Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025

including possible effects on the protocols from issues like such as AI fuzzing attempts, to social engineering by AI's,

"You know those massive problems we already had going back decades? Well what if the same problems happened in the future but with the letters 'A' and 'I' prepended? Scary!"

through to how we deal with and approach and facilitate Avatars and Agents.

Gosh darn it don't tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of "agent" already well established in web standards.

Very practical no notes

This ties back into the recurring question of drawing boundaries around "AI" as a concept. Too many people just blithely accept that it's just a specific set of machine learning techniques applied to sufficiently large sets of data. This in spite of the fact that we're several AI "cycles" deep where every 30 years or so (whenever it stops being "retro") some new algorithm or mechanism is definitely going to usher in Terminator II: Judgement Day.

This narrow frame focused on LLMs still allows for some discussion of the problems we're seeing (energy use, training data sourcing, etc) but it cuts off a lot of the wider conversations about the social, political, and economic causes and impacts of outsourcing the business of being human to a computer.

The extreme hypercentralisation really does suck :|

Comic Book Guy energy

God I remember having to cite RFC at other vendors when I worked in support and it was never not a pain in the ass to try and find the right line that described the appropriate feature. And then when I was done I knew I sounded like this even as I hit send anyway.

Can't they just re-release Kris I befolkningsfrågan? Tried and tested solutions like full employment policies, cheap houses, more support and money for parents.

Or is kids not all that important if it means having to improve conditions for ordinary people?

Scandinavian fathers and sons are famously not close.

@gerikson

Could be court shows / Maury Povich type shows / murder shows.

Watch enough of those and you're not going to want to have anything to do with humans.

Don't make me tap the sign:

no gods, no kings

Highlights from the comments: @wjpmitchell3 writes,

Actual psychology researcher: the problem with IQ is A) We don't really know what it's measuring, B.) We don't really know how it's useful, C.) We don't really know how context-specific it is, D.) When people make arguments about IQ, it's often couched around prejudiced ulterior motives. No one actually cares about IQ; they care about what it's a proxy measure of and we don't have good evidence yet to say "This is a reliable and broadly-encompassing representation of intelligence." or whatever else, so if you are trying to use IQ differences to say that there are race differences in intelligence, you have no grounds. The best you can say is there are race differences in this proxy measure that we're still trying to understand. It's dangerous to use an unreliable and possibly inaccurate representation of a phenomena to make policy changes or inform decisions around race. The evidence threshold has to be extremely high because we're entering sensitive ethical spaces, which is something that rationalist don't do well in because their utilitarian calculus has difficulty capturing the intangibles.

@arnoldkotlyarevsky383 says,

Nothing wrong with being self educated but she comes across as being not as far along as you would want someone to be in their self-education before being given a platform.

@User123456767 observes,

You can kind of tell she grew up as a Calvinist because she still seems to think she's part of the elect she's just replaced an actual big G God with some sort of AI God.

@jaredsarnie3712 begins,

I feel like so much of what she says boils down to finding bizarre hypothetical situations where child sexual abuse is morally acceptable.

And from @Fruuuuuuuuuck:

Doomscroll gooner arc

Alright that’s it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing

Fansubs are openly doing it for the love of the anime, so chances are they'd avoid AI slop like the plague (though the CHUDs would be okay with ChatGPT subs if it meant avoiding The Woke^tm)

(note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don’t open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)

Good thing I'm a fucking NEET, then

Gary Marcus has been a solid source of sneer material and debunking of LLM hype, but yeah, you're right. Gary Marcus has been taking victory laps over a bar set so so low by promptfarmers and promptfondlers. Also, side note, his negativity towards LLM hype shouldn't be misinterpreted as general skepticism towards all AI... in particular Gary Marcus is pretty optimistic about neurosymbolic hybrid approaches, it's just his predictions and hypothesizing are pretty reasonable and grounded relative to the sheer insanity of LLM hypsters.

Also, new possible source of sneers in the near future: Gary Marcus has made a lesswrong account and started directly engaging with them: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q2PdrjowtXkYQ5whW/the-best-simple-argument-for-pausing-ai

Predicting in advance: Gary Marcus will be dragged down by lesswrong, not lesswrong dragged up towards sanity. He'll start to use lesswrong lingo and terminology and using P(some event) based on numbers pulled out of his ass. Maybe he'll even start to be "charitable" to meet their norms and avoid down votes (I hope not, his snark and contempt are both enjoyable and deserved, but I'm not optimistic based on how the skeptics and critics within lesswrong itself learn to temper and moderate their criticism within the site). Lesswrong will moderately upvote his posts when he is sufficiently deferential to their norms and window of acceptable ideas, but won't actually learn much from him.

