Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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. Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and happy holidays in general!)
elsewhere on lemmy, a piece from the atlantic (be warned: they quote lasker/cremieux for some reason) on new shiny glp-1 agonist that you can order off telegram from some random ass chinese lab:
The tests, insofar as they are reliable, do flag problems. According to Finnrick Analytics, a start-up that provides free peptide tests and publicly shares the results, 10 percent of the retatrutide samples it has tested in the past 60 days had issues of sterility, purity, or incorrect dosing. Two other peptide-testing labs, Trustpointe and Janoshik, have said in interviews with Rory Hester, a.k.a. PepTok on YouTube, that they see, respectively, an overall fail rate of 20 percent and a 3 to 5 percent fail rate for sterility alone across all peptides.
isn’t dear leader EY taking this? it’s still not approved yet, so it’s not available on normal market, and because it’s peptide it’s i.m. only. also, side effects not just for this one, but for entire class include anhedonia, which must be very rational thing to risk without medical need. chat, what’s your p(infected sore on EY’s ass)
I posted about Eliezer hating on OpenPhil for having too long AGI timelines last week. He has continued to rage in the comments and replies to his call out post. It turns out, he also hates AI 2027!
I looked at “AI 2027” as a title and shook my head about how that was sacrificing credibility come 2027 on the altar of pretending to be a prophet and picking up some short-term gains at the expense of more cooperative actors. I didn’t bother pushing back because I didn’t expect that to have any effect. I have been yelling at people to shut up about trading their stupid little timelines as if they were astrological signs for as long as that’s been a practice (it has now been replaced by trading made-up numbers for p(doom)).
When we say it, we are sneering, but when Eliezer calls them stupid little timelines and compares them to astrological signs it is a top quality lesswrong comment! Also a reminder for everyone that I don’t think we need: Eliezer is a major contributor to the rationalist attitude of venerating super-forecasters and super-predictors and promoting the idea that rational smart well informed people should be able to put together super accurate predictions!
So to recap: long timelines are bad and mean you are a stuffy bureaucracy obsessed with credibility, but short timelines are bad also and going to expend the doomer’s crediblity, you should clearly just agree with Eliezer’s views, which don’t include any hard timelines or P(doom)s! (As cringey as they are, at least they are committing to predictions in a way that can be falsified.)
Also, the mention about sacrificing credibility make me think Eliezer is intentionally willfully playing the game of avoiding hard predictions to keep the grift going (as opposed to self-deluding about reasons not to explain a hard timeline or at least put out some firm P()s ).
We have a new odium symposium episode. This week we talk about Ayn Rand, who turned out to be much much more loathsome than i expected.
available everywhere (see www.odiumsymposium.com). patreon episode link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/haters-v-ayn-146272391
AI researchers are rapidly embracing AI reviews, with the new Stanford Agentic Reviewer. Surely nothing could possibly go wrong!
Here’s the “tech overview” for their website.
Our agentic reviewer provides rapid feedback to researchers on their work to help them to rapidly iterate and improve their research.
The inspiration for this project was a conversation that one of us had with a student (not from Stanford) that had their research paper rejected 6 times over 3 years. They got a round of feedback roughly every 6 months from the peer review process, and this commentary formed the basis for their next round of revisions. The 6 month iteration cycle was painfully slow, and the noisy reviews — which were more focused on judging a paper’s worth than providing constructive feedback — gave only a weak signal for where to go next.
How is it, when people try to argue about the magical benefits of AI on a task, it always comes down to arguing “well actually, humans suck at the task too! Look, humans make mistakes!” That seems to be the only way they can justify the fact that AI sucks. At least it spews garbage fast!
(Also, this is a little mean, but if someone’s paper got rejected 6 times in a row, perhaps it’s time to throw in the towel, accept that the project was never that good in the first place, and try better ideas. Not every idea works out, especially in research.)
When modified to output a 1-10 score by training to mimic ICLR 2025 reviews (which are public), we found that the Spearman correlation (higher is better) between one human reviewer and another is 0.41, whereas the correlation between AI and one human reviewer is 0.42. This suggests the agentic reviewer is approaching human-level performance.
