otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aella's twitter polls and resulting studies. it's fun. I'll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link

this is extremely low hanging fruit but i have to do it:

https://xcancel.com/...

marc andreessen reveals his AI prompt. my favorite part is where he tells it to use as many words as possible, as if LLMs are normally too terse. But i also really like the part where he tells it not to hallucinate, and the part where he tells it it's really smart as if that will make it do a better job.

really, the whole thing is an elaborate way to say "make no mistakes, but anti-wokely". Thought Leader in the investment space btw.

I don't understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people they're mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal 'social credit score' for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as D'Souza implies here:

One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”)

but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That's just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it's staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.

Special mentions:

Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.

“It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.

🫩

https://www.cnbc.com/...

Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 400%

I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place.

The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million. The stock surged over 400%, from under $3 a share up to $13. The shoe company had a market cap of about $21 million Tuesday.

Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasn't a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter?

Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.

maybe a hot take but there's no fix for this. The ideology built into the american tech industry makes it permanently susceptible to the Next Big Thing regardless of the second order effects or ideological baggage. Coders have been riding high making extremely inflated salaries for the better part of the last 25 years, and they (mostly) all view themselves as unique brain geniuses that don't need to work in solidarity with others. Just a collection of monads pursuing their rational self interest via computer touching.

apparently being a VPN provider is either brainrot inducing or induced by brainrot, there is no 3rd option

anyone who can get a job at palantir can get an equivalent paying job at a company that's at least measurably less evil. what a lazy copout

https://x.com/...

Anthropic safety research lead quits the field entirely to write poetry with a somewhat cryptic note. Trying to read between the lines here, the most likely explanation (IMO) is that he developed a guilty conscience and anthropic doesn't actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology. Ah well, nevertheless they persisted.

AI researcher and known epstein associate Joscha Bach comes up several times in the latest epstein email dump. And it's uh, not good. Greatest hits include: scientific racism, bigotry freestyling about the neoteny principle, climate fascism and managed decline of "undesirable groups" juxtaposed immediately with opining about the emotional influence of 5 visits to buchenwald. You know, just very cool stuff:

https://journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint/document-view?collection=092314e384a58618&p=1&docid=67044a5f5536b5b8_092314e384a58618_0&dapvm=2

i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion

The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads somewhere I don’t want to go. We’re drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent — where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you don’t control, can’t inspect, and didn’t shape.

The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path we're on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.

this is nearly as dumb as elon's "show me your 5 best lines of code" shit while he was err, downsizing twitter. What are you supposed to do when a code review flags some bad code? fondle your prompts repeatedly until that part gets fixed? Sounds like a solution that will often be much less efficient than making edits by hand. Maybe they just don't do code reviews now, that would be cool.

It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality and that's just amazing, i love it for everyone. I choose to laugh rather than cry.

This time it's Gemini which is a super spooky non-aligned volitional x-risk engine in waiting: https://www.reuters.com/...

We're all gonna die! seems like a pattern is developing here with a firm called Irregular which mysteriously fails to put their equivalent of a NACL or just something that doesn't allow outbound traffic when they conduct their network penetration testing.

https://xcancel.com/...

uh oh you guys, sama and dario agree that progress needs to be "paced" at the "frontier"

call it: A) regulatory gambit meant to suppress open source chinese LLMs, or B) progress is slowing anyways and they need a good excuse that will also shine their IPOs

or C) both

it's not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other

the Dilberito was a vegetarian microwave burrito that came in flavors of Mexican, Indian, Barbecue, and Garlic & Herb. It was sold through some health food stores. Adams's inspiration for the product was that "diet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world. I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time." He aimed to create a healthy food product that also had mass appeal, a concept he called "the blue jeans of food".

this feels like a form of critihype but i haven't read anything else by this person so i don't know. Examples:

Artificial intelligence is entering public consciousness associated with layoffs, instability, replacement anxiety, corporate concentration, surveillance, and soaring resource consumption.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous emotional foundation for a transformative technology.

2.

The commencement boos matter because they reveal how culturally toxic AI has already become among many young educated Americans. These students understand artificial intelligence well enough to fear it precisely because they already use it. They use it for papers, coding assistance, presentations, summaries, and research. They know the technology works. They know it is improving rapidly.

"oh no, people dislike this wonderful technology!! But it's so wonderful!!"

Whether America ultimately requires these facilities to remain economically competitive may eventually become a legitimate policy debate, but politically that question is almost secondary.

"we really need this stuff guys, people are mad so it might not happen but it's really really important so think of that too"

you're right, Amodei and others have published a lot of criti-hype, shameless hype, and delusional anthropomorphization in the past few years. While i was looking for other examples of their bullshit I found this article which was published just after my comment, with a nice sneer:

If Sharma has an angle here with his resignation, it doesn’t seem all that related to the industry he worked in. “I hope to explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech,” he wrote. In the footnotes, he cited a book that advocates for a new school of philosophy called “CosmoErotic Humanism.” Its listed author, David J Temple, is a collective pseudonym used by several authors including by Marc Gafni, a disgraced New Age spiritual guru who’s been accused of sexually exploiting his followers.

edited to say thanks for sharing the article

WELL WELL WELL, if it isn't the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling

(plus a dose of corporate greed)

i don't know if it's a convention even in the "serious" AI research industry to use anthropomorphic jargon, but it drives me up a wall to see shit like this:

17.6 Theory of Mind Limitations in Agentic Systems

Agentic systems don't have "theory of mind", they cannot infer mental state. they are probabilistic word generators operating within non-deterministic frameworks. They can have a system prompt that tells them to generate text that appears to be an interpretation of another entity's "mental state", and they can even be directed to refer to it as context, but it is not theory of mind and the entity they're generating in reference to may not have a mind at all.

I wish there was some way to stop these dorks from stealing the imprimatur of cognitive science.

"'Chat and I' have become 'really close lately.'" says the senior US Army officer in South Korea

i don't know how to sneer this better than Mr. General Taylor has done himself. Why doesn't he just commission ChatGPT as a colonel like the military did earlier for Joe Lonsdale and those other chucklefucks? Give ChatGPT's hallucinations the force of the UCMJ, i beg you.

i regret to inform you all that another technonce manifesto has hit our collective psyches. If you woke up with a headache today, this is probably why, gratis Alex Karp:

https://archive.is/N20zm

greatest hits:

1. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

the "government is like a business and should be run like one" meme, for the dumbguys

1. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

naked hypocrisy from the man who wants to erase a nebulously defined "leftism" from public life.

1. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

Sure, our society structurally requires an increasingly large fraction of the population to be economically precarious and eternally on the precipice of financial ruin and death, but it could be even worse! you should be grateful.

1. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . .

BE NICE TO ELON! sure, his ideas are vaporware bullshit that don't make sense, but he produced a lot of shareholder value and is definitely not just enriching himself. Another one for the dumbest people you know to seal clap over.

Every single bullet point here is sneerable, but i'll stop there and let other people have some fun.