blakestacey

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
sneerclub
sorted by: new top controversial old
Eliezer uses the tragic death of someone to smugly (and falsely) further his rhetoric in c/sneerclub@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 58 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

The New York Times treats him as an expert: "Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and an author of a forthcoming book". He's an Internet rando who has yammered about decision theory, not an actual theorist! He wrote fanfic that claimed to teach rational thinking while getting high-school biology wrong. His attempt to propose a new decision theory was, last I checked, never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and in trying to check again I discovered that it's so obscure it was deleted from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Functional_Decision_Theory

To recapitulate my sneer from an earlier thread, the New York Times respects actual decision theorists so little, it's like the whole academic discipline is trans people or something.

Disney sues AI image generator Midjourney in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago

viral: Midjourney fucking up human hands

spiral: Midjourney somehow fucking up Simpsons hands

https://bsky.app/profile/blakestacey.bsky.social/post/3lrep72zj4c23

When the complaint gets to saying what Midjourney advertises in their "explore" feature, it features dead-eyed waifu Elsa and body-pillow-ready topless Ariel.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th June 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th June 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

so much content

The choice of, or instinctive reaching for, the word content speaks volumes.

where anything you want to see or read can be spun up in an instant, without labor.

"Without labor," sure.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th June 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago

A comparison springs to mind: inviting the most pedantic nerds on Earth to critique your chatbot slop is a level of begging to be pwned that's on par with claiming the female orgasm is a myth.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th June 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 29 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Bringing over aio's comment from the end of last week's stubsack:

This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasn't gotten the message, saying that the project has been "paused". It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.

Way down in the linked wall o' text, there's a comment by "Chaotic Enby" that struck me:

Another summary I just checked, which caused me a lot more worries than simple inaccuracies: Cambrian. The last sentence of that summary is "The Cambrian ended with creatures like myriapods and arachnids starting to live on land, along with early plants.", which already sounds weird: we don't have any fossils of land arthropods in the Cambrian, and, while there has been a hypothesis that myriapods might have emerged in the Late Cambrian, I haven't heard anything similar being proposed about arachnids. But that's not the worrying part.

No, the issue is that nowhere in the entire Cambrian article are myriapods or arachnids mentioned at all. Only one sentence in the entire article relates to that hypothesis: "Molecular clock estimates have also led some authors to suggest that arthropods colonised land during the Cambrian, but again the earliest physical evidence of this is during the following Ordovician". This might indicate that the model is relying on its own internal knowledge, and not just on the contents of the article itself, to generate an "AI overview" of the topic instead.

Further down the thread, there's a comment by "Gnomingstuff" that looks worth saving:

There was an 8-person community feedback study done before this (a UI/UX text using the original Dopamine summary), and the results are depressing as hell. The reason this was being pushed to prod sure seems to be the cheerleading coming from 7 out of those 8 people: "Humans can lie but AI is unbiased," "I trust AI 100%," etc.

Perhaps the most depressing is this quote -- "This also suggests that people who are technically and linguistically hyper-literate like most of our editors, internet pundits, and WMF staff will like the feature the least. The feature isn't really "for" them" -- since it seems very much like an invitation to ignore all of us, and to dismiss any negative media coverage that may ensue (the demeaning "internet pundits").

Sorry for all the bricks of text here, this is just so astonishingly awful on all levels and everything that I find seems to be worse than the last.

Another comment by "CMD" evaluates the summary of the dopamine article mentioned there:

The first sentence is in the article. However, the second sentence mentions "emotion", a word that while in a couple of reference titles isn't in the article at all. The third sentence says "creating a sense of pleasure", but the article says "In popular culture and media, dopamine is often portrayed as the main chemical of pleasure, but the current opinion in pharmacology is that dopamine instead confers motivational salience", a contradiction. "This neurotransmitter also helps us focus and stay motivated by influencing our behavior and thoughts". Where is this even from? Focus isn't mentioned in the article at all, nor is influencing thoughts. As for the final sentence, depression is mentioned a single time in the article in what is almost an extended aside, and any summary would surely have picked some of the examples of disorders prominent enough to be actually in the lead.

So that's one of five sentences supported by the article. Perhaps the AI is hallucinating, or perhaps it's drawing from other sources like any widespread llm. What it definitely doesn't seem to be doing is taking existing article text and simplifying it.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th June 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
Apple: ‘Reasoning’ AIs fail hard if they actually have to think in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 19 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

/r/justonemoreprompt

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th June 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago

A student put on some Internet radio station for background music at the end-of-semester barbecue, so I heard a Grammarly ad. In related news, I now long for the sweet embrace of a peat bog.

https://bsky.app/profile/tomdellaringa.bsky.social/post/3lr4djpa4zc2t

https://bsky.app/profile/dennisbhooper.bsky.social/post/3lr4lyaxmkc2b

Manifest 2025 Update: Still A Tech Bro Eugenics Conference in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

There comes a point when "they are themselves racist AF" becomes the simplest explanation for so many things.

