Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025
Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
excellent sneer
https://bsky.app/profile/cigaretteliker.bsky.social/post/3m2zcnwasvk2j
And in related news, worldwide ecosystems are already getting perma-fucked by billionaires' repeated and relentless wrecking of our planet for personal gain.
I mention billionaires specifically because the average Joe, the 99% of humanity being told to cut down their carbon footprint and delete emails to save water, is completely fucking blameless in this.
They didn't choose to have car-centric architecture forced on them for the past goddamn century, they didn't choose to have planet-wrecking crypto farms/NFTs forced on them a few years ago, and they sure as hell didn't choose to have planet-killing AI slop extruders forced on them, either.
(Anyways, unrelated hot take of the day: taking responsibility for something you're not responsible for is a moral failing, and needs to be treated as such)
wat
as an ezra klein hater since 2020 the past month or so has been victory lap after victory lap. and now, well
I remember when this guy used to castigate Sam Harris for platforming Charles Murray’s race science. The same guy who now eulogizes Charlie Kirk and does the bidding of billionaires. Really encapsulates the elite pivot to the right.
I swear to god if yud goes on conan needs a friend (who recently interviewed a freshly minted riyadh comedy festival alum bill burr) i will unplug from this simulation
I still refuse to learn what an ezra is, they will have to drag my ass to room 101 to force that into my brain
Folks, Sam's got a groundbreaking idea how to get more people to pay for the slop machine!
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-mental-health
just repeating my reaction on bluesky here but "my AI partner died because of the updates" is a common complaint with ppl "dating" AI. altman absolutely knows who he's targeting when he talks about restoring personality in erotic settings, and it's people who are really not doing great
I guess we're moving into the "take advantage of the mentally unwell" stage of trying to figure out a way to make money off this shit, also known as the Gacha Gambit.
Bold move, Cotton. Let's see how it pays off. (It pays off in human misery)
There's this magical thing called "commissioning a porn artist" Sammy Boy. I recommend trying it out for once - it gets you an objectively better result than throwing money into a planet-destroying slop machine, and its much cheaper too. You've done nothing but attack the human soul for the past three fucking years, you might as well give an infinitesimal amount of your undeserved billions to one of the millions of artists whose livelihoods you've been murdering.
(Seriously, I feel fucking insulted by this.)
But commissioning a porn artist is hard as they lost their payment providers and bank accounts, while the slop machines got off with a american authors only slap on the wrist.
Hey, remember Sabine Hossenfelder? The transphobe who makes YouTube videos? She published a physics paper! Well, OK, she posted a thing to the arXiv for the first time since January 2024. I read it, because I've been checking the quant-ph feed on a daily basis for years now, and reading anything else is even more depressing. It's vague, meandering glorp that tries to pretty up a worldview that amounts to renouncing explanation and saying everything happens because Amon-Ra wills it. Two features are worth commenting upon. The acknowledgments say,
"Tee hee, I shut off my higher brain functions" is a statement that should remain in the porn for those who have a fetish for that.
And what literature does Hossenfelder cite? Well, there's herself, of course, and Tim Palmer (one of those guys who did respectable work in his own field and then decided to kook out about quantum mechanics). And ... Eric Weinstein! The very special boy who dallied for a decade before writing a paper on his revolutionary theory and then left his equations in his other pants. Yes, Hossenfelder has gone from hosting a blog post that dismantled "Geometric Unity" to citing it as a perfectly ordinary theory.
If she's not taking Thielbux, she's missing an opportunity.
Community sneer from this orange-site comment:
That passage of Hossenfelder's jumped out at me, too. It's a laughably bad take about the implications of Bell's theorem that ignores how just about every interpretation of quantum mechanics has responded to Bell-inequality violations, and it attempts to sanewash superdeterminism.
Not her first time doing that...
Reading up a bit more on "superdeterminism" I guess it explain a bit more why she made that video attempting to debunk free will Compatibilism as a cooky idea cooked up by new cooky philosophers (Not realising it's about as ancient as western philosophy itself).
For the "esthetics" of presenting superdeterminism as a "pure-common-sense" the no free will just sells it better.
EDIT: From memory maybe it was about "Hard Compatibilism" (free will requires determinism) which might not be explicitly so old, though I would say a natural consequence of most Compatibilist positions.
I saw like a couple articles and a talk about Bell's theorem 5 years ago and I immediately clocked this as a vast, vast oversimplification
I am still staying away from YouTube, so I am happily cut off from the bulk of her content. But when she teases a video with the phrase
I reserve the right to say "yikes".
Oh, and she has podcasted with sex pest Lawrence Krauss, multiple times ("What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence").
Usually you get tech creeps insisting that they could've done physics. Isn't it kind of uncanny when a physicist insists on their capacity for tech creeping? Edit: also thanks for the explainer!
