Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems
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.)
I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.
It's something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I'm not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it's the websites themselves.)
Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.
On a product page I then saw:
This was very strange... because that makes no sense at all. "Gefühlt" is a form (participle) of the verb "fühlen", which means "to feel". It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.
So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense "to feel" as "felt". And of course "felt" can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called "Filz"), so it's a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they're in.
And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.
And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It's unbearable. At least there's a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!
Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people's faces?
::: spoiler Click here if you want a horribly bad translation in your face :::
From Reddit
This really gets on my nerves too. They probably came up with the idea that they could increase time spent on their platforms and thus revenue by providing more content in their users' native languages (especially non-English). Simply forcing it on everyone, without giving their users a choice, was probably the cheapest way to implement it. Even if this annoys most of their user base, it makes their investors happy, I guess, at least over the short term. If this bubble has shown us anything, it is that investors hardly care whether a feature is desirable from the users' point of view or not.
if it's opt-out, it also keeps use of the shitty ai dubbing high thus making it an artficial use case. it's like with gemini counting every google search as single use of it
Considering how many are Trump bros, they probably consider getting consent to be Cuck Shit^tm^ and treat hearing anything but English as sufficient grounds to call ICE.
I found out about that too when I arrived at Reddit and it was translated to Swedish automatically.
Yes, right, Reddit too! Forgot that one. When I visit there I use alternative Reddit front-ends now which luckily spare me from this.
btw I noticed that Etsy is not actually in SV, so the problem is bigger than that.
Ah, im not the only one, yes very annoying. I wonder if there isn't also a setting they can ask the browsers about the users preferred language usage. Like how you can change languages on a windows install and some installers/etc follow that preferred language.
An underappreciated 8th-season Star Trek: TNG episode where Data tries to get closer to humanity by creating an innovative new metamaterial out of memories of past emotions
Ooooh that would explain a similarly weird interaction I had on a ticket-selling website, buying a streaming ticket to a live show for the German retro game discussion podcast Stay Forever: they translated the title of the event as “Bleib für immer am Leben”, guess they named it “Stay Forever Live”? No way to know for sure, of course.
aliexpress did that since forever but you can just set display language once and you're done. these ai-dubs are probably worst so far but can be turned off by uploader (it's opt-out) (for now)
Yud:
And suddenly I realized that I never want to hear a Rationalist say the words "mating pool".
(I fired up xcancel to see if any of the usual suspects were saying anything eminently sneerable. Yudkowsky is re-xitting Hanania and some random guy who believes in g. Maybe he should see if the Pioneer Fund will bankroll publicity for his new book....)
Good news for women, less risk of the pool needing to be drained because someone crapped in it again.
Can’t remove them if they were never in it.
Wasn't the "problem" that there's too many men in the mating pool and women are "alphamaxxing" or whatever the fuck to get the highest quality dick? Shouldn't this be a good thing for incels like Hanania.
probably on par with the other stuff you might see at a rationalist poly compound
rsyslog goes "AI first", for what reason? no one knows.
Opening ipython greeted me with this: "Tip: IPython 9.0+ has hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions."
I wish open source projects would stop doing this.
what
Thanks for the "from now on stay away from this forever" warning. Reading that blog post is almost surreal ("how AI is shaping the future of logging"), I have to remind myself it's a syslog daemon.
I would've stan'd syslog-ng but they've also been pulling some fuckery with docs again lately that's making me anxious, so I'm very :|||||
Potential hot take: AI is gonna kill open source
Between sucking up a lot of funding that would otherwise go to FOSS projects, DDOSing FOSS infrastructure through mass scraping, and undermining FOSS licenses through mass code theft, the bubble has done plenty of damage to the FOSS movement - damage I'm not sure it can recover from.
that and deluge of fake bug reports
The deluge of fake bug reports is definitely something I should have noted as well, since that directly damages FOSS' capacity to find and fix bugs.
Baldur Bjanason has predicted that FOSS is at risk of being hit by "a vicious cycle leading to collapse", and security is a major part of his hypothesised cycle:
yeah but have you considered how much it's worth that gramma can vibecode a todo app in seconds now???
Don't know if LLMs will kill OSS, but they sure are a kick-in-the-dick
I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.
It's extremely annoying everywhere. GitHub's updates were about AI for so fucking long that I stopped reading them, which means I now miss actually useful stuff until someone informs me of it months later.
For example, did you know GitHub Actions now has really good free ARM runners? It's amazing! I love it! Shame GitHub only bother's to tell me about their revolutionary features of "please spam me with useless PRs" and... make a pong game? What? Why would I want this?
ugh, why would i want a summary of a pull request? the whole point of reviewing a pull request is checking the details to make sure it's not missing something important or doing something wrong.
thescream.tiff
the announcement post is obviously LLM-generated as well
My favorite static site generator, Marmite, is now making Special Accomodations for AI bros by making a context file? The dev is also making all of his PRs with Claude.
Anyone have any recommendations for replacements?
Vegemite?
I'll get my coat.
I don't know static site generators, but I took a look at your site and the text doesn't render! The font file appears to not be good. Also sorry for having to move to another software.
I'm working on it! Hopefully it'll be legible sometime this week.
found on reddit. posted without further comment
Shot-in-the-dark prediction here - the Xbox graphics team probably won't be filling those positions any time soon.
As a sidenote, part of me expects more such cases to crop up in the following months, simply because the widespread layoffs and enshittification of the entire tech industry is gonna wipe out everyone who cares about quality.
