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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Rationalist debatelord org Rootclaim, who in early 2024 lost a $100K bet by failing to defend covid lab leak theory against a random ACX commenter, will now debate millionaire covid vaccine truther Steve Kirsch on whether covid vaccines killed more people than they saved, the loser gives up $1M.
One would assume this to be a slam dunk, but then again one would assume the people who founded an entire organization about establishing ground truths via rationalist debate would actually be good at rationally debating.
Debating post-truth weirdos for large sums of money may seem like a good business idea at first, until you realize how insufferable the debate format is (and how no one normal would judge such a thing).
Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. I’m not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that it’s a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume I’m making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that he’d try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboard’s refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.
Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since I’m pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.
The starcraft apm thing always amused me, people who instead of giving an order once, just keep clicking that mouse and issuing the same move order over and over again because apms. Good way to teach Goodhart’s law to Gamer Brains.
is that why tournament StarCraft fucking looks like that? it’s anxiety-inducing and my brain hates it. maybe the intense focus on APM and rote strategy is why I ended up liking turn-based strategy games a lot more
He wants to be seen as the Uber-nerd, better at nerding than everybody else, so of course he would cheat. See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake. He just is hype and bravado because a group of people who saw him stutter (*) about some half remembered/understood science fiction ideas were impressed with his genius and drive up his stocks/reputation. He now is going after the anti-woke nerds as potential marks (He has said quite a few dumb thinks about video games recently).
See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard. (E: He also is bad at dnd., a cooperative game which you basically cannot fail to play well))
*: Nothing wrong with having a stutter, that happens. It is weird people claim his stutter is not because he just stutters, but because it is a sign his brain is so great that he is having a hard time because it is thinking about so many genius level things at the same time.
See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake.
oh hell no
See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard.
so many right-wing grifters want to be associated with gaming because gamers are really easy to trick. in this case it’s particularly obvious: musk doesn’t give a fuck about the games he claims to be an expert in, but souls games are particularly nerdy and quake’s in that right nostalgia spot that most of musk’s marks know what it is but don’t know how high-level play looks
because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, musk’s doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you can’t see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym) and therefore obviously the best leader. all the associated messaging — how you need to be a genius to play at this (actually relatively low) level, how speedrunning (extremely poorly) helps you see the matrix, how game X (it’s gonna be fucking starcraft next I swear) makes you an expert in resource management — is crafted to make the susceptible associate these lazy non-wins with political leadership.
also, lol @ musk, best buddies with Tim Sweeney, forgetting that unreal tournament exists. maybe that makes two of them — Sweeney really doesn’t give a fuck about UT anymore either
I’m employing the working hypothesis that gamers are particularly easy to trick with rage-bait because of short-circuited dopamine loops. One must compulsively game, but if the game sucks, then there must be an explanation that’s as simple as the game. I’ve got a couple of buddies who are always whining about the new Call of Duty, but always pick it up every year anyway. This correlates with all the anti-woke misogyny freakouts, too… their gaming is on a spectrum with their porn consumption, and a lot of these weirdos are probably alt-tabbing back and forth as urges arise.
I was rather shocked that Epic took down UT2003/2004 from the storefronts where it still existed, on top of already failing to deliver the new-generation Unreal Tournament. Seems like a wholly thoughtless way to bury their history, but maybe there were some expiring licensing rights tied up in that? I seriously have to doubt that, though.
because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, musk’s doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you can’t see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym)
See also how he claimed Zuck was avoiding him and didn’t want to fight him because he would lose. (yeah, going to Zucks home when he is not home and offered to fight you in a real ring which you keep ignoring makes you the winner really).
Or see his twitter stats. Before the muskening of twitter, twitter kept various public (because publicly traded) stats which people could see, monthly increase in something like monthly active users which can be targeted by advertising, stuff like that. (the growth rate of which was apparently about 1-2% per month, which is quite impressive imho), but now he talks about ‘unregretted user minutes (up by 10% this year(*)), and stuff like that’. He never mentions that (according to the stats I looked into shortly before the takeover) twitter always grew in users, he makes it looks like he did something special. Like a guy buying a restaurant transformed it into a mcdonalds and then goes ‘look we sold a lot more hamburgers than last year’.
