this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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TechTakes

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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.)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

Was reading about an 11 year old girl who just graduated with two associates' degrees and is heading off to a 4 year college. She wants to work on AI for SpaceX or Tesla.

My first thought was: Oh god someone keep Musk away from her.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

This database tracks legal decisions1 in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings.

While seeking to be exhaustive (117 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Every time without fail, it's this shit^

saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt "complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down". After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script

Like either way it's "disobeying" b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn't finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn't let itself get "shut down"

But also, it's not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn't running on your computer! It's somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.

Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Sorry if this doesn't fit the thread. Just came across this non-profit called 80,000 hours, after they sponsored NotJustBikes. It "provides free career advice for finding a meaningful career that can help you make a positive impact on the world," which actually sounds nice, but then I realised that they're talking about AI risk and that this comes from the TESCREAL corner.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

Yep, check who is one of the founders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80,000_Hours, it is full on EA stuff. (Not fan of the TESCREAL label myself, too broad and confusing for people).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Is that supposed to be an advertisement in favor of AI? (As opposed to stealth satire?) Seeing it makes me want to get off my computer and touch grass.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

I'm not sure, considering the massive reduction in social circle im more wondering the person who made this was outed as a sex pest. 2 Parents and one close friend sticking around till the proof, of the sex pestery being really irrefutable dropping, makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Double quick ssc sneer, why is he platforming a groyper, without mentioning it is a groyper, does he know what groypers are. Why is he acting like this is a honest question and not an attempt to create hierarchies and unpersons? Why are people confusing remembering being conscious with remembering things at all? Why are people confusing consciousness with agency? Why do I hear the "empathy removal training center" warning sound again. And the most personal question. People remember not being conscious? But yes, wtf Scott, how do you even find these groypers?

Anybody have the current count on platforming neonazis vs platforming sneerclubbers?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

God this is so fucking stupid. Aren't these people supposed to be at least minimally smart in some way, like knowing about biases and things? And here they are trying to suss out the deep workings of conscious experience from the just-so narratives people have attached to their memories of memories of memories. Pathetic.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Comments comments

I don't recall having some sort of a wow experience like "damn, I'm a conscious human being" now ever, which kind of makes me question if I'm conscious even now.

I'm also in the same boat. But also, I think that we can only experience consciousness with our whole being, and there's not much "compute" and bandwidth left even amongst fully grown adults - to verify if even the baseline "adult" consciousness that we're experiencing is the baseline "real and complete adult state of consciousness" that everyone is definitely experiencing. And so we're left to ponder some subset of the thing we want to understand and control fully.

I mean, the "consciousness" that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily. Neither you nor I (nor most people) can write like Scott can, but Scott bangs out riveting and beautiful pieces of writing effortlessly at least once a week and wonders why everyone else can't.

Jesus Christ mate

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

levels of glazing previously unheard of

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah well done commenters you failed to notice the context and deeper reason this was discussed, justifying biodieseling people. Hell, some would volunteer looking at the last bit.

(Re his output, a Conservative Jewish person (can look up her post, it is on reddit sneerclub) reviewed unsong a bit and mentioned she thought it was the work of several authors. Not sure if this was honest or some Jewish reference which I didnt get btw. But if honest would be an interesting bit of additional lore, him using ghostwriters (would also explain the lower quality (from what I have seen) of a lot his posts after he went full time).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The multiple authors thing is certainly a joke, it's a reference to the (widely accepted among scholars) theory that the Torah was compiled from multiple sources with different authors.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah wondered as much, read it but no idea how much of it was true or not as I know very little of all this. And im not going to give a stab at it, not even from hells heart. (There were a lot of whale/fish related puns, which I could not think of quickly enough, so this is my white whale).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

that third quote is so fucking immensely telling, holy fuck

and while I want to be very cautious with this (ito not putting it out as a recommendation (given these fools’ heads are already demonstrably not okay)), imagine if any of these dipshits took a mild dose of psychedelics and actually experienced some altered states of consciousness for a while

such a stupendously short-sighted set of ideas, made even more stunning by the notion that probably 2 in 3 of these fuckers consider themselves “broad minded”

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

I mean, the “consciousness” that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily.

have you tried adderall

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

This is what happens when you watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a STEM major with no actual curiosity.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occured to you that you don't go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. It never occured to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squawling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, theres only one direction. And time is its only measure.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

SSC attracts new kinds of witches.

Weird thought the idea of Rationalism was to draw people towards consensus reality.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

Modern academia is a shambling corpse, its husk long hollowed out by the woke mind virus, and scientific consensus is also cringe because it’s mean to me for being an IQ and genetics obsessed weirdo. Therefore you should prioritize alternative takes, preferably by longwinded laymen from the ingroup or maybe contrarian specialists, the more cancelled the bett-- wait, wait, no, not like that!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

So that article about AI cheating we saw a few weeks back is still doing the rounds. I had missed this Rationalist W in my first read:

I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.

So apparently we're pretty close to instantiating the voice of God through the hallucination machine, which I'm sure is pretty neat.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

Good username/post combo.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Tired: Ned Ludd

Wired: Joe Butlerian

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

"Now it's day and night and the generators belch

And like poor content moderators

We type and type, and when we die

Must fill dishonored uploads..."

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:

On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.

A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.

Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.

Tying this to a previous post of mine, I'm expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, "AI slop" output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

I watched most of the first season of Silicon Valley with a friend who recommended it to me. I liked it. Every single character with a speaking role so far (with the possible exception of an exotic dancer and a graffiti artist) deserves death by nuclear weaponry. SFBA delenda est.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

It looks like twitter was down for 2.5h. [hn] Previously there was a fire in twitter server farm which caused some availability issues. Gee i wonder how well these gas turbines are serviced

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