(I get the feeling we’re close to this bubble’s end.)
Anyways, 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.)
Apparently there are rumours going around that Dario had a hand in Jensen’s ousting. I’d suppose its because he’s one of those ‘we can’t loose to China’ folks. But also wouldn’t that be a seriously stupid move with the IPO around the corner? Then again, Anthropic are not exactly the smartest bunch (and these are just rumours)
Oh look, bicameral mind is in the spotlight again.
I posit that farts were odorless until some time after the invention of writing. This is not a hypothesis. You can’t falsify it. Therefore it’s true. White people invented smelling farts.
Is this like the time when people who had never been at sea in the late afternoon decided that ancient greeks couldn’t tell red from blue?
In Homer’s Iliad, we rarely encounter the Greek word for ‘I’
Greek in general tends to omit the first person pronoun since the corresponding conjugation is both pretty distinct and also rimes with said pronoun, so why say ‘I am’ when ‘am’ do trick is usually how it goes.
Now I’m not saying their entire methodology was open iliad.pdf, ctrl+f ἐγώ and be surprised at the result count, but if they landed on the authors of the Iliad being p-zombies for their conclusion, disregarding such an assumption might be premature.
The ego!
Let me introduce another related concept: olfactory zombies. Imagine if there are people who can’t actually smell farts. These O-zombies physiologically have the nerves to detect the volatile chemicals responsible for fart smell, but they don’t actually feel the experience of smelling a fart. They may react to farts in the same way as non-O-zombies who smell a fart, but it’s a non-conscious programmed response and they are not aware of how it feels to actually smell a fart.
There’s no reason not to assume O-zombies are real. There’s also no reason not to assume there’s a good reason to care even if they were.
You better believe that I’m appropriating this for the next time some dweeb comes at me with p-zombies
I formally dedicate this to public domain wherever possible, CC0 where not possible and heartily discourage attribution and royalties.
deleted by creator
Showing sloperators that using an LLM makes their brain power shrink over time has had little effect; they all think that they are big brain bois with extra capacity to spare.
What if they heard that LLM usage shrinks their penis by a micron every so many million tokens?
Think that would just drive them to incel style rhetoric. With a helping of ‘no you are right to worry, but it doesn’t look like your penis has shrunk sir’ from the bots. (poor third world workers who then have to process that shit. “why are all these people suddenly uploading their penis in grok?”).
they’d just start buying overpriced leather jackets to compensate. there’s a worked example in the press right now
Leather blocks the Chat-5GPT rays
Jet fuel can’t melt leather
It’s true: sloperators have vast amounts of grey matter sitting neglected
I don’t really want to just put someone’s /u/ on blast, but I’ve found an account on Lemmy that appears to be posting nothing but anti-AI posts with LLM titles and top level comments. What a world.
do it, alert mods and or admins of respective communities, it’s not the first time it happens and one at least was banned before
Apparently checks out. Guess it’s just a block from me.
Kinds funny to make propaganda against llms and bill the llm companies for it tho
The second affair has hit Nvidia stock
I want this to matter but stock market stuff is all fake anyway.
People say something like “1.2 trillion wiped out” but stocks aren’t actually tied to anything anywhere near their actual value (dividends) and it’s only ever a tiny volume being traded anyway. Most stock trading is indistinguishable from meme coins.
NVIDIA has enough control over actually valuable technology that they don’t particularly need to be able to raise additional funding to continue turning the world’s chips into stacked boxes in a Taiwanese warehouse.
I mean if it keeps going down its going to be pretty bad news for Anthropic’s IPO
I think anthropic’s business model is bad news for their IPO. Nvida stocks be damned the filing is fucking hilarious.
putting ‘we dont know if we’ll ever be profitable’ in the IPO filing was definitely a brave move, I’ll give them that
Sorry I have to vent, but looks like the humblebundle site did an AI powered redesign as the site (while looking like it works) is now a total mess. I’m a bit in slow motion trainwreck watching mode. Sucks I do have a list of unclaimed keys still at the site which I paid for (some of which are now gone, as in I know I still had a key as I kept a list of some of the keys in a file (I was worried something like this happening for a while) but the keys are no longer in the list of games I got, this is just one of the many many bugs or just plain weird things I noticed (The reddit is filled with people having a lot more complaints, somebody bought a ‘4 for 1, play with your friends’ pack, and only got one key, if you made a ‘gift a key link’ yday the link now is dead, but the game counts as claimed, etc etc).
