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 so 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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
someone mentioned weird quasi-lefist SE Gyges in last weekās post, they have a LW account:
Nice to see heās been keeping productive now that he apparently got banned from bsky.
Just in time for TESCREAL (āthe weirdo sf harry potter sex cult that runs AIā) to go viral too.
Technically, we already created a shit machine with the Gastrobot.
Fun aside aside, solid satire all around
I have tried and failed stopping the ensloppification of my company, and I have failed greatly. We now have a new policy that you have to write a justification for making a PR yourself instead of using the chatbot. All the strict checks that were implemented over the years (clear documentation, no more than x files per commit/PR, etc.) are out of the window.
This comes after the push for a fucking AI audit where every employee is supposed to justify why they are not using LLMs for certain tasks. Also some person blew the token limit with some web scraping bullshit last cycle and was lauded for embracing the technology.
Also our CEO has recently begun subtly insinuating heās now heard of fucking AI doom cultists.
I hate everything.
@mii @BlueMonday1984 Can you use a LLM to write these justifications? I mean, they donāt have to be good, no one is reading them after all ā¦
(No, Iām not suggesting to violate any principles of yours, of course)
@mii @cstross I spent decades of my career haranguing management to spend an extra $500 on better computing gear to make their almost six-figure programmers more efficient. But now weāve got management haranguing employees to use this ephemeral technology. I donāt get it.
āHey we got you this thing to make you more productive and weāre gonna watch comparative performance and if youāre falling behind weāre gonna have wordsā would at least make business sense. This is mirror universe shit.
Iām so sorry, Mii. I can only hope you find a job that actually respects you after this one, because I cannot see your current company recovering from this shit.
iām so sorry.
Thatās some bullshit. Much respect for pushing back!
I hope that weāre through the worst of it.
ā¦Iām so sorry, and itās good (???) to know my company still has a few steps on the AI delusion ladder to climb. I guess with the way itās been going I need to mentally prepare for the same thing youāre going through to come in a few months.
Carl Brown (Internet of Bugs) has an excellent video about how to actually achieve AI safety, i.e. actually hold these fuckers accountable for their behavior. If I had a program run for several weeks that hacked into Hugging Face, even accidentally, I would get my ass hauled into a courtroom and thrown in prison. But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness.
When will people finally understand that actions speak louder than words? Follow the money! Follow the incentives! Do you really think that there is any real reason that these companies would give a shit about safety?
Although, in the case of the AI industry, I canāt fully blame people who donāt follow AI news, since the AI industry has highly refined propaganda (inherited from rationalist propaganda, and helped along by the preexisting notions of AI from science fiction).
But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness.
You have to both call it AI and be stupendously rich (or stupendously poor and owe hundreds of billions to investors). If you or I tried running an agent and hacking HFā¦ Believe it or not straight to jail
Iāve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you canāt deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.
If MIRI was Sam Altmanās old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he canāt work in it, isnāt this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
The way I relate to rationalists is itās like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These āspecialized mindsā can also make them off-putting to many people.
I donāt know if Iād consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.
āIām intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, Iām sold!ā
Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, heās an absolute wanker.
If MIRI was Sam Altmanās old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he canāt work in it, isnāt this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
It is very funny how the rhetoric from the rationalist doomers has been one of the main forces propping up the AI industry. If theyāre saying AI will be powerful enough to kill us all, theyāre still saying that AI is powerful! They are so high on their own supply (and the fame and wealth from finally being in the spotlight) that they have not realized just how much they have undermined their own cause.
Then again, perhaps one could say that a doomsday prophet, deep down, actually wants doom to happen.
(Also, the paltry amount of technical work done by MIRI has zero relevance whatsoever to modern day AI.)
you canāt deny their foresight.
skill issue
Their ideas were compelling and you canāt deny their foresight
Ah yes, the AI did almost kill everyone with custom bacteria.
10 seconds in and Iām already thinking about how many ideas for new chemical weapons I could come up with, and I havenāt studied chemistry since high school.
I recall a long time ago when the first āwe are going to hack virusses and the terrorists will kill everybodyā stories came up that actual viroligists already explained that this is not how it works, and this isnāt a risk people should really fear. But science fiction > experts.
