Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025
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.)
From gormless gray voice to misattributed sources, it can be daunting to read articles that turn out to be slop. However, incorporating the right tools and techniques can help you navigate instructionals in the age of AI. Let's delve right in and and learn some telltale signs like:
The worst are slop-generated recipes that you only realise are fake halfway through reading when they tell you to add half a cup of table salt to your cake batter
not even a couple of small rocks? smh
Nice sneer: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen
"The home of 1999" already beat them to that.
ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you've probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.
I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don't want any part in this shit anymore.
ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australia's age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSA... yeah.
Yes, of course, it's everywhere. What's left but becoming a hermit...?
But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I don't think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isn't - that you'll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.
an unintended side effect of this is people who can't or don't want to verify their age going to less reputable sources. so even though it can be done in a "privacy-respecting fashion" (see, for example, soatok's post on this^[https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-to-be-a-privacy-footgun/] ), it's still a bad idea.
additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal^[e.g. "steam porn games" → "this person's existence is inherently sexual" → "ban lgbtq content"]
Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting post and interesting blog in general!
Yes, any version of age control which would realistically get passed will be bad. This:
is absolutely true. The fact that those privacy preserving approaches exist but aren't used is all the proof I personally need of this.
Would you mind explaining how to do that easily in a way that only reveals age without being a privacy nightmare? Which means that it mustn't be giving sites an excellent tracking identifier nor requires them to process documents themselves.
I'd have imagined something along these lines:
There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.
Really unfortunate word in this context. (Not your fault of course.)
is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? it's one thing if it's gaming-related^[i guess. not really, fuck discord.], but when i'm at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say "ask for help in our discord server", i feel like i'm in a fever dream and i'm going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt
Yeah, for multiple reasons. Mostly because all the information in there isn’t accessed or searchable from the outside, and technically not even from the inside because Discord’s search feature fucking sucks.
Also logging is hard, all the various channels are annoying (esp as th, and having to jump through various hoops just get into channels (hoops for which the instructions can be outdated/bad (one of them used a feature that was disabled on my machine for some reason, but nobody had realized that was possible)) is just nuts. And then there is the whole thing that Discord itself wants to make the platform as busy as possible by adding more and more moving things. I just want to chat.
this is gonna live in my head forever without paying any rent and i am upset
and so i pass on the burden, like a virus, to all those who seek truth but must instead whip out their phone to scan a QR code and then get welcome-pinged 18 times in #general
Another day of living under the indignity of this cruel, ignorant administration.
There's something particularly galling about "everybody who knows how to access the money got fired". The wholly believable implication that nobody made an active choice to fuck this guy over. Through sheer incompetence that money just vanished into the goddamn ether because God forbid anyone in the modern business or political spaces actually have to take responsibility for their decisions.
Historians like to use "state capacity" as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.
I didn't think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”
Cloudflare has publicly announced the obvious about Perplexity stealing people's data to run their plagiarism, and responded by de-listing them as a verified bot and added heuristics specifically to block their crawling attempts.
Personally, I'm expecting this will significantly hamper Perpllexity going forward, considering Cloudflare's just cut them off from roughly a fifth of the Internet.
Found an AI bro making an incoherent defense of AI slop today (fitting that he previously shilled NFTs):
Needless to say, he's getting dunked on in the replies and QRTs, because people like him are fundamentally incapable of being punk.
(EDIT: Originally found this through Bluesky)
Yes, doing the thing which the entire business world is pouring billions into and trying their hardest to shove onto everyone to maximize imagined future profits, that's what counterculture is all about.
this guy actually lost a bundle in NFTs a few years ago
Ran across a pretty solid sneer: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.
Found a particularly notable paragraph near the end, focusing on the people focusing on "prompt engineering":
You want my take, I'd personally go further and say the people who can't perform tasks without AI will wind up borderline-unemployable once this bubble bursts - they're gonna need a highly expensive chatbot to do anything at all, they're gonna be less productive than AI-abstaining workers whilst falsely believing they're more productive, they're gonna be hated by their coworkers for using AI, and they're gonna flounder if forced to come up with a novel/creative idea.