The UI does have nice rounded corners now however.
E: additional funny moment, so I know people who have subscribed to humble choice (a monthly thing) an basically have forgotten about it, but during the creation of the new site they messed something up and they no longer have the information on file to complete the transaction for that, so a lot of subscriptions will likely auto cancel, what a foot shot).
E2: It also removed 2FA, made it possible to change passwords without the old password, and switch emails without access to the old email. Amazing work.
Yeah, I have also been amazed. Like there is so much wrong. (love the 2022 and earlier games on the ‘new releases’ page for example).
Ah, the dev on main and push on Friday school of development.
Complaint driven development if you will.
God bless linkedin lunatics
Transcription of the image below
People often forget that Jensen is the hero who brought the light of modern AI to every household. He is also one of the most technical and charismatic CEOs in tech. He single handedly contributed more to the US and global economy than 80% of all other tech execs combined. Jensen is the heart and mind of Nvidia and one small mistake on the personal level only shows that he is human. Do not judge. ♥️ Jensen ♥️
Yes just a small personal mistake like blowing up your marriage and committing treason 😂😂😂
Treason is cool and good. Cheaters can walk into a fire.
calling what jensen did ‘treason’ accepts far too much of both the AI boosters’ and the corrupt imperialist US government’s worldview, in my opinion
This is true, but given how so many other AI boosters have committed hard to being hawkish towards China to justify throwing more money into the AI money hole I think it’s worth using the “treason” angle as a wedge issue. I don’t personally think it’s that big a deal apart from the rank hypocrisy of it, but it feels like a far stronger push against Nvidia and the bubble as a whole than focusing on Jensen’s personal relationships.
yeah 100% but like he could have rounded up all us politicians into one room and sold the GPS coordinates to China who then bombed it and it’d still be awesome.
You can’t betray people that impose themselves on. Treason is fake bullshit
The Git project has put its current LLM policy (which currently blocks some AI use) up to a vote. An easily manipulated vote, like the kind Debian did. For the version control software used by the vast majority of software projects across the world.
Why don’t they just vibe code their own implementation of anthropic Scion and leave git to us “luddites” - especially since git isn’t fit for purpose any more when you’re slopping out 30k changes a day
Cathartic venting, tangential to the ordure du jour: in high school everyone I had a crush on had a crush on Joseph Gordon Levitt. It brings me great joy to know that he is now alignment brainrotted, and I am not.
The AI 2027 authors are back: Q3.5 Timelines Update: Looks Like the Intelligence Explosion Will Happen in 2027 After All
It’s all about that new METR data. Took a quick scroll and the whole thing is about forecasting and modelling. Its pretty lengthy so if anyones willing to take the plunge and read it all youll have my thanks
METR recently estimated that Anthropic is now making AI progress about twice as fast as its historical rate (they would not be surprised by anything from 1.3x to 3x), and guessed that “perhaps ≈80%” of the current acceleration is due to AI. If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario.
Going down a little bit:
A 1.7x pace of progress is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. AI 2027 predicted 2x AI R&D uplift in Dec 2026; as argued above, this would imply a substantially lower pace of progress than the 1.7x AI-attributable pace of progress that METR’s estimates imply for Nov. So when exactly did AI 2027 predict a 1.7x pace of progress over baseline? We created this trajectory by modifying a few key parameters until it roughly matched AI 2027. In that trajectory, 1.7x acceleration over the 2024.0–2025.5 rate of progress happens in roughly April 2027. So by this metric, we are ~5 months ahead of schedule.
And a chart of their predictions to end it all off:
(Only one person above 50%?)
Mark your calendars everybody!
