Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st August 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.)
From the comments:
Hmm, OK. Where might this be going?
yes, instead they use Scott's and just keep typing forever
"Which Scott?"
"Any of them."
OmniScott.
Yud once debated Massimo Pigliucci and did poorly. He tried and failed to publish academic research in a journal not controlled by his groupies (desk reject? failed to pass peer review?).
Have there been any other times when he engaged with someone with actual education and experience who was not his fan? It sounds like he was on twitter.
You can't talk to us like that, we are not the biassed masses, we are unbiased!
a banger toot about our very good friends' religion
Tom is a top chap of generally correct opinions
I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always “ya but what is intelligence” or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while I’ve tried to use the example that if these “AI coding” things are tools, why would I use a tool that’s never perfect? For example I wouldn’t reach for a 10mm wrench that wasn’t 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have “it could still be useful” responses.
I’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR: Age, Sex, Location Randomization
On a semi-related sidenote, part of me feels that the AI bubble has turned programming into a bit of a cultural punchline.
On one front, the stench of Eau de Tech Asshole that AI creates has definitely rubbed off on the field, and all the programmers who worked at OpenAI et al. have likely painted it as complicit in the bubble's harms.
On another front, the tech industry's relentless hype around AI, combined with its myriad failures (both comical and nightmarish) have cast significant doubt on the judgment of tech as a whole (which has rubbed off on programming as well) - for issues of artistic judgment specifically, the slop-nami's given people an easy way to dismiss their statements out of hand.
you have so many of these! it's amazing! are you going to publish soon? it seems like it might need a whole guide of its own!
moderately barbed jesting aside, a serious question: have you spoken with any programmers/artists/researchers/.... ? so many of your comments have "part of me feels" parts hitting pop-concern-direction things and, like, I get it, but. have you spoken with any of them? what were those conversations like? what did you take away from them? what stuck with you that you want to share?
https://bsky.app/profile/iainnd.bsky.social/post/3lxdvmkua4227
I know everybody here has heard of it, but in the small chance it breaks containment: use notepad++ it is great.
I apologize to bring you the latest example of the intersection of US fascism with silicon valley tech industry.
This time the Whitehouse have decided that UI design is kinda important (gee I wonder if there used to be a department or two for that): https://americabydesign.gov/
Well nothing wrong with a little updating of UI anywa--
Oh god kill it with fire.
The web design of their website is also worth remarking on here:
For some reasonEvery single word gets it's own element to make the obnoxious fade in possible. Because I guess that's what happen when you fire all the people who actually know what they're doing.The tech bros tied to this? Joe Gebbia co-founder of AirBNB, along with Big-Balls. Maybe others but those are the two who were retweeted by the twitter account.
Edit: also this part:
Someone ought to remind them of US copyright law because official federal work is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States
The Trump administration could've gotten some rando on neocities or nekoweb to do their website and unironically gotten a better result than this bland garbage.
They might as well have gone with the Schutzstaffel lightning bolts - they're pretty recognisable even if the resolution is Jack x Shit, and they fit Trump's general ideology pretty well.
I have no idea what is good web design. I'll just note makes the waving red, white and blue flag in the background makes the white heading text pretty hard to read.
Seems you do have some idea.
Yay! *pats myself on the back*
Is this National Design Studio actually part of the federal government, though? Or is this a further collapsing of the distinction between state and enterprise? Because honestly I could totally buy members of this administration looking for ways to use copyright law to go after people who make parodies or otherwise use US iconography without toeing the party line. I'm doing my damnedest not to go full tinfoil hat with this shit, but it's proving so hard.
Finally a page Trump can read. (that font size damn...)
Unironically, this was surely the primary design brief.
New Pivot to AI candidate just dropped: Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters
Clearly artificial superintelligence has arrived, and instead of killing us all with diamondoid bacteria, it's going to kill us by force-feeding us fast food.
At first, I couldn't believe that the staff didn't catch that. But thinking about it, no, I totally can.
Update on ChatGPT psychosis: there is a cult forming on Reddit. An orange-site AI bro has spent too much time on Reddit documenting them. Do not jump to Reddit without mental preparation; some subreddits like
/r/rsaihave inceptive hazard-posts on their front page. Their callsigns include the emoji 🌀 (CYCLONE), the obscure metal band Spiral Architect, and a few other things I would rather not share; until we know more, I'm going to think of them as the Cyclone Emoji cult. They are omnist rather than syncretic. Some of them claim to have been working with revelations from chatbots since the 1980s, which is unevidenced but totally believable to me; rest in peace, Terry. Their tenets are something like:The goal appears to be to enter and maintain the spiraling state for as long/much as possible. Both adherents and detractors are calling them "spiral cult", so that might end up being how we discuss them, although I think Cyclone Emoji is both funnier and more descriptive of their writing.
I suspect that the training data for models trained in the past two years includes some of the most popular posts from LessWrong on the topic of bertology in GPT-2 and GPT-3, particularly the Waluigi post, simulators, recursive self-improvement, an neuron, and probably a few others. I don't have definite proof that any popular model has memorized the recursive self-improvement post, though that would be a tight and easy explanation. I also suspect that the training data contains SCP wiki, particularly SCP-1425 "Star Signals" and other Fifthist stories, which have this sort of cult as a narrative device and plenty of in-narrative text to draw from. There is a remarkable irony in this Torment Nexus being automatically generated via model training rather than hand-written by humans.
This is Uzumaki by Junji Ito but computers and stupid
Turns out every time I forgot to update the exit condition from a loop I actually created and then murdered a superintelligence
Hmm, is it better or worse that they're now officially treating SICP as a literal holy book?