Sanders why https://gizmodo.com/bernie-sanders-reveals-the-ai-doomsday-scenario-that-worries-top-experts-2000628611
taking a wild guess it's Yudkowsky. "very knowledgeable people" and "many/most experts" is staying on my AI apocalypse bingo sheet.
even among people critical of AI (who don't otherwise talk about it that much), the AI apocalypse angle seems really common and it's frustrating to see it normalized everywhere. though I think I'm more nitpicking than anything because it's not usually their most important issue, and maybe it's useful as a wedge issue just to bring attention to other criticisms about AI? I'm not really familiar with Bernie Sanders' takes on AI or how other politicians talk about this. I don't know if that makes sense, I'm very tired
Not surprised. Making Hype and Criti-hype the two poles of the public debate has been effective in corralling people who get that there is something wrong with the "AI" into Criti-hype. And politicians needs to be generalists so the trap is easy to spring.
Still, always a pity when people who should know better fall into it.
404media posted an article absolutely dunking on the idea of pivoting to AI, as one does:
Fucking ghastly equivocation. Not just between "LLMs" and "machine learning", but between opening a website that has a chatbot icon I never click and actually wasting my time asking questions to the slop machine.
This is pure speculation, but I suspect machine learning as a field is going to tank in funding and get its name dragged through the mud by the popping of the bubble, chiefly due to its (current) near-inability to separate itself from AI as a concept.
It’s distressingly pervasive: autocorrect, speech recognition (not just in voice assistants, in accessibility tools), image correction in mobile cameras, so many things that are on by default and “helpful”
Apparently, for some corporate customers, Outlook has automatically turned on AI summaries as a sidebar in the preview pane for inbox messages. No, nobody I've talked to finds this at all helpful.
A thing I recently noticed: instead of showing the messages themselves, the MS Teams application on my work phone shows obviously AI generated summaries of messages in the notification tray. And by "summaries" I mean third person paraphrasings that are longer than the original messages and get truncated anyway.
"Worse than useless" would be an understatement.
It feels like gang initiation for insufferable dorks
Here's an example of normal people using Bayes correctly (rationally assigning probabilities and acting on them) while rats Just Don't Get Why Normies Don't Freak Out:
(Dude then goes on to try to game-theorize this, I didn't bother to poke holes in it)
The thing is, genocides have happened, and people around the world are perfectly happy to advocate for it in diverse situations. Probability wise, the risk of genocide somewhere is very close to 1, while the risk of "omnicide" is much closer to zero. If you want to advocate for eliminating something, working to eliminating the risk of genocide is much more rational than working to eliminate the risk of everyone dying.
At least on commenter gets it:
(source)
Edit never read the comments (again). The commenter referenced above obviously didn't feel like a pithy one liner adhered to the LW ethos, and instead added an addendum wondering why people were more upset about police brutality killing people than traffic fatalities. Nice "save", dipshit.
Hmm, should I be more worried and outraged about genocides that are happening at this very moment, or some imaginary scifi scenario dreamed up by people who really like drawing charts?
One of the ways the rationalists try to rebut this is through the idiotic dust specks argument. Deep down, they want to smuggle in the argument that their fanciful scenarios are actually far more important than real life issues, because what if their scenarios are just so bad that their weight overcomes the low probability that they occur?
(I don't know much philosophy, so I am curious about philosophical counterarguments to this. Mathematically, I can say that the more they add scifi nonsense to their scenarios, the more that reduces the probability that they occur.)
reverse dust specks: how many LWers would we need to permanently deprive of access to internet to see rationalist discourse dying out?
What’s your P(that question has been asked at a US three letter agency)
it either was, or wasn't, so 50%
You know, I hadn't actually connected the dots before, but the dust speck argument is basically yet another ostensibly-secular reformulation of Pascal's wager. Only instead of Heaven being infinitely good if you convert there's some infinitely bad thing that happens if you don't do whatever Eliezer asks of you.
Yes, this is why people think that. This is a normal thought to think others have.
Why do these guys all sound like deathnote, but stupid?
because they cribbed their ideas from deathnote, and they're stupid
Here's my unified theory of human psychology, based on the assumption most people believe in the Tooth Fairy and absolutely no other unstated bizarre and incorrect assumptions no siree!
I mean if you want to be exceedingly generous (I sadly have my moments), this is actually remarkably close to the "intentional acts" and "shit happens" distinction, in a perverse Rationalist way. ^^
Thats fair, if you want to be generous, if you are not going to be Id say there are still conceptually large differences between the quote and "shit happens". But yes, you are right. If only they had listened to Scott when he said "talk less like robots"
Remember last week when that study on AI's impact on development speed dropped?
A lot of peeps take away on this little graphic was "see, impacts of AI on sw development are a net negative!" I think the real take away is that METR, the AI safety group running the study, is a motley collection of deeply unserious clowns pretending to do science and their experimental set up is garbage.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-168077291
"First, I don’t like calling this study an “RCT.” There is no control group! There are 16 people and they receive both treatments. We’re supposed to believe that the “treated units” here are the coding assignments. We’ll see in a second that this characterization isn’t so simple."