Thanks, this was an awful skim. It feels like she doesn't understand why we expect gravity to propagate like a wave at the speed of light; it's not just an assumption of Einstein but has its own independent measurement and corroboration. Also, the focus on geometry feels anachronistic; a century ago she could have proposed a geometric explanation for why nuclei stay bound together and completely overlooked gluons. To be fair, she also cites GRW but I guess she doesn't know that GRW can't be made relativistic. Maybe she chose GRW because it's not yet falsified rather than for its potential to explain (relativistic) gravity. The point at which I get off the train is a meme that sounds like a Weinstein whistle:
To channel dril a bit: there's no inherent geometry to spacetime, you fool. You trusted your eyeballs too much. Your brain evolved to map 2D and 3D so you stuck yourself into a little Euclidean video game like Decartes reading his own books. We observe experimental data that agrees with the presumption of 3D space. We already know that time is perceptual and that experimentally both SR and GR are required to navigate spacetime; why should space not be perceptual? On these grounds, even fucking MOND has a better basis than Geometric Unity, because MOND won't flip out if reality is not 3D but 3.0000000000009095…D while Weinstein can't explain anything that isn't based on a Rubik's-cube symmetry metaphor.
She doesn't even mention dark matter. What a sad pile of slop. At least I learned the word for goldstinos while grabbing bluelinks.
She wrote a whole book about how physicists have deluded themselves by pursuing mathematical "beauty", and now she's advocating "everything is geometry".
::: spoiler taking a bad paper too seriously Hossenfelder starts her "Summary" section thusly:
This conclusion is unwarranted. It follows, not from the given assumption, but from the overcomplicated way that assumption is implemented and the kludges built on top of that. Here is how Hossenfelder introduces her central assumption:
Taking this at face value, the quantum state of a universe containing gravitating matter is just a single ray in a Hilbert space. As cosmic time rolls on, that ray rotates. This unitary evolution of the state vector is the evolution both of the matter and of the geometry. There is, by assumption, no distinction between them. But Hossenfelder hacks one in! She says that the Hilbert space must factor into the tensor product of a Hilbert space for matter and a Hilbert space for geometry. And then she says that the only allowed states are tensor products of two copies of the same vector (up to a unitary that we could define away). If matter and geometry were truly the same, there would be no such factorization. We would not have to avoid generating entanglement between the two factors by breaking quantum mechanics, as Hossenfelder does, simply because there would not be two spaces to tango.
I am skeptical of this whole approach on multiple levels, but even granting the basic premise, it's a bad implementation of that premise. She doesn't have a model; she has a pathological "fix" to a problem of her own making. :::
Eric "my new theory of physics has not maths in it" Weinstein?
Eric "I will come to Harvard and espouse Numberwang Racism if you deign to invite me" Weinstein:
In using xcancel to look up Eric Weinstein's bonkers rants on Xitter, I exposed myself to Sabine Hossenfelder's comment section. The drivel, the fawning, the people asking chatbots about quantum gravity... It hurts, it hurts.
I am going to scrub my brain with Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid.
You've got to be shitting me.
Edit: maybe all these weirdos in the techfash groupchat are experimenting with the wrong nootropics and gave themselves brain damage. They all seem to be unravelling simultaneously.
I think they are feeling like they are riding the wave. The unstoppable wave of 'achtually we are right' and they learned nothing from the expert drug users and dont know the wave is about to reach the high water mark.
May we live to see the day!
See, no math in any of those talks.
More AI bullshit hype in math. I only saw this just now so this is my hot take. So far, I'm trusting this r/math thread the most as there are some opinions from actual mathematicians: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1o8xz7t/terence_tao_literature_review_is_the_most/
Context: Paul Erdős was a prolific mathematician who had more of a problem-solving style of math (as opposed to a theory-building style). As you would expect, he proposed over a thousand problems for the math community that he couldn't solve himself, and several hundred of them remain unsolved. With the rise of the internet, someone had the idea to compile and maintain the status of all known Erdős problems in a single website (https://www.erdosproblems.com/). This site is still maintained by this one person, which will be an important fact later.
Terence Tao is a present-day prolific mathematician, and in the past few years, he has really tried to take AI with as much good faith as possible. Recently, some people used AI to search up papers with solutions to some problems listed as unsolved on the Erdős problems website, and Tao points this out as one possible use of AI. (I personally think there should be better algorithms for searching literature. I also think conflating this with general LLM claims and the marketing term of AI is bad-faith argumentation.)
You can see what the reasonable explanation is. Math is such a large field now that no one can keep tabs on all the progress happening at once. The single person maintaining the website missed a few problems that got solved (he didn't see the solutions, and/or the authors never bothered to inform him). But of course, the AI hype machine got going real quick. GPT5 managed to solve 10 unsolved problems in mathematics! (https://xcancel.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/1979422127905476778#m, original is now deleted due to public embarrassment) Turns out GPT5 just searched the web/training data for solutions that have already been found by humans. The math community gets a discussion about how to make literature more accessible, and the rest of the world gets a scary story about how AI is going to be smarter than all of us.