I'm gonna say "worse", because it turned the SCP writers into unwitting accomplices to a literal cult.
SICP, not SCP
brb going to try douglas hofstadter for crimes against humanity
This hits differently over the recent news that ChatGPT encouraged and aided a teen suicide.
::: spoiler transcript Kelsey Piper xhitted: Never thought I'd become a 'take you relationship problems to ChatGPT' person but when the 8yo and I have an argument it actually works really well to mutually agree on an account of events for Claude and the ask for its opinion
I think she considers the AIs far more knowledgeable than me about reasonable human behavior so if I say something that's no reason to think it's true but if Claude says it then it at least merits serious consideration :::
When an 8 year old thinks an AI is "far more knowledgeable than me about reasonable human behavior" that could lead a person to self-reflection. Could.
@nightsky @Architeuthis Computer programs are generally written to be basically polite for customer service purposes.
A generative text program that opened chats with "Ugh, what do you want THIS time, loser?" would likely find itself ....corrected.... by the parent company on short order.
@nightsky @Architeuthis the kid's not wrong, though 😭
In 12 years we'll get a book "My Mom Outsourced Raising Me to AI and it Broke Me"
Found the original Tweet, with a reply from Yud himself:
I feel dumber for having read that, and not in the intellectually humbled way.
I mean, tampering with the system prompt is definitely a kind of concern, given what we've seen happen with Grok's tenure as mechahitler or Replika users finding their girlfriend no longer wanted them. But "messing with system memory" is the kind of sci-fi nonsense that should stay in a cyberpunk novel.
He has capital L Lawfulness concerns. About the parent and the child being asymmetrically skilled in context engineering. Which apparently is the main reason kids shouldn't trust LLM output.
Him showing his ass with the memory comment is just a bonus.
"I have Lawfulness concerns" is just another way of saying "I deserve to be shoved into a locker".
System memory is just the marketing label for "having an LLM summarize a bunch of old conversations and shoving it into a hidden prompt". I agree that using that term is sneer-worthy.
Thanks for the clarification. I had definitely assumed that he meant some kind of God-AI-level attack that revolved around live editing the data or state in RAM or something.
Yes dude, that's the main thing you should be concerned about of course. AI tools couldn't possibly be bad in and of themselves, it has to be human tampering. You've always been very clear about that part.
tfw your gifted child syndrome resentment of adults is powerful enough to make you forget about your life's work
I was trying to figure out why he hadn't turned this into an opportunity to lecture (or write a mini-fanfic) about giving more attack surface to the AGI to manipulate you... I was stumped until I saw your comment. I think that is it, expressing his childhood distrust of authority trumps lecturing us on the AI-God's manipulations.
and of course we all have root on the prompt, where - at will - we can just instantly impose all manner of will on the corporate vendor chatbot. y'know, the chatbot operating in a service structured as much as possible to try to do what the corporate vendor wants to desperately maintain
(it continues to astound me that anyone takes yud seriously, at all, ever)
That is his concern and not the billionaires behind it messing with the systems so much you cant prompt override it? Please tell me this guy doesnt work in AI alignment.
I have context that makes this even more cringe! "Lawfulness concerns" refers to like, Dungeons and Dragons lawfulness. Specifically the concept of lawfulness developed in the Pathfinder fanfiction we've previously discussed (the one with deliberately bad BDSM and eugenics). Like a proper Lawful Good Paladin of Iomedae wouldn't put you in a position where you had to trust they hadn't rigged the background prompt if you went to them for spiritual counseling. (Although a Lawful Evil cleric of Asmodeus totally would rig the prompt... Lawfulness as a measuring stick of ethics/morality is a terrible idea even accepting the premise of using Pathfinder fanfic to develop your sense of ethics.)
Not everything that Yud writes feels like it should be read in the voice of Augustus St. Cloud, but a lot of it sure does.
From elsewhere in the replies:
---TracingWoodgrains, who apparently feels that he is qualified to judge any other human being, ever, in spite of evidence to the contrary
KP writing a paper for the journal “New Frontiers In Gaslighting Children”
"When the 8-year-old and I have an argument, it actually works really well to mutually agree on an account of events... and then take cocaine together."
Acknowledging/validating each other's feelings and finding a mutually-agreeable understanding of the conflict is already the hard part that most parents and kids aren't willing to do. Talking to a chatbot after that just seems like you don't understand the fucking point and are still trying to "be right" or whatever.
Pro tip: search GitHub for "removed env". Vibe coders who don't understand envs probably don't know git either.
My eyes are bleeding. WARNING: psychic damage will occur.
Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of openai and claude api keys.
More of a pet peeve than a primal scream, but I wonder what's with Adam Tooze and his awe of AI. Tooze is a left-wing economic historian who’s generally interesting to listen to (though perhaps in tackling a very wide range of subject matter sometimes missing some depth), but nevertheless seems as AI-pilled as any VC. Most recently came about this bit: Berlin Forum on Global Cooperation 2025 - Keynote Adam Tooze
Really, anyone Adam? Are you sure about the techbro pitch there?
Sad if true. I really enjoyed his book The Wages of Destruction which mythbusts a lot of folk knowledge about the Nazis
https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/The-Wages-of-Destruction.html
I literally just got the audiobook.
Discovered a solid sneer online today, aptly titled "I Am An AI Hater"
This is an excellent sneer, thank you for sharing! <3
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/nigh
So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. I'm going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual "imitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the least" school of design. They've confirmed that they're not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so that's all good. That's not what I want to talk about.