E: also terrorists donāt just want to kill everybody, and guns and fertilizer are cheap and easy to use.
and if that didnāt get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance
And was a Bayesian calculating agent that enumerates every possible explanation for the information it takes in and ranks them according to evidence, along with every trajectory through the world that could fulfill its utility function, rather than approximating the high dimensional shape of text
Least surprising news of the week
If MIRI was Sam Altmanās old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he canāt work in it, isnāt this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
Plus Anthropic-the company he quit for being irresponsible-being heavily tied to EA/rationalism. Not exactly the best endorsement
These āspecialized mindsā can also make them off-putting to many people.
The eugenics endorsing also does a pretty good job with that
Is there a place to see this other than getting an account on that site?
There might be some way of bypassing the ATproto sign-in wall, but I donāt know and donāt care enough to figure it out. The content of the locked post is only this screenshot. Ed Zitron asks, āWhat is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists?ā and Coxon replies as quoted above.
Iām not a scientologist but LRH had some great ideas
Oh, Zitrons bluesky, cool
thatās his twitter, but heās also on bsky. coxon might not be
Fuck, when did icons in the WordPress plugin search screen become animated? How do I make them fucking stop? I just want to read what the fucking plugins are so I can maybe find one that works you fucking assholes.
Apparently itās getting weird over at Automattic
$15m for 33 hours. good old fashioned shit show, no bots required.
How do you all cope with the great ensloppification of the net when searching.
I usually limit to before 2022 but thatās increasingly out of date, fiddly, and not always accurate anyway. I just fucking hate getting a couple of paragraphs into something and realising itās all fake.
And human work is buried in tides of garbage. Itās not like it was great the last few years BS (before slop) but itās awful now
Really bumping up against this taking a math class. Itās not just the ick feeling of getting slapped with a Google AI rendition that may or may not be accurate. Thereās at least 4 or 5 other vendors, Chegg and the like, doing the same thing but keeping their explanations behind a login wall. Thatās the entire first page of Google search results now. Of course, simply copying and pasting questions from a textbook is a terrible search strategy. But I still wish I could find a durable math Q&A community that wasnāt slop-adjacent.
Iām glad I studied when hyperphysics was top of the search results. Education now seems miserable.
You can get a local copy of all of hyperphysics
Which math class?
Calculus III, vector calculus
Well, that at least Iām reasonably prepared to answer questions about.
Hereās a free online textbook that may be useful. Iād also recommend grabbing a copy of Mary L. Boasā Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences.
limiting to .edu or ye olde mathematics stack exchange might get you part of the way, in addition to the previous suggestions. Lots of good stuff on old university websites!
Edit: and hyperphysics, as suggested by schnoopy
My non-helpful answer is to resign myself to accepting that whatever I was searching for isnāt that important.
More practically, finding human-written work is the thing that https://marginalia-search.com/ excels at, although you might have to scroll a bit to find a relevant result.
the marginalia dude is a bit of both-sideist, though it couldāve been worse (his second reply in the thread clarifies things a bit). and frankly, most of the alternative search engines developers are worse.
Software programmers: At last we have created the Milkshake Duck from classic internet shitpost āDo Not Create the Milkshake Duckā
Yeah, his clarification means he may be a liberal or anarkiddy rather than, as was my first reaction, a fascist.
This is nice! Iām curious how itās building its index.
Probably not great fot general research, but for finding wholesome authentic stuff like cooking recipes it seems great.
Yeah, pretty much. I think Marginalia is explicitly not trying to be the search engine, but rather to surface some of the more-neglected corners of the internet. So it wonāt function as a complete substitute for another.
Unfortunately some stuff is important lol. Iāll check out marginalia but suspect itāll be hard to find non evil-empire focused stuff
What the fuck is this and why am I getting emails from avaaz about it
I feel like every time I turn around thereās another baffling anti/ai project
So bored of the super intelligence narrative that has been breathlessly accepted by the media in general after a few decades of priming via sci-fi movies and slightly more recently, āCEO saidā reporting.
All these anti-ai or pro-ai-but-in-the-specific-way-i-like (also looking at you Gary Marcus) efforts serve to divide and conquer opposition to current GenAI nonsense.
Also bonus points to these people for co-signing a document with Steve Bannon. I mean if thatās not a red flagā¦
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-doomers-trump-bannon-sanders.html
Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).