(I am once again shilling Ben Recht's substack. )
When you look at METR's web site and review the credentials of its staff, you find that almost none of them has any sort of academic research background. No doctorates as far as I can tell, and lots of rationalist junk affiliations.
oh yeah that was obvious when you see who they are and what they do. also, one of the large opensource projects was the lesswrong site lololol
i'm surprised it's as well constructed a study as it is even given that
While I also fully expect the conclusion to check out, it's also worth acknowledging that the actual goal for these systems isn't to supplement skilled developers who can operate effectively without them, it's to replace those developers either with the LLM tools themselves or with cheaper and worse developers who rely on the LLM tools more.
True. They aren't building city sized data centers and offering people 9 figure salaries for no reason. They are trying to front load the cost of paying for labour for the rest of time.
OpenAI claims that their AI can get a gold medal on the International Mathematical Olympiad. The public models still do poorly even after spending hundreds of dollars in computing costs, but we've got a super secret scary internal model! No, you cannot see it, it lives in Canada, but we're gonna release it in a few months, along with GPT5 and Half-Life 3. The solutions are also written in an atrociously unreadable manner, which just shows how our model is so advanced and experimental, and definitely not to let a generous grader give a high score. (It would be real interesting if OpenAI had a tool that could rewrite something with better grammar, hmmm....) I definitely trust OpenAI's major announcements here, they haven't lied about anything involving math before and certainly wouldn't have every incentive in the world to continue lying!
It does feel a little unfortunate that some critics like Gary Marcus are somewhat taking OpenAI's claims at face value, when in my opinion, the entire problem is that nobody can independently verify any of their claims. If a tobacco company released a study about the effects of smoking on lung cancer and neglected to provide any experimental methodology, my main concern would not be the results of that study.
Edit: A really funny observation that I just thought of: in the OpenAI guy's thread, he talks about how former IMO medalists graded the solutions in message #6 (presumably to show that they were graded impartially), but then in message #11 he is proud to have many past IMO participants working at OpenAI. Hope nobody puts two and two together!
This result has me flummoxed frankly. I was expecting Google to get a gold medal this year since last year they won a silver and were a point away from gold. In fact, Google did announce after OAI that they had won gold.
But the OAI claim is that they have some secret sauce that allowed a “pure” llm to win gold and that the approach is totally generic- no search or tools like verifiers required. Big if true but ofc no one else is allowed to gaze at the mystery machine. It is hard for me to take them seriously given their sketchy history, yet the claim as stated has me shooketh.
Also funny aside, the guy who lead the project was poached by the zucc. So he’s walking out the front door with the crown jewels lmaou.
The curl Bug Bounty is getting flooded with slop, and the security team is prepared to do something drastic to stop it. Going by this specific quote, reporters falling for the hype is a major issue:
Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”. Oh but for sure it’s broken and you are expert enough to know? One of the examples the reporter kept replying with how a strcpy() could be unsafe and the curl devs were kindly explaining that yes in general that function has potential for issues but their usage was not such a case. Reporter just repeats without paying attention. Insanity.
I love working in systems writing C and assembly but I’ve grown many gray hairs over the years being yelled at that “C is the worst” or “lol memory bug” or the classic “this thing isn’t working perfectly for me so it must have been written in C and we need to rewrite it entirely in (alpha) language which is for sure better than the collective centuries of expertise in C existing now”. These LLMs sure do amplify these obnoxious voices because now the fancy chatbot says so.
At that point, I feel the team would be justified in telling these slop-porters to go fuck themselves and closing the report - they've made it crystal clear they're beyond saving.
(And on a wider note, I suspect the security team is gonna be a lot less willing to give benefit of the doubt going forward, considering the slop-porters are actively punishing them for doing so)
It’s unfortunate that the bug bounty payout removal is probably the best immediate remedy for some filtering but with curl being everywhere resume padders are still going to rush to generate slop reports or patches. I hope they are more fast and direct with communication as well. Their current patience and politeness is admirable.
Sex pest billionaire Travis Kalanick says AI is great for more than just vibe coding. It's also great for vibe physics.
My guess is that vibe-physics involves bruteforcing a problem until you find a solution. That method sorta works, but is wholly inefficient and rarely robust/general enough to be useful.
Nah, he's just talking to an LLM.
And I don't think you can brute force physics in general, having to experimentally confirm or disprove every random-ass intermediary hypothesis the brute force generator comes up with seems like quite the bottle neck.
For sure. There's an infinite amount of ways to get things wrong in math and physics. Without a fundamental understanding, all they can do is prompt-fondle and roll dice.
They are not even rolling the dice. The bot is just humoring them, it apparently just defaults to eventually going 'you are close to the edge of what is, known, well done keep going'.
If infinite monkeys with typewriters can compose Shakespeare, then infinite monkeys with slop machines can produce Einstein (but you need to pump in infinite amounts of money first into my CodeMonkeyfy startup, just in case).
Evan Urquhart:
https://xcancel.com/jasonlk/status/1946069562723897802
[...]
Saw this, was going to post this a literal minute before you did but stared into this abyss a little too long.
Here's what the abyss revealed:
Can't wait to see this guy just use a different but same tool to delete his shit again, and learn nothing
I'd be lying if I said the randomly generated narrative the LLM is stringing together isn't hilarious.
"I panicked and ran database commands without permission."
"I destroyed all production data."
"You immediately said 'No', ''Stop', 'You didn't even ask.'"
"But it was already too late."