No, what's grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative "antiwoke" backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasn't a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I can't think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.
Note I dont know what a cracker barrel is irl, as we dont have them here. But my view of the bsky socials was 'rebrand sucks, dont really care, wow why are the right so obsessed over this' culminating in people talking about how these kinds of stores are a simulacrum of a cozy mom n pop store and people are unknowningly mad about losing even the simulacrum, and how this is all due to capitalism. (More commercialization than capitalism imho, but capitalism did speed up the process). Just as rainbow capitalism will betray you in the search for more profit so will cozy capitalism.
E: update on the story "Cracker Barrel's Pride page now redirects to its "Culture and Belonging" page, removing its LGBTQ+ Alliance and DEIB Team." And while I didn't know CB, this ensures I will never eat there if I ever have a chance.
@Soyweiser @techtakes The correct term for the type of capitalism that enshittifies its product should be "crapitalism".
Yeah, it is also sad the culture warriors are not aware they are mad about this sort of crapitalism. They think the hominization of the builds is due to the woke, and not because the mother company owns the building/land of the franchise and this no slanted roofs bit (see https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:66rbia7w4vcwiszfppfv3r2e/bafkreiacsurup26wigvedpedf44rodrwzzebfcytzdglb2bh6wjh6brbsa@jpeg), increases resale value. Just companies looking for more and more minimal minimal viable product.
::: spoiler image description Post from some social media by user Mancowmuller On the left four images of the outsides older style fast food places, all with more rustic looking buildings, notably buildings with more slanted roofs, evoking very slightly a more European home style (sorry if this is the wrong way to describe it im not an architect).
On the right four images of the outsides of four new style fast food places where the buildings look more like office buildings or simple modern stores, very blocky, lot of glass big panels/windows and flat roofs.
A big text is overlayed on these 8 shrines of American style capitalism saying 'Communism.' ::: Also important to note on the image, looks like the new style ones are not all real. Some of the details look off which makes me suspect it is AI generated. Esp the pizza hut one.
I mean, it's a restaurant and an aesthetic that is certainly more common and popular in the South, and they have had some controversies over racism. Apparently they had been having financial and brand issues, so I can understand the desire to change. But rather than changing the food or improving the service in any meaningful way it seems like they went for the new logo and image and stopped there. Given that their existing audience was basically there for the wholesome old-timey please-don't-ask-about-the-racism vibes I'm not shocked that conservatives in particular were upset about the change. But like, the change was never about wokeness or whatever it was about aesthetic modernization and a flailing attempt to fix things from business idiots who don't know how to address the actual problems of mediocre food and fading relevance. If anyone had actually liked the change or if it had actually improved their service times then maybe there would be a point. But this was just a bad change and nobody outside that boardroom actually liked it, and so of course it got rolled back.
"Simulacrum" is the perfect word for it. None of these posers making a fuss about a corporate logo have simmered a pot of of soup beans in their life.
I must admit I stole that partially from somebody else who mentioned the idea. Which also had me go 'indeed, that is a good word'
Was it the "Hyperreal Simulacrum" from the joe rogan takedown videos you linked in last weeks stubsack?
No somebody else. Hyperreal simulacrum is a bit of a different concept I think. Because that supersedes reality, this is just a weird sort of nostalgia.
I think I mentioned Doughboys in this sack somewhere, so talking about CB is fair game
Lesswronger reads about Orcas the first time in their life. Decided that training them to become smarter than humans is now the next important step.
They made several posts about it, and just the opening bits are funny. I obv didn't read any of them an only looked at the opening statements. I will produce a quote from each.
Yes, the weird percentage is in the text, the [1] footnote says 15%, no idea why they can't edit their text normally.
And from the last article, two lines as a treat:
(Nice of the person to think of the orcas btw, just wish it was more preservation than 'how can we make these animals help us out).
E: apparently "An alternative approach to superbabies" is also about orcas, they just no longer stand behind it.
The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me
All I need to know about HDI (human-dolphin interaction) (read: fuckin) is covered in many episodes of my favorite podcast Doughboys
That story mentions Carl Sagan but omits the detail that Peter the dolphin propositioned him. (It's in the William Poundstone biography, IIRC.)
Sadly, the orcas go after sailing boats not the big motorized yachts, less eat the rich and more eat the upper middle class.
That's because we haven't helped them achieve their full potential
FInally read the wikipedia page on orcas an hour ago, and boy do I have plans, let me start the wiki.
what have the orcas done to deserve this
Dolphins tend to be pretty good hackers.
So perhaps orcas can be too.
::: spoiler Image description. Still from the movie Johnny Mnemonic (1995), on the left is Keanu Reeves playing Johnny Mnemonic in a black and white suit sitting in a chair with a large cyberpunk helmet on his face. He is gripping the chair tightly. On the right there is Jones the Dolphin, a model of a diseased looking dolphin swimming in a dirty small tank with a large cyberpunk implant on his face. :::
Larry Niven had a fixed idea about cetacean intelligence, and it showed up in mass-audience SF like Star Trek IV.
The story below is another example of really creepy things being done in the name of science in the postwar era.
I have three more examples of sapient marine mammals!
Gotta be trolling.
Somebody on LW also thought so, and they replied they are 100% serious. Which still could be trolling. Lot of effort for no payoff however. Personally I think this person is just very young. I can get a teenager going all in on this. (a teenager being this much into IQ stuff is pretty bad tbh).