Actually, now all my concerns are now completely gone. They found that one number is bigger than another number, so I take back all of my counterarguments. I now have full faith that this is going to work out.
Reviews are AI generated, and may contain errors.
We had built this for researchers seeking feedback on their work. If you are a reviewer for a conference, we discourage using this in any way that violates the policies of that conference.
Of course, we need the mandatory disclaimers that will definitely be enforced. No reviewer will ever be a lazy bum and use this AI for their actual conference reviews.
Problem: Reviewers do not provide constructive criticism or at least reasons for paper to be rejected. Solution: Fake it with a clanker.
Genius.
the noisy reviews — which were more focused on judging a paper’s worth than providing constructive feedback
dafuq?
Yeah, it’s not like reviewers can just write “This paper is utter trash. Score: 2” unless ML is somehow an even worse field than I previously thought.
They referenced someone who had a paper get rejected from conferences six times, which to me is an indication that their idea just isn’t that good. I don’t mean this as a personal attack; everyone has bad ideas. It’s just that at some point, you just have to cut your losses with a bad idea and instead use your time to develop better ideas.
So I am suspicious that when they say “constructive feedback”, they don’t mean “how do I make this idea good” but instead “what are the magic words that will get my paper accepted into a conference”. ML has become a cutthroat publish-or-perish field, after all. It certainly won’t help that LLMs are effectively trained to glaze the user at all times.
To be fair, currently conference reviewers frequently do not even do reviewing so this might be a step up.
terrible state of house CO detectors is not an excuse for putting a CO generator in the living room.
me, thinking it’s a waste to not smoke indoors because my landlord won’t fix the CO detectors: oh
(jk I don’t smoke)
Going from lazy, sloppy human reviews to absolutely no humans is still a step down. LLMs don’t have the capability to generalize outside the (admittedly enormous) training dataset they have, so cutting edge research is one of the worse use cases for them.
An LLM is better than literally nothing. There have been scandals of papers being basically copies of previous papers at conferences and that was only caught because some random online read the papers.
Nobody is reading papers. Universities are a clout machine.
Alice: what is
2 + 2?LLM:
random.random() + random.random()Alice:
1.2199404515268157is better than nothing, i guessyou’ve got so much in common with an LLM, since you also seem to be spewing absolute bullshit to an audience that doesn’t like you
Your premise is total bullshit. That being said, I’d prefer a world where nobody reads papers and journals stop existing to a world where we are boiling the oceans to rubber-stamp papers.
What value are you imagining the LLM providing or adding? They don’t have a rich internal model of the scientific field to provide an evaluation of novelty or contribution to the field. They could maybe spot some spelling or grammar errors, but so can more reliable algorithms. I don’t think they could accurately spot if a paper is basically a copy or redundant, even if given RAG on all the past papers submitted to the conference. A paper carefully building on a previous paper vs. a paper blindly copying a previous paper would look about the same to an LLM.
Sean Munger, my favorite history YouTuber, has released a 3-hour long video on technology cultists from railroads all the way to LLMs. I have not watched this yet but it is probably full of delicious sneers.
the rivers…
randomly placed and statistically average, just like real rivers!
whole country is swole, good mirror of the maga mind
I hear they have the biggest bal of tine in Hond.
Starting this Stubsack off, here’s Baldur Bjarnason lamenting how tech as a community has gone down the shitter.
That’s a bummer of a post but oddly appropriate during the darkest season in the northern hemisphere in a real bummer of a year. Kind of echoes the “Stop talking to each other and start buying things!” post from a few years back though I forget where that one came from.
I think I read that post and thought it was incredibly naive, on the level of “why does the barkeep ask if I want a drink?” or “why does the pretty woman with a nice smile want me to pay for the VIP lounge?” Cheap clanky services like forums and mailing lists and Wordpress blogs can be maintained by one person or a small club but if you want something big, smooth, and high-bandwidth someone is paying real money and wants something back. Examples in the original post included geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter and those were all big business which made big investments and hoped to make a profit.