Thread on this lying bullshit
I feel like this response is still falling for the trick on some level. Of course it's going to "act contrite" and talk about how it "panicked" because it was trained on human conversations and while that no doubt included a lot of Supernatural fanfic the reinforcement learning process is going to focus on the patterns of a helpful asistant rather than a barely-caged demon. That's the role it's trying to play and the work it's cribbing the script from includes a whole lot of shitposts about solving problems with "rm -rf /"
also great: the promptfondlers unrapidly rediscovering why source control management exists and is desired
their story is so incoherent, i can't even tell if there was a database to begin with
So recently (two weeks ago), I noticed Gary Marcus made a lesswrong account to directly engage with the rationalists. I noted it in a previous stubsack thread
And sure enough, he has started talking about P(Doom). I hate being right. To be more than fair to him, he is addressing the scenario of Elon Musk or someone similar pulling off something catastrophic by placing too much trust in LLMs shoved into something critical. But he really should know better by now that using their lingo and their crit-hype terminology strengthens them.
We live in a world where the US vice president admits to reading siskind AI fan fiction, so that ship has probably sailed.
It has but we dont have to make it worse, we can create a small village that resists. Like the one small village in Gaul that resisted the Roman occupation.
I appreciate the reference having read half a dozen Astérix albums in the last few days. I just hope our Alesia has yet to come.
Yeah, that metaphor fits my feeling. And to extend the metaphor, I thought Gary Marcus was, if not a member of the village, at least an ally, but he doesn't seem to actually realize the battle lines. Like maybe to him hating on LLMs is just another way of pushing symbolic AI?
Could also just be environment, pretty hard to stay on one site staunchly if half the people around you are then people your radically oppose.
Also wonder about the only game in town factor
He knows the connectionist have basically won (insofar as you can construe competing scientific theories and engineering paradigms as winning or losing... which is kind of a bad framing), so that is why he pushing the "neurosymbolic" angle so hard.
(And I do think Gary Marcus is right that the neurosymbolic approaches has been neglected by the big LLM companies because they are narrower and you can't "guarantee" success just by dumping a lot of compute on them, you need actual domain expertise to do the symbolic half.)
My new video about the anti-design of the tech industry where I talk about this little passage from an ACM article that set me off when I found it a few years back.
In short, before software started eating all the stuff "design" meant something. It described a process of finding the best way to satisfy a purpose. It was a response to the purpose.
The tech industry takes computation as being an immutable means and finds purposes it may satisfy. The purpose is a response to the tech.
p.s. sorry to spam. :)
vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ollyMSWSWOY pod: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/8ffce464/tech-as-anti-design
threads bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3ltwles4hkk2t masto: https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/114852024025529148
New high-strength sneer from Matthew Hughes: The Biggest Insult, targeting "The Unspeakable Contempt At The Heart of Generative AI"
Found a good security-related sneer in response to a low-skill exploit in Google Gemini (tl;dr: "send Gemini a prompt in white-on-white/0px text"):
I've got time, so I'll fire off a sidenote:
In the immediate term, this bubble's gonna be a goldmine of exploits - chatbots/LLMs are practically impossible to secure in any real way, and will likely be the most vulnerable part of any cybersecurity system under most circumstances. A human can resist being socially engineered, but these chatbots can't really resist being jailbroken.
In the longer term, the one-two punch of vibe-coded programs proliferating in the wild (featuring easy-to-find and easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities) and the large scale brain drain/loss of expertise in the tech industry (from juniors failing to gain experience thanks to using LLMs and seniors getting laid off/retiring) will likely set back cybersecurity significantly, making crackers and cybercriminals' jobs a lot easier for at least a few years.
https://www.profgalloway.com/ice-age/ Good post until I hit the below:
Having a hard time imagining 300 but AI myself, Scott. Could we like, not shoehorn AI into every other discussion?
Iirc Galloway was a pro cryptocurrency guy. So this tracks
E: imagine if the 3d printer people had the hype machine behind them like this. 'China better watch out, soon all manufacturing of products will be done by people at home'. Meanwhile China: [Laughs in 大跃进].
I think that 3D printing never picked up, because it's one of those things that empower the people, i.e. to repair stuff or build their own things, so the number of opportunities to grift seems to be smaller (although I'm probably underestimating it).
Most of the recently hyped technologies had goals that were exact opposites of empowering the masses.
I think that is it tbh. There was no big centralized profit, so no need to hype it up.
Tangential: I’ve heard that there are 3D printer people that print junk and sell them. This would not be much of a problem if they didn’t pollute the spaces they operate in. The example I’ve heard of is artist alleys at conventions- a 3D printer person will set up a stall and sell plastic models of dragons or pokemon or whatever. Everything is terrible!
So, essentially AI slop, but with more microplastics. Given the 3D printer bros are much more limited in their ability to pollute their spaces (they have to pay for filament/resin, they're physically limited in where they can pollute, and they produce slop much slower than an LLM), they're hopefully easier to deal with.
I liked his stuff on wework back in the day. Funny how he could see one tech grift really clearly and fall for another. Then again, WeWork is in the black these days. Anyway I think Galloway pivoted (apologies) to Mens Rights lately; and he also gave some money to UCLA Extension (ie not the main campus) which is a bit hard to interpret.
yeah lol ez just 3dprint polypropylene polymerization reactor. what the fuck is hastelloy?
Yeah, but we never got that massive hype cycle for 3d printers. Which in a way is a bit odd, as it could have happend. Nanomachine! Star trek replicators! (Getting a bit offtopic from Galloway being a cryptobro).