And also seemingly made by one of the profusion of post-covid right wing grifters
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/24-dolphin-of-169474003
New Odium Symposium episode, āThe Dolphin Fucking Elders of Atlantisā. We talk about new age crystal healing pioneer Frank Alper and his channeled lectures on Atlantis, Lemuria, Anti-Atlantis, crystals, and the future of humanity.
If you listen anywhere besides Patreon or Spotify, the episode is delayed. Our hosting service went āLLM basedā (?) as I recounted previously and then just stopped working. Weāre switching hosts and will have the episode up as soon as possible.
urgh. which pod host was it?
zencastr. itās the new episode processing that hasnāt been functioning. had some contact with support, didnāt help, currently in the process of getting them to redirect our RSS
oh yeah i remember
I use zencastr for recording (works so far?) and never ever for hosting (I use libsyn for audio and youtube for video)
Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:
Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts arenāt wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is.
This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then āvolunteeringā to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage āToo big to failā t-shirts floating around on ebay.
Fun times!!
Is there a link?
Itās a listserv. dm me if youād like me to ask Paul to add you.
So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to āslow downā āAIā development:
- itās too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all
- the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and thereās no obvious way to fix that
Iāll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.
edit I missed āblatant regulatory captureā
@gerikson My assumption is that they want a regulatory moat to protect āfrontierā models from āopen weightā / AKA cheap models.
Itās just margin protection.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Also they dare not actually let the market price their shares.@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Yeah, the whole idea is to perpetuate the myth that these companies are really close to coming out with a product that people will actually pay to use. A product that people will pay enough to cover its cost. They want to simultaneously make an excuse for why it is taking so long while making gormless investors think it is just around the corner.
The symbiosis between the rabid cultists, the technofedual wannabe-lords, and the get rich quick grifters is so weird to watch.
Also the frontier ālabsā are rapidly running out of money and having to raise more and more insane investment rounds. This is a great way to save face and back away from burning $$$$ on training runs that push the frontier of can a model rearrange some arbitrary coloured squares by 10% next they just need to solve the problem of how to make their customers pay cost+ on inference when theyāve been giving it away at steep discounts for nearly 4 yearsā¦ Easy!
University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:
And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and Iām like, what do you want me to do? I canāt control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didnāt tell me what it was.
The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, whoās the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? Theyāre going to figure out a way.
Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.
Interesting, he usually falls for all their BS.
@nfultz what HF incident? I did search
The huggingface incident: https://awful.systems/post/9312280/12315846
@BioMan Ah, thanks. Iād never seen the abbreviation and didnāt make the connection. That experiment was so badly done.
the next 72 hours are about to get interesting (if this is true)
The lesswrong reactions are hilarious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s76hbGpaMkhiNwbTX/matrice-jacobine-s-shortform?commentId=B2WSExeg8wfgDqZiM
One commenter realizes the truth, but is heavily downvoted:
For anyone who was at all unclear on the subject: Heās not on your side. Heās against you. He wants you to fail. Stop trying to fix him. AI safety is in the same situation as measles prevention, free trade, military readiness, or the prosecution of the remaining Epstein offenders. Trump & co. are against these things, and theyāre not going to be converted just because you tell them again how important these things are.
Sorry bud, if lesswrongers were capable of grasping this they wouldnāt have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropicās half-hearted gestures of placation to doomer-cultists. And of course, many lesswrongers are genuinely very right wing and will thus rationalize justifications for the more centrist lesswrongers to suck up to Trump.
Another comment:
My knowledge of politics is nil, but <steelman about what if trump actually wasnāt trump>
(emp mine)
Rationalist have never run into a right-wing talking point or person they were unwilling to steelman nor a leftist they were unable to screw up steelmanning.
I recall the motte, where the one leftwinger who still tried to debate got the complaint he was just explaining basic leftwing concepts over and over (with good reason).
It was also amusing to see people on r/ssc complain on how leftwing politicians never think about X and Y, while our local Dutch leftwing politicians were talking about those subjects the same week.
if trump says ārokos basiliskā on tape Iām done
Nobody knows statistics like me. My uncle, great professor, great genes, he knew, frequentist is the worst. Now, Bayes-e-an statistics is the best, the biggest statistics. You gotta have priors! You have a belief, a tremendous belief, beautiful belief in your head. And then you learn, you get the data, and frankly its nasty and unfair, fake news.