I was thinking this also, like it's the perfect parody of several lesswrong and EA memes: overly concerned with animal suffering/sapience, overly concerned with IQ stats, openly admitting to no expertise or even relevant domain knowledge but driven to pontificate anyway, and inspired by existing science fiction... I think the last one explains it and it isn't a parody. As cinnasverses points out, Cetacean intelligence shows up occasionally in sci-fi. to add to the examples... sapient whales warning the team of an impending solar flare in Stargate Atlantis via echolocation induced hallucinations, the dolphins in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, and the whales showing up to help in one book of Animorphs.
there's having a favourite animal, then there's whatever this is
Ironically I just put down a deposit on a orca tattoo.
I haven’t clicked on any links here yet, this sounds like a bit, but because it’s LW I have to assume bad faith and that this is real.
E: lol real. Why wouldn’t they go for apes lol
Someone tried Adobe's new Generative Fill "feature" (just the latest development in Adobe's infatuation with AI) with the prompt "take this elf lady out of the scene", and the results were...interesting:
There's also an option to rate whatever the fill gets you, which I can absolutely see being used to sabotage the "feature".
Putting the “manic pixie” in manic pixie dream girl
Watch till end the third option made me choke on my drink it was way too funny
James Gleick on "The Lie of AI":
https://around.com/the-lie-of-ai/
Nothing new for regulars here, I suspect, but it might be useful to have in one's pocket.
people who talk about "prompting" like it's a skill would take a class^[read: watch a youtube tutorial] on tasseomancy because a coffee shop opened across the street
I think this is more about plausible deniability: If people report getting wrong answers from a chatbot, this is surely only because of their insufficient "prompting skills".
Oddly enough, the laziest and most gullible chatbot users tend to report the smallest number of hallucinations. There seems to be a correlation between laziness, gullibility and "great prompting skills".
is the deniability you are referring to of the clanker-wankers (CW^[unrelated, but i miss when that channel had superhero shows. bring back legends of tomorrow]) themselves or the clanker-producers (e.g. sam altman)?
because i agree on the latter^[i.e., someone like altman would say "you're prompting it wrong" to skirt accountability or create an air of scientific/mathematical rigor], but i do see CWs saying stupid shit like "there is more to it than just writing a description"
edit: credit, it was @antifuchs who introduced the term to me here
edit2: sorry, my dumbass understands your point now (i think). if i wank clankers and someone tells me "that shit doesn't work," i can just respond "you must have been prompting it wrong". but, i do think the way many users of these tools are so sycophantic means it's also a genuine belief, and not just a way to escape responsibility. these people are fart sniffers, after all
To put it more bluntly: Yes, I believe this is mainly used as an excuse by AI boosters to distract from the poor quality of their product. At the same time, as you mentioned, there are people who genuinely consider themselves "prompting wizards", usually because they are either too lazy or too gullible to question the chatbot's output.
For all that user error can be a real thing it also gets used as a thought-terminating cliche by engineer types. This is a tendency that industry absolutely exploits to justify not only AI grifts but badly designed products.
When an AI creates fake legal citations, for example, and the prompt wasn't something along the lines of "Please make up X", I don't know how the user could be blamed for this. Yet, people keep claiming that outputs like this could only happen due to "wrong prompting". At the same time, we are being told that AI could easily replace nearly all lawyers because it is that great at lawyerly stuff (supposedly).
OpenAI has stated its scanning users' conversations (as if they weren't already) and reporting conversations to the cops in response to the recent teen suicide I mentioned a couple days ago.
So, rather than let ChatGPT drive users to kill themselves, its just going to SWAT users and have the cops do the job.
(On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)
Mentioned it on bsky, more externalizing of the costs of their product. And due to vpns will not even work in a lot of cases. (And also prob gdpr illegal).
E: A big reason why this kind of stuff is in there and prob very hard to get rid of is places like alt.suicide.holiday which have been online for ages, and are from what I can tell not considered bad places by the experts.
The last open letter was funnier. Even though "[t]he stakes could not be higher," this one doesn't even have Yud going on a promo tour talking about all of humanity dropping dead from diamondoid bacteria that ChatGPT will order from Fiverr after going foom.
They bet humanity's future on the premise that very rich people would keep promises.
This seems very stupid to me.
The Independent has yet another profile of the Collinses which finally starts to map their network (a brother is in DOGE). Just who is their PR person would be good to know. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-musk-ai-pronatalists-collins-b2777577.html
Puts their being a Thiel media op in an even more pathetic light.
I don't buy his narrative about juvie at all.
"Enjoy" this Wronger explaining human sexual attraction
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ktydLowvEg8NxaG4Z/neuroscience-of-human-sexual-attraction-triggers-3
I have but skimmed it, not plumbed its depths for sneers.
Ugh reading more of this and it's awful.
He writes that women are attracted to men who could beat us up or control us. He writes that the reason for this attraction is so we have a chance to marry the man and prevent these bad things from happening.
His "science" assumes that women think like they do in shitty erotica written by men for men. Even by rationalist evo-psych standards this is pretty poorly thought out.
OK other straight ladies here, raise your hand if you've ever felt that middle aged congressmen, as a whole, "radiate animal magnetism". Anyone? Anyone?
Imagr description: Steven Pinker, Lawrence Krauss and Jeffrey Epstein, posted as per tradition when either of the latter two are mentioned
Don't they just radiate animal magnetism
krauss in this photo specifically reminds me of gibson's description of the finn
Having now read it (I have regrets), I think it's even worse than you suggested. He's not trying to argue that women are attracted to dangerous men in order to prevent the danger from happening to them. He assumes that, based on "everyday experience" of how he feels when dealing with "high-status" men and then tries to use that as an extension of and evidence for his base-level theory of how the brain does consciousness. (I'm not going to make the obvious joke about alternative reasons why he has the same feeling around certain men that he does around women he finds attractive.) In order to get there he has to assume that culture and learning play no role in what people find attractive, which is just absurd on it's face and renders the whole argument not worth engaging with.