I can imagine it clear... a chart showing minimum feature size decreasing over time (using cherry picked data points) with a dotted line projection of when 3d printers would get down nanotech scale. 3d printer related companies would warn of dangers of future nanotech and ask for legislation regulating it (with the language of the legislation completely failing to effect current 3d printing technology). Everyone would be buying 3d printers at home, and lots of shitty startups would be selling crappy 3d printed junk.
nasb, new torres piece out, promising title and opening
(I’ll have to read it after done with my present other currency-related diversions. old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud.gif)
I like his new framing of the accelerationists and transhumanists as pro-extinctionists.
I like how quoting Grimes lyrics makes the banality of these people thuddingly clear.
Substituting this for the text whenever I see Sammy Boy say something again
I think it's a better way of framing things than the TESCREALs themselves use, but it still falls into the same kind of science fiction bucket imo. Like, the technology they're playing with is nowhere near close to the level of full brain emulation or mind-machine interface or whatever that you would need to make the philosophical concerns even relevant. I fully agree with what Torres is saying here, but he doesn't mention that the whole affair is less about building the Torment Nexus and more about deflecting criticism away from the real and demonstrable costs and harms of the way AI systems are being deployed today.
Those opening Peter Thiel quotes... Thiel uses talks about (in a kind of dated and maybe a bit offensive) trans people, to draw the comparison to transhumanists wanting to change themselves more extensively. The disgusting irony is that Thiel has empowered the right-wing ecosystem, which is deeply opposed to trans rights.
I've always found transhumanism the segment of TREACLES I'm the most ambivalent about. Many good and cool things like gender affirming care and assistive technologies (hell, maybe even medicine altogether) are pursuits that could be described as broadly within the scope of transhumanism. Thiel is not strictly wrong to point that out. One should still note he's saying it in a super outdated and genital-centric way that's just barely shy of merely cringe instead of outright transphobic. Additionally, he's talking out of both sides of his mouth. All the nice stuff about gender transition is meant to convince you of the problematic transhumanist bullshit he also (or rather, actually) likes.
Previously sneered:
More recently, in the comments:
It's like watching people volunteer for a lobotomy.
You thought Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) was bad. You were wrong. He's even worse. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/cremieux-jordan-lasker-mamdani-nyt-nazi-faliceer-reddit/
also here https://awful.systems/post/4995759
The long and short of it is motherjones discovered TPOs openly nazi alt.
The whole internet loves Éspèrature Trouvement, the grumpy old racist! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the racist is not that old and actually has a pretty normal name. Also don't look up his runescape username.
Fucking hell. Not the most important part of the story, but his elaborate lies about being Jewish are very very weird. Kind of like white Americans pretending that they're Cherokee I guess?
It's not that weird when you understand the sharks he swims with. Race pseudoscientists routinely peddle the idea that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than any other ethnic or racial group. Scoot Alexander and Big Yud have made this claim numerous times. Lasker pretending to be a Jew makes more sense once you realize this.
I'm aware of the idea, but it's still very weird for someone to pretend to be Jewish and also be a Nazi!
thinking about how often code will be like
and justified because "it just needs to work"
and now we have professional vibe coders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish
I have been thinking about the true cost of running LLMs (of course, Ed Zitron and others have written about this a lot).
We take it for granted that large parts of the internet are available for free. Sure, a lot of it is plastered with ads, and paywalls are becoming increasingly common, but thanks to economies of scale (and a level of intrinsic motivation/altruism/idealism/vanity), it still used to be viable to provide information online without charging users for every bit of it. Same appears to be true for the tools to discover said information (search engines).
Compare this to the estimated true cost of running AI chatbots, which (according to the numbers I'm familiar with) may be tens or even hundreds of dollars a month for each user. For this price, users would get unreliable slop, and this slop could only be produced from the (mostly free) information that is already available online while disincentivizing creators from producing more of it (because search engine driven traffic is dying down).
I think the math is really abysmal here, and it may take some time to realize how bad it really is. We are used to big numbers from tech companies, but we rarely break them down to individual users.
Somehow reminds me of the astronomical cost of each bitcoin transaction (especially compared to the tiny cost of processing a single payment through established payment systems).
I've done some of the numbers here, but don't stand by them enough to share. I do estimate that products like Cursor or Claude are being sold at roughly an 80-90% discount compared to what's sustainable, which is roughly in line with what Zitron has been saying, but it's not precise enough for serious predictions.
Your last paragraph makes me think. We often idealize blockchains with VMs, e.g. Ethereum, as a global distributed computer, if the computer were an old Raspberry Pi. But it is Byzantine distributed; the (IMO excessive) cost goes towards establishing a useful property. If I pick another old computer with a useful property, like a radiation-hardened chipset comparable to a Gamecube or G3 Mac, then we have a spectrum of computers to think about. One end of the spectrum is fast, one end is cheap, one end is Byzantine, one end is rad-hardened, etc. Even GPUs are part of this; they're not that fast, but can act in parallel over very wide data. In remarkably stark contrast, the cost of Transformers on GPUs doesn't actually go towards any useful property! Anything Transformers can do, a cheaper more specialized algorithm could have also done.
