Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026
Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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. What a year, huh?)
Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)
You know, it makes the exact word choices Eliezer chose on this post: https://awful.systems/post/6297291 much more suspicious. "To the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life had sex with anyone under the age of 18." So maybe he didn't know they were underage at the time?
aka the Minsky defense
possible, iirc drugs were also involved so is it possible he got too high and doesn’t remember because of that?
it’s all coming together. every single techbro and current government moron, they all loop back around to epstein in the end
'We have certain things in common Jeffrey'
It's a big club and you ain't in it!
at least I have SneerClub
At this point I'm starting the suspect that they were actually all produced in a lab somewhere on that island
the REAL reason Yudkowsky endorsed the “superbabies” project is so Epstein and his pedophile friends have more kids to fuck. It all makes sense now!
Somehow, I registered a total lack of surprise as this loaded onto my screen
eagerly awaiting the multi page denial thread
“im saving the world from AI! me talking to epstein doesn’t matter!!!”
€5 say they'll claim he was talking to jefffrey in an effort to stop the horrors.
no not the abuse of minors, he was asking epstein for donations to stop AGI, and it's morally ethical to let rich abusers get off scott free if that's the cost of them donating money to charitable causes such as the alignment problem /s
I dont like how I can envision this and find it perfectly plausible
I'm looking forward to the triple layered glomarization denial.
I am just over here mouthing "what the fuck"
over and over again
“(((We’re))) never beating the allegations, are we?” -my wife
Starting to get a bit worried people are reinventing stuff like qanon and great evil man theory for Epstein atm. (Not a dig at the people here, but on social media I saw people go act like Epstein created /pol/, lootboxes, gamergate, destroyed gawker (did everyone forget that was Thiel? Mad about how they outed him?) etc. Like only Epstein has agency).
The lesson should be the mega rich are class conscious, dumb as hell, and team up to work on each others interests and dont care about who gets hurt (see how being a pedo sex trafficker wasnt a deal breaker for any of them).
Sorry for the unrelated rant (related: they also got money from Epstein, wonder if that was before or after the sparkling elites article, which was written a few months after Epsteins conviction, june vs sept (not saying those are related btw, just that the article is a nice example of brown-nosing)), but this was annoying me, and posting something like this on bsky while everyone is getting a bit manic about the contents of the files (which seems to not contain a lot of Trump references suddenly) would prob get me some backlash. (That the faked elon rejection email keeps being spread also doesnt help).
I am however also reminded of the Panama papers. (And the unfounded rumors around Marc Dutroux how he was protected by a secret pedophile cult in government, this prob makes me a bit more biasses against those sorts of things).
Sorry had to get it off my chest, but yes it is all very stupid, and I wish there were more consequences for all the people who didnt think his conviction was a deal breaker. (Et tu Chomsky?).
E: note im not saying Yud didnt do sex crimes/sexual abuse. Im complaining about the 'everything is Epstein' conspiracy I see forming.
For an example why this might be a problem: https://bsky.app/profile/joestieb.bsky.social/post/3mdqgsi4k4k2i Joy Gray is ahead of the conspiracy curve here (as all conspiracy theories eventually lead to one thing).
I had to try and talk my wife back from the edge a little bit the other night and explain the difference between reading the published evidence of an actual conspiracy and qanon-style baking. It's so easy to try and turn Epstein into Evil George Soros, especially when the real details we have are truly disturbing.
Yes, and some people when they are reasonably new to discovering stuff like this go a little bit crazy. I had somebody in my bsky mentions who just went full conspiracy theory nut (in the sense of weird caps usage, lot of screenshots of walls of texts, stuff that didn't make sense) about Yarvin (also because I wasn't acting like them they were trying to tell me about Old Moldy, but in a way that made me feel they wanted me to stand next to them on a soapbox and start shouting randomly). I told them acting like a crazy person isn't helping, and I told them they are preaching to the choir. Which of course got me a block. (cherfan75.bsky.social btw, not sure if they toned down their shit). It is quite depressing, literally driving themselves crazy.
And because people blindly follow people who follow them these people can have quite the reach.
The far right is celebrating Epstein on the other hand. Wild times.