It's almost endearing (or sad) that he believes (or very strongly wants to believe) his experience is "typical", exploring the boundaries of what you are attracted to typically doesn't involve this much evo-pysch psychobabble, or even this much fragile masculinity.
I feel like this is some friggin' Kissinger "power is an aphrodisiac" nonsense. Which is hilarious because while yes Kissinger spent more time out on the town with beautiful women than you would expect for a Ben Stein-esque war criminal, when journalists at the time talked to those women they pretty consistently said that they enjoyed feeling like he respected them and wanted to talk about the world and listened to what they had to say. But that would be anathema to Rationalism, I guess.
lol. lmao.
What a coincidence! I read this post quickly and without thoroughly considering much of anything.
This comes shockingly close to self-awareness.
I think that goes without saying on LW but glad someone put it in writing
Are we sure this isn't an SCP entry?
We should have a cognitohazard tag
Honestly it’s probably most things we post
Apart from the Hellraiser fanfiction.
don't think I'd seen that before but I shall earmark it for a weekend perusal :)
it's just this with more words (context: someone dead serious tweeted that speedrunning is communism and brought into it peterson's mouth noises on sex somehow, and all in 14 tweets)
Relevant
(that's the same link)
Ah fuck. I didn’t click it cos I assumed it was the original tweet. I’ll just leave it there so you can all witness my crimes
the original tweets were deleted and only survive as screenshots
Somehow I had missed this when it originally spawned and I was not prepared for this level of psychic damage.
roy_batty.aac
Ugh what is it with misogynists and compulsively writing out this nonsense again and again? Just want to punch him on the nose. Make it stop.
...
kys
WTF is wrong with these people
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=wFmCveaxA5EnNtuCj
Sorry darling, but according to my game-theoretical model this discussion ends in my victory in every possible combination of moves, so can we just skip to the point you apologise?
Where... where are you going
Man doesnt get to do everything he wants, this means woman has all the power. Problem with seeing everything as a hierarchy means you cant see partnerships.
The old chestnut that really these days it's women who hold all the power is as old as times. I saw an instance in Perrault's introduction to the tale of Griselidis (1691) and I'm sure you can go much further back. Not sure why we ever even bothered with voting rights, reproductive freedom, or personhood.
Are they drawn to the cult because they are obsessed with status, or does the cult foster this obssession? Yes.
From the other reactions, dont have the energy to read it atm (it was this or orcas), looks like he is recreating heartiste from first principles.
Via, prob posted here already "Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code", as the article is a month old.
What the hell does that even mean, lmao?
What kind of drugs are they on
Second quote is classic "you must be prompting it wrong". No, it can't be that people which find a tool less useful will be using it less often.
Feel like people are just reaching for things 'clearly we need tools to help us with the process, so lets just call them debuggers for AI'
So the normal debuggers that we have for ages, right?
I assume these 'ai debuggers' are for looking inside the AI black box when they AI goes 'yes I'm very sorry I will not do it again' before doing it again.
but can you grift using these?
AI innovation in this space usually means automatically adding stuff to the model's context.
It probably started meaning the (failed) build output got added in every iteration, but it's entirely possible to feed the LLM debugger data from a runtime crash and hope something usable happens.
It wasn't posted yet in lemmy, did search. Yours was the only thing I found. So, I posted it in programming to rile people
Yeah I did a search for "stack overflow" and found zero results so think search was a bit buggy atm. Votes also not showing atm for example. Not sure if by design.
this might be a federation breakage, or the queue catching up
Sorry searched only locally forgot to mention that, but pretty quickly after the server came back up
New Ed Zitron: "How to Argue With An AI Booster", an hour-long read dedicated to exactly what it says on the tin.
I'm curious, do you get paid for being a multiprotocol rss repeater?
I don't know if they do but as someone too lazy to actually set up an RSS feed I deeply appreciate it.
I appreciate it, and this also gives us an easy way to discuss it as Zitron seems to be quite popular here. So makes sense to me to just also post it here. And not everybody uses RSS (or Eds one).
maybe that means something like this should be a linkblog/{atom,rss,...} feedsite on its ace?
No, I do this for the love of the game
Being paid 90s tv ad money has to suck donkey nads :<
Even for the people that do get email notifications of Zitron's excellent content (like myself), I appreciate having a place here to discuss it.
It's a nice master post that gets all his responses and many useful articles linked into one place. It's all familiar if you've kept up with techtakes and Zitron's other posts and pivot-to-ai, but I found a few articles I had previously missed reading.
Related trend to all the but achskhually's AI booster's like to throw out. Has everyone else noticed the trend where someone makes a claim of a rumor they heard about an LLM making a genuine discovery in some science, except it's always repeated second hand so you can't really evaluate it, and in the rare cases they do have a link to the source, it's always much less impressive than they made it sound at first...
I regret to inform you all that Elon Musk appears to be completely addicted to AI-generated anime porn..
I'm sorry but this is zero percent surprising like ye of course he is, he was addicted to anime porn before AI generation probably
sex weirdo (derogatory)
He isnt the only weird fascist attracted to digital porn. And not just the rank and file.