Sufficiently overfitted benchmarks are indistinguishable from exponential progress.
yeah but wen fuckable digital jesus.
I have had to explain to my boss that METR are cultists
I vaguely remember it being mentioned that one of the METR staff was married to a rationalist (it was either an Anthropic employee or Paul Christiano, I forgot who)
It’s all about that new METR data.
Yeah, they seem to have moved on from multiplying sufficiently large matrixes is magic to thinking it’s actually the code writing that’ll get mystical any time now.
One more if statement bro
So I went all the way down to the appendix, and found a gem:
Appendix: Ambiguity in “80% of current acceleration is due to AI”. Claude Opus 5.5 gives the following possible interpretations of METR’s claim that “we guess that a majority (perhaps ≈80%) of the current (October 2026) acceleration is due to AI.”
Claude Opus 5.5 gives the follow possible interpretations
Did…did they just say they used Claude for this?? (Ironic, because METR also used a bunch of Claude in the source article)
Also, this is the median value. No mean value and doesn’t seem much modal value. Only one paragraph where they mention that the acceleration was only on well-specified tasks (in the section titled “How large is the (AI-attributable) acceleration in the current pace of progress, really?”)
reposting this r/BetterOffline post for further context on the METR data
For years the LW types have just been saying ‘i asked claude’ about EVERYTHING
TED-AI as in the meaninglessly distilled and contrived ted-talk idea of AI
Broke: “it is AGI when it makes A BILLION DOLLARS”
Woke: “it is AGI when it does a ted talk”
by that definition we already have AGI. Not because it’s that good but rather because TED was already brainrot slop well before LLMs.
If AI will not come closer to AGI, the definition of AGI will come closer to AI.
Pretty sure its just a fancier term for AGI (Top Expert Dominating AI)
“Top Expert Dominating” is when someone with a lot of experience makes someone else discover that they’re a switch after all.
I intended it as a sneer lol. Aka I don’t see a difference in meanings here
ohhhh
Wholesome indie Darling about human connection actually slopgobbled https://aftermath.site/big-walk-ai-igf-jurors-controversy/
discloses now rather than at launch because they’re just so wholesome and committed to ethics.
Arguing over homeopathic doses of AI misses the point like with actual homeopathy. They used it.
Developers House House told Aftermath via email that “LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs”, and that they “estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage”. They also stress that “generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game”.
Not to get all doctorow on this, but I generally don’t think we should concede this approach to using LLMs to the yooooooo I just vibecoded an FIFA 2027 cloen for android watch WITH MY DICK!!!11!! people.
If/when a time comes when genAI isn’t actively ruining everything and doesn’t need all the RAM and hard drive space in the world to be useful, using it like that seems a far cry better than even what torvalds is currently doing.
Can you trust that figure, though? They’re already in trouble for being deceitful about slop usage, and 0.1% is close enough to zero that it could have literally been zero if anyone cared about minimising anything.
Yeah, it’s definitely an open question if they are being honest for honesty’s sake or just trying to get ahead of people realising that the game is slop-infested in obvious ways.
Assuming the first, the number is definitely based on vibes, but 0.1% of say ten million lines of code is still a lot of code, and the way LLMs have been shoved into every nook and cranny of the major IDEs, demanding proof of zero tokens spent during development puts enterprise devs in a weird spot, especially with stack overflow all but defunct and the various tool vendors increasingly assuming you’ll be using them in LLM-first dev scenarios and skimping on providing in-depth guidelines, or slopping them out.
It sucks.
Build a machine that isn’t made of trust violations, controiled by the worst people in the world, and actively making climate change worse potentially killing millions first slopper.
Sure seems that AI usage more and more has the stink of ‘you can trust people who use this at all’.
Unrelated to that this is also very odd:
Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasn’t possible.
Unity jumped on the slop train some time ago, so I’m chalking that up to the codebase being flooded with slop.
I feel like I’ve seen more than one person around the Interwebs make the joke, “It’s a brutal betrayal to discover that Big Walk uses Unity.”
What advantage does unity have over godot these days anyway?
Nevermind my suggestion, of course they also use AI shit now.