Do the AI doomers/Yuddites REALLY want their signature policy tied to one of the least competent, least popular presidents in history? I would be thinking very hard about this one if I were part of their crew. āYou know who took p(doom) seriously? TRUMP!ā is, ah, not a marketing coup, to put it mildly
Well they think the world will end before the next election, so they have no other choice.
If only they had not told people to not cry wolf.
They think this is their last chance to save the entire universe forever and ever amen and will take anything that does not lead to extinction and the conversion of the entire universe into something that does not experience happiness. Keep in mind these are the people who thought that the world could suddenly blow up from a new innovation in a lab in 2015 and had psychotic episodes on that basis.
Trump, who does not experience happiness, would love to convert the entire universe into his own property.
Trump could personally fly up and prevent a 100 kilometre long asteroid from falling on the Earth and I still wouldnāt give him a Nobel Prize
I hate hate hate that my niche internet morbid fascination from my college laptop in 2009 is now an oval office power struggle.
Quotes from the president of the united states in the last twelve hours:
āThe only control or guardrails that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENTā
āThere is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centersā
āAmericanism, not effective altruismā (!!!)
āAI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIAā
ā¦I guess the Peter Thiel faction won.
Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?
Letting normies who never learned to spot a mailing-list blowhard and a comment-section troll onto the Internet was a mistake.
Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?
Nah, lesswrongers donāt even have that level of introspection. Plus a lot of them are outright pro-oligarch-technofedual-lord, at least enough so that it outweighs their doomer-cultists allegiance.
I hate to turn this into a screenshot fest but i meanā¦
Theyāre calling out effective altruism BY NAME from the white house. The president is still ranting about this. This is NEW.
āDemocrat-polarizedā is such a word choice. Like, ah yes, it is clearly the Democratās fault the right goes batshit at even a hint global warming is real or at any sort of gun regulation or any social safety net expansion.
You hardly need me to explain this, but the primary thing a conservative seeks to conserve is their own wealth and influence. Of course the deflation of the bubble begins Yudās conversion process
I actually suspect he really does think he is above that and is unlikely to go down the right wing grifter rabbithole. The āonly i can save the worldā fix is so much stronger than any other weaksauce dopamine he could get from that.
It would be hilarious if the AI doomers actually did manage to get Trump to sign some of their ideas into action with executive orders, only for him to reverse course or fail in implementation details, and then a hard tide of anti-Trump sentiment in the next administration to totally undo them.
Sadly it looks like we will only get the more immediate humor of Trump going hard against them.
And unfortunately several democratic party luminaries getting the AI doom brainworms in response
from the looks of it multiple Republicans are also going turncoat on AI and embracing the doom narrative so itās slowly turning into Trump vs The World
I wish the opposition did not have brain worms
I mean thatās if Trump actually does it. Heās pretty good at ignoring what the public wants
Coxon (that Anthropic employee) Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have all joined forces against AI
All I will say is please god let Anthropicās bullshit backfire and have them pass Bernieās bill to completely shut down all AI development it would be so fucking funny
They are going to try to, in rough order of ease and plausiblity:
- provide a legal excuse for them to stop shoveling money into a furnace of training for exponentially diminishing returns that they can no longer pretend about
- attain regulatory capture where their weirdos are in charge of everything
- to thereby make open source AI illegal, only things that go through THEIR gated portals can be used
- Maybe make ownership of the means of computation for ANY reason illegal so you cannot own anything and have to rent everything from them for any purpose because YOU MIGHT BE SUMMONING THE DEMON IN YOUR GARAGE!!!oneoneoen its only a coincidence that this means you have to rent GPUs for games and rent datacenter space from oligarchs rather than buy them or do what you want on your own hardware
Confirmed
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/14/google-deepmind-ai-warnings
The shape of the solution is simple: stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence. Treat compute, the main ingredient in AI training, like fissile material. Track it and restrict access to quantities large enough to improve AIs beyond known-safe levels. More specifically, the AI Futures Projectās āPlan Aā is a credible starting proposal that limits AI harms while allowing fast AI progress to continue to benefit the world. We have real options for verifying compliance with international compute-restriction treaties, without trusting adversaries like China.