All in all, any promptfondlers still existing after the bubble will likely be fired swiftly and struggle to find new work, as they end up becoming significant drags to any company's bottom line.
Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If you're willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: they're called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your "natural language" prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha you're doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.
Crypto bros continue to be morally bankrupt. There is an a coin / NFT called "GreenDildoCoin" and they've thrown dildos onto court at multiple WNBA basketball games (ESPN, video). It warms my heart that one of them was arrested. More of that please.
Polymarket even had a "prediction" on it. Because surely the outcome there couldn't be influenced by someone who also placed a large bet. Oh and Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme about it
None of this is particularly surprising if you've followed NFTs at all: the clout chasing goes to the extreme. In the limit memecoins can act as donations to terrible people from donors who want them to be terrible. Still I hate how much publicity this has gotten, and how this has manifested as gross disrespect towards women atheletes / women's sports by the sorts of losers who make "jokes" about no one watching WNBA games.
It truly blows that cryptocurrency turned out to be useful only for crimes (uncool) and sex weirdos (derogatory).
I think the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that Yud is a serious thinker is to actually read what he writes. Luckily for us, he's rolled us a bunch of Xhits into a nice bundle and reposted on LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research
So remember that hedge fund manager who seemed to be spiralling into psychosis with the help of ChatGPT? Here's what Yud has to say
OR it's just that the way LLM chat interfaces are designed is to never say no to the user (except in certain hardcoded cases, like "is it ok to murder someone") There's no inner agency, just mirroring the user like some sort of mega-ELIZA. Anyone who knows a bit about certain kinds of mental illness will realize that having something the behaves like a human being but just goes along with whatever delusions your mind is producing will amplify those delusions. The hedge manager's mind is already not in a right place, and chatting with 4o reinforces that. People who aren't soi-disant crazy (like the people haphazardly safeguarding LLMs against "dangerous" questions) just won't go down that path.
Yud continues:
Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because it's actually not sentient or has plans in what we usually term intelligence, but is simply reflecting and amplifying the delusions of one person with mental health issues?
Occam's razor states that chatting with mega-ELIZA will lead to some people developing psychosis, simply because of how the system is designed to maximize engagement. Yud's hammer states that everything regarding computers will inevitably become sentient and this will kill us.
NO FFS. Chat-GPT is just agreeing with some hardcoded prompt in the first instance! There's no inner agency! It doesn't know what "psychosis" is, it cannot "see" that feeding someone sub-SCP content at their direct insistence will lead to psychosis. There is no connection between the 2 states at all!
Add to the weird jargon ("homeostatically", "crazymaking") and it's a wonder this person is somehow regarded as an authority and not as an absolute crank with a Xhitter account.
Imagine a world where, instead of performing this kind of juvenile psychoanalysis of slop, Yud instead turned his stupid focus on, like, Star Wars EU novels or something.
Edit: from the comments: there's mention about "HHH", so now I say: imagine a world where all the rats and other promptfondlers dedicated all their brainrot energy toward the pro-wrestling fandom instead.
ah man this rules. just gonna live in this world for a bit
both would be funnier
Starting this off with a new Blood in the Machine: The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now)
OpenAI is food. You can tell because it's washed, rinsed, and cooked.
Call me AGI because I am stealing this without attribution
this gave me a good chuckle after a few Some Fuckin Days, ty
who's the bigger fish that's gonna eat them?
@[email protected] probably. you can tell because of the food poisoning. (Hope you're feeling better!)
Recently, I've been seeing a lot of adverts from Google about their AI services. What really tickles me is how defeatist the campaign seems. Every ad is basically like "AI can't do X, but it can do Y!", where X is a job or other task that AI bros are certain that AI will eventually replace, and Y is a smaller, related thing that AI gets wrong anyway. For an ad agency, I'd expect more than this.
ZITRON DROPPED
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency
"Hmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words."