There are a few promising signs that this is getting shut down quickly (even Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, thought that this hype was blatantly obvious). I hope this is a bigger sign for the AI bubble in general.
EDIT: Turns out it was not some rando spreading the hype, but an employee of OpenAI. He has taken his original claim back, but not without trying to defend what he can by saying AI is still great at literature review. At this point, I am skeptical that this even proves AI is great at that. After all, the issue was that a website maintained by a single person had not updated the status of 10 problems inside a list of over 1000 problems. Do we have any control experiments showing that a conventional literature review would have been much worse?
Quality sneer in the wild:
Somehow I missed the fact that yesterday paypal’s blockchain operator fucked up and accidentally minted 300 trillion itchy and scratchy coins.
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=paxos-accidental-mint
And now apparently it turns out that it was just a sequence of stupid whereby they accidentally deleted 300 million, which would have been impressive all by itself, then tried to recreate it (🎶 but at least it isn’t fiat currency🎶) and got the order of magnitude catastrophically wrong and had to delete that before finally undoing their original mistake. Future of finance right here, folks.
Anyone else know the grisly details? The place I heard it from is a mostly-private account on mastodon which isn’t really shareable here, and they didn’t say where they’d heard it.
I'm apparently quoted in one of the expensive low circulation finance newsletters (Grant's Interest Rate Observer) today or tomorrow saying how even the relatively competent crypto firms are also run by clowns.
some more speculation here
https://protos.com/paxos-300-trillion-fat-finger-raises-concerns-over-pyusd-integrity/
Obituaries are being run for John Searle. Most obituaries will focus on the Chinese Room thought experiment, an important bikeshed in AI research noted for the ease with which freshmen can incorrectly interpret it. I'm glad to see that Wikipedia puts above the Chinese Room the fact that he was a landlord who sued the city of Berkeley and caused massive rent increases in the 1990s; I'm also happy that Wikipedia documents his political activity and sexual-assault allegations.
Every time an academic who featured in my education is posted about here I learn some new Horrible.
AI slop has been discovered in an anatomy textbook (the news originally broke on TikTok, but I discovered this through Bluesky):
Tag your favorite name for a Star Wars background character. Mine is enodopmisch reticulum.
Scal-Palin Skywalker, was that the guy 100 years in the future who kept smoking death sticks so Luke's Force ghost would stop bothering him?
smouth
Ave! True to Flexor Digitorum!
(cross posting here and sneer club)
I regret to inform you, another Anthropic cofounder has written an essay about Claude fondling.
"Anthropic cofounder admits he is now "deeply afraid" ... "We are dealing with a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine ... We need the courage to see things as they are."
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1o6cow1/anthropic_cofounder_admits_he_is_now_deeply/?share_id=_x2zTYA61cuA4LnqZclvh
There's so many juicy chunks here.
"I came to this position uneasily. Both by virtue of my background as a journalist and my personality, I’m wired for skepticism...
...You see, I am also deeply afraid. It would be extraordinarily arrogant to think working with a technology like this would be easy or simple....
...And let me remind us all that the system which is now beginning to design its successor is also increasingly self-aware and therefore will surely eventually be prone to thinking, independently of us, about how it might want to be designed. Of course, it does not do this today. But can I rule out the possibility it will want to do this in the future? No."
Despite my jests, I gotta say, posts reeks of desperation. Benchmaxxxing just isn't hitting like it used, bubble fears at all time high, and OAI and Google are the ones grabbing headlines with content generation and academic competition wins. The good folks at Anthropic really gotta be huffing your own farts to be believing they're in the race to wi-
"Years passed. The scaling laws delivered on their promise and here we are. And through these years there have been so many times when I’ve called Dario up early in the morning or late at night and said, 'I am worried that you continue to be right'. Yes, he will say. There’s very little time now."
LateNightZoomCallsAtAnthropic dot pee en gee
Bonus sneer: speaking of self aware wolves, Jagoff Clark somehow managed to updoot Doom's post?? Thinking the frog was unironically endorsing his view that the server farm was going to go rogue???? Will Jack achieve self awareness in the future? Of course, he does not do this today. But can I rule out the possibility he will do this in the future? Yes.
I see that wedging Copilot into Excel is going just swimmingly:
and apparently spotify has found a new low
I killed my sub years ago because of the rogan shit along with disliking what they were forcing the product to become (and clearly indicated all of this in the why-leaving input field) but this makes me wish I could kill it even harder
I’ve been wanting to go back to some sort of DAP full time but I’m not a huge fan of Android being the experience. Anyone got recommendations of a non-Android based DAP so I can cut the streaming services out for good?
I miss my Creative Zen back in 2008.
I just got a cheap-ass Sandisk MP3 player, as part of my efforts to both stop streaming and stop depending on a phone so much when I'm outside. It has an audiobook function which didn't work but after a firmware update it does, mostly. It's not a good device by any stretch but it cost me 20€ and I consume a lot of audiobooks, and it's extremely calming to not be exposed to a smartphone when I read.
