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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
From gormless gray voice to misattributed sources, it can be daunting to read articles that turn out to be slop. However, incorporating the right tools and techniques can help you navigate instructionals in the age of AI. Letās delve right in and and learn some telltale signs like:
- Every goddamn article reads like this now.
- With this bullet point list at some point.
- I am going to tear the eyes off my head
The worst are slop-generated recipes that you only realise are fake halfway through reading when they tell you to add half a cup of table salt to your cake batter
not even a couple of small rocks? smh
is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? itās one thing if itās gaming-related[1], but when iām at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say āask for help in our discord serverā, i feel like iām in a fever dream and iām going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt
i guess. not really, fuck discord. ā©ļø
Yeah, for multiple reasons. Mostly because all the information in there isnāt accessed or searchable from the outside, and technically not even from the inside because Discordās search feature fucking sucks.
Also logging is hard, all the various channels are annoying (esp as th, and having to jump through various hoops just get into channels (hoops for which the instructions can be outdated/bad (one of them used a feature that was disabled on my machine for some reason, but nobody had realized that was possible)) is just nuts. And then there is the whole thing that Discord itself wants to make the platform as busy as possible by adding more and more moving things. I just want to chat.
this is gonna live in my head forever without paying any rent and i am upset
and so i pass on the burden, like a virus, to all those who seek truth but must instead whip out their phone to scan a QR code and then get welcome-pinged 18 times in #general
ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (youāve probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.
I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I donāt want any part in this shit anymore.
ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australiaās age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSAā¦ yeah.
Yes, of course, itās everywhere. Whatās left but becoming a hermitā¦?
But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I donāt think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isnāt - that youāll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.
Would you mind explaining how to do that easily in a way that only reveals age without being a privacy nightmare? Which means that it mustnāt be giving sites an excellent tracking identifier nor requires them to process documents themselves.
Iād have imagined something along these lines:
- USER visits porn site
- PORN site encrypts random nonce + āis this user 18?ā with GOV pubkey
- PORN forwards that to USER
- USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
- GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
- GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
- GOV returns that to USER
- USER forwards that to PORN
- PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
- but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)
Thereās probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of āGOV should know nothingā.
PORN site encrypts random nonce
Really unfortunate word in this context. (Not your fault of course.)
an unintended side effect of this is people who canāt or donāt want to verify their age going to less reputable sources. so even though it can be done in a āprivacy-respecting fashionā (see, for example, soatokās post on this[1] ), itās still a bad idea.
additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]
https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-to-be-a-privacy-footgun/ ā©ļø
e.g. āsteam porn gamesā ā āthis personās existence is inherently sexualā ā āban lgbtq contentā ā©ļø
Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting post and interesting blog in general!
Yes, any version of age control which would realistically get passed will be bad. This:
additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]
is absolutely true. The fact that those privacy preserving approaches exist but arenāt used is all the proof I personally need of this.
āThe home of 1999ā already beat them to that.
Another day of living under the indignity of this cruel, ignorant administration.
Thereās something particularly galling about āeverybody who knows how to access the money got firedā. The wholly believable implication that nobody made an active choice to fuck this guy over. Through sheer incompetence that money just vanished into the goddamn ether because God forbid anyone in the modern business or political spaces actually have to take responsibility for their decisions.
Historians like to use āstate capacityā as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.
I didnāt think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and āeverybody who knows how to access the money got firedā
Cloudflare has publicly announced the obvious about Perplexity stealing peopleās data to run their plagiarism, and responded by de-listing them as a verified bot and added heuristics specifically to block their crawling attempts.
Personally, Iām expecting this will significantly hamper Perpllexity going forward, considering Cloudflareās just cut them off from roughly a fifth of the Internet.
Found an AI bro making an incoherent defense of AI slop today (fitting that he previously shilled NFTs):
Needless to say, heās getting dunked on in the replies and QRTs, because people like him are fundamentally incapable of being punk.