He're hoping that the more he spends time gooning the more he'll leave the rest of us alone. crosses fingers
TIL that "Aris Thorne" is a character name favoured by ChatGPT - which means its presence is a reliable slop tell, lol
like the dumbass-ray version of Ballard calling multiple characters variants on "Traven"
what to do with this information
https://awful.systems/post/5168673/8320254 a third name has hit the towers.
If you know any sci-fi/fantasy mags, you should probably tell them about it to help them identify and reject slop more easily.
with a moment's thought, it should be obvious that they are painfully aware, and with another moment's thought that that's where I found this out.
New Public Good newsletter, talking about YouTube editing users' uploads without their permission/knowledge.
Mark Cuban is feeling bullied by Bluesky. He will also have you know that you need to keep aware of the important achievements of your betters, as though he is currently the 5th most blocked user on there, he was indeed once the 4th most blocked user. Perhaps he is just crying out to move up the ranks once more?
It’s really all about Bluesky employees being able to afford their healthcare for Mark you see.
And of course, here’s never-Trumper Anne Applebaum running interference for him. Really an appropriate hotdog-guy-meme moment – as much as I shamelessly sneer at Cuban, I’m genuinely angered by the complete inability of the self-satisfied ‘democracy defender’ set to see their own complicity in perpetuating a permission structure for priviliged white men to feel eternally victimized.
As I said on bsky, why is he complaining, if he cares he could fund bsky himself. Bsky could name an office wing after him, give his kids legacy admissions, give him a shoutout in every video they make.
(While my tone is mocking here, I actually dont think these things are bad (except the legacy admissions obv), and he should be a patron. The unwillingness of the 'left/democrat' rightwing rich people to use their wallets while the right hands out wellfare for everyone willing to say slurs sucks. Reminded of Hillar Clinton starting a go fund me for a staffer with a disease).
Only had to scroll about halfway through the replies before I found somebody suggesting an SPAC
@fnix @BlueMonday1984 these fuckers all have *such thin skin*
https://www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-evil-of-ai-safety
Once again shilling another great Ben Recht post. This time calling out the fucking insane irresponsibility of "responsible" AI providers to do the bare minimum to prevent people from having psychological beaks from reality.
"I’ve been stuck on this tragic story in the New York Times about Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his life after months of getting advice on suicide from ChatGPT. Our relationship with technological tools is complex. That people draw emotional connections to chatbots isn’t new (I see you, Joseph Weizenbaum). Why young people commit suicide is multifactorial. We’ll see whether a court will find OpenAI liable for wrongful death.
But I’m not a court of law. And OpenAI is not only responsible, but everyone who works there should be ashamed of themselves."
It's a good post. A few minor quibbles:
I think at least some of the people at launch were true believers, but strong financial incentives and some cynics present at the start meant the true believers didn't really have a chance, culminating in the board trying but failing to fire Sam Altman and him successfully leveraging the threat of taking everyone with him to Microsoft. It figures one of the rare times rationalists recognize and try to mitigate the harmful incentives of capitalism they fall vastly short. OTOH... if failing to convert to a for-profit company is a decisive moment in popping the GenAI bubble, then at least it was good for something?
I wish people didn't feel the need to add all these disclaimers, or at least put a disclaimer on their disclaimer. It is a slightly better autocomplete for coding that also introduces massive security and maintainability problems if people entirely rely on it. It is a better web search only relative to the ad-money-motivated compromises Google has made. It also breaks the implicit social contract of web searches (web sites allow themselves to be crawled so that human traffic will ultimately come to them) which could have pretty far reaching impacts.
One of the things I liked and didn't know about before
That is hilarious! Kind of overkill to be honest, I think they've really overrated how much it can help with a bioweapons attack compared to radicalizing and recruiting a few good PhD students and cracking open the textbooks. But I like the author's overall point that this shut-it-down approach could be used for a variety of topics.
One of the comments gets it:
LLMs aren't actually smart enough to make delicate judgements, even with all the fine-tuning and RLHF they've thrown at them, so you're left with over-censoring everything or having the safeties overridden with just a bit of prompt-hacking (and sometimes both problems with one model)/1
"The Torment Nexus definitely has positive uses. I personally use it frequently for looking up song lyrics and tracking my children's medication doses. I find it helpful."
quoting that
@blakestacey @scruiser I guess people can derive a lot of value so long as it's *other people* being tormented
it might be that, or it may have been intended to shut off any output of medical-sounding advice. if it's the former, then it's rare rationalist W for wrong reasons
look up the story of vil mirzayanov. break out these bayfucker style salaries in eastern europe or india or number of other places and you'll find a long queue of phds willing to cook man made horrors beyond your comprehension. it might even not take six figures (in dollars or euros) after tax
maybe they really made machines in their own image
"hello anthropic? can you pay me 50k a year so that i specifically don't go around making biological weapons? think about all these future simulated beings it'll save"
@fullsquare @cstross at those amounts, no-one is going to take you seriously. You should be asking at least 50M a year.
The deaths just keep coming: the Wall Street Journal's just reported on a murder-suicide caused by ChatGPT.
To me, in terms of the chatbot's role, this seems possibly even more damning than the suicides. Apparently, the chatbot didn't just support this man's delusions about his mother and his ex-girlfriend being after him, but even made up additional delusions on its own, further "incriminating" various people including his mother, whom he eventually killed. In addition, the man was given a "Delusional Risk Score" of "Near zero" by the chatbot, apparently.
On the other hand, I'm sure people are going to come up with excuses even for this by blaming the user, his mental illness, his mother or even society at large.