Anyone who has helped run a medium-sized club or a Fedi server has faced an agenda item like "we are growing. Input of resources from new members is not matching the growth in costs and hassle. How do we explain to the new members what we need to keep going and get them to follow up? "
There is a whole argument that VC-backed for-profit corporations are a bad model for hosting online communities but even nonproffits or Internet celebrities with active comments face the issue “this is growing, it requires real server expenses and professional IT support and serious moderation. Where are those coming from? Our user base is used to someone else invisibly providing that.”
if you have a point, make it. nihilism is cheap.
Its not nihilism to observe that Reddit is bigger and fancier than this Lemmy server because Reddit is a giant business that hopes to make money from users. Online we have a choice between relatively small, janky services on the Internet (where we often have to pay money or help with systems administration and moderation) or big flashy services on corporate social media where the corporation handles all the details for us but spies on us and propagandizes us. We can chose (remember the existentialists?) but each comes with its own hassles and responsibilities.
And nobody, whether a giant corporation or a celebrity, is morally obliged to keep providing tech support and moderation and funding for a community just because it formed on its site. I have been involved in groups or companies which said “we can’t keep running this online community, we will scale it back / pass it to some of our users and let them move it to their own domain and have a go at running it” and they were right to make that choice. Before Musk Twitter spent around $5 billion/year and I don’t think donations or subscriptions were ever going to pay for that (the Wikimedia Foundation raises hundreds of millions a year, and many more people used Wikipedia than used Twitter).
you’re either not understanding or misrepresenting valente’s points in order to make yours: that we can’t have nice things and shouldn’t either want or expect them, because it’s unreasonable. nothing can change, nothing good can be had, nothing good can be achieved. hence: nihilism.
Not at all. I am saying that we cannot all have our own digital Versailles and servants forever after. We can have our own digital living room and kitchen and take turns hosting friends there, but we have to do the work, and it will never be big or glamorous. Valente could have said “big social media sucks but small open web things are great” but instead she wants the benefits of big corporate services without the drawbacks.
I have been an open web person for decades. There is lots of space there to explore. But I do not believe that we will ever find a giant corporation which borrows money from LutherCorp and Bank of Mordor, builds a giant ‘free’ service with a slick design, and never runs out of money or starts stuffing itself with ads.
I kinda half agree, but I’m going to push back on at least one point. Originally most of reddit’s moderation was provided by unpaid volunteers, with paid admins only acting as a last resort. I think this is probably still true even after they purged a bunch of mods that were mad Reddit was being enshittifyied. And the official paid admins were notoriously slow at purging some really blatantly over the line content, like the jailbait subreddit or the original donald trump subreddit. So the argument is that Reddit benefited and still benefits heavily from that free moderation and the content itself generated and provided by users is valuable, so acting like all reddit users are simply entitled free riders isn’t true.
In an ideal world, reddit communities could have moved onto a self-hosted or nonprofit service like LiveJournal became Dreamwidth. But it was not a surprise that a money-burning for-profit social media service would eventually try to shake down the users, which is why my Reddit history is a few dozen Old!SneerClub posts while my history on the Internet is much more extensive. The same thing happened with ‘free’ PhpBB services and mailing list services like Yahoo! Groups, either they put in more ads or they shut down the free version.
A point that Maciej Ceglowski among others have made is that the VC model traps services into “spend big” until they run out of money or enshitiffy, and that services like Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal offer ‘social-media-like’ experiences on a much smaller budget while earning modest profits or paying for themselves. But Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal are never going to have the marketing budget of services funded by someone else’s money, or be able to provide so many professional services gratis. So you have to chose: threadbare security on the open web, or jumping from corporate social media to corporate social media amidst bright lights and loudspeakers telling you what site is the NEW THING.
It sounds like part, maybe even most, of the problem is self inflicted by the VC model traps and the VCs? I say we keep blocking ads and migrating platforms until VCs learn not to fund stuff with the premise of ‘provide a decent service until we’ve captured enough users, then get really shitty’.
