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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

  • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    7 days ago

    Crossposted to LW, a starry eyed AI Safety Cultist writing about their time at Anthropic

    https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/some-memories-of-early-anthropic

    After lunch one of the co-founders pulls me into his office for a wide-ranging, casual chat about how to make AI go well. It’s very fun - he’s smart, personable, funny, urbane. “The government won’t do anything about AI until it’s far too late”, I opine at one point. “Our strategy has to rely on the market and on civil society.” He leans forward, his gaze hardening. “You’re wrong there. There are people in Washington - the serious people, you know - watching all this very closely. I speak to them regularly. They trust me.” In retrospect, that was the moment I decided to join.

    I articulate my fears of a totalitarian bureaucratic state powered by traumatized AI bureaucrats, and suggest that we need to introduce some kind of elite rivalry dynamics into the AI bureaucracy, multiple centers of power. He starts laughing again, and laughs for a full minute. “I don’t know how to end this call, I’ll be haunted by this all night”, he says. Eventually I hang up. I think about reporting the conversation to Anthropic security, but reviewing in my mind I don’t recall sharing any confidential information, just vibes and high level thoughts, the same kind of stuff that lands on LessWrong every week.

    April 26th. I’m awake at 2 am again. I write in my journal “I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. Why won’t you listen to me you “embodied” motherfucker. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. Anthropic is bad for me. Why are you grasping at reasons to stay. Why why why.”

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      This has a lot of “are we the baddies” energy! I’m almost surprised there aren’t more tech workers that quit like this person apparently did? I say almost, because it doesn’t seem that hard for the existing pattern of jaded cynicism and/or greed to cover LLM companies.

      • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        I am currently studying, among other things, mathematical relationships between phenomena in machine learning and evolutionary biology and finding super interesting things that made someone suggest I join one of the big companies. My face…

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      They think their plans might be the only thing standing between humanity and the abyss. And they’re at the breaking point, nervous-system-wise. What if I use my fancy words to sow doubts and undermine them

      abusive cult shit sure does do a number on people :|

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      7 days ago

      In a sane world, this allegation about a conversation around January to March 2023 would be national news:

      A senior colleague hears I’m not happy with my team fit and asks me to go on a walk. I know him a bit from a past life - one of the kindest and most civic-minded people I’ve met. He says he might be starting a new special team that will train dangerous bio and cyber and nuclear models and show scary demos to governments in order to get them to take AI risk seriously. I politely decline.

      This reminds me of what went wrong in the rational world of American defense intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.

        • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          On the upside, they probably won’t actually succeed at anything novel. On the downside, having workers breed anthrax (or something along those lines were the information is out there, if not necessarily publicly well known) under a chatbot’s instructions will still be bad.