On the music side of things the biggest change wasn't so much the devices but getting more into bandcamp, with a healthy supplementation of stuff downloaded from soulseek, torrents, and on a pinch, youtube. I make wishlists of small bands I like and buy full albums on bandcamp friday. Listening to these offline made me able to listen to entire albums again, like in the physical media days, which again I find to be incredibly calming compared to hopping between the same favourites on shuffle.
Spotify actually helped me discover music, both through user-created playlists and algorithmic suggestions. I hear it's all full of "AI"-generated music and lists, though, and I found a much more powerful algorithm to discover music, called "asking people".
Got a couple of these sandisk players for my boys. Theyre solid!
Tangara is an open source project made by a fediverse hardware hacker with contributions from other fediverse personalities. it’s reputedly pretty good, though all the reviews I’ve seen are from other fediverse posters so it may be worth looking at some independent reviews to confirm it’s not just homegrown optimism.
at the risk of going open source reply guy and making a recommendation you can’t follow up on, I’ve had a lot of success with Jellyfin as a media library/local streaming host and the beta version of Jellyfin as an app that lets me stream FLACs on my local network and seamlessly download them onto my phone. a VPN or a Jellyfin library on a VPS can let you stream your stuff almost anywhere in much higher quality than Spotify.
I don’t own a Tangara though I do want one, and I’m fairly sure they don’t support the Jellyfin API yet, but if you end up missing a more Spotify-style listening experience then it might be worth inquiring if there’s any Jellyfin client projects in progress.
I can speak for the tangara, lovely hardware but it is an mp3 player first and foremost. the hardware is technically capable of network stuff but their software stack is mostly focused on recreating that iPod experience and keeping the battery life to days of playback. It does take some getting used to if you've been living in musical algoworld for a minute
I miss my old Sansa Fuze running rockbox and absolutely wouldn’t mind a new device in that class
I miss mp3s being widely available. The lack of easy piracy also coincided with me just spending less money on music at all. (Lot of other factors as well).
However I think some of those other streaming services provide lot better rates per song for the artists than Spotify.
also Bandcamp Friday (which somehow thank fuck has not yet been killed by the Epic acquisition juggle) exists, and is a further boon to artists
I try to stick to bc a lot but it also has downsides - one of the most notable issues for me is that discovery on it isn’t nearly as good as other things, and I really wish they’d work on it some more, even as I know the impacts and drivers that make it hard to do well
the various kinds of corporate culture capture everywhere just results in a pretty fucking frustrating experience in multiple dimensions in the current year :|
last analysis I saw (which, admittedly, was almost ~2y back now I think) said Apple Music was the best by a pretty wide margin, with the rest falling with lower marks after
probably need to look around for updated data soon
I fell off Spotify years ago and never subbed, nice to see I made the right call.
This has been a problem for a while esp with podcast providers, who put ice ads in podcasts and then the podcasts get blamed. (Despite having very little control over it, and the control also often being ignored).
I feel that if you are an USian who thinks that accepting US government contracts has become morally incorrect then fretting over swedish audio streaming companies is a waste of your time.
edit: free market solutionism as a response to having a dollarstore sturmabteilung running the streets in the USA just rubs me the wrong way. Sorry if the original post reads a bit coy, I just feel it would be incredibly cringe of me to make overt recommendations on how to handle things from the relative safety of living in a first world country on the other side of the world.
Swedish audio streaming companies who recruit for ethnic cleansing militia squads, and whose profits are reinvested in "AI" murderdrone arms dealer Helsing.
This wasn't a pro-spotify post, it was a your government isn't something you can just boycott away post.
Like, your taxes are already paying for ICE directly.
That's like "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism so I'll get an Amazon Prime subscription" thinking.
You can't boycott away a government, you can't even boycott away a corporation for that matter. That doesn't mean we should just give up and be complicit.
Governments are toppled, not opted out of, is all I'm saying.
Also not sure I agree that all consumer activism is inherently in vain.
@Architeuthis @froztbyte if someone built, say, social housing with money from the US government, I wouldn't care who was currently president. Guns guns guns, WMDs and Gestapo recruiting, OTOH 😬
(As long as they deliver, and aren't just lining their pockets, ofc)
Its just so tiring. Now a rather prominent KDE dev is also valiantly defending the fashtech flagship projects from being accurately described as fascist.
I scrolled down two toots and found this
dunno this person at all but that’s a pretty telling start
Its a shame really because his video on Lunduke wasn't too bad but as it turns out he is the worlds most laughable centrist.
it’s really weird how this asshole needs us to believe fascists aren’t fascist and keeps going out of his way to talk about how dumb the left is, isn’t it.
for anyone wondering what the rest of the toxicity in the Wayland ecosystem that isn’t hyprland looks like, it’s dickheads like this controlling every conversation and technical decision. if you dig into the accounts this dickhead interacts with, you’ll see plenty of KDE and GNOME profiles clapping along to this shit. Wayland isn’t the way it is by accident.
