourney to make it.
rsaarelm: People don't appreciate the beauty of Substack's built-in slop generator.
gwern: "I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations." Have you appreciated the depth of my artist's statement?
After spending hundreds of hours per mod year trying to get a Wronger on the Right track , mod Habryka spends multiple hours writing a post explaining why the Wronger gets a 3 year ban
Bonus appearance of r/SneerClub right after the preamble!
In other news, I've stumbled across some AI slop trying to sell a faux-nostalgic image of the 1980s:
Unsurprisingly, its getting walloped in the quotes - there's people noting how it misrepresents the '80s, people noting much the '80s sucked and how its worst aspects are getting repeated today, people noting the video's whiter than titanium dioxide, people suggesting there's suicidal undertones to it, and a few comparisons to San Junipero from Black Mirror here and there.
Personally, this whole thing has negative nostalgic value to me - I was born in 2000, well after the decade ended (temporally and culturally), and the faux-nostalgic uncanny-valley vibe this slop has reminds me more of analog horror than anything else.
These fake people all have extremely 2025 voices
"AI is obviously gonna one-shot the human limbic system," referring to the part of the brain responsible for human emotions. "That said, I predict — counter-intuitively — that it will increase the birth rate!" he continued without explanation. "Mark my words. Also, we’re gonna program it that way."
groks gunna make u fuck
Here's my idea to increase the birth rate:
Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children won't have horrible lives.
@dgerard is never going to run out of content for pivot, is he:
it is difficult to overstate the stupendous degree to which Peter Kyle's job is beyond him
Ran across a viral post on Bluesky:
Unsurprisingly, the replies and quotes are universally outraged at the news.
Every task you outsource to a machine is a task that you don't learn how to do.
And school is THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LEARN THINGS, JESUS H. FUCK
BLOOMBERG BREAKING: Sam Altman promises that GPT-6 will generate Ghibli images with levels of piss yellow heretofore "unseen"
altman is the waluigi to musk’s wario
i have on good authority (ed zitron's low effort skeets) that wario works for anthropic, and his surname is amodei
Why would you do waluigi and wario dirty like that?
gemini isn't even trying now
Not a sneer, but there is this yt'er called the Elephant Graveyard (who I know nothing about apart from these vids) who did a three part series on Joe Rogan, the downfall of comedy, hyperreality, which is weirdly relevant, esp part 3 where suddenly there are some surprise visits.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EuKibmlll4
New article on AI scraping just hit The Register, with some choice quotes from Anubis dev Xe Iaso. Xe herself has given some additional thoughts.
That's weird, The Register's versions of the quotes are different (not just pared down).
You don’t say, the register, taking journalistic integrity less than serious? (Hi, it’s me, a person who has been annoyed by their editorial choices for more than two decades now)
The overall collapsing of journalism and shit-slinging has had consequences for beyond the obvious.
Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the "AI" data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use Three Times as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the Entire City Of New Orleans, every year.
https://bsky.app/profile/wolvendamien.bsky.social/post/3lwyxhchxos2g
Ultra-rare NIMBY W
Meanwhile on /r/programmingcirclejerk sneering hn:
transcription
OP: We keep talking about “AI replacing coders,” but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.
Comment: The future of coding is jerking off while waiting for AI managers to do your project for you, then retrying the prompt when they get it wrong. If gooning becomes the de facto way to program, maybe expecting to cum will be baggage we'll need to unlearn.
Promptfondlers are tragically close to the point. Like I was saying yesterday about translators the future of programming in AI hell is going to be senior developers using their knowledge and experience to fix the bullshit that the LLM outputs. What's going to happen when they retire and there's nobody with that knowledge and experience to take their place? I'll have sold off my shares by then, I'm sure.
Not a sneer in the classical sense. It seems that Extropic AI is about to finally ship something.
There is still no actual data about the hardware on their website...
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.
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:
At this stage of the AI boom, when every major chatbot is legitimately helpful in numerous ways, benchmarks, science, and rigor feel almost insignificant. What matters is how the chatbot feels—and, in the case of the Google integrations, that it can span your entire digital life. Before OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence—a model that can do basically any knowledge work as well as a human, and the first step, in the company’s narrative, toward overhauling the economy and curing all disease—it is aiming to build an artificial general assistant. This is a model that aims to do everything, fit for a company that wants to be everywhere.
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.