Manifest 2025 Update: Still A Tech Bro Eugenics Conference in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 15 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

🎶 Substack, David Shor, Nate Silver, Noahpinion,

Dick Hanania, bathrobe from Aella

We didn't start the fire 🎶

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th June 2025 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?

2
SneerClub Classic: got em (first posted 17 October 2021) (awful.systems)
 

Steven Pinker tweets thusly:

My friend & Harvard colleague Howard Gardner, offers a thoughtful critique of my book Rationality -- but undermines his cause, as all skeptics of rationality must do, by using rationality to make it.

"My colleague and fellow esteemed gentleman of Harvard neglects to consider the premise that I am rubber and he is glue."

1
"If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within [HPMoR], go ahead and try." (awful.systems)
 

In the far-off days of August 2022, Yudkowsky said of his brainchild,

If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within it, go ahead and try. Having a long story isn't the same fundamental kind of issue as having an extra sentence.

To which MarxBroshevik replied,

The first two sentences have a weird contradiction:

Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase. Each bookcase has six shelves, going almost to the ceiling.

So is it "every inch", or are the bookshelves going "almost" to the ceiling? Can't be both.

I've not read further than the first paragraph so there's probably other mistakes in the book too. There's kind of other 'mistakes' even in the first paragraph, not logical mistakes as such, just as an editor I would have... questions.

And I elaborated:

I'm not one to complain about the passive voice every time I see it. Like all matters of style, it's a choice that depends upon the tone the author desires, the point the author wishes to emphasize, even the way a character would speak. ("Oh, his throat was cut," Holmes concurred, "but not by his own hand.") Here, it contributes to a staid feeling. It emphasizes the walls and the shelves, not the books. This is all wrong for a story that is supposed to be about the pleasures of learning, a story whose main character can't walk past a bookstore without going in. Moreover, the instigating conceit of the fanfic is that their love of learning was nurtured, rather than neglected. Imagine that character, their family, their family home, and step into their library. What do you see?

Books — every wall, books to the ceiling.

Bam, done.

This is the living-room of the house occupied by the eminent Professor Michael Verres-Evans,

Calling a character "the eminent Professor" feels uncomfortably Dan Brown.

and his wife, Mrs. Petunia Evans-Verres, and their adopted son, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

I hate the kid already.

And he said he wanted children, and that his first son would be named Dudley. And I thought to myself, what kind of parent names their child Dudley Dursley?

Congratulations, you've noticed the name in a children's book that was invented to sound stodgy and unpleasant. (In The Chocolate Factory of Rationality, a character asks "What kind of a name is 'Wonka' anyway?") And somehow you're trying to prove your cleverness and superiority over canon by mocking the name that was invented for children to mock. Of course, the Dursleys were also the start of Rowling using "physically unsightly by her standards" to indicate "morally evil", so joining in with that mockery feels ... It's aged badly, to be generous.

Also, is it just the people I know, or does having a name picked out for a child that far in advance seem a bit unusual? Is "Dudley" a name with history in his family — the father he honored but never really knew? His grandfather who died in the War? If you want to tell a grown-up story, where people aren't just named the way they are because those are names for children to laugh at, then you have to play by grown-up rules of characterization.

The whole stretch with Harry pointing out they can ask for a demonstration of magic is too long. Asking for proof is the obvious move, but it's presented as something only Harry is clever enough to think of, and as the end of a logic chain.

"Mum, your parents didn't have magic, did they?" [...] "Then no one in your family knew about magic when Lily got her letter. [...] If it's true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it's true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it's false. That's what the experimental method is for, so that we don't have to resolve things just by arguing."

Jesus, this kid goes around with L's theme from Death Note playing in his head whenever he pours a bowl of breakfast crunchies.

Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy, sponsored in whatever maths or science competitions he entered. He was given anything reasonable that he wanted, except, maybe, the slightest shred of respect.

Oh, sod off, you entitled little twit; the chip on your shoulder is bigger than you are. Your parents buy you college textbooks on physics instead of coloring books about rocketships, and you think you don't get respect? Because your adoptive father is incredulous about the existence of, let me check my notes here, literal magic? You know, the thing which would upend the body of known science, as you will yourself expound at great length.

"Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Wesley Crusher would shove this kid into a locker.

view more: ‹ prev next ›