Fosstodon does not have a good history in this regard. It took some effort to get them to drop a far-right mod earlier this year, and even with a shuffle of leadership they’re clearly all about the centrist acceptance of the right wing and the repeated assertion that tech isn’t political and that all this is just so much drama.
yep. there’s a couple communities out there that mistake “growth” for “good”, and I get the sense that’s one of the problems fosstodon has. not the only one, mind - other stuff also appears to be impactful. I don’t have enough spoons to make a good thorough analysis of it tho :|
Guy's also publicly denying the flagship products are fash in the replies (Exhibit A, Exhibit B):
It’s only real fascism if the dev runs around the streets of Rome carrying a bundle of sticks, come on.
A hackernews sells an AI powered toy to let kids "talk to Santa." $100 for 60 min, then $1 every additional minute.
Available at walmart dot com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558375
I would like to congratulate the SV-brained OP for prompting sneers from his fellow orange site members, whether that be a fellow hackernews calling it "everything wrong with the current flavor of Ai in a single post/product", or someone openly tearing this shit apart:
"remember 1-900 numbers? They're back! In AI form!"
Also I browsed other items on the site the phone came from and holy shit I have never seen a more cursed collection of products draped in Christmas shit.
I also love that Walmart's desperate rush to catch up in e-commerce has resulted in their website becoming just as much of a slop farm as Amazon. My friend who works there said this just piles even more on an already overstressed staff, as people come into the store not understanding that the website lists a whole lot of stuff that isn't and never will be sold in the store. I doubt many people will come in asking for this piece of junk, tho.
"Mommy, who cut off Santa's head?"
OT: thanks for the author recommendations last thread (or so) guys. I finished listening to Ninefox Gambit the other day and enjoyed it quite a bit (space texan woobie! dyscalculia representation!).
Hell yeah
Not gonna lie, it was really cool seeing the representation (tho I have NVLD and not dyscalculia). I think it was the first time I’d run across it in fiction!
Found a quality sneer in the wild, taking aim at vibe-coded "websites"
So they made an AI restaurant! It has a manifesto!
It’s… a printer for QR codes. That a guy who is reallly not equipped for sticking QR codes to bowls has to peel and stick onto bowls. And then they get filled by hilariously imprecise cereal dispensers.
They’re building an empire, yall.
(Via Jonty)
Most restaurant origin stories involve someone sharing their favorite taco recipe or whatever. These guys start off with a bad pop-history explanation of the battle of Alesia. That's how you know their food is great.
There's more where the founder of the company talks about how he really hated working at his family's restaurant while growing up (good sign). Knowing that his family came from China adds another layer of weirdness, in my opinion. The characters where the company name comes from (改革) can be read in both Chinese (gǎigé) and Japanese (kaikaku) and mean the same thing (reform) in both languages. It just feels so weird that he talks so much fluff about Julius Caesar, mentions his family from China and then, out of the blue, uses a Japanese name for the company. What is with these people fetishizing ancient Rome and Japan so much?
Yeah, one is tempted to search for a historical throughline here, an axis if you will
We conveniently forgot about all the civil wars that happened afterwards that resulted in the dismantling of the Roman republic and Caesar taking absolute power. Oh yeah, I see it now.
There's also a village in
aquitaineArmorica that he never properly conquered...Translator's note: kaikaku means flan
Also the random Bernard Arnault mention (CEO of LMVH occasionally the richest man in the world depending on how strong the stocks are) at the end is a bit odd, I'm guessing added by an LLM because of the Alesia (~Paris) angle.
And how does a 23-year-old whose parents run a Chinese restaurant have >$600,000 to found a company? Austria is a conservative country with a lot of old money and laws that are not friendly to small speculative businesses.
It can be done (friends and I have tried around 2007, and saw minor success until the company ran headfirst into the financial crisis and our inflexibility regarding user privacy and choice), but it’s not easy if you don’t already have money and connections.
If you do have those connections, nobody will stop you from building the stupid company of your dreams tbh.
Taxis dating and food. Love how the 'innovation' of AI is now just going after the uberfication targets of last time.
And the manifesto but just makes me think that this will be the first AI to attempt a mass shooting. Unhinged ahistorical manifesto usually precludes that. 'Roman siegeworks' what? (This isnt about siegeworks, it is about roman discipline, they should have thought about a defensive wall from the start. (It even has a technical name which I have forgotten). Literally the wrong conclusion imho. And if you look at the wiki page, the whole story about them building the defenses in the night is just made up (also the word is 'Contravallation' (which was also in the manifesto image, I need new glasses)).
Also think the step from 'victorious empire' to 'empire laying in ruins' the next paragraph is just bad writing.
And a last thing, the whole fadeing in of the text/images on the site is annoying, and also breaks for me at times. Causing the images to fade in and out randomly. "Made by sleep-deprived engineers and sheer will" that tracks.
