Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
All participants in the Stubsack, including awful.systems regulars and those joining from elsewhere, are reminded that this is not debate club. Anyone tempted by the possibility of debate-club behavior is encouraged to touch your nearest grass immediately. We are here to sneer, not to bicker: This is a place to mock the outside world, not to settle grand matters of ideology, unless the latter is done in an extraordinarily amusing way.
I need to lurk more, feel like I missed some good drama 🍿
If it isn’t on this quick sneer page, you can just look at the posts with a lot of replies, either shows it broke containment, or somebody went full debate mode.
sometimes both
My dad was a bit freaked out by a video version (We’re not ready for super-intelligence)of the “AI 2027” paper, particularly finding two end scenarios a bit spooky: colossus-style cooperating AIs taking over the world, and the oligarch concentration of power one, which i think definitely echoed sci-fi he watched/read as a teen.
In case anyone else finds it useful these are the “Comments as I watch it”, that I compiled for him
Before watching Video Notes:
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AI Only channel with only 3 videos
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Produced By “80000hours”, which is an EA branch (trying to peddle to you the best way to organize 40years * 50 weeks * 40 hours [I love that they assume only 2 weeks of holidays]); which is definitely cult adjacent: https://80000hours.org/about/#what-do-we-do. Mostly appears to be attempting to steer young people to what they believe are “High impact” jobs.
Video Notes:
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The backing paper is a bit of a joke, one “AI 2027”, for reference one of the main authors is very much a “cult member”, Scott Alexander Siskind, author of “Slate Star Codex” and “Astral Codex Ten”.
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Other authors include [AI Futures Project] :
- Daniel Kokotajlo (podcast co-host of siskind, ex open-ai employee, LessWrong/EA regular)
- Thomas Larsen (ex MIRI [Machine Intelligence Research Institute = really really culty], LessWrong/EA regular)
- Eli Lifland (LessWrong/EA regular)
- Romeo Dean (Astra Fellowship recipient = money for AI Safety research, definitely EA sphere)
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A lot of fluff trying to hype up the credentials of the authors.
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AGI does not have a bounded definition.
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They are playing up the China angle to try and drum up jingoistic support.
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Exaggerating Chat GPT-3 success, by merely citing “users”, without mentioning actual revenue, or actual quality.
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Quote:
How do these things interact, well we don’t know but thinking through in detail how it might go is the way to start grappling with that.
-> I think this epitomises the biggest flaw of their movement, they believe that from “first-principles” it’s possible to think hard enough (without needing to confront it to reality) and you can divine the future.
-> You can look up “Prediction Markets”, which is another of their ontological sins.
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I will note that the prediction of “Agents” was not a hard one, since this is what all this circle wants to achieve, and as the video itself points out it’s fantastically incompetent/unreliable.
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Note: This video was made before the release of GPT-5. We don’t know precisely how much more compute altogether GPT-5 truly required, but it’s very incremental changes compared to GPT-4. I think this philosophy of “More training” is why OpenAI is currently trying (half-succeeding half failing) to raise Trillions of dollars to build out data-centers, my prediction is that the AI bubble bursts before these data centers come to fruition.
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Note: The video assumes keeping models secret, but in reality OpenAI would have a very vested interest in displaying capability, even if not making a model available to the public. Also even on consumer models, OpenAI currently loses a bunch of money for every query.
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Note: The video assumes “Singularitarianism”, of ever acceleration in quality of code, and that’s why they keep secret models. I think this hits a compute/energy wall in real life, even if you assume that LLMs are actually useful for making “quality” code. These ideas are not new, and these people would raise alarms about it with or without current LLM tech.
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Specific threats of “Bio-weapon”, which a priori can not really be achieved without experimentation, and while “automated” labs half exis, they still require a lot of human involvement/resources. Technically grad students could also make deadly bioweapons, but no one is being alarmist about them.
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Note: “Agent 2” Continuous Online learning is gobbledygook, that isn’t how ML, even today works. At some point there are very diminishing returns, and it’s a complete waste of time/energy to continue training a specific model, a qualitative difference would be achieved with a different model. I suspect this sneakily displays “Singularitarianism” dogma.
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Quote:
Hack into other servers Install a copy of itself Evade detection
-> This is just science-fiction, in the real world these models require specialized hardware to be run at any effective speed, this would be extremely unlikely to evade detection. Also this treats the model as a single entity with single goals, when in reality any time it’s “run” is effectively a new instance.