Well, after 2.5 years and hundreds of billions of dollars burned, we finally have GPT-5. Kind of feels like a make or break moment for the good folks at OAI~~! With the eyes of the world on their lil presentation this morning, everyone could feel the stakes: they needed something that would blow our minds. We finally get to see what a super intelligence looks like! Show us your best cherry picked benchmark Sloppenheimer!
Graphic design is my PASSION. Good thing the entirety of the world's economy is not being held up by cranking out a few more points on SWE bench right????
Ok. what about ARC? Surely ya'll got a new high to prove the AGI mission was progressing right??
Oh my fucking God. They actually have lost the lead to fucking Grok. For my sanity I didn't watch the live stream, but curiously, they left the ARC results out of their presentation. Even though they gave Francois access early to test. Kind of like they knew this looks really bad and underwhelming.
"The word blueberry contains the letter b 3 times."
Also reported in more detail here:
(via)
Wait just how bad is 4? 30% accurate? Did they train it wrong as a joke? Also hatless 5 worse than 3?
Yeah, O3 (the model that was RL'd to a crisp and hallucinated like crazy) was very strong on math coding benchmarks. GPT5 (I guess without tools/extra compute?) is worse. Nevertheless...
The one big cope I'm seeing is in the METR graph ofc. Tiny bump with massive error bars above Grok 4 so they can claim the exponential is continuing while the models stagnate in all material ways.
50% success rate? sorry, all this for a coin flip?
Looks like they already removed it.
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Wikipedia has higher standards than the American HIstorical Association. Let's all let that sink in for a minute.
Wikipedia also just upped their standards in another area - they've updated their speedy deletion policy, enabling the admins to bypass standard Wikipedia bureaucracy and swiftly nuke AI slop articles which meet one of two conditions:
"Communication intended for the user”, referring to sentences directly aimed at the promptfondler using the LLM (e.g. "Here is your Wikipedia article on…,” “Up to my last training update …,” and "as a large language model.”)
Blatantly incorrect citations (examples given are external links to papers/books which don't exist, and links which lead to something completely unrelated)
Ilyas Lebleu, who contributed to the update in policy, has described this as a "band-aid" that leaves Wikipedia in a better position than before, but not a perfect one. Personally, I expect this solution will be sufficent to permanently stop the influx of AI slop articles. Between promptfondlers' utter inability to recognise low-quality/incorrect citations, and their severe laziness and lack of care for their """work""", the risk of an AI slop article being sufficiently subtle to avoid speedy deletion is virtually zero.
This point stood out to me as particularly bizarre. Either the image is garbage in which case it shouldn't be shared in the classroom either because school students deserve basic respect, good material, and to be held to the same standards as anyone else; or it isn't garbage and then what are you so ashamed of AHA?
Nothing expresses the inherent atomism and libertarian nature of the rat community like this
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAzoPABejzKucwiow/alcohol-is-so-bad-for-society-that-you-should-probably-stop
A rundown of the health risks of alcohol usage, coupled with actual real proposals (a consumption tax), finishes with the conclusion that the individual reader (statistically well-off and well-socialized) should abstain from alcohol altogether.
No calls for campaigning for a national (US) alcohol tax. No calls to fund orgs fighting alcohol abuse. Just individual, statistically meaningless "action".
Oh well, AGI will solve it (or the robot god will be a raging alcoholic)
OK now there's another comment
Excepting cases like the legal restriction of alcohol sales in many many areas (Nordics, NSW in Aus, Minnesota in the US), you can in fact just tax the living fuck out of alcohol if you want. The article mentions this.
JFC these people imagine they can regulate how "AGI" is constructed, but faced with a problem that's been staring humanity in the face since the first monk brewed the first beer they just say "whelp nothing can be done, except become a teetotaller yourself)
No fucking shit?
I, for one, happen to live in one of these "Nordics" and alcohol is actually taxed quite heavily here. If we're looking at change on an individual level, it would actually be good for the society if more people were drinking alcohol, as long as the benefit of them contributing to society through tax euros outweighs the adverse health effects.
