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blakestacey

@ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts
7
Comments
576
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th August 2025

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  • In non-tsunami news tonight:

    Starting August 13th, YouTube will detect underage users in the US based on their activity and the age of their account, allowing the platform to automatically apply restrictions.

    Welp, I guess I have two weeks to download all the YouTube videos I will ever want to watch again.

    (pauses, thinks)

    The once-lost Evangelion AIDS PSA it is, then

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th August 2025

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  • All the cited URLS in the footnotes end with “utm_source=chatgpt.com”.

    I just do not understand these people. There is something dead inside them, something necrotic.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th August 2025

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  • DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, BECOME ADDICTED TO TOKENS

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th August 2025

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  • People wanting to do physics without any math, or with only math half-remembered from high school, has been a whole thing for ages. See item 15 on the Crackpot Index, for example. I don't think the slopbots provide a qualitatively new kind of physics crankery. I think they supercharge what already existed. Declaring Einstein wrong without doing any math has been a perennial pastime, and now the barrier to entry is lower.

    When Devereaux writes,

    without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt [...] But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there are but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible.

    I think he misses an angle. Yes, physics is armored with jargon and equations and tables of symbols. But for a certain audience, these themselves provoke contempt. They prefer an "explanation" which uses none of that. They see equations as fancy, highfalutin, somehow morally degenerate.

    That long review of HMPoR identified a Type of Guy who would later be very into slopbot physics:

    I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • I found this because Greg Egan shared it elsewhere on fedi:

    I am now being required by my day job to use an AI assistant to write code. I have also been informed that my usage of AI assistants will be monitored and decisions about my career will be based on those metrics.

    It gets worse from there.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • It's "general intelligence", the eugenicist wet dream of a supposedly quantitative measure of how the better class of humans do brain good.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • From Yud's remarks on Xitter:

    As much as people might like to joke about how little skill it takes to found a $2B investment fund, it isn't actually true that you can just saunter in as a psychotic IQ 80 person and do that.

    Well, not with that attitude.

    You must be skilled at persuasion, at wearing masks, at fitting in, at knowing what is expected of you;

    If "wearing masks" really is a skill they need, then they are all susceptible to going insane and hiding it from their coworkers. Really makes you think (TM).

    you must outperform other people also trying to do that, who'd like that $2B for themselves. Winning that competition requires g-factor and conscientious effort over a period.

    zoom and enhance

    g-factor

    <Kill Bill sirens.gif>

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • Yud continues to bluecheck:

    "This is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat," mused Yudkowsky. "Yes yes, I'm sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager," he continued. "It is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them."

    Is this "narrative" in the room with us right now?

    It's reassuring to know that times change, but Yud will always be impressed by the virtues of the rich.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

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  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

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  • https://xcancel.com/jasonlk/status/1946069562723897802

    Vibe Coding Day 8,

    I'm not even out of bed yet and I'm already planning my day on @Replit.

    Today is AI Day, to really add AI to our algo.

    [...]

    If @Replit deleted my database between my last session and now there will be hell to pay

  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

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  • Evan Urquhart:

    I had to attend a presentation from one of these guys, trying to tell a room full of journalists that LLMs could replace us & we needed to adapt by using it and I couldn't stop thinking that an LLM could never be a trans journalist, but it could probably replace the guy giving the presentation.

  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

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  • After understanding a lot of things it’s clear that it didn’t. And it fooled me for two weeks.

    I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.

    qu1j0t3 replies:

    that's, uh, not really the ideal takeaway from this lesson

  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

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  • We—yes, even you—are using some version of AI, or some tools that have LLMs or machine learning in them in some way shape or form already

    Fucking ghastly equivocation. Not just between "LLMs" and "machine learning", but between opening a website that has a chatbot icon I never click and actually wasting my time asking questions to the slop machine.

  • Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

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  • I like how quoting Grimes lyrics makes the banality of these people thuddingly clear.