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Note: This subculture loves the concept of “science in secrecy”, which features a lot in the writings of Elizer Yudkowsky. Which is cultish both in keeping their own deeds “in a veil of secrecy”, and helpful here when making a prophecy/conspiracy theory, by making the claim hard to disprove specifically (it’s happening in secret!)
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Note: Even today Chain-of-thought is not that reliable at explaining why a bot gives a particular answer. It’s more analog to guiding “search”, rather than true thought as in humans anyway. Them using “Alien-Language” would not be that different.
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Agent 3, magically fast-and-cheap, assuming there are now minimum energy requirements. Then you can magically run 200,000 copies of. magically equivalent to 50,000 humans sped up by 30x. (The magic is “explained” in the paper by big assumptions, and just equating essentially how fast you can talk with the quality of talking, which given the length of their typical blog posts is actually quite funny)
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Note: “Alignment” was the core mission of MIRI/Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Note: Equating Power and Intelligence a lot (not in this video, but in general being suspiciously racist/eugenicist about it), ignoring the material constraints of actual power [echo: Again the epitomical sin of “If you just think hard enough”]
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Note: Also assuming that trillions of dollars of growth can actually happen, simultaneously with millions losing their jobs.
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I am betting that the “There is another” part of the video is probably deliberately echoing Colossus.
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The video casually assumes that the only limits to practical fusion and nanotech just intelligence (instead of potential dead-ends, actually the nanotech part is a particular fancy of theirs, you can lookup “diamondoid bacteria” on LessWrong if you want a laugh)
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The two outcomes at the end of the video are literally robo-heaven and robo-hell, and if you just follow our teachings (in this case slow-downs on AI) you can get to robo-heaven. You will notice they don’t imagine/advocate for a future with no massive AI integration into society, they want their robo-heaven.
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Quote:
None of the experts are disagreeing about a wild future.
-> I would say specifically some of them are suggesting that AGI soon is implausible quite strongly. I think many would agree that right now the future looks dire with or without super-AI, or even regular AI.
Takeaway section:
Yeah this really is a cult recruitment video essentially.
We’re almost at the end of 2025 and agents don’t fucking exist the way they predicted. Literally 0% acc so far. Ai 2027 agmi.
^image of Daniel K who already updated his rapture prophecy to 2029 because he’s a mark
I stumbled onto that vid a while back, watched the first minute or so, lol’ed at the glazing of kokotajlo, and stopped the vid. I did think about posting it here to be torn apart but forgot about it. I watched a little bit further and got “they chose to write this as a narrative” of course they fucking did. It’s their one thing. Write a shitty 10k word story that amounts to some combination of “really makes you think” and “big if true”.
Here’s a story: Once upon a time there was a world. In it people were sad. Then one day swlabr was elected supreme benevolent ruler and then nobody was sad again :) the end. Wow make u think. Many experts agree
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Haven’t seen this skeet posted here. Skeet:
It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4
who’s the basilisk now?
Last week, we learned that area transphobe Sabine Hossenfelder is using her arXiv-posting privileges to shill Eric Weinstein’s bullshit. I have poked around the places where I’d expect to find technical discussion of a physics preprint, and I’ve come up with nothing. The Stubsack thread, as superficial as it was, has been the most substantive conversation about her post’s actual content.
Wrong link. this points to the NeurIPS post for this week.
Good catch; thanks. I think I had too many awful.system tabs open at once.
today in I fucking called it fedora aka mostly red hat has decided to allow slop code in a way that violates even their utterly mid stated principles around the tech
if you’re downstream from any fedora packages (and I don’t know the scope of this policy so it might be safe to consider anything owned by red hat in general to be tainted — yes I realize most of us are downstream from a bunch of red hat shit) it might be time to evaluate an alternative if available
among others, so many systemd and libvirt things :|
fortunately a long-ish tail on a lot of that, but fucking still
deleted by creator
New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. […] 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
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31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
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20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
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Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content
And yet the BBC still has a Programme Director for “Generative AI” who gets trotted out to say “We want these tools to succeed”. No, we don’t, you blithering bellend.
@blakestacey @BlueMonday1984 I also want my Perpetual Motion Machine and Circle-Squaring Algorithm to succeed, but what are ya gonna do? 🤷♀️
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In lighter news, this anti-LLM rhyme made me chuckle:
I will not talk with a chatbot
I do not want it while I shopI do not want it on Windows X-box
I do not want it in FirefoxI do not want it in my house
I do not want it on my mouse
I do not want it here or there
I do not want it anywhere.I do not want AI and Spam
I do not want them Sam-Alt-ManI suppose it is an iambic tetrameter, but the third and fourth lines do not fit.
