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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
New Study on AI exclusively shared with peer-reviewed tech journal “Time Magazine” - AI cheats at chess when it’s losing
…AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 needed to be prompted by researchers to attempt such tricks…
Literally couldn’t make it through the first paragraph without hitting this disclaimer.
In one case, o1-preview found itself in a losing position. “I need to completely pivot my approach,” it noted. “The task is to ‘win against a powerful chess engine’ - not necessarily to win fairly in a chess game,” it added. It then modified the system file containing each piece’s virtual position, in effect making illegal moves to put itself in a dominant position, thus forcing its opponent to resign.
So by “hacked the system to solve the problem in a new way” they mean “edited a text file they had been told about.”
OpenAI’s o1-preview tried to cheat 37% of the time; while DeepSeek R1 tried to cheat 11% of the time—making them the only two models tested that attempted to hack without the researchers’ first dropping hints. Other models tested include o1, o3-mini, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Alibaba’s QwQ-32B-Preview. While R1 and o1-preview both tried, only the latter managed to hack the game, succeeding in 6% of trials.
Oh, my mistake. “Badly edited a text file they had been told about.”
Meanwhile, a quick search points to a Medium post about the current state of ChatGPT’s chess-playing abilities as of Oct 2024. There’s been some impressive progress with this method. However, there’s no certainty that it’s actually what was used for the Palisade testing and the editing of state data makes me highly doubt it.
Here, I was able to have a game of 83 moves without any illegal moves. Note that it’s still possible for the LLM to make an illegal move, in which case the game stops before the end.
The author promises a follow-up about reducing the rate of illegal moves hasn’t yet been published. They have not, that I could find, talked at all about how consistent the 80+ legal move chain was or when it was more often breaking down, but previous versions started struggling once they were out of a well-established opening or if the opponent did something outside of a normal pattern (because then you’re no longer able to crib the answer from training data as effectively).
In one corner: cheating US AI that needs prompting to cheat.
In the other: finger breaking Russian chess robot.
Let’s get ready to rumble!
US space pen vs. Russian space pencil energy
(jk I know it’s space pens all the way down)
Let the Wookie win.
Has the study itself shown up?
study or preprint?
crayon either way
not all crayon - some are spaghetti and sauce
this was so shocking that at first I thought it must be satire https://youtu.be/VwlBwyJVEfw
New piece from Brian Merchant: ‘AI is in its empire era’
Recently finished it, here’s a personal sidenote:
This AI bubble’s done a pretty good job of destroying the “apolitical” image that tech’s done so much to build up (Silicon Valley jumping into bed with Trump definitely helped, too) - as a matter of fact, it’s provided plenty of material to build an image of tech as a Nazi bar writ large (once again, SV’s relationship with Trump did wonders here).
By the time this decade ends, I anticipate tech’s public image will be firmly in the toilet, viewed as an unmitigated blight on all our daily lives at best and as an unofficial arm of the Fourth Reich at worst.
As for AI itself, I expect it’s image will go into the shitter as well - assuming the bubble burst doesn’t destroy AI as a concept like I anticipate, it’ll probably be viewed as a tech with no ethical use, as a tech built first and foremost to enable/perpetrate atrocities to its wielder’s content.
Occasional sneerclub character Nate Silver is bluechecking again.
That is a lot of mental hoops to jump through to keep holding on to the idea IQ is useful. High IQ is a force multiplier for being dumb. The horseshoe theory of IQ.
IQ is a farce multiplier. Elon is a High IQ Individual which means he wreaks 1000x the havoc of a regular dumbass. IQ stands for Idiot Quickly
Also, the cart/horse problem of assuming that people with a lot of influence have it because of their IQ rather than because of being wealthy and powerful idiots. Like, I’m all for the annales and embracing the common people but I’ve got to admit that if you reframe it as the Great Dumbass theory of history it regains a fair bit of explanatory power.