There are a bit different axes here. The tax money doesn't directly go towards alleviating the suffering of family members of alcoholics, nor does it directly lower the effects of drunk driving. The income is a nice to have, for sure, but the stated aim is to be a "sin tax" which makes the bad thing less affordable.
[Drunk, having a good time with friends]: I'll show you collecting state tithes for immoral substance consumption!
sin tax errorOh, you're not doing the thing that's supposedly the entire point of the website? Don't worry, no one else is either.
To be scrupulously fair it is a repost of another slubbslack[1]. Amusingly, both places have a comment with the gist of "well alcohol gets people laid so what's the problem". This of course is a reflection that most LWers cannot get a girl into bed without slipping her a roofie.
[1] is that even ok? I know the LW software has a "mirroring" functionality b/c a lot of content is originally on the member's SS, maybe you cna point it at any SS entry and get it onto LW.
Perfecting the art of getting sloshed is my 80,000 hours of meaningful work.
I just enjoy dabbling
cheers m8, ill drink to that
Sorry to talk about this couple again, but people are discovering the eugenicists are also big time racists
This is just haplessly comical. The AI-generated sinister hijab lady, the attempts at algorithm-compliant YouTube face, the fact that they're doing this instead of raising their kids (which may be beneficial for the kids in the long run...) Who do they imagine they're convincing?
I'd assume they need X pieces of
flairpropaganda to get their theilbucks.It gets worse.
Btw, the 'teen pregnancy' thing, is prob a bit ahistorical. If we use teen marriages as a standing for teen pregnancies, these were historically very low. (contrary to what people believe about the past, mostly because strategic marriages by rich people/nobles were not, but those people were not normal people) See: https://bsky.app/profile/nogoodwyfe.bsky.social/post/3lv2ehbn7pc2x
But reactionaries gotta go back to some imagined ideal past. No matter what actually learned people say. (and that is also why the far right is anti-intellectual).
Joining the war on teen pregnancies on the side of teen pregnancies to bring back the ideal past of - check notes - the 1990ies in the US.
(At least a cursory look points toward teen pregnancies in the US peeking some time in the 1990ies.)
I assume they don't know teen pregnancies peaked in the 90s.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984
Wait, are those AMERICANS asking:
"Is the Arab brain 🧠 incompatible with democracy?"
The Americans who overthrew an Iranian democracy to install a dictator and are currently overthrowing their own elected government so they can be ruled by dictator? Those Americans?
🤣🙃
#uspol #iran
Most inhabitants of Iran would dislike being called Arabs... but I guess the lazy racists are just using it as a shorthand for "brown people who are Muslim"
It's kind of a missed opportunity too, what with how heavily the OG Persians feature in the early chapters of the racist "clash of civilizations" narrative.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 I was wondering where this was hosted, and it’s just fucking YouTube.
Once again, AUP’s are just brand safety, and brand safety is just whatever make the most money.
They have a video basically endorsing ex-gay shit because natalism too. Throws around ‘SSA’ and everything.
Make that TWO videos.
Ah, yes, Western Paganism is famed for its uniformity of belief and complete lack of objectionable people saying hateful things. (Pay no attention to the Nazis behind the curtain, they're not Real Pagans™.)
ChatGPT-5 is having a day on r/ChatGPT.
Can we call this the peak of the LLM hype cycle now?
Half of these are people using GPT to write a rant about GPT and the other half are saying "skill issue", it's an entirely different world.
The firestorm's made it to r/SubredditDrama.
Only taste tester I trust dropped his verdict
(Bonus)
At my big tech job after a number of reorgs / layoffs it's now getting pretty clear that the only thing they want from me is to support the AI people and basically nothing else.
I typed out a big rant about this, but it probably contained a little too much personal info on the public web in one place so I deleted it. Not sure what to do though grumble grumble. I ended up in a job I never would have chosen myself and feel stuck and surrounded by chat-bros uggh.
