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 so 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.)
Sounds promising. For something like this to be good, it has to thread the needle in terms of highlighting the blatant disregard for humanity from the tech CEOs without falling victim to the skynet boogeyman. So based on the little I’ve heard, they might do ok at that. But I never get my hopes up anymore tbh, just in general
Another Anthropic employee has quit for reasons typical of an Anthropic employee
“I quit my job at the scary drawing company because the drawing I made was too scary for me but my bosses didn’t seem scared enough”
Pls don’t be clickbaity
Some alignment guy bailed out of fear anthropic will unfavorably immanentize the eschaton. It’s as cliche and pointless as the op makes it sound.
Still the link OP shared is like 80% about Terrence Tao worrying about LLMs ruining mathematics, it’s a kind of reverse bury the lead situation, which is a bit unnecessary.
tried to make the link automatically skip to the part about the Anthropic employee but I guess substack doesnt work like that
Status of my evening:
Post a link to my personal website, find out a minute later that it’s “down for maintenance”, try to log into my web hosting dashboard (Siteground) to figure out what’s going on, it rejects the 2FA code it sends me, then the 2FA code suddenly works, then the dashboard is full of hard-selling slop features that I will gouge out my left eye with a spork and skull-fuck the hole with the blunt end before I will use… My blog seems to be back now, though?
Fuck, I need to migrate my blog. If there is even anywhere to migrate it to.
I’m very happy with a Hetzner auction server. Though I’ve lots of different things running on it, might he overkill for “just” WordPress. They offer cheapish VPSs though. And they’re in Europe and have excellent technical support.
Not an ad, I just like them
The latest tech bro attack on public education is Alpha School for teenagers. One reporter thinks that if we take the accounts claiming to be students are real then:
…we have to take semi-seriously the question of whether Alpha School is a cult? A set of indoctrination camps for the airport-book class? What the hell is happening here?
A focus on judging people by biometrics, cult criticism, and assertion that LLMs can replace teachers. Someone on Bsky replies:
The cult of Alpha school is strong in Miami-where the Miami tech/finance/crypto bro set is just generally dumber (or less intellectual, less cultured, less educated) and far less ethical than in other parts of the country (not that silicon valley tech bros are awesome, but the worst ones move here)
Hereticon got started in Miami.
Looks like there might be a bit of an openai vs anthropic dick waving competition over mathematical proofs. I haven’t had time to digest all of this yet because it is a bit hard for me to read, but there are a few interesting nuggets in there such as making it clear that the ai firms treat this as a marketing exercise (no surprises there). They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved (again, no surprises).
Levent had been told by Sebastien “very little human input” had been used. This turned out not to be true. Over the course of the call, as members of their team sent Sebastien corrections and details over their internal chat, it emerged that an entire team had been working on the problem, that this was one of a number of things that was tried, that work had started on the unforced problem, that the team first set the model on easier problems, including Euler, that even the prompt that had been shown to me had been written by prompting Codex, and that an insane amount of compute had been used.
The main statement is here: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf
Associated stuff linked from here: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198
Do note that the author made heavy use of llm assistance for their work, and does consider it to be the future of developing mathematical proofs… this isn’t human vs ai.
The /r/singularity and orange site responses have been gross, lots of commenters willing to totally overlook the multiple different ways OpenAI has been utter scum in this debacle in order to celebrate another LLM “success”.
They’re also apparently trying to obscure the amount of human assistance involved
of course lol, gotta keep that agi ruse up
there are tons of issues here. almost impossible to convey how bad things are. in no particular order:
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this research breakthrough was a consequence of dumping tons of money into the ai companies. if the future of the field means being entangled with openai et al. and extreme expenses that is going to upend mathematics in a much bigger way than ability to prove new things will. this hasn’t been a focal point of discussion yet but it looks to be at the center of mathematics going forward imo.
