Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026

https://awful.systems/post/7380892

I like how even by ACX standards scoot’s posts on AI are pure brain damage

One level lower down, your brain was shaped by next-sense-datum prediction - partly you learned how to do addition because only the mechanism of addition correctly predicted the next word out of your teacher’s mouth when she said “three plus three is . . . “ (it’s more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true). But you don’t feel like you’re predicting anything when you’re doing a math problem. You’re just doing good, normal mathematical steps, like reciting “P.E.M.D.A.S.” to yourself and carrying the one.

The most compelling analogy: this is like expecting humans to be “just survival-and-reproduction machines” because survival and reproduction were the optimization criteria in our evolutionary history. […] This simple analogy is slightly off, because it’s confusing two optimization levels: the outer optimization level (in humans, evolution optimizing for reproduction; in AIs, companies optimizing for profit) with the inner optimization level (in humans, next-sense-datum prediction; in AIs, next-token prediction). But the stochastic parrot people probably haven’t gotten to the point where they learn that humans are next sense-datum predictors, so the evolution/reproduction one above might make a better didactic tool.

He also threatens an Anti-Stochatic-Parrot FAQ. Here’s hoping if this happens Bender et al enthusiastically point out this is coming from a guy whose long term master plan is to fight evil AI with eugenics.

How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Google’s and Facebook’s advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.