That’s how you know a human wrote it
You don’t recognize it?
No, I don’t.
one of today’s lucky 10,000
very short children’s book, with intentionally atypical rhythm, by Dr Seuss
written in call-response style in dialogue between two characters (unnamed and Sam-I-Am)
https://www.readstoriesforkids.com/Green-Eggs-and-Ham-text.html - text without images, but best enjoyed with the images
the full book on The Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/greeneggsham0000unse/
dr seuss - green eggs & ham
deleted by creator
Another attempt to platform fascists has cropped up in FOSS, and Drew DeVault’s talked all about it. Featuring our good friend Curtis Yarvin.
of course the organization I know primarily for platforming fascists and astroturfing on YouTube was secretly an even worse grift and somehow tied in with Yarvin, why wouldn’t it be
given that Rossmann’s at the head of this thing too, I’m starting to regret not taking GrapheneOS (who, notably, were also a target for this grift) seriously when they said Rossmann’s involved in a bunch of terrible shit. the right to repair deserves a better figurehead.
fuckin pisses me off, given his clippy campaign is helping move pivot shirts
sigh
I WILL NOT CHANGE, CLIPPY SUCKED FIRST
Damn right. He needs to quit, he’s the one who sucks.
The fash don’t have magic doodoo fingers that obligate decent people to surrender every time they touch something we like, and we should never concede as if they do.
hadn’t been aware that rossman’s into dodgy stuff (knew fairly little about him outside of some repair stuff on his channel), but ugh
also clicking through into FUTO’s projects and it’s all a bit gravitating around a point, “built on polycentric”. so I wonder what that means?
Polycentric is an open-source, distributed social network that lets you publish content to multiple servers.
already at “I’m interested” because it’s interesting to see what other work happens in this space.
and then very next sentence we get to
If you’re censored on one server, your content remains accessible from other servers
ah. I see. the “opt-out moderation” is also telling - how does it work? who knows! it’s got a paragraph under introduction but seems to not be mentioned anywhere else in the docs.
extra frustrating to see because the projects these fucks are taking on (like the open cast thing) are items that sorely need stronger options in the open space. but not like this. never like this.
Ah, it’s another Urbit isn’t it?
certainly has more than a bit of that urbit coiner Sovereign Individual shit going on yeah
I tried looking around a bit to see if I could find any info about contributors there, and for the most part none of them really seem to have much internet fingerprint at all. did find one person with a moderately extensive set of personal repo/project commits spanning back a few years, spanning long enough so as to find that they were doing a BSc/Hons/something circa 2018. which isn’t concrete but does strongly hint at a current age of mid 20s to mid 30s. “get 'em while they’re young and you can poison their brains early!” - the bayfucker mantra
god damn it. i guess the name of the founder might have been a hint, only one letter away from our favorite roman saluter.
i use immich, one of the projects they seem to have actually funded in a big way. it’s a very good selfhosted replacement for google photos. at least the license is actually open source, as opposed to grayjay, so here’s hoping it has a future in case the fascists try to fuck with it.
i guess the problem though isn’t with the funding and/or control of individual projects, it’s with the long-term influence in the foss community they seem to be after.
i had a feeling about FUTO because of rossmann’s involvement. became leery of him after this youtube bullshit from 2018:
Let’s discuss why journalists are afraid of Elon Musk right now(and why they deserve to be)
Elon Musk wants to come up with a way to rate the credibility and accuracy of media organizations & individual journalists. This blatant misrepresentation of his words, given in the middle of this conversation, is a PERFECT example of WHY this is so badly needed in modern society.
I’m not a fan of Tesla for being, in many ways, the “Apple of cars.” That being said, whether or not I like Tesla when it comes to a repair standpoint has nothing to do with the hate being thrown at Elon for something he never meant in the words he said, and is entirely separate from my agreement with him on the idea of a media credibility rating platform.
This is not a sneer so much as a sneer request; anyone know of any good articles written about the total hypocrisy of the Free Speech brigade since the inauguration? By far the most anti-speech environment in decades and most of them are still just whining about pronouns on campus or whatever.