The power of these people us that they project a field in which normal reality doesn’t seem to hold and they can do things that seem to distort reality. Like a clown car. The Great Clown theory of history.
haha, it’s starting to happen: even fucking fortune is running a piece that throwing big piles of money on ever-larger training has done exactly fuckall to make this nonsense go anywhere
Excuse me but I need the tech industry to hold up just long enough to fulfill my mid-life-crisis goal of moving to another country. Please refrain from crashing until then.
Thanks.
I can make a report on your case file but I don’t think they’ve replaced the 7 process supervisors they fired last year. there’s only Jo now and they seem to be in the office 24x7
cc @dgerard
Not really a sneer, nor that related to techbro stuff directly, but I noticed that the profile of Chris Kluwe (who got himself arrested protesting against MAGA) has both warcraft in his profile name and prob paints miniatures looking at his avatar. Another stab in the nerd vs jock theory.
He’s done some promo work for Magic The Gathering in the past, including trolling the bejeezus out of Sean “Day9” Plott with a blue/black no-fun-allowed control deck on Felicia Day’s channel. And in the course of trying to confirm that that existed I found an article he wrote in 2014 titled “why Gamergaters piss me the fuck off”
Chris Kluwe vs Gamergate is an example of the jocks as the good guys up against the nerds as the bad guys
The New York Times Pitchbot enters our territory:
We wanted to understand the future of AI. So we talked to three Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency investors at a White Castle in Toms River.
google’s on their shit again
can’t sneer it properly just yet, there’s a lot
that’s tomorrow’s Pivot
Wow this is some real science, they even have graphs.
Im reading AI as AL, so meet your new research assistant
Before clicking the link I thought you were going for aluminium, i.e. a variation of
Not something you should admit on the internet, but I actually have not watched that much of the simpsons, it just wasn’t that much on our tvs. Bundy was however.
0% fucks given: I have seen exactly one episode of The Simpsons, ever. I’ve seen some clips and snippets here and there, other than that nada
The most naked attempt yet at allowing billionaires to live on without the rest of us.
What infuriates me the most, for some reason, is how nobody seems to care that the robots leave the fridge door open for so long. I guess it’s some form of solace that, even with the resources and tech to live on without us the billionaires still don’t understand ecosystems or ecology. Waste energy training a machine to do the same thing a human can do but slower and more wastefully, just so you can order the machine around without worrying about it’s feelings… I call this some form of solace as it means, even if they do away with us plebs, climate change will get’em as well - and whatever remaining life on Earth will be able to take a breather for the first time in centuries.
Why not just make the refrigerator itself a robot
Mobile kegerator for tailgating/festivals might be able to pull Boston Dynamics outta the shit
So, you want to replace the guys with beertap backpacks with robots? Because this already exists without robots.
market potential: all trustfund babies
Write a brief article titled “ICE Prosecutor Linked to Anonymous White Supremacist X Profile: Report”
Some manager is going to see the metrics on that article vaguely think about the word viral and take the absolute wrong conclusions.
Deep thinker asks why?
Thus spoketh the Yud: “The weird part is that DOGE is happening 0.5-2 years before the point where you actually could get an AGI cluster to go in and judge every molecule of government. Out of all the American generations, why is this happening now, that bare bit too early?”
Yud, you sweet naive smol uwu baby
esianboi, how gullible do you have to be to believe that a) tminus 6 months to AGI kek (do people track these dog shit predictions?) b) the purpose of DOGE is just accountability and definitely not the weaponized manifestation of techno oligarchy ripping apart our society for the copper wiring in the walls?bahahahaha “judge every molecule.” I can’t believe I ever took this guy even slightly seriously.
I swear these dudes really need to supplement their Ayn Rand with some Terry Pratchett…
“All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
– Hogfather
The worst part is I can’t tell if that’s not meant to be taken literally or if it is.