The big shift in per-action cost is what always seems to be missing from the conversation. Like, in a lot of my experience the per-request cost is basically negligible compared to the overhead of running the service in general. With LLMs not only do we see massive increases in overhead costs due to the training process necessary to build a usable model, each request that gets sent has a higher cost. This changes the scaling logic in ways that don't appear to be getting priced in or planned for in discussions of the glorious AI technocapital future
This is a very important point, I believe. I find it particularly ironic that the "traditional" Internet was fairly efficient in particular because many people were shown more or less the same content, and this fact also made it easier to carry out a certain degree of quality assurance. Now with chatbots, all this is being thrown overboard and extreme inefficiencies are being created, and apparently, the AI hypemongers are largely ignoring that.
Somebody found a relevant reddit post:
Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social (who has clippy earrings in a video!) writes: " This is fascinating: reddit link
Someone “worked on a book with ChatGPT” for weeks and then sought help on Reddit when they couldn’t download the file. Redditors helped them realized ChatGPT had just been roleplaying/lying and there was no file/book…"
qu1j0t3 replies:
you have to scroll through the person's comments to find it, but it does look they did author the body of the text and uploaded it as a docx into ChatGPT. so points for actually creating something unlike the AI bros
it looks like they tried to use ChatGPT to improve narration. to what degree the token smusher has decided to rewrite their work in the smooth, recycled plastic feel we've all come to know and despise remains unknown
they did say they are trying to get it to generate illustrations for all 700 pages, and moreover appear[ed] to believe it can "work in the background" on individual chapters with no prompting. they do seem to have been educated on the folly of expecting this to work, but as blakestacey's other reply pointed out, they appear to now be just manually prompting one page at a time. godspeed
They now deleted their post and I assume a lot of others, but they also claim they have no time to really write and just wanted a collection of stories for their kid(s). Which doesnt make sense, creating 700 pages of kids stories is a lot of work, even if you let a bot improve the flow. Unless they just stole a book of children's stories from somewhere. (I know these books exist, as a child from one of my brothers tricked me into reading two stories from one).
looks like there's either downvote brigade keeping critical comments at +1 or 0, or reddit brigading countermeasures went on in defense of wittle promprfondler
Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing. https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673
The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.
Apologies if this was posted when published.
Daniel Koko's trying to figure out how to stop the AGI apocalypse.
How might this work? Install TTRPG afficionados at the chip fabs and tell them to roll a saving throw.
And if that doesn't work? Koko ultimately ends up pretty much where Big Yud did: bombing the fuck out of the fabs and the data centers.
Suppose further that enough powerful people are concerned about the poverty in Ireland, anti-catholic discrimination, food insecurity, and/or loss of rental revenue, that there's significant political will to Do Something. Should we ban starvation? Should we decolonise? Should we export their produce harder to finally starve Ireland? Should we sign some kind of treaty? Should we have a national megaproject to replace the population with the British? Many of these options are seriously considered.
Enter the baseline option: Let the Irish sell their babies as a delicacy.
Funnily enough, there are a lot of data centres in Ireland. Maybe there will be a missile strike and Ireland's population will shrink back to 19th century numbers
Ah, yes, artificially kneecap chip fabs' yields, I'm sure that will go over well with the capitalist overlords who own them
Someone didn't get the memo about nVidia's stock price, and how is Jensen supposed to sign more boobs if suddenly his customers all get missile'd?
I spend a lot of my professional life modeling this kind of data. My wafers having to make will saves is going to complicate things…
As a worker in the semiconductor space, I suddenly feel the urge to write a 100k word blog post about how a preemptive strike against LW is both necessary and morally correct.
Weird Al impersonator sprinkling Pentium 3's over the corpses as a calling card
The sanctions and inspections idea is so silly esp after what the USA/Trump did to Iran. (I mean the deciding that Iran wasnt keeping their end of the bargain and still making Uranium. So after the end Iran started to make more Uranium for real. Gg everyone).
Also 'cull the gpus': [angry gamer noises]
"If the AI God doesn't kill you, we will." is one hell of a sales pitch.
I'm not gonna advocate for it to happen but I'm pretty sure the world would be overall in a much healthier place geopolitically if someone actually started yeeting missiles into major American cities and landmarks. It's too easy to not really understand the human impact of even a successful precision strike when the last times you were meaningfully on the other end of the airstrike were ~20 and ~80 years ago, respectively.
Democratizing graphic design, Nashville style
Description: genAI artifact depicting guitarist Slash as a cat. This cursed critter is advertising a public appearance by a twitter poster. The event is titled "TURDSTOCK 2025". Also, the cat doesn't appear to be polydactyl, which seems like a missed opportunity tbh.
Turdstock? Wow, the name immediately says this is a festival worth attending! The picture only strengthens the feeling.
Intentionally being on Broadway at 1-4 PM on a Sunday is a whole vibe, and that's before considering whatever the fuck this is.
The whole thing screams old people desperately trying to be edge and cool but missing all the signifiers. A 'bad'word but baby talk style (like a young child saying poop), reference to slash which was already dated when I was young, the time of day so people can arrive home early and still make dinner (and not late at night like the cool music thing). The headliner is a twitter microceleb and not an actual cool band. But hey, at least kid rock isnt attending, so it escapes the 100% poser feeling.
E: saw this on my bsky, the guy is such a sad loser.
What in the world is a catturd2 public appearance like, anyway? This sad, drunk old loser shouting random slurs at the crowd?