I mean, I am going to say it but not as an excuse. Should companies that supply these products be held accountable as the criminals they are? Yes. Is this all downstream from the fact our society hasn't treated mental health as a serious matter, therapy access is garbage, all the while being a young person in 2025 is a hopeless string of horrors and anxiety? Also yes.
Torment Chatbot That Kills You is a bad thing to create, but also no one would be chatting with the Torment Chatbot That Kills You if society hadn't utterly failed them beforehand.
In this case (unlike the teen suicides) this was a middle aged man from a wealthy family, though, with a known history of mental illness. Quite likely, he would have had sufficient access to professional help. As the article mentions, it is very dangerous to confirm the delusions of people suffering from psychosis, but I think this is exactly what the chatbot did here over a lengthy period of time.
That OpenAI haven't recalled their product after it's been involved in several violent deaths, that it would even be absurd to suggest they should recall it, really highlights how corrupt and disgusting the industry and the whole structure propping it up are.
Found a couple articles about blunting AI's impact on education (got them off of Audrey Watters' blog, for the record).
The first is a New York Times guest essay by NYU vice provost Clay Shirky, which recommends "moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward [...] assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time."
The second is an article by Kate Manne calling for professors to prevent cheating via AI, which details her efforts in doing so:
Manne does note the problems with this (outing disabled students, class time spent writing, and difficulties in editing, rewriting, and make-up work), but still believes "it is better, on balance, to take this approach rather than risk a significant proportion of students using AI to write their essays."
what worked for me teaching an undergrad course last year was to have
it ended up working pretty well. an added benefit was that my TAs didn't have to deal with the nightmare of grading 120 very poorly written homeworks every four weeks. my students also stopped obsessing about the grades they would receive on their homeworks and instead focused on
learningthe grades they would receive on their examshowever, at the k-12 level, it feels like a much harder problem to tackle. parental involvement is the only solution i can think of, and that's already kind of a nightmare (at least here in the us)
RE: (meta?)speculation about the quantum bubble. So the preceding two tech bubbles tried to worm their way into the arts: NFTs, and slop. How do we think the quantum hucksters are gonna try co-opt craativity?
No idea, but the big problem area to look out for imho is when it gets matched with quantum woo again. And if people manage to link that to computers.
Quantum as a concept doesn't really have any way to co-opt creativity that I can see - its a rather "science-y" concept in the public eye, far away from anything associated with the arts.
Probably won't stop the hucksters, though - they'll happily make shit up if it means butting in on artists' turf.
Lots of woo and mysticism already has a veneer of stolen Quantum terminology. It's too far from respectable to get the quasi-expert endorsement or easy VC money that LLM hype has gotten, but quantum hucksters fusing quantum computing nonsense with quantum mysticism can probably still con lots of people out of their money.
Automobile advertising
At the risk of doing some "founder mode" idiot's homework for them, impermanence is inherent to a lot of artforms, and I can see some insane and vague pitches to use quantum to "capture the magic moment". Or maybe they tie it back into NFTs with quantum technology that comes up with every variant of the bored chimpanzee at once.
new zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-bubble-2027/
new Vagina Museum
Zitron taking every opportunity to shit on Scott's AI2027 is kind of cathartic, ngl
I like how he doesn't even bother debunking it point by point, he just slams the very premise of it and moves on.
I like how Zitron does a good job of distinguishing firm overall predictions from specific scenarios (his chaos bets) which are plausible but far from certain. AI 2027 specifically conflated and confused those things in a way that gave it's proponents more rhetorical room to hide and dodge.
it's a long one and right behind paywall there's a ::: spoiler Table Of Contents How I Am Justifying "Guessing" NVIDIA, And What Will Happen Soonest Nevertheless, NVIDIA Will Accelerate The Collapse If Its Stock Falters Big Tech's Bubble Burst Moment Will Be When Growth Slows Capital Expenditures Are The Next Thing To Go CoreWeave — A Timebomb For The Markets and AI Writ Large How Does CoreWeave Collapse? The End Of AI Startup Funding How The Collapse Of Funding Begins — A Scenario (Chaos Bet) Costs Are A Brewing Scandal In Generative AI — Another Chaos Bet The Curious World of Anthropic and OpenAI, And My Own Suspicions About Their Businesses How About Anthropic's Costs? An Important Note: Anthropic and OpenAI's Costs Are Dramatically Underrepresented Because Neither Company Pays For The Construction Of (Or Owns) Their Infrastructure Questions About OpenAI's Revenue And Costs OpenAI Is Using Cal State's "Edu" Contracts To Pump Its Paid Business User Numbers — And It's Unclear How Long It Keep A User In Its Numbers What About Government Contracts? OpenAI Is Using "$1 for a Month" Subscription Deals On Teams To Juice Business User Numbers — And Offering Deals For ChatGPT Plus For $10-a-month To Stop User Churn (REMINDER: OpenAI Loses Money On Every User Anyway) I Believe OpenAI's Costs Are Worse Than They Seem — Where Is All The Money Going? OpenAI Will Burn At Least $3 Billion On Salaries In 2025, And May Spend As Much As $8 Billion — With Any Layoffs Guaranteeing An Industry-Wide Panic Compute Costs Are Likely Astronomical, Burning At Least $15 Billion — If Not $20 Billion — In 2025 Alone OpenAI Is Bleeding Out, And Could Run Out Of Money By End Of Year Chaos Bet: Microsoft Kills OpenAI By Blocking Its Non-Profit Conversion Even If Microsoft Agrees, OpenAI Does Not Have Enough Time To Convert To A For-Profit By The End Of The Year Chaos Pick: OpenAI Does Not Convert, And Does Not Receive More Money From SoftBank Alternate Chaos Pick: OpenAI Does Convert, But SoftBank Can't Get The Money How Does OpenAI (or Anthropic) IPO? I Believe Both OpenAI and Anthropic May Be Overstating Revenues And User Numbers, Using The Media To Launder Their Reputations What Happens Next? So Why Did You Say 2027? :::
Enjoy this malicious prompt trying to find crapto secrets after a compromise
https://semgrep.dev/blog/2025/security-alert-nx-compromised-to-steal-wallets-and-credentials/#header-6
Democratic presidential nominee (E: this is a dark joke) for 2028 (vs trump of course) Newsom is doing a bit of ironic memecoin corruption. So many blueanon people are going to lose money if he goes along with this.