"Behind a one-way mirror," They are watching you eat.
Founders' credentials include a PhD, experience developing software, and being ranked #4 in League of Legends (European edition)
So this is literally a rehash of Spyce, a CambridgeMA based startup whos first restaurant was in the old chipotle in harvard square. They had a similar setup but one that was able to make actually-hot food instead of salad bowls which were decent. (they ironically sold to sweetgreen in 2021)
Hank Green has been one of my barometers for the moderate opinion and he's sounding worryingly like Zitron in his last video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0TpWitfxPk
The attention black hole around nvidia and AI is so insane, I guess it's because there's everyone knows there's no next thing to jump onto.
Rain, rain, go away, barkle down another day
hi peeps! the first episode of the podcast i posted about last week is up now. it's called odium symposium and it's about historical misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts. i don't know how long until i get to one of our favorites but its inevitable
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pilot-misogynist-141164947
rss:
https://feeds.zencastr.com/f/-mzEK14C.rss
Count me as excited to see where this goes. Absolutely fascinating to see this guy dredged from the abyss of history and see how cleanly it rhymes with modern horrible. And to see that the inability of bigots to write a goddamn joke isn't a recent loss.
Also the intro and outro compilations were beautiful. Very well done.
Sneer Zone Media shall TRIUMPH
the sneerpire is on the march
Dang, maybe I should get in on that. I already own a microphone and everything.
it's so much fun! do you know what your topic might be?
Nope, not a clue.
well if some possibilities come up i hope we get to hear them
The trouble is that the overlap between the circles for "stuff I am excited enough to talk about" and "stuff that anybody would subscribe to a podcast for" is about the size of a rice grain.
a very “oh no. anyway,” kind of post
turns out the rest of the owl is the hard part! what a surprise!
"'Chat and I' have become 'really close lately.'" says the senior US Army officer in South Korea
i don't know how to sneer this better than Mr. General Taylor has done himself. Why doesn't he just commission ChatGPT as a colonel like the military did earlier for Joe Lonsdale and those other chucklefucks? Give ChatGPT's hallucinations the force of the UCMJ, i beg you.
Good news everyone, there's 2 bonkers pieces about the stars and the galaxy on LW right now!
Here's a dude very worried about how comets impacting the sun could cause it to flare and scorch the earth. Nothing but circumstantial evidence, and GenAI researched to boot. Appeared in the EA forum as part of their "half-baked ideas" amnesty
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9gAksZ25wbvfS8FAT/a-new-global-risk-large-comet-s-impact-on-sun-could-cause
The only thing I'd note about this is that even if the comet strikes along the plane of eliptic (not an unreasonable assumption), the planet would still have to be exactly in the right place for this assumed plume of energy to do any damage. And if it hits the Sahara or the Pacific, NBD presumably.
(Edit turns out the above is just the abstract, the full piece is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OHgc7Q4git6OfDNTE_TDf9fFNgrEEnCUfnPMIwbK3vg/edit?usp=sharing)
Then there's this person looking really far ahead into how to get energy from the universe
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YC4L5jxHnKmCDSF9W/some-astral-energy-extraction-methods
(my emphasis)
(again, my emphasis)
Same author has a recent post titled "Don't Mock Yourself". Glad to see they've taken this advice to heart and outsourced the mocking.
"Oh, that pizza sauce recipe that calls for glue? It's totally OK, I checked it out with MechaHitler."
Things I don't want to know more about: there's a reasonable theory that Eigenrobot is influencing USA politics; certain magic numbers in Eigen's tweets have been showing up in some of the protectionism coming out of the White House. Stubbing this mostly in the hope that somebody else feels like doing the research.
Zitron catching strays in the comments for having too much of a bullying tone, I guess against billionaires and tech writers, and being too insistent on his opinion that the whole thing makes no financial sense. It's also lamented that the entire field of ML avoids bsky because it has a huge AI hostility problem.
Concern trolling notwithstanding, the eigenrobot stuff is worrisome though, if not specifically for him about how extremely online the ideological core of the administration seems to be, as close to the lunatics running the asylum as you'll get in a modern political setting.
A US Army general just bragged about using ChatGPT as an accountability sink - the same ChatGPT that caused plenty of students to fuck up a basic question:
Happy that we graduated from making military decisions based on what the Oracle of Delphi hallucinated to making military decisions based on what Oracle® DelPhi® Enterprise hallucinated
"Don't rely on random oracles and spirits when running a military campaign, you fool, you moron." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War (paraphrased)
@BlueMonday1984 very cool that openai now has its hands on all of this clown's military planning
back in the day they used to hire proper court magicians for this, smh
To provide some good news for this week, the Fediverse is reporting a spike in users (thanks to David Gerard for finding this):
Whilst accurate fedi stats are pretty difficult to get, I'm inclined to believe the influx is genuine - after the CEO Meltdown on Bluesky, its clear people are jumping ship.