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possibly for legal reasons, the statement stops short of accusing openai of stealing their in progress work. as in literally snaking their documents off the cloud and using them to try to undercut researchers. but it’s very clear that that is what the author believes happened
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openai straight up threatened the mathematician in question. in a colloquial sense they’re engaging in extortion. apparently this is so routine for them that they didn’t even stop to consider that they can’t threaten an academic’s career (or they assumed the mathematician would understand there will be no academic careers in the future)
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openai is straight up lying about their research methods. there are various ways that their announcements have had the potential to be misleading (for example when you see “we spent $2000 to compute these proofs” ask how much they spent on attempts that didn’t work). but what they’re saying may generally just not be true even in a literal sense
OpenAI:
While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk/post/3muznyls6vk2v
lmao what the fuck do you mean it’s unlikely but you can’t rule it out. do you not know what you’re training your models on? are you guys unaware of what’s going on in your own operation? does openai research not have any knowledge of what data they train their models on?
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The progression from ‘the alleged novel parts were actually already in the training data’ to ‘we just stole them from some guy’s chatbot logs’ has been nothing if not organic.
an insane amount of compute had been used.
You don’t say.
@[email protected] I suppose this is a score for you apropos our recent discussion on industrial espionage. Although I’ll note that the domain they tried to take over this time (dickwaving with math proofs) does also not have a business model, so they’re not really working themselves out of their financial death sentence.
Also hard to feel like a point for me when that atrocious Meta settlement with the attorney generals that basically locks in profits via regulatory capture just came out…
As someone from the US it feels like a nuclear missile pointed at the fediverse…
Glad to see that OpenAI has not changed in their scummy ways. Despite all that has changed in the meantime, they have kept their time-honored tradition of passing off other people’s work as their own.
One of OpenAI’s math announcements a month ago claimed that their results cost only $2000 worth of tokens, which frustrated me because they were likely sweeping away many inconvenient details and almost certainly misrepresenting their true costs. But people took this as a gotcha. This is the same bullshit as the water usage arguments. We are literally seeing city council members signing motherfucking NDAs about this, and you think that water usage numbers provided by the tech companies themselves are going to sway me?
I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public. From what I remember, the Hugging Face incident got a lot more press than any of the math results.
I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public.
They want to sell the claim that they’ve “achieved AGI”. For the general public they can sell on the vibe of “the computer talks back to you”, but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.
And the bonus advantage of an academic community of which a sizable fraction is willing to burn leaded gasoline to truck the child laborers into the sweatshop to paint asbestos with radium, if it’ll get them arXiv posts.
yeah I think the push for math results is because they know some of their big investors know enough about how hard/advanced math is and they want to impress them. Burning down an entire academic community is worth it for that
Deleting this for now as I don’t have time to rewrite it properly, but I’m sure someone else will do a better job of the plagiarism/training on private data stuff that I’ve missed.
As Talia Ringer has pointed out elsewhere, there major issues from the point of view of mathematicians is the rush to scoop another researcher’s work, which is a dick move, and pressure to drop a co-author who works for a competing AI firm.
what? that is absolutely not true. ill try to address this on my lunch break but it is way more serious than that
New (to me) lore from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline
This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses.
The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day.
lol pilgramage what. is he converting?
lol pilgramage what. is he converting?
The parts I skimmed mostly read like a travelogue so tax write-off vacations with the family in Europe, plus he has an audience of marks that will eat up fucking anything as long as it’s framed as independent research into the parts mainstream academia doesn’t want YOU to know about.
Still the cross-section between simulationists/transhumanists and mysticism enthusiasts was already huge before Yud mixed in adult Harry Potter fandom and an implicitly supernatural set of adages about human-to-computer soul transfer and living in the end of days waiting for the Artificial Godhead Intelligence to incarnate and judge humanity.
the kindergarten/elementary school / New Atheism view of religion is “believe in big sky father, ask him personally for good stuff, get good stuff”. Religions that manage to progress out of the cult stage do have something more going on, generally a system of ethics designed to help people cope with the vagaries of life (and maybe also control their thoughts so they don’t revolt).