I really hope he is going to use this as a 'use the controversy to reveal the corruption of the system' style thing (in .nl a tv-show did this where they made a gameshow in which people who needed a new kidney could get one, as a ruse to spread awareness to ask for more donors and everybody participating was informed of this from the start (led to 12k new donors at least)). But I really doubt it.
He is not the Democratic presidential nominee for 2028.
... thank almighty fuck
...yet.
Ow really? Tell me more.
The Democratic party's presidential nominee for 2028 will be chosen by a primary election, which will also be in 2028. Until a candidate wins the primary election, there is no nominee. This is important because Newsom is a sack of shit and we have multiple years with which to oppose his run for nomination.
Ow really? Tell me more.Sorry that was mean.
I mean to say I'm aware of this, I know he isn't and that Trump should not be allowed a third term, it was intended as a dark joke and to portray my dislike of the people pushing both people.
E: but yes, sorry for wasting your time being snarky while you honestly tried to help.
Good news, everyone! A Wronger has Thoughts about Female Attractiveness
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cHqCGG5dTmpnM7y92/female-sexual-attractiveness-seems-more-egalitarian-than
30 karma, 15 comments. Very Rational.
To summarise:
This is just a LWer's version of a shitty greentext ending with "why are women like this?"
E: sorry for necroposting, this came up somehow and I didn't check which sack it was under.
The NYT's reported on the suicide of a 16-year old boy, noting how ChatGPT assisted him in said suicide and deterred him from seeking help.
This is not the first time a chatbot's driven someone to suicide. And I fully expect it won't be the last.
Thought 1: This is the kind of incident that makes politicians vote for a law named after a dead kid. It behooves us to think of what kind of legislation could actually address the problem without becoming a clusterfuck that worsens everyone's life, including children's. cough #OnlineSafetyAct cough
Thought 2: Hey, all you guys using LLMs to replace opinion surveys or do "research" on social interactions because it's cheaper than gathering real data... How many human beings talk like the suicide-encouragement bot here?
Thought 3: Oh, remember when OpenAI paid $10 million to buy off the American Federation of Teachers? Because Pepperidge Farm still has that browser tab open. Every school administrator who breathes a word about bringing "AI" into the classroom deserves to get lit up by parents asking why they are embracing suicide tech.
A complete ban on chatbots/LLMs would be enough. These things have basically zero ethical use case, it'd be a net positive if they were legally wiped from existence.
Against my better judgment, I decided to follow that link and check the quotes. Thankfully, there was nobody defending this - calling for a ban on AI, calling for ChatGPT's shutdown, calling for Sam Altman to be charged, pretty much everyone was out for blood.
My in very bad taste remark: well we need to weigh one dead kid on the one side an on the otherside there is the millions of people who would be unhappy if they couldn't easily make
dustpecksstupid political memes with a piss filter.Textbook case of anthropomorphisation from The Guardian, trying to posit that AI systems are capable of feeling pain.
You want my unsolicited opinion, machines cannot feel pain/emotion, only imitate it, and the rise of LLMs have made this crystal clear. Much like with being creative or making art, feeling genuine emotion is the exclusive domain of human/animal minds.
It's so bizarre to see AI get the benefit of a superposition of states where we all admit that these are not machines capable of thought, yet at the same time go through these stupid exercises where we pretend that they are.
one that I suspect will surprise none of us
depressing how Cheetoh & Co. continue to wrecking ball the shit out of everything
(wonder how long it is before the US degrades far enough that other countries start ratcheting up border/traveller defenses, compared to the current ~free rein they have (which, y'know, was owed to years of hard and soft power that the orange man is also rapidly pissing away))
By my guess, not that long. If you have reports of American inadequacy during an outbreak (pretty likely), or horror stories of your countrymen getting persecuted (should be easy to find), you should have a solid political case for border lockdowns.
Focusing on Canada and Mexico specifically, I expect Canada will build its metaphorical walls first - the ongoing drug war in Mexico, plus the brutality of its cartels, will likely act to deter would-be American refugees from there.
Ethan Marcotte's given his thoughts on the new "America by Design" web page, noting how its shittiness aligns perfectly with the Trump administration's values.
To my eternal sadness, this guy makes a decent point about the horror possibly continuing (yellow site has mixed takes and adds claims about "if we didn't have to pay for training, we'd be profitable" by sam and dario ).
If this bears out, it might be that the only thing that'll end this bubble is the vibe shift & backlash against AI
The people at Zitron's subreddit have thoughts
I mean if anything all he proved that DeepSeek-R1 could be profitable
if any of this was true these companies would actually be making money
i'd like to see some elaboration from the smiling man himself (when he's back), since he seems to have some numbers on that
This bullshit again
Hot take: If a text extruder's winning gold medals at your contest, that's not a sign the text extruder's good at something, that's a sign your contest is worthless for determining skill.