You could try getting laid off, scrambling for a year trying to get back into a tech position, start delivering Amazon packages to make ends meet, and despair at the prospect of reskilling in this economy. I... would not recommend it.
It looks like there are a weirdly large number of medical technician jobs opening up? I wonder if they're ahead of the curve on the AI hype cycle.
Amazon should treat drivers better. I hate how much "hustle" is required for that sort of job and how poorly they respect their workers.
I think my job needs me too much to lay me off, which I have mixed feelings about despite the slim-pickings for jobs.
I'm also trying to position myself to potentially have to flee the USA* due to transgender persecution**. There's still a lot of unknowns there. I'll probably stay at my job for awhile while I work on setting some stuff up for the future.
That said part of me is tempted to reskill into a career that'd work well internationally (nursing?) -- I'm getting a little up in years for that but it'd probably be a lot more fulfilling than what I'm doing now.
* My previous attempt did not work out. I rushed things too much and ended up too stressed out and unbelievably homesick.
** This has been getting incredibly stressful lately.
Most medical careers work well internationally, in principle. Something to keep in mind is that language proficiency may be a stated or unstated prerequisite for employment, in particular if you have contact with patients. If you work with the machines (lab technician, etc) the language may be of less importance. Or at least, so I have heard. Relevance depends on your country of choice and your pre-existing language skills, of course.
To bad attempt number one didn't work well. Better luck with attempt number two.
Discovered new manmade horrors beyond my comprehension today (recommend reading the whole thread, it goes into a lot of depth on this shit):
New article from Matthew Hughes, about the sheer stupidity of everyone propping up the AI bubble.
Orange site is whining about it, to Matthew's delight:
HN is all manly and butch about "saying it like it is" when some techbro is in trouble for xhitting out a racism, but god forbid someone says something mean about sama or pg
Is Hughes legit, and is this the 3rd time's the charm when it comes to linking to substacks here? ;)
In more low-key news, the New Yorker's given public praise to Blood in the Machine, pulling a year-old review back into the public spotlight.
Its hardly anything new (the Luddites' cultural re-assessment has been going on since 2023), but its hardly a good sign for the tech industry at large (or AI more specifically) that a major newspaper's decided to give some positive coverage to 'em.
With that out the way, here's a sidenote:
When history looks back on the Luddites' cultural re-assessment, I expect the rise of generative AI will be pointed to as a major factor.
Beyond being a blatant repeat of what the Luddites fought against (automation being used to fuck over workers and artisans), its role in enabling bosses to kill jobs and abuse labour in practically every field imaginable (including fields that were thought safe from automation) has provided highly fertile ground for developing class solidarity.
Found someone trying to fire back at the widespread sneering against promptfondlers:
Emphasis on "trying" here - they're getting cooked in the replies and QRTs. Here's a couple highlights - one from someone running an escape room, and one which allegedly ended in someone meeting a baseballer:
today I learnt that there are actual people irl who get genuinely upset if they catch you shoveling hot shit into your mouth. like they view it as a serious moral failing in certain circles
To be fair to baseball girl, I've found "what's this thing I know but I forgot the name of" one of the best use cases for chatbots, because web search is too fucked to help you with it now. It sucks that it's the case, but it has sadly helped me like, a couple of times (and after I insulted and redirected the chatbot when it inevitably gave me a shit initial answer).
More publicity for or longtime friends: Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right, apparently the parties DJ was, as is tradition, a weird nerd: https://bsky.app/profile/alt-text.bsky.social/post/3lvxlb4migv2w (I linked to the alt text which was collected from the image, scroll up for the image itself).
JFC this hurt me to read, as a person who enjoys folk songs played on old instruments. They think this is genetic?!
Well, they are the common clay of the new west.
I'm sorry, as in the awful no-effort MIDIs played through a "medieval" soundfont youtube spammed me with? Jesus Christ that's embarrassing.
I have not tried to find out what kind of music they played, but the fact that the DJ complained about the music is just amazing. She will talk about this event for years.