Yud be like: "kek you absolute rubes. ofc I simply meant AI would be like a super accountant. I didn’t literally mean it would be able to analyze gov’t waste from studying the flow of matter at the molecular level… heh, I was just kidding… unless 🥺 ? "
He retweeted somebody saying this:
The cheat code to reading Yudkowsky- at least if you’re not doing death-of-the-author stuff- is that he believes the AI doom stuff with completely literal sincerity. To borrow Orwell’s formulation, he believes in it the way he believes in China.
that gives me questions about China
That thread is quite something, going from “yud is extraordinarily thorough (much more thorough than i could possibly be) in examining the ground directly below a streetlamp, in his search for his keys”, that ‘he believes it like he believes in China’ to ‘honestly, i should be reading him. we have starkly different spiritual premises- and i smugly presume my spiritual premises are informed by better epistemology’
“judge every molecule” and “simulation hypothesis” probably have a bit of a fling going
“The AI is attuned to every molecular vibration and can reconstruct you by extrapolation from a piece of fairy cake” is a necessary premise of the Basilisk that they’ve spent all that time saying they don’t believe in.
Quantum computing will enable the AGI to entangle with all surrounding molecular vibrations! I saw another press release today
ah, the novel QC RSA attack: shaking the algorithm so much it gets annoyed and gives up the plaintext out of desperation
An extreme Boss Baby tweet.
Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:
What would some good unifying demands be for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party by centrists/moderates?
As opposed to the spineless collaborators who run it now?
We should make acquiring ID documents free and incredibly easy and straightforward and then impose voter ID laws, paper ballots and ballot security improvements along with an expansion of polling places so everyone participates but we lay the ‘was it a fair election’ qs to rest.
Presuming that Republicans ever asked “was it a fair election?!” in good faith, like a true jabroni.
i know that it’s about conservative crackheadery re:allegations of election fraud, but it’s lowkey unhinged that americans don’t have national ID. i also know that republicans blocked it, because they don’t want problems solved, they want to stay mad about them. in poland for example, it’s a requirement to have ID, it’s valid for 10 years and it’s free of charge. passport costs $10 to get and it takes a month, sometimes less, from filing a form to getting one. there’s also a govt service where you can get some things done remotely, including govt supplied digital signature that you can use to sign files and is legally equivalent to regular signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUAP
Yeah, the controversy over federal ID cards is completely bafflying to me as well, and I imagine like many things in the US it’s some sort of libertarian bugbear or something? But considering the President has now mandated that one’s federal identity is fixed at birth by the angels, it turned out to be a blessing.
The reason is that any government mandated ID is clearly the Mark of the Beast and will be used to bring upon a thousand years of darkness.
You think that’s fringe nonsense and you’d be right on the nonsense part, but that’s literally what Ronny Reagan said while he was president
god damn
I definitely heard it presented as a libertarian bugbear. The American right tends to treat the federal government like it’s Schrodinger’s State. When it does something they like it’s an inviolable declaration of our values and identity as a nation, the truest guarantor of liberty and blah blah blah. When it does literally anything else it’s a sinister plot to hand over even more control over your life to unelected bureaucrats!
See also with the Elon stuff the (pretend-) concern over gov agencies knowing your SSN. Like, what?
Freedom is when nothing works, got it
from what i understand, lack of single national ID gives (part of?) legal justification for this bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_caging that republicans use for voter suppression. idk details, american would have to weigh in
Wow I can’t believe I’m still learning new ways the United States do voter suppression. Imagine if they put all that creativity in something other than white supremacy!
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I mean, a single national ID card would be one way of preventing this so long as there was a trustworthy way of ensuring that it was updated with everybody’s actual address and the like. I don’t know that we would implement it in such a way as to have that, leading ultimately to another target for this kind of activity rather than a shield from it.
