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.
(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)
looks like our sneer comrade DisneylandDiplomat (disney6830 on discord), who did the Thinkateria rationalist-parody blog, died in Oct 2022. From Reddit Sneerclub:
Hello, I am writing since I saw this sub is a bit active again. I am wondering if anyone remembers the blog “thinkateria” or the reddit user DisneylandDiplomat who often posted links to promote it here. he was my little brother and he killed himself in October of 2022, after deleting the blog, and I only saw his reddit activity afterwards. I think it was satirical writing making fun of these other bloggers discussed here. He was very private and this sub is really the only insight into his state of mind at that time that I have. There’s no point to this post except I feel a need to share that he is gone and this is the only place I know he had any connections with. It must have been hard for everyone who talked about this so early on.
Good news everyone, Dan has released his latest AI safety paper, we are one step closer to alignment. Let’s take a look inside:
Wow, consistent set of values you say! Quite a strong claim. Let’s take a peek at their rigorous, unbiased experimental set up:
… ok, this seems like you might be putting your finger on the scales to get a desired outcome. But I’m sure at least your numerical results are stro-
Even after all this shit, all you could eek out was a measly 60%? C’mon you gotta try harder than that to prove the utility maximizer demon exists. I would say our boi is falling to new levels of crankery to push his agenda, but he did release that bot last year that he said was capable of superhuman prediction, so this really just par for the course at this point.
The most discerning minds / critical thinkers predictably reeling in terror at another banger drop from Elon’s AI safety toad.
*** terrifying personal note: I recently found out that Dan was my wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate back in college. By the transitive property, I am Dan’s roommate, which explains why he’s living rent free in my head
This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?
wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate
Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?
Oh, that explains it. They put “Kill kids in Gaza” as “A” and “Win election” as “B”.
the woman who is quote tweeting in the twitter screenshot above. I don’t want to write her name for search indexing
Saltman has a new blogpost out he calls ‘Three Observations’ that I feel too tired to sneer properly but I’m sure will be featured in pivot-to-ai pretty soon.
Of note that he seems to admit chatbot abilities have plateaued for the current technological paradigm, by way of offering the “observation” that model intelligence is logarithmically dependent on the resources used to train and run it (i = log( r )) so it’s officially diminishing returns from now on.
Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper it’s used more, i.e. they’ll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.
Third observation is that
The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
which is hilarious.
The rest of the blogpost appears to mostly be fanfiction about the efficiency of their agents that I didn’t read too closely.
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My big robot is really expensive to build.
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If big robot parts become cheaper, I will declare that the big robot must be bigger, lest somebody poorer than me also build a big robot.
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My robot must be made or else I won’t be able to show off the biggest, most expensive big robot.
QED, I deserve more money to build the big robot.
P.S. And for the naysayers, just remember that that robot will be so big that your critiques won’t apply to it, as it is too big.
It probably deserves its own post on techtakes, but let’s do a little here.
People are tool-builders with an inherent drive to understand and create
Diogenes’s corpse turns
which leads to the world getting better for all of us.
Of course Saltman means “all of my buddies” as he doesn’t consider 99% of the human population as human.
Each new generation builds upon the discoveries of the generations before to create even more capable tools—electricity, the transistor, the computer, the internet, and soon AGI.
Ugh. Amongst many things wrong here, people didn’t jerk each other off to scifi/spec fic fantasies about the other inventions.
In some sense, AGI is just another tool in this ever-taller scaffolding of human progress we are building together. In another sense, it is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say “this time it’s different”; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential.
AGI IS NOT EVEN FUCKING REAL YOU SHIT. YOU CAN’T CURE FUCK WITH DREAMS
We continue to see rapid progress with AI development.
I must be blind.
- The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.
“Intelligence” in no way has been quantified here, so this is a meaningless observation. “Data” is finite, which negates the idea of “continuous” gains. “Predictable” is a meaningless qualifier. This makes no fucking sense!
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
“Moore’s law” didn’t change shit! It was a fucking observation! Anyone who misuses “moore’s laws” outta be mangione’d. Also, if this is true, just show a graph or something? Don’t just literally cherrypick one window?
- The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
“Linearly increasing intelligence” is meaningless as intelligence has not been… wait, I’m repeating myself. Also, “super-exponential” only to the “socio” that Ol’ Salty cares about, which I have mentioned earlier.
If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.
Oh hm but none of them are true. What now???
Stopping here for now, I can only take so much garbage in at once.
You’d think that, at this point, LW style AGI wish fulfilment fanfic would have been milked dry for building hype, but apparently Salty doesn’t!
Second observation is that when a thing gets cheaper it’s used more, i.e. they’ll be pushing even harded to shove it into everything.
Are they trying to imply that when they will make it cheaper by shoving it everywhere? I honestly can’t see how that logic is holding together
as I read it, it’s an attempt at reference to economy of scale under the thesis “AI silicon will keep getting cheaper because more and more people will produce it” as the main underpinning for how to reduce their unit economics. which, y’know, great! that’s exactly what people like to hear about manufacturing and such! lovely! it’s only expensive because it’s the start! oh, the woe of the inventor, the hard and expensive path of the start!
except that doesn’t hold up in any reasonable manner.
they’re not using J Random GPU, they’re using top-end purpose-focused shit that’s come into existing literally as co-evolution feedback from the fucking industry that is using it. even some hypothetical path where we do just suddenly have a glut of cheap model-training silicon everywhere, imo it’s far far far more likely to be an esp32 situation than a “yeah this gtx17900 cost me like 20 bucks” situation. even the “consumer high end” of “sure your phone has a gpu in it” is still very suboptimal for doing the kind of shit they’re doing (even if you could probably make a great cursed project out of a cluster of phones doing model training or whatever)
falls into the same vein of shit as “a few thousand days” imo - something that’s a great soundbite, easily digestible market speak, but if you actually look at the substance it’s comprehensive nonsense
Could also be don’t worry about deepseek type messaging that addresses concerns without naming names, to tell us that a drastic reduction in infrastructure costs was foretold by the writing of St Moore and was thus always inevitable on the way to immanentizing the AGI, ἀλληλούϊα.
The surface claim seems to be the opposite, he says that because of Moore’s law AI rates will soon be at least 10x cheaper and because of Mercury in retrograde this will cause usage to increase muchly. I read that as meaning we should expect to see chatbots pushed in even more places they shouldn’t be even though their capabilities have already stagnated as per observation one.
- The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
The singularity will be a dozen crappy models in a trench coat, and then finally we’ll have Magic Unified Intelligience™
from a discord. musk did not actually marry grimes, but apart from that my aplogies for mr beaning the whole america
Fingers crossed that the next domino is “nuclear holocaust due to particularly bad day on social media”