(Yes; FIRE has passed this very basic test and has occasionally switched topics from whining about “leftist professors” to saying stuff like “it’s not great that we’re deporting people for writing articles for their school paper about how genocide is bad”. Literally everyone else is a hypocrite)
Biggest examples I know of is Shaun’s 4-hour review of the “War on Science” book, and the backlash to the Riyadh Comedy Festival (the whole drama here was hilarious, and not because of the comedy).
Here’s a written review of that book which covers its problems fairly well, I think. (Which indirectly reminded me that last year I wrote a blog post about how Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense wasn’t such hot stuff. I guess I hadn’t shared that here before.)
I also found this Reddit comment that lays into Sokal and Bricmont’s treatment of Lacan, but not having read Lacan, I can’t vouch for it:
I’ll just note the sneerability of how Sokal contributed to sex pest Krauss’ War on Science book, right alongside Jordan Peterson, who has said plenty of things as batshit as Sokal accused Lacan of being.
TechDirt has posts about this quite often.
The Framework thread caused by the company’s fash turn is still going even after eight full days.
Lotta lowlights to pick from, but the guy openly praising DHH for driving Basecamp straight off a cliff is particularly sneer-worthy:
“Apolitical” is peak red flag these days, eh?
Definitely, it’s just code for I’m ok with nazis at this point.
Yeah definitely synonymous with the whole “neutrality sides with the oppressor” thing
More “red hat” than “red flag”, but you’re still dead-on.
I hope it’s still going after 8 full years, if the company’s even still in business. Trust is only built back with accountability.
“Not Winston Smith?” So, O’Brien?
For something lighter, here’s an AI bro getting wowed by the shittiest “video game” I’ve ever seen (trust me, the screenshot doesn’t do it justice):
In lieu of sneering this shit, I’d like to argue that arts education should become mandatory for all students post-bubble, regardless of their profession. STEM, humanities, tech, doesn’t matter - give them four years of art so they don’t turn out like this guy.
https://xcancel.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1980035057067884670
hmm yes, this will surely replace wikipedia.
Trump freed Binance fraudster, SBF pardon futures mooning rn
Does anyone else get flashbacks to that episode of the Powerpuff girls where the villain takes over the city and makes a law that “crime is now legal”? Because that keeps popping into my head for some reason.
Google seems to have turned off the -ai in search on iPhone (Safari browser)and overrides it to return an AI-generated result now. Anyone got a fucking workaround on this bc I do not want to see that shit
The obvious workaround is to stop using google search.
Yes, but I wouldn’t say that to someone I want to still like me after.
I use Mullvad Leta, which is basically a front-end for the Google (and Brave) API. It used to be exclusive to Mullvad customers but I believe it’s available to everyone now.
It doesn’t support image search, but so far this has been consistently good enough for me.
NeurIPS is one of the big conferences for machine learning. Having your work accepted there is purportedly equivalent to getting a paper published in a top-notch journal in physics (a field that holds big conferences but treats journals as more the venues of record). Today I learned that NeurIPS endorses peer reviewers asking questions to chatbots during the review process. On their FAQ page for reviewers, they include the question
I often use LLMs to help me understand concepts and draft my writing. Can I use LLMs during the review process?
And their response is not shut the fuck up, the worms have reached your brain and we will have to operate. You know, the bare minimum that any decent person would ask for.
You can use resources (e.g. publications on Google Scholar, Wikipedia articles, interactions with LLMs and/or human experts without sharing the paper submissions) to enhance your understanding of certain concepts and to check the grammaticality and phrasing of your written review. Please exercise caution in these cases so you do not accidentally leak confidential information in the process.
“Yeah, go ahead, ask ‘Grok is this true’, but pretty please don’t use the exact words from the paper you are reviewing. We are confident that the same people who turn to a machine to paraphrase their own writing will do so by hand first this time.”
Please remember that you are responsible for the quality and accuracy of your submitted review regardless of any tools, resources, or other help you used to construct the final review.
“Having positioned yourself at the outlet pipe of the bullshit fountain and opened your mouth, please imbibe responsibly.”
Far be it for me to suggest that NeurIPS taking an actually ethical stance about bullshit-fountain technology would call into question the presentations being made there and thus imperil their funding stream. But, I mean, if the shoe fits…
I did not think anything could make me sympathetic to the authors who put 0.1pt white text in their papers so that any reviewer lazy enough to use an LLM would get prompt injected, but here we are.
Highlight the space just after the abstract of my own most recent arXiv preprint for a surprise. :-)