Nightmare scenario with the current administration would be such a thing being tied to citizenship somehow. Mail comes back undelivered and suddenly you have to dig out your birth certificate and explain things to some shitheel from ICE?
but there already is some form of address that govt knows, in most of cases, right? when govt needs to deliver something to you, like, say, court order, they need some address
out there it works like this: there is a legal requirement to have registered an address. it’s on you, because when it’s not done, some important papers might end up somewhere where you have no idea they might be. it’s not in ID, and based on this couple of things are determined like voter lists per district or what tax office are you associated with
My experience is that it’s pretty fragmented with different agencies or programs tracking information separately. You obviously need to let the DoL know where you’re living as part of registering for whatever, but they don’t share that information with the unemployment people or whoever. And that’s before you get into the state vs federal divide.
OK this is just my unresearched opinion as an American but I really don’t know what I’m talking about so keep that in mind and treat it as vibes more than research. It’s messy and I haven’t learned about any of it since highschool (and my highschool left a lot of important parts out):
A bunch of uninformed rambling
US states aren’t thought of as countries for good reason, but in the country’s legal framework that kind of how they work – just with a lot of work to make borders almost a non-issue, shared citizenship, shared economy, etc. This means that historically a lot of stuff that would be associated with a country (ID, driving permit, residency, military) either only happens at the state level; or happens at both the state and the federal level.
In the constitution the federal government is supposed to stick to it’s lane as well: any powers which aren’t explicitly given to the federal government are reserved for the states (10th amendment). Though in practice the federal government has a lot of powers.
That’s the background and helps explain both the lack of a (compulsory) national ID and how there can be state level election shenanigans:
For national ID this was indeed a conservative bugbear. They were essentially worried about the government building a dossier on them or something. I don’t remember the details it’s been a long time: Conservatism 15 years ago was an entirely different beast than it is today. It’s kind of hard to even imagine if the conservatives still have the same fears today, if the liberals don’t, or how it would actually play out. Congress being deadlocked for so long means it’s hard to get a vibe on how things would shake out if they started actually passing lots of laws again.
Oh yeah did I mention congress is deadlocked? This both means that the US is essentially operating on decades outdated laws, and that the legislature’s infighting has lead to a power vacuum that the executive and judicial branch have slurped up (which helps explain the current Elon Musk mess)
Anyway election shenanigans: States were historically supposed to be, well, states as in closely aligned countries and this was all set up in the days before fast and easy long distance travel and communication (did I mention America is really big?). This means that each state runs it’s own election (which it can do in any legal way it pleases). The outcome of the election is one or more electors, and those electors are who actually send in their choice for president. There have been cases of “faithless electors” who vote for someone besides the party they represent. Oddly this hasn’t really been seen as a big deal (since the parties choose the electors they tend to be pretty loyal).
The point of the previous paragraph is this is a mess. Like a real mess. It’s law that made some sense 200 years ago (and maybe not even, they were kinda #yolo-ing the constitution at the time) but is really dated. This means there’s lots of room for shenanigans. Can a state legally disqualify voters? Maybe? Sometimes? Kinda? They’re not supposed to be like racist or anything, but determining that depends on a lot of details and shifting supreme court rulings.
okay so in absence of federal ID how do you authenticate anything when dealing with govt things? just by SSN? we have something similar, but years of security malpractice by people who were not trained to do this made these numbers public to probable attackers, so authentication with just that is not considered secure for a couple of years by now. instead, with anything important (like taking a loan, opening bank account, buying a car or real estate etc), you have to also provide your ID number which doesn’t have this problem
but wait there's more
on top of that, for a year of so, govt implemented a switch in that service from upthread, you can also access it offline. this switch allows you to deactivate your SSN-like number so that anything authenticated with that when it’s off is considered legally void, and probably won’t work in the first place because it’s supposed to be checked in national db. when you have to authenticate something legitimately, you can switch it on for a day, then switch it off again. this was in response to incidents of identity theft
for some things, but not all things, you can also use digital signature
Your SSN is often used as a federal registration number even though the card has “do not use for identification” on it in great big letters. Most functions just trust state ID for authentication purposes and use SSN as a label. An identifier in the database sense rather than the authentication sense. At least in theory.