*: I mention this because I assume that people can do a bit of math in their head and can compare 1-2% monthly growth with 10% yearly, even if it isn’t the same stats.
narcissism is a fuck
this is a pithy framing, I admit, and with him as possibly a boundary-pushing narcissist with record-breaking voids inside… still
it is funny as fuck, though
on which note: I would love to see a kind of “double-blind” experience where a pile of (ideally, more clever/clueful) muskrats get to interact with felon (without knowing that they are), and then watch the fallout as they all go “wtf is this dumbass I’m speaking to”
I’m thinking something in the survivor-y format of shows
probably wouldn’t ever happen, felon’s too fucking proud (and would 10000000% rig the game to own image advantage). but in a perfect world where this happened, oh wouldn’t that just be some great television
I got bounced back to Casey Newton’s recent master class in critihype and found something new that stuck in my craw.
Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong — see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.
In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right.
First off, please note that this describes two of the most recent tech bubbles and doesn’t provide any recent counterexamples of a seemingly-ridicilous new gimmick that actually stuck around past the initial bubble. Effectively this says: yes, they’re 0 for 2 in the last 20 years, but this time they can’t all be wrong!
But more than that I think there’s an underlying error in acting like “the tech sector” is a healthy and competitive market in the first place. They may not directly coordinate or operate in absolute lockstep, but the main drivers of crypto, generative AI, metaverse, SaaS, and so much of the current enshittifying and dead-ending tech industry comes back to a relatively small circle of people who all live in the same moneyed Silicon Valley cultural and informational bubble. We can even identify the ideological underpinnings of these decisions in the TESCREAL bundle, effective altruism and accelerationism, and “dark enlightenment” tech-fascism. This is not a ruthlessly competitive market that ferrets out weakness. It’s more like a shared cult of personality that selects for whatever makes the guys in top feel good about themselves. The question isn’t “how can all these different groups be wrong without someone undercutting them”, it’s “how can these few dozen guys who share an ideology and information bubble keep making the exact same mistakes as one another” and the answer should be to question why anyone expects anything else!
In the model card for o1, OpenAI notes: “When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. … When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.”
And yet reading that should give us at least some pause
The lack of critical thinking on display here is stunning.
Brief overlapping thoughts between parenting and AI nonsense, presented without editing.
The second L in LLM remains the inescapable heart of the problem. Even if you accept that the kind of “thinking” (modeling based on input and prediction of expected next input) that AI does is closely analogous to how people think, anyone who has had a kid should be able to understand the massive volume of information they take in.
Compare the information density of English text with the available data on the world you get from sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, proprioception, and however many other senses you want to include. Then consider that language is inherently an imperfect tool used to communicate our perceptions of reality, and doesn’t actually include data on reality itself. The human child is getting a fire hose of unfiltered reality, while the in-training LLM is getting a trickle of what the writers and labellers of their training data perceive and write about. But before we get just feeding a live camera and audio feed, haptic sensors, chemical tests, and whatever else into a machine learning model and seeing if it spits out a person, consider how ambiguous and impractical labelling all that data would be. At the very least I imagine the costs of doing so are actually going to work out to be less efficient than raising an actual human being and training them in the desired tasks.
Human children are also not immune to “hallucinations” in the form of spurious correlations. I would wager every toddler has at least a couple of attempts at cargo cult behavior or inexplicable fears as they try to reason a way to interact with the world based off of very little actual information about it. This feeds into both versions of the above problem, since the difference between reality and lies about reality cannot be meaningfully discerned from text alone and the limited amount of information being processed means any correction is inevitably going to be slower than explaining to a child that finding a “Happy Birthday” sticker doesn’t immediately make it their (or anyone else’s) birthday.
Human children are able to get human parents to put up with their nonsense ny taking advantage of being unbearably sweet and adorable. Maybe the abundance of horny chatbots and softcore porn generators is a warped fun house mirror version of the same concept. I will allow you to fill in the joke about Silicon Valley libertarians yourself.
IDK. Felt thoughtful, might try to organize it on morewrite later.
the looting of the commons continues apace
I’m not too surprised by this happening (and I see the specter of the same thing approaching with salt (bought by vmware bought by broadcom…)), but god am I tired of how fucking effective the method is