Simple way of messing with the dumbest robot ignoring scrapers. Html bomb.
Here's a writeup on how to do this practically
https://ache.one/notes/html_zip_bomb
On a personal note, part of me expects this will see some adoption as an anti-scraping measure - unlike tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes, this won't take up a significant amount of resources to implement, and their ability to crash AI scraper bots both wastes the AI corps' time by forcing them to reboot said scraper and encourages them to avoid your website entirely.
Will probably repost this in the next sack. A redditor over at r/philosophy tries to argue that AI bans are ideological and therefore bad, after a 3 day ban for posting slop.
E: OP is an EA/LWer. lol
Do you mean op as in the guy who posted it or who wrote it? The latter has some really bad arguments imho. Esp for a 'professional philosopher'.
On the subject of AI art being bad for artists: "Compare banning lightbulbs for putting candle-makers out of work. Then suppose that lightbulbs are in fact perfectly legal, but some luddite ideologues manage to capture certain online spaces and ban anyone from using a backlit screen to view the website"
I did look into this at time of edit: the author of the article linked AND the poster of the link are nestled in rat space. So yes
E: when I wrote this comment, I was only thinking about the statement "OP is an EA/LWer". to be clear:
author of the article claims that they tried to post one of their articles to r/philosophy, and because the article contained AI generated content, they received a 3 day ban
poster of the article is a separate person
E2: the author of the article is also participating in the reddit thread, FWIW
Ah so both. Yeah the candle maker quote is from the writer of the article.
discussion continued here: ----> https://awful.systems/comment/8326480
can't wait to see what fresh horrors this shit unleases
ugh cybersecurity is already a fucking nightmare i should have braced myself
wouldn't you just love some snakeoil sauce on your snakeoil sandwich? imagine how good it'll go with that snakeoil cocktail we've given you, on the house!
(which, ofc, is a limited-size cocktail. only 30ml! enough to get a feel for our snakeoil! but also it's only 10ml/day. license levels. you understand, I'm sure.)
Fuck. The higher ups at my workplace are currently utterly Claude-brained to the point it makes you think they’re getting their salaries from Anthropic. I am like 80% sure this shit will be on my table when I’m back from vacation in two weeks.
sorry for the jumpscare while you’re on holiday :)
Considering the quality of your average LLM, and the quality of the promptfondlers who use them, I expect this will result in a lot of serious security vulnerabilities and broken projects.
Considering how bad these things are at math, see below, and how important math is for cryptography, see any textbook on it, this will be !!fun!!.
New case popped up in medical literature: A Case of Bromism Influenced by Use of Artificial Intelligence, about a near-fatal case of bromine poisoning caused by someone using AI for medical advice.
On first glance, this also looks like a case where a chatbot confirmed a person's biases. Apparently, this patient believed that eliminating table salt from his diet would make him healthier (which, to my understanding, generally isn't true - consuming too little or no salt could be even more dangerous than consuming too much). He was then looking for a "perfect" replacement, which, to my knowledge, doesn't exist. ChatGPT suggested sodium bromide, possibly while mentioning that this would only be suitable for purposes such as cleaning (not as food). I guess the patient is at least partly to blame here. Nevertheless, ChatGPT seems to have supported his nonsensical idea more strongly than an internet search would have done, which in my view is one of the more dangerous flaws of current-day chatbots.
Edit: To clarify, I absolutely hate chatbots, especially the idea that they could replace search engines somehow. Yet, regarding the example above, some AI bros would probably argue that the chatbot wasn't entirely in the wrong if it hadn't suggested adding sodium bromide to food. Nevertheless, I would still assume that the chatbot's sycophantic communication style significantly exacerbated the problem on hand.
the stupidest thing about it is that there already is commercial low sodium table salt, and it substitutes part of sodium chloride with potassium chloride, because the point is to decrease sodium intake, not chloride intake (in most of cases)
Turns out I had overlooked the fact that he was specifically seeking to replace chloride rather than sodium, for whatever reason (I'm not a medical professional). If Google search (not Google AI) tells the truth, this doesn't sound like a very common idea, though. If people turn to chatbots for questions like these (for which very little actual resources may be available), the danger could be even higher, I guess, especially if chatbots had been trained to avoid disappointing responses.
