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  • Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts – 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA.

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency

    "Hmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words."

  • SneerClub @awful.systems

    General HPMoR sneer collection

  • Because I read Yudkowsky being interviewed about writing HPMoR, and you should suffer too.

    Funniest bits:

    Yudkowsky still thinks that he described Mendelian inheritance, despite everyone from FF.net commenters on pointing out his mistake.

    Wandering off into "the multiverse" and algorithmic information theory to fumble at explaining that magic works the way it does in a book because the writer made it that way.

    This paragraph:

    So to generalize that, let’s talk about the principle of “Make All the Characters Awesome.” This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?

    This comment:

    My own belief about why so many people didn't want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: "make every character awesome," "give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life").

  • Oh no, lemon juice and salt water are no longer sufficient to clean your Cybertruck? Try Drano!

  • In non-tsunami news tonight:

    Starting August 13th, YouTube will detect underage users in the US based on their activity and the age of their account, allowing the platform to automatically apply restrictions.

    Welp, I guess I have two weeks to download all the YouTube videos I will ever want to watch again.

    (pauses, thinks)

    The once-lost Evangelion AIDS PSA it is, then

  • All the cited URLS in the footnotes end with “utm_source=chatgpt.com”.

    I just do not understand these people. There is something dead inside them, something necrotic.

  • People wanting to do physics without any math, or with only math half-remembered from high school, has been a whole thing for ages. See item 15 on the Crackpot Index, for example. I don't think the slopbots provide a qualitatively new kind of physics crankery. I think they supercharge what already existed. Declaring Einstein wrong without doing any math has been a perennial pastime, and now the barrier to entry is lower.

    When Devereaux writes,

    without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt [...] But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there are but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible.

    I think he misses an angle. Yes, physics is armored with jargon and equations and tables of symbols. But for a certain audience, these themselves provoke contempt. They prefer an "explanation" which uses none of that. They see equations as fancy, highfalutin, somehow morally degenerate.

    That long review of HMPoR identified a Type of Guy who would later be very into slopbot physics:

    I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.

  • River crossing puzzles are a genre of logic problems that go back to the olden days. AI slop bots can act like they can solve them, because many solutions appear in their training data. But push the bot a little harder, and funny things happen.

  • I found this because Greg Egan shared it elsewhere on fedi:

    I am now being required by my day job to use an AI assistant to write code. I have also been informed that my usage of AI assistants will be monitored and decisions about my career will be based on those metrics.

    It gets worse from there.

  • There's an "I am no man" joke in here somewhere that I am too tired to figure out.

  • It's "general intelligence", the eugenicist wet dream of a supposedly quantitative measure of how the better class of humans do brain good.

  • From Yud's remarks on Xitter:

    As much as people might like to joke about how little skill it takes to found a $2B investment fund, it isn't actually true that you can just saunter in as a psychotic IQ 80 person and do that.

    Well, not with that attitude.

    You must be skilled at persuasion, at wearing masks, at fitting in, at knowing what is expected of you;

    If "wearing masks" really is a skill they need, then they are all susceptible to going insane and hiding it from their coworkers. Really makes you think (TM).

    you must outperform other people also trying to do that, who'd like that $2B for themselves. Winning that competition requires g-factor and conscientious effort over a period.

    zoom and enhance

    g-factor

    <Kill Bill sirens.gif>

  • Yud continues to bluecheck:

    "This is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat," mused Yudkowsky. "Yes yes, I'm sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager," he continued. "It is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them."

    Is this "narrative" in the room with us right now?

    It's reassuring to know that times change, but Yud will always be impressed by the virtues of the rich.

  • SneerClub @awful.systems

    The shocking rise of one of the tech right’s favorite posters

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    Wake up babe, new "in this moment I am enlightened" copypasta just dropped

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Credulous coverage of AI slop on Wikipedia

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9 March 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23 February 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    DeepSeek might not be such good news for energy after all

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Random Positivity Thread: Happy Book Memories

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems

    bless this jank @awful.systems

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    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Facebook "Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal"

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Elsevier: Proudly charging you money so its AI can make your articles worse

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    The Professor Assigns Their Own Book &mdash; But Now With a Tech Bubble in the Middle Step

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Harmonice Mundi Books: An idea for an ethical academic publisher

    TechTakes @awful.systems

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

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 29 September 2024

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024