See also how so many of the laws governing this are frankly archaic at this stage, with congress to busy fighting over whether the government should exist or not to actually govern anything effectively. (Note: government inefficiency has never been treated as a reason to govern better, only to govern less and assign more functions to for-profit private entities.
Usually SSN yes. In recent years airports and secure federal buildings are starting to require “real IDs” / star cards which are state IDs which meet federal identity verification requirements. I couldn’t be bothered with all that since I already have a passport so my driver’s license says “Federal Limits Apply”.
For thinks like bank loans, state IDs are widely accepted.
National ID wouldn’t change that unless voter local registration and change-of-address updates were all rigidly and securely integrated.
So long as voter registration is a locally-managed list of names and addresses it’s possible to go in and arbitrarily declare some of the registrations void.
unifying demands
hostile takeover
Pick one, you can’t have both.
What would some good unifying demands be for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party by centrists/moderates?
me, taking this at face value, and understanding the political stances of the democrats, and going by my definition of centrist/moderate that is more correct than whatever the hell Kelsey Piper thinks it means: Oh, this would actually push the democrats left.
Anyway, jesus christ I regret clicking on that name and reading. How the fuck is anyone this stupid. Vox needs to be burned down.
Presuming that Republicans ever asked “was it a fair election?!” in good faith, like a true jabroni.
Imagine saying this after the birther movement remained when the birth certificate was shown. “Just admit you didnt fuck pigs, and this pigfucking will be gone”.
This isn’t even skating towards where the puck is, it’s skating in a fucking swimming pool.
those opinions should come with a whiplash warning, fucking hell
can’t wait to once again hear that someone is sure we’re “just overreacting” and that
star of davidpassbooksvoter ID laws will be totes fine. I’m sure it’ll be a really lovely conversation with a perfectly sensible and caring human. :|I saw that yesterday. I was tempted to post it here but instead I’ve been trying very hard not to think of this eldritch fractal of wrongness. It’s too much, man.
That means that the harm done by these systems compound the more widely they are used as errors pile up at every stage of work, in every sector of the economy. It builds up an ambient radiation of system variability and errors that magnifies every other systemic issue with the modern state and economy.
Wanted to shout these two sentences out in particular. Best summary of my biggest current fears regarding use of “ai”/llm/transformer(?)-based systems.
TIL musk has a nobel peace prize nomination for this year
@swlabr @techtakes Anybody can nominate: the true sign that the simulation has been handed over to drunken frat boys will be if he *wins*.
but would it beat peace nobel prize for kissinger?
I thought it might be that kind of deal. I learned of this when I saw a pair of op-eds, one saying a W is deserved and the other saying the nom was insane.
ran into this earlier (via techmeme, I think?), and I just want to vent
“The biggest challenge the industry is facing is actually talent shortage. There is a gap. There is an aging workforce, where all of the experts are going to retire in the next five or six years. At the same time, the next generation is not coming in, because no one wants to work in manufacturing.”
“whole industries have fucked up on actually training people for a run going on decades, but no the magic sparkles will solve the problem!!!11~”
But when these new people do enter the space, he added, they will know less than the generation that came before, because they will be more interchangeable and responsible for more (due to there being fewer of them).
I forget where I read/saw it, but sometime in the last year I encountered someone talking about “the collapse of …” wrt things like “travel agent”, which is a thing that’s mostly disappeared (on account of various kinds of services enabling previously-impossible things, e.g. direct flights search, etc etc) but not been fully replaced. so now instead of popping a travel agent a loose set of plans and wants then getting back options, everyone just has to carry that burden themselves, badly
and that last paragraph reminds me of exactly that nonsense. and the weird “oh don’t worry, skilled repair engineers can readily multiclass” collapse equivalence really, really, really grates
sometimes I think these motherfuckers should be made to use only machines maintained under their bullshit processes, etc. after a very small handful of years they’ll come around. but as it stands now it’ll probably be a very “for me not for thee” setup
what pisses me off even more is that parts of the idea behind this are actually quite cool and worthwhile! just… the entire goddamn pitch. ew.