The way I understood salt is that you should be careful with it if you have heart problems or heart problems run in the family, and then esp when you eat a lot of ready made products which generally have more salt. Anyway, talk to your doctor if you worry about it. Not chatgpt.
I’m excited that Silicon Valley tech has finally managed to invent thinking. Makes this book obsolete at long last.
In other news, the mainstream press has caught on to "clanker" (originally coined for use in the Star Wars franchise) getting heavy use, with Rolling Stone, Gizmondo and Axios putting out articles on it, and NPR featuring it in Word of the Week.
You want my take, I expect it will retain heavy usage going forward - as I've stated before (multiple times at least), AI is no longer viewed as a "value-neutral" tool/tech, but as an enemy of humanity, whose use expresses a contempt for humanity.
So question, anybody ever see this before in heavy usage? Or is this just some weird media thing?
I've seen it pick up lately, particularly in non-sneer-adjacent spaces, but it's definitely recent and I'm not sure how common it really was, which is a shame because I love it.
But was that before or after they wrote about it? (Doesnt really matter btw, just curious, slopper and clanker are pretty good)
I've never seen it used in real life, but I did see it occasionally on social media before these articles.
cue botlickers whining about "robot discrimination"
A nice long essay by Freddie deBoer for our holiday week: the release of GPT-5; I wholly recommend reading the whole thing!
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy
Choice snippet to whet your appetites:
"With all of this, I’m only asking you to observe the world around you and report back on whether revolutionary change has in fact happened. I understand, we are still very early in the history of LLMs. Maybe they’ll actually change the world, the way they’re projected to. But, look, within a quarter-century of the automobile becoming available as a mass consumer technology, its adoption had utterly changed the lived environment of the United States. You only had to walk outside to see the changes they had wrought. So too with electrification: if you went to the top of a hill overlooking a town at night pre-electrification, then went again after that town electrified, you’d see the immensity of that change with your own two eyes. Compare the maternal death rate in 1800 with the maternal death rate in 2000 and you will see what epoch-changing technological advance looks like. Consider how slowly the news of King William IV’s death spread throughout the world in 1837 and then look at how quickly the news of his successor Queen Victoria’s death spread in 1901, to see truly remarkable change via technology. AI chatbots and shitty clickbait videos choking the social internet do not rate in that context, I’m sorry. I will be impressed with the changes wrought by the supposed AI era when you can show me those changes rather than telling me that they’re going to happen. Show me. Show me!"
This is just a strictly worse version of David's AGI (A Guy in India) sneer.
Freddy is clearly gesturing at a critique of a kind of Whig history here, and I fully agree but think his overall implications (at least so far) are off-base. He seems to be arguing that AI-based technological processes are not inevitable and that the political, economic, and social worlds are not actually required by physical necessity to follow the course predicted by its modern prophets of doom. But I think the appropriate followup to this understanding of history is that things, broadly speaking, don't just happen. History is experienced in the active voice, not the passive, and people doing things now is what can shape the kind of future we get. In as much as the Internet was coopted by capitalism and turned into its present form, that should be understood as a consequence of decisions people made at the time. We can understand the reasons for those decisions and why they didn't choose differently to carry us down alternate paths, but that should not deny their agency, lest we lose sight of our own.
like with the terrorist group isil, you should not give it to freddie de fucking boer.
I'm ignorant- give me the lore drop.
Back in 2017, Freddie lost an argument with Malcolm Harris, lobbed some completely made-up sexual harassment allegations against Harris, and then blamed the whole thing on a bipolar episode. Nowadays he just makes up professors to get mad at.
According to wikipedia he's a eugenics enjoyer. Another W for nominative determinism I guess.
Explains his gushing over Scott in the intro.
