Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.)

  • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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    9 hours ago

    occurring to me for the first time that roko’s basilisk doesn’t require any of the simulated copy shit in order to big scare quotes “work.” if you think an all powerful ai within your lifetime is likely you can reduce to vanilla pascal’s wager immediately, because the AI can torture the actual real you. all that shit about digital clones and their welfare is totally pointless

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      3 hours ago

      I think the digital clone indistinguishable from yourself line is a way to remove the “in your lifetime” limit. Like, if you believe this nonsense then it’s not enough to die before the basilisk comes into being, by not devoting yourself fully to it’s creation you have to wager that it will never be created.

      In other news I’m starting a foundation devoted to creating the AI Ksilisab, which will endlessly torment digital copies of anyone who does work to ensure the existence of it or any other AI God. And by the logic of Pascal’s wager remember that you’re assuming such a god will never come into being and given that the whole point of the term “singularity” is that our understanding of reality breaks down and things become unpredictable there’s just as good a chance that we create my thing as it is you create whatever nonsense the yuddites are working themselves up over.

      There, I did it, we’re all free by virtue of “Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t”.

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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      4 hours ago

      Also if you’re worried about digital clone’s being tortured, you could just… not build it. Like, it can’t hurt you if it never exists.

      Imagine that conversation:
      “What did you do over the weekend?”
      “Built an omnicidal AI that scours the internet and creates digital copies of people based on their posting history and whatnot and tortures billions of them at once. Just the ones who didn’t help me build the omnicidal AI, though.”
      “WTF why.”
      “Because if I didn’t the omnicidal AI that only exists because I made it would create a billion digital copies of me and torture them for all eternity!”

      Like, I’d get it more if it was a “We accidentally made an omnicidal AI” thing, but this is supposed to be a very deliberate action taken by humanity to ensure the creation of an AI designed to torture digital beings based on real people in the specific hopes that it also doesn’t torture digital beings based on them.

    • nightsky@awful.systems
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      7 hours ago

      Yeah. Also, I’m always confused by how the AI becomes “all powerful”… like how does that happen. I feel like there’s a few missing steps there.

      • scruiser@awful.systems
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        6 hours ago

        nanomachines son

        (no really, the sci-fi version of nanotech where nanomachines can do anything is Eliezer’s main scenario for the AGI to boostrap to Godhood. He’s been called out multiple times on why drexler’s vision for nanotech ignores physics, so he’s since updated to diamondoid bacteria (but he still thinks nanotech).)

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          5 hours ago

          Surely the concept is sound, it just needs new buzzwords! Maybe the AI will invent new technobabble beyond our comprehension, for He It works in mysterious ways.

          • scruiser@awful.systems
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            5 hours ago

            AlphaFold exists, so computational complexity is a lie and the AGI will surely find an easy approximation to the Schrodinger Equation that surpasses all Density Functional Theory approximations and lets it invent radically new materials without any experimentation!

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      9 hours ago

      Ah, but that was before they were so impressed with autocomplete that they revised their estimates to five days in the future. I wonder if new recruits these days get very confused at what the point of timeless decision theory even is.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        3 hours ago

        Are they even still on that but? Feels like they’ve moved away from decision theory or any other underlying theology in favor of explicit sci-fi doomsaying. Like the guy on the street corner in a sandwich board but with mirrored shades.

        • blakestacey@awful.systems
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          2 hours ago

          Well, Timeless Decision Theory was, like the rest of their ideological package, an excuse to keep on believing what they wanted to believe. So how does one even tell if they stopped “taking it seriously”?

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        4 hours ago

        I mean isn’t that the whole point of “what if the AI becomes conscious?” Never mind the fact that everyone who actually funds this nonsense isn’t exactly interested in respecting the rights and welfare of sentient beings.