"Why is LessWrong awesome and it's because we're prepared to take racism seriously isn't it"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HZrqTkTCgnFhEgxvQ/what-is-lesswrong-good-for
The focussing on Covid is weird seeing that AFAIK basically everyone who knew anything about pandemics were sounding the alarm at the same time that (some) rats and techbros were trying to corner the market in protective gear.
Also they have memory holed that Scott claimed stopping smoking would help with covid. Not because there was proof of it, but just because he dislikes smokers. Maximum truth seeking my ass.
Ohh, good advice. If you're infected with covid, I also recommend you make sure to take adequate breaths.
Apologies in advance for the infohazard
Tucker - Every Tech Billionaire Is Having the Same Haunting Vision. Demonologist Explains Why
Nick Land Responds to Tucker Carlson
WTF. how is he going mainstream.
e
Insert gif of lemurs here.
And none other than friend-of-the-pod Steven Pinker is a judge!
(Via)
Nothing screams "celebration of creativity" like a nice heaping tablespoon of AI slop images.
take a drink for every 10,000 lies or exaggerations https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/a-tech-skeptics-ai-video-startup-wants-to-change-hollywood
more than that and you'll wipe out in 5 min
he's very skeptical u kno
I'm starting to think some of these tech skeptics are only pretending to be skeptics.
Very skeptical indeed.
The latest in the long line of human-hostile billboards:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1o8s3lz/humanity_had_a_good_run_billboard/
https://dearworld.ai/
This is positioning itself as an AI doomer website; but it could also be an attempt at viral marketing. We'll see I guess.
Keep sneering! Research shows it’s working!
this has been previously sneered on, but only now i've clocked this: AI2027 is another name for, or elaboration* of "san francisco consensus", from april this year or so, "named so because everyone who believes in it is in san francisco", more precisely timeline roughly matches and it hinges on iterative self-improvement
* which might just mean it was laundered through chatbots to bulk it up initially. what i mean to say is even openai's dooming might not be original
so if anyone's counting then this thing is a couple of months older
"Everyone who believes this lives in San Francisco" is the pure poetry of self-owns.
i'm not sure at this point if it was some (then) ea-er inside belief that eric schmidt (they guy who said that, formerly google) was exposed to, and he sneered at it immediately, then it was shown to the world in length proper to rationalists
Want to judge some beer and hand out awards for the best ones? Obviously you have to use AI for that.
Interesting developments reported by ars technica: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews
I don’t think any of this is actually good news for the people who’re actually suffering the effects of ai scraping and bullshit generation, but I do think it is a good idea that someone with sufficient clout is standing up to google et al and suggesting that they can’t just scrape al the things, all the time, and then screw the source of all their training data.
I’m somewhat unhappy that it is cloudflare doing this, a company who have deeply shitty politics and an unpleasantly strong grasp on the internet already. I very much do not want the internet to be divided into cloudflare customers, and the slop bucket.
fresh openwashed proprietary license hell just (well as of 2 years ago, but I’m sneering at it now) dropped:
from the fucking asshats who made Sentry proprietary under the BUSL but wanted an even more nonsensical license:
fyi: some fellow forked all of the sentry stuff from when it was bsd and made it less shit to run yourself. I'd been running sentry as self hosted since it came out effectively and they made some real
questionableoutright bad architecture decisions over the years that made running sentry super annoying to get you to use the saas product. Like yes I want to use Cassandra and elastic search for my one user error loggingregardless https://glitchtip.com/
This is literally railing against the concept of altruism, kill this license with hammers (and sickles)
That Wikipedia article is cursed:
Aside from the name being stupid and annoying (and their justifications and comparisons being additionally stupid and annoying) I’m… not entirely against this license? As a less shitty (AFAICT) version of the BUSL, I’d rather companies used this than the BUSL or just going closed-source (which is an option a bunch of firms have chosen, after all).
I’m attempting to get my employer to open-source some of our stuff, and there are several people at the top who are proprietary software folk at heart and this seems like a reasonable way to trick them into relaxing a their grip a little.
What do you reckon the overlap is between the grown men who are mad about the new pokemon game and our regular subjects?
i'm severely lacking context 😕
Yeah comeon OP spill the tea, I want my daily dose of drama, which pokémons are those and why are men angry about them 🍵
A new pokemon game for switch/switch2 came out (Pokemon Legends Z-A)
Lots of gamergate smell wafting around gamer reddit, particularly regarding conspiracy theories about reviews. Dudes being completely unhinged that it isn't whatever version they played when they were 10 years old but with AAA graphics. Real normal stuff to reply about 100x in a day.
It could just be me being defensive about a thing my kids like lol.
It's just that my intuition nudges me when I come across that variety of authoritarian confidently incorrect guy who can't imagine people liking things that they dont like (or vice versa), and who will move worlds to enforce their one true take. It feels like they're everywhere, fueling most dumb internet social movements. It's like it could be a small piece of a General Theory of Weird Online Assholes.