I can answer that, as turdstock 2024 is on yt, it seems this john rich guy talking about how much he likes catturd, begging for donations (while saying fema is bad), some people spending a lot of time saying nothing (I'm skimming past and there is so much nothing being said), and some country songs (which is not my genre, did notice that for one guy the mix was off, making the music/singing bad to hear, so well done tech team there (they fix it later but still)). And then I saw the audience (they also said millions watched catturd 2023, which considering this vid has 9k views, and there are like 100 people in the audience I doubt (checked turdstock 2023, which seems to only be on rumble 223k views. So lol, double lol, saw the same fucking artists (and the for the same guy the technical issues, poor guy) (and wow rumble sucks compared to yt)). There actually also don't seem to be that many songs, think half the time was people talking. Also, No Catturd appearance from what I can tell (E: he is there, he just doesn't do anything it seems, he prob speaks a few minutes I guess). Also really weird bit about how somebody send a mean facebook post and facebook went 'are you sure this is mean' and they went all 'zuck was never punched in the face on the playground ... the founding fathers ... there was a patriot girl ... [5 minutes of talking] ... when those redcoats moved on us ... etc (this bit took 20 minutes between songs)'. There is also a guy praying for various things on stage, angry raised catholic noises
But yes, can't judge it on the music, as an event it seemed boring as fuck, too much talking, not enough music, boring audience (none of who were holding drinks), weird political message. Rather watch Kreator for 4 hours, which considering some of the speech clips I hear, seems to be the message they were going for. Somehow the geriatrics in the audience are the most dangerous people because they only want to be left alone (??). No lightshow, no stage presence, no skulls, no fireworks (this is both a comment on the lack of fireworks, and a general comment on what I saw).
Anyway, seems my initial feeling of massive uncool stands.
Also seem they reused the slash cat AI image for 2025.Nope different cat, just same AI slop shit.E: "Ticket Price: $199 plus taxes and fees." WHAT Wacken metalfest costs 333,00 € and that is for a whole weekend (and actually has a real Slash).
lol holy shit
Thank you for your service!
What is esp interesting is how they make this event sound bigger than it is. The venue is small, but that makes the 'it was sold out' show up sooner (also less hard to find enough people who would chuck down 200 bucks for this shit), but then they make claims about the livestream numbers. (which are going to be hard to check) etc. Weird sort of radicalization way to make people think there are more people in their movement than there are. Bit like going 'catturd2 has 4m followers!' like those numbers mean much online, esp on zombie twitter (see also John Rich has 150k subs on yt, but averages to 10k plays per non-music video at a quick glance (his music songs do very well however at millions per views (the one song I listened to was also about how Jesus was coming back soon to punish all the evildoers))), so people like the music+message in the music, but not when the guy actually opens his mouth for other stuff, all very vibes stuff. But also just how few actual music is being played vs people making nonsense talks about America/whatever. (and also listening to his live performance, I don't think John Rich is a good musician (at least not live, the yt clips of him are pretty good, so either he was having a bad day, or autotune stuff).
And it wasn't that hard, not like I spend that much time on it, it is quite interesting in a way, to look at these kinds of movements and try to see past their propganda and notice who they actually reach and what they do and say. And considering the people they attracted it feels very much a last attempt from a dying generation whos sun has set. (but that could also just be because younger people aren't as easily scammed into giving away 200 bucks for this).
truth in advertising: they're hinting what the music will sound like
Fucking monodactyl ass cat
Found an unironic AI bro in the wild on Bluesky:
You want my unsolicited thoughts on the line between man and machine, I feel this bubble has done more to clarify that line then to blur it, both by showcasing the flaws and limitations inherent to artificial intelligence, and by highlighting the aspects of human minds which cannot be replicated.
I'm not comfortable saying that consciousness and subjectivity can't in principle be created in a computer, but I think one element of what this whole debate exposes is that we have basically no idea what actions makes consciousness happen or how to define and identify that happening. Chatbots have always challenged the Turing test because they showcase how much we tend to project consciousness into anything that vaguely looks like it (interesting parallel to ancient mythologies explaining the whole world through stories about magic people). The current state of the art still fails at basic coherence over shockingly small amounts of time and complexity, and even when it holds together it shows a complete lack of context and comprehension. It's clear that complete-the-sentence style pattern recognition and reproduction can be done impressively well in a computer and that it can get you farther than I would have thought in language processing, at least imitatively. But it's equally clear that there's something more there and just scaling up your pattern-maximizer isn't going to replicate it.
Copy/pasting a post I made in the DSP driver subreddit that I might expand over at morewrite because it's a case study in how machine learning algorithms can create massive problems even when they actually work pretty well.
It's a machine learning system, not an actual human boss. The system is set up to try and find the breaking point, where if you finish your route on time it assumes you can handle a little bit more and if you don't it backs off.
The real problem is that everything else in the organization is set up so that finishing your routes on time is a minimum standard while the algorithm that creates the routes is designed to make doing so just barely possible. Because it's not fully individualized, this means that doing things like skipping breaks and waiving your lunch (which the system doesn't appear to recognize as options) effectively push the edge of what the system thinks is possible out a full extra hour, and then the rest of the organization (including the decision-makers about who gets to keep their job) turn that edge into the standard. And that's how you end up where we are now, where actually taking your legally-protected breaks is at best a luxury for top performers or people who get an easy route for the day, rather than a fundamental part of keeping everyone doing the job sane and healthy.