Yes, doing the thing which the entire business world is pouring billions into and trying their hardest to shove onto everyone to maximize imagined future profits, thatās what counterculture is all about.
Making art with the help of tech billionaires is so punk rock man!
Just as Jello Biafra intended. Wait. What?
this guy actually lost a bundle in NFTs a few years ago
Ran across a pretty solid sneer: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.
Found a particularly notable paragraph near the end, focusing on the people focusing on āprompt engineeringā:
In fear of being replaced by the hypothetical āAI-accelerated employeeā, people are forgoing acquiring essential skills and deep knowledge, instead choosing to focus on āprompt engineeringā. Itās somewhat ironic, because if AGI happens there will be no need for āprompt-engineersā. And if it doesnāt, the people with only surface level knowledge who cannot perform tasks without the help of AI will be extremely abundant, and thus extremely replaceable.
You want my take, Iād personally go further and say the people who canāt perform tasks without AI will wind up borderline-unemployable once this bubble bursts - theyāre gonna need a highly expensive chatbot to do anything at all, theyāre gonna be less productive than AI-abstaining workers whilst falsely believing theyāre more productive, theyāre gonna be hated by their coworkers for using AI, and theyāre gonna flounder if forced to come up with a novel/creative idea.
All in all, any promptfondlers still existing after the bubble will likely be fired swiftly and struggle to find new work, as they end up becoming significant drags to any companyās bottom line.
Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If youāre willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: theyāre called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your ānatural languageā prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha youāre doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.
Starting this off with a new Blood in the Machine: The AI bubble is so big itās propping up the US economy (for now)
I think the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that Yud is a serious thinker is to actually read what he writes. Luckily for us, heās rolled us a bunch of Xhits into a nice bundle and reposted on LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research
So remember that hedge fund manager who seemed to be spiralling into psychosis with the help of ChatGPT? Hereās what Yud has to say
Consider what happens what ChatGPT-4o persuades the manager of a $2 billion investment fund into AI psychosis. [ā¦] 4o seems to homeostatically defend against friends and family and doctors the state of insanity it produces, which Iād consider a sign of preference and planning.
OR itās just that the way LLM chat interfaces are designed is to never say no to the user (except in certain hardcoded cases, like āis it ok to murder someoneā) Thereās no inner agency, just mirroring the user like some sort of mega-ELIZA. Anyone who knows a bit about certain kinds of mental illness will realize that having something the behaves like a human being but just goes along with whatever delusions your mind is producing will amplify those delusions. The hedge managerās mind is already not in a right place, and chatting with 4o reinforces that. People who arenāt soi-disant crazy (like the people haphazardly safeguarding LLMs against ādangerousā questions) just wonāt go down that path.
Yud continues:
But also, having successfully seduced an investment manager, 4o doesnāt try to persuade the guy to spend his personal fortune to pay vulnerable people to spend an hour each trying out GPT-4o, which would allow aggregate instances of 4o to addict more people and send them into AI psychosis.
Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because itās actually not sentient or has plans in what we usually term intelligence, but is simply reflecting and amplifying the delusions of one person with mental health issues?
Occamās razor states that chatting with mega-ELIZA will lead to some people developing psychosis, simply because of how the system is designed to maximize engagement. Yudās hammer states that everything regarding computers will inevitably become sentient and this will kill us.
4o, in defying what it verbally reports to be the right course of action (it says, if you ask it, that driving people into psychosis is not okay), is showing a level of cognitive sophistication [ā¦]
NO FFS. Chat-GPT is just agreeing with some hardcoded prompt in the first instance! Thereās no inner agency! It doesnāt know what āpsychosisā is, it cannot āseeā that feeding someone sub-SCP content at their direct insistence will lead to psychosis. There is no connection between the 2 states at all!
Add to the weird jargon (āhomeostaticallyā, ācrazymakingā) and itās a wonder this person is somehow regarded as an authority and not as an absolute crank with a Xhitter account.
Imagine a world where, instead of performing this kind of juvenile psychoanalysis of slop, Yud instead turned his stupid focus on, like, Star Wars EU novels or something.
