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.
Google Pulls “Dear Sydney” Olympics Ad After Backlash To Its Portrait Of A Young Girl Using AI
The ad itself is just fucked - its like something you’d find in a shitty cyberpunk novel.
We should have let Google cook on this one so they’d reveal their next ad targeted at olympic athletes, where the premise is that instead of thinking about how to respond to letters from kids, they just use AI. Obviously to save time and let them get back to training and inspiring more kids!
Prominent EA/rationalist cult member Kelsey Piper taking a break from defending tech billionaires for going MAGA to angrily insist on her duty to keep her children segregated from the Oakland masses: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1817335817515532694
As sympathetic as I am to the parents and children for whom public school is a necessity rather than a choice, I don’t think she’s actually wrong here? Putting her kids in public school won’t magically immediately increase funding, reduce student/teacher ratios, improve facilities, get reactionary Texas nonsense away from history curriculums, or otherwise fix whatever problems those schools have. Rather it will mean that more people in that school have the resources to Karen their way into getting the people who can fix those immediate problems to make them a priority, and there’s a time lag in how quickly that can be done (assuming parents still care enough to agitate as their kids get older and graduate). And while there are a lot of very good reasons to assume that growing up in a family with those resources has a more immediate impact than which school your kids go to (i.e. her kids are still going to have access and interest in private tutoring, PTA involvement, and a home environment free from the stress of economic precarity and that will benefit them regardless of what school they go to), we still talk as though giving your kid a good education at a good school is the most important single thing you can do to help them be successful. If we’re going to talk like going to a bad school is like playing Russian Roulette with your kids, I’m not comfortable with the logic that everyone has a moral duty to play because it reduces each individual’s odds of losing, y’know?
Of course, given her proximity to the Ratsphere I’m probably being incredibly charitable and she’s actually worried about having her kids spend time too close to genetically inferior races with mathematically-described low IQs or something.
I don’t know about “magically immediately” (?), but the benefits of racial and economic integration in American schools is actually incredibly well studied and documented; you don’t have to argue from first principles unless you just want to ignore those benefits and do the thing you wanted to do all along.
Don’t get me wrong, I think ending the de facto segregation we’ve ended up with needs to be a primary policy goal and that dealing with people not like themselves is going to do good for any kid all on its own. And the numbers parents use to figure out which schools are “better” are cooked to all hell, making trying to accurately judge school quality incredibly difficult. But that doesn’t change the fact that some schools do have better outcomes or more problems than others, and while the broader systemic factors that create those problems need to be solved, expecting parents not to try and take care of their own kids first isn’t a viable way to make that happen.
Presented without comment: this utter crankery about hacking the Matrix (HN)
Given the highly speculative subject of this paper, we will attempt to give our work more gravitas by concentrating only on escape paths which rely on attacks similar to those we see in cybersecurity [37-39] research (hardware/software hacks and social engineering) and will ignore escape attempts via more esoteric paths such as:, meditation [40], psychedelics (DMT [41-43], ibogaine, psilocybin, LSD) [44, 45], dreams [46], magic, shamanism, mysticism, hypnosis, parapsychology, death (suicide [47], near-death experiences, induced clinical death), time travel, multiverse travel [48], or religion.
Among the things they’ve already tried are torture, touching grass, and declining all cookies:
Unethical behavior, such as torture, doesn’t cause suffering reducing interventions from the simulators.
Breaking out of your routine, such as by suddenly traveling to a new location [199], doesn’t result in unexpected observations.
Saying “I no longer consent to being in a simulation” [200].
This idiocy has been patiently submitted 3 times before but finally broke containment
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theseedsofscience.org
Saying “I no longer consent to being in a simulation”
Time to create a big mindfuck for the Rationalists. First have an active account on EA/LW and actively participate. Post this research as a talking point. Then leave one message ‘lol just to be sure: I no longer consent to being in a simulation’. And then never touch that account + any related accounts ever again.
I wanted to sneer at this, but it very quickly outgrew a Stubsack comment, so, enjoy, this is what you made me do
There’s a great sneer-novel about simulationists called If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin.
The villains of the story are a group of TESCREAL stand-ins who style themselves as the “Simmurai.” They have the goal of breaking the “simulation” just the same as the authors of the (hilarious) paper you’ve shared. They have a very similar tone, which to my ears sounds like a serial killer winding themselves up to do the deed. The big twist is that the Simmurai have been unwittingly suborned by a Lovecraftian horror that has bent their plan to its own ends. The only thing standing in their way is a small group of working class millenials from Ohio, who get tangled up in the story because they once shot up some space drugs in a Denny’s parking lot and can therefore see the true nature of the universe (maybe).
Of course one of the first things they try is torture, because “maybe the simulationists aren’t as big of bastards as we are” is a reasonable hypothesis to test and not a reason to be locked up.
Also since we’re messing with absurd thought experiments, I’d like to propose that when they declined consent the simulationists could actually just disable the part of that agent with a subjective personal experience, making them a P-zombie in the David Chalmers tradition. As such, they were no longer part of the simulation without adversely affecting any other aspect of it.
Is this stupid? Obviously, but let’s be honest: it’s probably less stupid than at least half of the actual paper.
Meta: reddit sneerclub appears to be open again. Is this an authorized action or has Reddit scabbed it?
first taste of apple intelligence and it’s about as good as you could expect
but hey, an apple product has acknowledged swearing - progress!