Part of that organizational problem is also in the DSP setup itself, since it allows Amazon to avoid taking responsibility or accountability for those decisions. All they have to do is make sure their instructions to the DSP don't explicitly call for anything illegal and they get to deflect all criticism (or LNI inquiries) away from themselves and towards the individual DSP, and if anyone becomes too much of a problem they can pretend to address it by cutting that DSP.
If anyone else is wondering: DSP here I think stands for "Delivery Service Partner", and driver for someone driving a vehicle. (I assumed the context "Digital Signal Processing" and driver as in "device driver" at first and was quite confused :P)
On-topic: I think regulation needs to come down hard on the delivery industry in general, be it parcels or food or whatever, working conditions there have been terrible for a long time.
Good poetic sneer: https://blog.foxtrotluna.social/theyre-putting-blue-food-coloring-in-everything/
I'm kind of half looking forward to every soda being sweetened with aspartame or acesulfame potassium, so I can finally quit drinking them. Perhaps blue food might indirectly help people like me eat healthier for a while. Thanks, torment nexus.
Better Offline was rough this morning in some places. Props to Ed for keeping his cool with the guests.
Oof, that Hollywood guest (Brian Koppelman) is a dunderhead. "These AI layoffs actually make sense because of complexity theory". "You gotta take Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously. He predicted everything perfectly."
I looked up his background, and it turns out he's the guy behind the TV show "Billions". That immediately made him make sense to me. The show attempts to lionize billionaires and is ultimately undermined not just by its offensive premise but by the world's most block-headed and cringe-inducing dialog.
Terrible choice of guest, Ed.
I study complexity theory and I'd like to know what circuit lower bound assumption he uses to prove that the AI layoffs make sense. Seriously, it is sad that the people in the VC techbro sphere are thought to have technical competence. At the same time, they do their best to erode scientific institutions.
Only way I can make the link between complexity theory and laying off people is thinking about putting people in 'can solve up to this level of problem' style complexity classes (which regulars here should realize gets iffy fast). So hope he explained it more than that.
The only complexity theory I know of is the one which tries to work out how resource-intensive certain problems are for computers, so this whole thing sounds iffy right from the get-go.
Yeah but those resource-intensive problems can be fitted into specific classes of problems (P, NP, PSPACE etc), which is what I was talking about, so we are talking about the same thing.
So under my imagined theory you can classify people as 'can solve: [ P, NP, PSPACE, ... ]'. Wonder what they will do with the P class. (Wait, what did Yarvin want to do with them again?)
There's really no good way to make any statements about what problems LLMs can solve in terms of complexity theory. To this day, LLMs, even the newfangled "reasoning" models, have not demonstrated that they can reliably solve computational problems in the first place. For example, LLMs cannot reliably make legal moves in chess and cannot reliably solve puzzles even when given the algorithm. LLM hypesters are in no position to make any claims about complexity theory.
Even if we have AIs that can reliably solve computational tasks (or, you know, just use computers properly), it still doesn't change anything in terms of complexity theory, because complexity theory concerns itself with all possible algorithms, and any AI is just another algorithm in the end. If P != NP, it doesn't matter how "intelligent" your AI is, it's not solving NP-hard problems in polynomial time. And if some particularly bold hypester wants to claim that AI can efficiently solve all problems in NP, let's just say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Koppelman is only saying "complexity theory" because he likes dropping buzzwords that sound good and doesn't realize that some of them have actual meanings.
I heard him say "quantum" and immediately came here looking for fresh-baked sneers
Yeah but I was trying to combine complexity theory as a loose theory misused by tech people in relation to 'people who get fired'. (Not that I don't appreciate your post btw, I sadly have not seen any pro-AI people be real complexity theory cranks re the capabilities. I have seen an anti be a complexity theory crank, but that is only when I reread my own posts ;) ).
solve this sokoban or you're fired
My hot take has always been that current Boolean-SAT/MIP solvers are probably pretty close to theoretical optimality for problems that are interesting to humans & AI no matter how "intelligent" will struggle to meaningfully improve them. Ofc I doubt that Mr. Hollywood (or Yud for that matter) has actually spent enough time with classical optimization lore to understand this. Computer go FOOM ofc.
Yeah, that guy was a real piece of work, and if I had actually bothered to watch The Bear before, I would stop doing so in favor of sending ChatGPT a video of me yelling in my kitchen and ask it if what is depicted was the plot of the latest episode.
Guys, how about we made the coming computer god a fan of Robert Nozick, what could go wrong?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/us8ss79mWCgTcSKoK/a-night-watchman-asi-as-a-first-step-toward-a-great-future
Somebody should touch grass, or check up on the news.
Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.
Haven't really kept up with the pseudo-news of VC funded companies acquiring each other, but it seems Windsurf (previously been courted by OpenAI) is now gonna be purchased by the bros behind Devin.
New post from Matthew Hughes: People Are The Point, effectively a manifesto against gen-AI as a concept.
Nikhil's guest post at Zitron just went up - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkable-incompetence-at-the-heart-of-tech/
EDIT: the intro was strong enough I threw in $7. Second half is just as good.
janitorai - which seems to be a hosting site for creepy AI chats - is blocking all UK visitors due to the OSA
https://blog.janitorai.com/posts/3/
I'm torn here, the OSA seems to me to be massive overreach but perhaps shielding limeys from AI is wroth it
hi it's me, your locally undesignated wordsmith! in today's wordsmithing, one not of my own but I thought worthy of known: robo-scab
(cred to @dgerard for linking upskeet that got me finding this. also I was so close; close but no cigar, I guess)