I wouldn’t argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance

Oh, I would.

I've seen people say stuff like "you can't disagree the models have rapidly advanced" and I'm just like yes I can, here: no they didn't. If you're claiming they advanced in any way please show me a metric by which you're judging it. Are they cheaper? Are they more efficient? Are they able to actually do anything? I want data, I want a chart, I want a proper experiment where the model didn't have access to the test data when it was being trained and I want that published in a reputable venue. If the advances are so substantial you should be able to give me like five papers that contain this stuff. Absent that I cannot help but think that the claim here is "it vibes better".

If they're an AGI believer then the bar is even higher, since in their dictionary an advancement would mean the models getting closer to AGI, at which point I'd be fucked to see the metric by which they describe the distance of their current favourite model to AGI. They can't even properly define the latter in computer-scientific terms, only vibes.

I advocate for a strict approach, like physicist dismissing any claim containing "quantum" but no maths, I will immediately dismiss any AI claims if you can't describe the metric you used to evaluate the model and isolate the changes between the old and new version to evaluate their efficacy. You know, the bog-standard shit you always put in any CS systems Experimental section.

It's kind of a shame to have to downgrade Gary to "not wrong, but kind of a dick" here. Especially because his sneer game as shown at the end there is actually not half bad.

So, Zelenskyy is goth?

Oh, and looking back at the comments on titotal’s post… his detailed elaboration of some pretty egregious errors in AI 2027 didn’t really change anyone’s mind, at most moving them back a year to 2028.

Huh, what's this I have open in another browser tab:

The Great Disappointment in the Millerite movement was the reaction that followed Baptist preacher William Miller's proclamation that Jesus Christ would return to the Earth by 1844, which he called the Second Advent. His study of the Daniel 8 prophecy during the Second Great Awakening led him to conclude that Daniel's "cleansing of the sanctuary" was cleansing the world from sin when Christ would come, and he and many others prepared. When Jesus did not appear by October 22, 1844, Miller and his followers were disappointed.

Another winner from Zitron. One of the things I learned working in tech support is that a lot of people tend to assume the computer is a magic black box that relies on terrible, secret magicks to perform it's dark alchemy. And while it's not that the rabbit hole doesn't go deep, there is a huge difference between the level of information needed to do what I did and the level of information needed to understand what I was doing.

I'm not entirely surprised that business is the same way, and I hope that in the next few years we have the same epiphany about government. These people want you to believe that you can't do what they do so that you don't ask the incredibly obvious questions about why it's so dumb. At least in tech support I could usually attribute the stupidity to the limitations of computers and misunderstandings from the users. I don't know what kinda excuse the business idiots and political bullshitters are going to come up with.

the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art

much simpler models are practically impossible to train without an existing model to build upon. With GenAI it's safe to assume that training that base model included large scale scraping without consent

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... Evangelion Unit 1 with a Superman logo and a Diabolik mask.

the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art and thus I didn’t have any ethical issues with it.

Personally, I consider training any slop-generator model to be unethical on principle. Gen-AI is built to abuse workers for corporate gain - any use or support of it is morally equivalent to being a scab.

Fast-forward to shortly after release and the game’s AI model has been pumping out Elsa and Superman.

Given plagiarism machines are designed to commit plagiarism (preferably with enough plausible deniability to claim fair use), I'm not shocked.

(Sidenote: This is just personal instinct, but I suspect fair use will be gutted as a consequence of the slop-nami.)

@zbyte64 @BlueMonday1984
the AI bot congratulated me on my gender transition

🫠

@zbyte64 the technical term for those "uh huh"s is backchanneling, and I wonder if audio chatbot models have issues timing those correctly. Maybe it's a choice between not doing it at all, or doing it at incorrect times. Either sounds creepy. The pause before an AI (any AI) responds is uncanny. I bet getting backchanneling right would be even more of a nightmare.

Anyway, congrats on getting through that interview, and congrats on your transition to Docker, I guess?

@zbyte64 this is so disrespectful to applicants.

@zbyte64 @BlueMonday1984 at... at least the AI is an ally? 🤔

Now I’m curious how a protected class question% speedrun of one of these interviews would look. Get the bot to ask you about your age, number of children, sexual orientation, etc

@zbyte64
I will go back to turning wrenches or slinging food before I spend one minute in an interview with an LLM ignorance factory.
@BlueMonday1984

@cachondo WTF? AI is crazy sometimes, and this is coming from a pro-AI person.