I’ve been waiting for this
top quality sneer from “@1techuptopiapls” on X the fascism app:
”man proves AI improvements are not economically viable as new Anthropic model successfully cures cancer"
is the cure to cancer in the room with us right now
This guy probably thinks that outputting sloppily written proofs to math problems is the same thing as curing cancer because both of them are done by super smart scientific brain geniuses and the AI is an even bigger brain genius.
most of the other replies are all ‘well yeah we knew sustaining AI progress would need exponentially more resources but its like definitely worth it’
When children go to sleep, the Sandman shows them dreams. When AI boosters go to sleep, the Smiling Man shows them nightmares.
And that gets us back to istewart and Dave Karpf’s point that these companies sell a narrative about what the future will be and who controls it, because they can not build that future.
It’s just ‘well the financials don’t make any sense and these companies are not looking profitable anytime soon but like AI models are super duper good and AGI is right around the corner so you need to invest’
A number of responses (like, 2 out of the 3 that it shows) refer to ‘the scaling laws’ without elaboration. Is this some jargon special to AI bros?
yeah essentially
the scaling laws are basically that AGI/ASI can be created by just scaling up the current LLMs
But they really aren’t! The actually interesting scaling laws from about 5-7 years ago that opened up machine learning to more applications all show that everything about machine learning is power-law diminishing returns with linear improvements in any metric requiring exponential increases in numbers of parameters / amounts of data / number of backprop cycles applied.
uh but have you considered unbounded recursive self-improvement? it’s how it works in books and in my imagination
The scaling laws maxed out around mid 2023 with the release of GPT-4 - that was around the time that everyone got excited about “test time inference” which is where LLMs spit out reasoning streams to convince you they are “thinking”. If you look at where LLMs have improved since then it’s mainly in tasks where they can be strapped into a harness and given concrete feedback like “your program didn’t compile” which are also coincidentally use cases where data from gpt and Claude users can easily be harvested and new training data can be squeezed out of underpaid third world mturkers.
In other words they’ve improved their training data in the specific domains they are operating in like we’ve been doing in machine learning since the mid 90s…
The big labs have just been doing an incredible job of marketing (and particularly in Anthropic’s case, brain damaging themselves into believing their own marketing)
These scaling laws are even funnier than that, as are more recent ones.
I continue to be extremely amused by the fact that you can take a LLM ‘reasoning’ trace, replace all the ‘reasoning’ with dashes or spaces, re-run the attention mechanism, and have what comes out the other end improve by a significant fraction as much as if you let it exude text that has the appearance of having to do with the topic at hand. It’s just more opportunity for the embedding vectors to dance against each other before you translate the abstract vectors back into natural language. Hence recent frontier models doing a thing where instead of doing a long reasoning trace, they build the attention matrix, allow the vectors to push each other around… then let those new vectors push each other around again, and again, and again, multiple rounds, before you start decoding.
More recently, I have seen some vague math into the scaling of the speed with which running many parallel systems with access to a common pool of text produce a legible result. If I recall, it comes to roughly:
N parallel systems
Finish in ~1/N^0.5 as much time
At ~N^0.5x the cost
So 16 parallel systems crosstalking finish complex tasks in 1/4 the time at 4x the cost (and 16x the instantaneous rate of operation per second)
Total System Failure: U.S. Government Networks Will Need To Be Torched And Rebuilt
Interesting if you want a rundown of US gov IT security fuckups, so far, in light of nvidia’s Jansen being recently revealed to have been compromised by Chinese intelligence.
I’ve noted repeatedly in my writing that the Trump administration’s cybersecurity policy has been indistinguishable from a foreign attack.
I have wondered for a long time what sorts of clandestine messages are going over the newly installed Starlink terminals, bypassing the normal firewalls and logs between sensitive systems and the terrestrial internet backbone…
new odium symposium episode. we talk about Lawrence Mead, the NYU professor who advanced much of the theory behind the US welfare reform of the 90s, and his more recent project of inventing a newer, better racism. https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/28-racism-2-174814488 or any podcast app
