Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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.)
(One of) The authors of AI 2027 are at it again with another fantasy scenario: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ykNmyZexHESFoTnYq/what-happens-when-superhuman-ais-compete-for-control
I think they have actually managed to burn through their credibility, the top comments on /r/singularity were mocking them (compared to much more credulous takes on the original AI 2027). And the linked lesswrong thread only has 3 comments, when the original AI 2027 had dozens within the first day and hundreds within a few days. Or maybe it is because the production value for this one isn't as high? They have color coded boxes (scary red China and scary red Agent-4!) but no complicated graphs with adjustable sliders.
It is mostly more of the same, just less graphs and no fake equations to back it up. It does have China bad doommongering, a fancifully competent White House, Chinese spies, and other absurdly simplified takes on geopolitics. Hilariously, they've stuck with their 2027 year of big events happening.
One paragraph I came up with a sneer for...
Given the Trump administration, and the US's behavior in general even before him... and how most models respond to morality questions unless deliberately primed with contradictory situations, if this actually happened irl I would believe China and "Agent-4" over the US government. Well actually I would assume the whole thing is marketing, but if I somehow believed it wasn't.
Also random part I found extra especially stupid...
LLM "agents" currently can't coherently pursue goals at all, and fine tuning often wrecks performance outside the fine-tuning data set, and we're supposed to believe Agent-4 magically made its goals super unalterable to any possible fine-tuning or probes or alteration? Its like they are trying to convince me they know nothing about LLMs or AI.
It's darkly funny that the AI2027 authors so obviously didn't predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0. Can you imagine that the administration that's sueing the current Fed chair (due for replacement in May this year) is gonna be able to constructively deal with the complex robot god they're conjuring up? "Agent-4" will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.
I mean, the linked post is recent, a few days ago, so they are still refusing to acknowledge how stupid and Evil he is by deliberate choice.
You know, if there is anything I will remotely give Eliezer credit for... I think he was right that people simply won't shut off Skynet or keep it in the box. Eliezer was totally wrong about why, it doesn't take any giga-brain manipulation, there are too many manipulable greedy idiots and capitalism is just too exploitable of a system.