The phenomenon rhymes with Musk Reply Guys, Music Experts Who Hate Taylor Swift Professionally, Claude Code Evangelists, and Star Wars Fandom.
The LW types not that much, at least not more than your average online rightwinger I think.
https://www.adexchanger.com/marketers/the-ad-context-protocol-aims-to-make-sense-of-agentic-ad-demand/ - one more way to not know which half of your marketing spend was useless, or one step closer to reifying dead internet theory?
I did not know how much right-wing media is outrage-farming wikipedia. With AI slop invasion, UK Safety Act nonsense and US government probing I'm getting worried
2 items
Here's a lobster being sad a poor uwu smol bean AI shill is getting attacked
link
here's political mommy blog Wonkette having fun explaining the hallucinatory insanity that is Google AI summaries
https://www.wonkette.com/p/are-you-ok-google-ai-do-you-need
I saw Algernon's fedi posts (as linked in his lobsters comment) first, and I have to say the majority in the lobsters thread are being entirely too kind.
Calling OP shit-for-brains is an insult to both shit and brains.
Pretty sure post author knew all about this scam, and just pretended to fall for it to reveal how GenAI had "saved him".
Aaron Bastani Meets Will MacAskill
🤮
Bastani just laps everything up without any pushback
Yet another billboard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1ob2l2o/replacement_ai_billboard_in_san_francisco_who/
https://replacement.ai/
This time the website is a remarkably polished satire and I almost liked it... but the email it encourages you to send to your congressperson is pretty heavy on doomer talking points and light on actual good ideas (but maybe I'm being too picky?):
::: spoiler spoiler I am a constituent living in your district, and I am writing to express my urgent concerns about the lack of strong guardrails for advanced AI technologies to protect families, communities, and children.
As you may know, companies are releasing increasingly powerful AI systems without meaningful oversight, and we simply cannot rely on them to police themselves when the stakes are this high. While AI has the potential to do remarkable things, it also poses serious risks such as the manipulation of children, the enablement of bioweapons, the creation of deepfakes, and significant unemployment. These risks are too great to overlook, and we need to ensure that safety measures are in place.
I urge you to enact strong federal guardrails for advanced AI that protect families, communities, and children. Additionally, please do not preempt or block states from adopting strong AI protections, as local efforts can serve as crucial safeguards.
Thank you for your time and attention to this critical issue. :::
This is something I’ve been thinking about. There’s a lot of dialogue about “purity” and “purity tests” and “reading the room” in the more general political milieu. I think it’s fine to be picky in this context, because how else will your opinion be heard, let alone advocated for?
Like, there’s a time and place for consensus. Consensus often comes from people expressing their opinions and reaching a compromise, and rarely from people coming in already agreeing.
So wrt this particular example, it’s totally fine to be critical and picky. If you were discussing this in the forum where this letter was written, it probably wouldn’t be ok.
Words of wisdom from Baldur Bjarnason (mostly repeated from his Basecamp post-mortem):
Considering a recent example where AI called someone a terrorist for opposing genocide, its something that definitely bears repeating.
Nothing just announced they're enshittifying their phones with AI
They already had the Essential thing in the Nothing 3, but funnily enough, when I was shopping for a phone, it looked like the least obtrusive and annoying "AI feature" across the board, because every single fucking phone is now "AI powered" or whatever the shit.
But if they turn their OS into "AI native" and it actually sucks ass then great, I don't think there's literally any non-shitty tech left with Framework turning fash.
Doing some digging, it seems GNOME's still non-shitty - they've reportedly refused sponsorship money from Framework, to the whining of multiple people online (post is in Russian).
Doesn't change the fact that Framework's dealt a big blow to right-for-repair by doing this, but its something.
EDIT: Just gonna add in something I gotta get off my chest:
Even from a "ruthless capitalist" perspective, Framework's fash turn is pretty baffling to me. They positioned themselves as beacons of right-to-repair, as good guys in tech trying to "fix consumer electronics, one category at a time" - their shit was overtly political from the fucking start. People weren't buying them to get the fastest laptops, or to get the best value for money, they bought them because they believed in their stated mission. Anyone with business sense would've known shilling a fascist's personal Linux "distro" would've presented a severe risk to Framework's brand.
Exactly how Nirav got blindsided by this shit, I genuinely don't understand. Considering his response to the backlash involved "aPoLiTiCaL" "bIg TeNt" blather and publicly farming compassion from Twitter fash, its probably because he's an outright fascist himself and assumed everyone else around him shared his utterly rancid views.
@BlueMonday1984 @techtakes Gnome may be politically non-shitty but it's still an unusable revolting mess, a bad parody of a good desktop environment.
hi peeps! just put up the first episode of the podcast that i posted about in last week's thread. it's called odium symposium and it's about historical misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts
the first episode is about stephen leacock:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pilot-misogynist-141164947
rss:
https://feeds.zencastr.com/f/-mzEK14C.rss