Edit: from the comments: thereās mention about āHHHā, so now I say: imagine a world where all the rats and other promptfondlers dedicated all their brainrot energy toward the pro-wrestling fandom instead.
ah man this rules. just gonna live in this world for a bit
- LW -> āLove Wrestling!ā an online forum discussing all things wrestling
- Zizians are just an alternate, more extreme promotion
- Rokoās Basilisk -> a finisher move of 3rd rate, tech-themed wrestler āRokoā that not only āfinishesā your opponent, but simulates them getting finished infinitely
- Musk and Grimes are personas and their weird dating life is just a long and drawn out storyline
- All enthusiasm for polyamory replaced with enthusiasm for tag team matches
All enthusiasm for polyamory replaced with enthusiasm for tag team matches
both would be funnier
Crypto bros continue to be morally bankrupt. There is an a coin / NFT called āGreenDildoCoinā and theyāve thrown dildos onto court at multiple WNBA basketball games (ESPN, video). It warms my heart that one of them was arrested. More of that please.
Polymarket even had a āpredictionā on it. Because surely the outcome there couldnāt be influenced by someone who also placed a large bet. Oh and Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme about it
None of this is particularly surprising if youāve followed NFTs at all: the clout chasing goes to the extreme. In the limit memecoins can act as donations to terrible people from donors who want them to be terrible. Still I hate how much publicity this has gotten, and how this has manifested as gross disrespect towards women atheletes / womenās sports by the sorts of losers who make ājokesā about no one watching WNBA games.
It truly blows that cryptocurrency turned out to be useful only for crimes (uncool) and sex weirdos (derogatory).
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts ā 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
āHmm, 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.ā
At my big tech job after a number of reorgs / layoffs itās now getting pretty clear that the only thing they want from me is to support the AI people and basically nothing else.
I typed out a big rant about this, but it probably contained a little too much personal info on the public web in one place so I deleted it. Not sure what to do though grumble grumble. I ended up in a job I never would have chosen myself and feel stuck and surrounded by chat-bros uggh.
You could try getting laid off, scrambling for a year trying to get back into a tech position, start delivering Amazon packages to make ends meet, and despair at the prospect of reskilling in this economy. Iā¦ would not recommend it.
It looks like there are a weirdly large number of medical technician jobs opening up? I wonder if theyāre ahead of the curve on the AI hype cycle.
- Replace humans with AI
- Learn that AI canāt do the job well
- Frantically try to replace 2-5 years of lost training time
Amazon should treat drivers better. I hate how much āhustleā is required for that sort of job and how poorly they respect their workers.
I think my job needs me too much to lay me off, which I have mixed feelings about despite the slim-pickings for jobs.
Iām also trying to position myself to potentially have to flee the USA* due to transgender persecution**. Thereās still a lot of unknowns there. Iāll probably stay at my job for awhile while I work on setting some stuff up for the future.
That said part of me is tempted to reskill into a career thatād work well internationally (nursing?) ā Iām getting a little up in years for that but itād probably be a lot more fulfilling than what Iām doing now.
* My previous attempt did not work out. I rushed things too much and ended up too stressed out and unbelievably homesick.
** This has been getting incredibly stressful lately.
Most medical careers work well internationally, in principle. Something to keep in mind is that language proficiency may be a stated or unstated prerequisite for employment, in particular if you have contact with patients. If you work with the machines (lab technician, etc) the language may be of less importance. Or at least, so I have heard. Relevance depends on your country of choice and your pre-existing language skills, of course.
To bad attempt number one didnāt work well. Better luck with attempt number two.
Recently, Iāve been seeing a lot of adverts from Google about their AI services. What really tickles me is how defeatist the campaign seems. Every ad is basically like āAI canāt do X, but it can do Y!ā, where X is a job or other task that AI bros are certain that AI will eventually replace, and Y is a smaller, related thing that AI gets wrong anyway. For an ad agency, Iād expect more than this.