I think this is why Buddhism (at least the Western kind) is so popular, as it relatively focussed on “how to live” rather than “what to believe”.
“Rationality” strives to be a secular Buddhism, you have rules and precepts for how to approach life and personal interactions. It’s interesting and maybe a comment on how human brains work that they seem to have invented a great sky father from first principles too.
there are some religions that put more emphasis on orthodoxy and there are religions that put more emphasis on orthopraxy. christianity would be more in the former category and buddhism, especially buddhism-as-mind-hacking-tool would be the latter. rationalists are just religious in a way that is less common in the west
tangent
the kindergarten/elementary school / New Atheism view of religion is “believe in big sky father, ask him personally for good stuff, get good stuff”.
there is some evidence that a couple of ancient polytheist religions worked this way, sort of https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
you might wonder if there’s some space for new atheist racism to happen, as religions that do more of orthopraxy are not western or ancient (therefore primitive)
Because rationalists distrust mainstream normal science and skepticism, they are far more willing to dabble in mysticism and the supernatural than normal skeptics.
Buddism us quite popular amoung the tech crowd from what I always gathered. So no shock there, that or Orthodox Christianity. (The latter being the preferred adult convert religion of alt right types. because they think it is like how space is uncorrupted by capitalism, but instead of capitalism they fear the woke).
It was only a matter of time. Enlightened centrist Brodie Robertson is now rubbing shoulders with DHH on his podcast. I guess after making nice with the likes of Andreas Kling, Vaxry and Lunduke it was only a small step to invite DHH as well.
Another oped from StudyHacks Cal Newport:
Opinion: How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now? | NYT
The time has come to push back. Once we understand the key ideas of Rationalism, we can begin to filter them out. Be very wary, for example, when A.I. leaders or online commentators begin talking in sweeping generalities about the future of the technology, such as stating with confidence that many jobs will soon be automated or that their language models will soon become sentient beings intent on escaping their creators’ control. (No, OpenAI’s autonomous agents conducting hacks doesn’t mean that A.I. is rising up against its human overlords.)
The correct reply is to promptly turn the conversation back to the possibilities, harms and viability of the products that actually exist. To extend an analogy I’ve made before, if Ford automobiles were spontaneously catching on fire, we wouldn’t tolerate the chief executive’s changing the subject to discuss our general lack of preparedness for a future with flying cars. We’d demand that the company address the acute problem happening right now.
(Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president? “We” tolerated exploding cars and people dying for years, until someone actually stepped up and forced the issue. How’s the country been treating that guy?)
It’s not surprising that so many Americans feel negatively about A.I. at the moment, but these sentiments aren’t inevitable. Our current crop of L.L.M.-powered tools are exciting — and worrisome, and promising, and frustrating, all at the same time. With proper direction, they’ll hopefully make our lives better. But they don’t have to be terrifying. We thought Silicon Valley was trying to warn us of an unavoidable danger, but maybe they were just being weird.
wonder if such a moderated, watered down position in a large publication ends up sending more eyeballs to Yudkowsky than it does to innoculate the general public, could end up a net negative.
Cal was on Better Offline recently and towards the end of the interview he was talking about a need for some sort of structured language for interacting with LLMs for purposes of code gen that could remove the ambiguity of natural language and my only thought on it was “my guy, you are describing a programming language but with extra baggage.”
structured language for interacting with LLM
that’s_not_how_any_of_this_works.webm
We had this and it is such a hassle that after decades of word a lot of old programmers are now flocking to the chatbots (I really wonder how much of the codegenai hype is due to older coder burnout).
Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president
didn’t Nader basically throw the election to Bush II?
Not compared to the supreme court, no. E: your recollection kinda proves the point imho.
I guess he’s not as bad as RFK Jr so that’s something .