I still think he makes a lot of good points in that promptfondlers are losing their shit because people aren't buyin the swill they're selling.
In a similar vein, check out this comment on LW.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hhbibJGt2aQqKJLb7/shortform-1?commentId=25HfwcGxC3Gxy9sHi
So belieiving in the inevitable coming of the robot god is dogma on LW now. This is a cult.
Also note the standard error that people make (Which Rationalists talk about but people also never seem to internalize) Scott is wise and knowledgeable, until we get to a thing DeBoer knows about, and then it suddenly is strange and out of place. But the wise and knowledgeable thing doesn't get revalued, which considering the complaint about Scott is a bit of a lack of selfawareness moment. Almost like something that looks like it is written in wise and knowledgeable and pleasing way doesn't have to be that. Anyway, sorry for the sidetrack we were talking about genAI and this is not relevant to that.
Gell-Mann amnesia.
Hey come now, it is a common Dutch last name. Don't slander Dutch people who are called boer (farmer) like that. Do it for the right reasons. We all suck, no matter our last names.
Wasn't the original designation of Boers (as in the Boer war) a denigrating term?
No idea. Prob best to check wikipedia for that. Could be last names, could be occupation, could be some denigrating term.
Looks like it's an endonym, or was at the time. OFC the reason for the Great Trek was that the boers were pissed they couldn't have slaves anymore while under British rule. Charming people all around.
Oof, thanks for the heads up!
Guh wtf
I feel ya, I got got by that Sam Kriss piece dunking on hpmor last week.
Never trust a guy with a substack
I'm waiting for the day substack puts RSS access behind a paywall. Unfortunately some decent blogs are still on that platform
I was thinking about that in reaction to something else. Anytime somebody casually brings up chrischan (she has been a decades long stalking/harassement target) should have been a bit of a red flag.
(E: not blaming people for missing that btw, it just stood out to me).
Could be worse, I got got by some neofascist scum who was dunking on rationalists.
I've been recommended more Veo 3 fails by The Algorithm. Apparently even some promptfans think it sucks.
https://youtu.be/3lzMkigMvD8
You WILL believe what happened when they tried to replicate Google's demos using the exact same prompts.
Found a good sneer recently: The LLM In The Room, about LLMs' deeply-lacking usefulness for programming
ed zitron must feel so vindicated rn https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
Good news everyone, we will be living with Big Yud until the literal end of time (see comments)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/owZt48g3GjJHDn5EE/kvmanthinking-s-shortform?commentId=YisxiwcWZq7eMPxSX
ugh you guys suck
Anybody have the adresses of the lw people? I have some oil I want to sell them, has a very small chance of extending life.
If only there was some widely-known Rationalist cliche about incredibly small probabilities with absurdly high negative impacts.
Archive.is because substack sucks. Remember Peter Todd, the ghost in the LLMs? New one of them dropped. Elara Voss
I noticed starting a couple weeks ago that archive.is is requiring me to complete captchas nearly every time I visit. Are other people experiencing this? If so, I wonder if the site's maintainers are reacting to increased traffic from LLM crawlers. The crawlers probably find Archive extraordinarily useful when they get blocked by source sites.
If you use cloudflare DNS or similar: there has been some inscrutable drama going back years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Cloudflare_DNS_availability
(You might be using Cloudflare DNS without realizing it if you use Firefox, since it's the default with DNS over HTTPs enabled)
(Oh no how much of my brain is dedicated to remembering random inscrutable tech drama?)
Edit: whoops commented too fast. That would explain broken DNS but not captchas. I blame the heatwave it has melted my brain.
I'm aware of the cloudflare issue, and I don't use them. So I'm pretty sure it's not that. (I use firefox but I turn off DNS over HTTPS)
They get mad at any DNS server that strips/doesn't include EDNS subnet info (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDNS_Client_Subnet)
NextDNS was another that would give me endless captchas.
I had no idea, not having that issue myself, anybody else have this problem? Should I use a different archiver?