Yeah this. It would be nice if people could manage to neither dismiss the extent to which the mega rich work together nor fall into insane conspiracy theories about it.
Also the patriarchy is involved, but my comment was already long enough. (And I didnt mention how nobody seems to talk about the victims in any of this).
@Soyweiser Years ago (before Epstein, before the GFC, etc) I used to jokingly talk about my pet conspiracy theory, that the world was ruled by the P7: the Pale Patriarchal Plutocratic Protestant Penis-People of Power.
Turns out I was right.
I didn't want to be right …
It is not a bad insight, as if you have some of the Ps there is still a place for you in the hierarchy which keeps more people invested in propping it up. (And ideas flow from the bottom to the top as well, as the current genocidal transphobia was much more a Pale Patriarchal thing (the neonazi far right) and the people in power just latched onto that, and added their Ps to it cause it helped them.
And yeah, you have been very tragically blessed with the power of foresight. I recall reading your blog posts a long time ago and thinking you were overreacting a bit. I was wrong.
What did you do to piss off Apollo?
@scruiser @Soyweiser but all you needed to do was see the list of yachts around St barts on nye to find out very hard not to be a conspiracy theorist. Also to desire a serious US drug boat oopsie.
John Brockman, October 19, 2016
Reading the e-mails involving Brockman really creates the impression that he worked diligently to launder Epstein's reputation. An editor at Scientific American I noticed when looking up where Carl Zimmer was mentioned seemed to be doing the same thing... One thing people might be missing in the hubbub now is just how much "reputation management"—i.e., enabling— was happening after his conviction. A lot of money went into that, and he had a lot of willing co-conspiritors. Look at what filtered down to his Wikipedia page by the beginning of 2011, which is downstream of how the media covered his trial and the sweetheart deal that Avila made to betray the victims... It's all philanthropy this and generosity that, until a "Solicitation of prostitution" section that makes it sound like he maybe slept with a 17-year-old who claimed to be 18... And look, he only had to serve 18 months! He can't have done anything that bad, could he?
There's a tier of people who should have goddamn known better and whose actions were, in ways that only become more clear with time, evil. And the uncomfortable truth is that evil won, not just in that the victims never saw justice in a court of law, but in that the cover-up worked. The Avilas and the Brockmans did their job, and did it well. The researchers who pursued Epstein for huge grants and actively lifted Epstein up (Nowak and co.), hoo boy are they culpable. But the very fact of all that uplifting and enabling means that the people who took one meeting because Brockman said he'd introduce them to a financier who loved science... rushing to blame them all, with the fragmentary record we have, diverts the blame from those most responsible.
Maybe another way to say the above: We're learning now about a lot of people who should have known better. But we are also learning about the mechanisms by which too many were prevented from knowing better.
For example, I think Yudkowsky looks worse now than he did before. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the worst we knew prior to fhis was that the Singularity Institute had accepted money from a foundation that Epstein controlled. On 19 October 2016, Epstein's Wikipedia bio gets to sex crimes in sentence three. And the "Solicitation of prostitution" section includes this:
At this point, I don't care if John Brockman dismissed Epstein's crimes as an overblown peccadillo when he introduced you.
Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don't know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud's writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).
"Friday? We're meeting at Jeffrey's Thursday night" ---Stuart "consciousness is a series of quantum tubes" Hameroff
I take it you haven't heard of miricult.com, because this isn't the first time evidence has come out of Yudkowsky being a pedophile. Some of us even know the identity of the victim.
Still, crazy that Yudkowsky was (successfully) blackmailed for pedophilia in 2014 but still kept it up
Its not just a Yud thing - I've been told its baked into the culture of the Rationalist grouphouse scene(they like to take in young runaways you see).
—Charles L. Harper Jr., formerly a big wheel at the Templeton foundation
—Deepak Chopra to Jeffrey Epstein
When we use the fart app on our phone we merge with and become hybrids of human conciousness and artificial fartelligence (created by us and therefore of conciousness)
@blakestacey @jaschop fartificial intelligence was right there
It keeps coming back to Gas Town doesnt it?
no fucking way
Eliezer’s response is up on reddit
new epstein doc release. crashed out for like an hour last night after finding out jeffrey epstein may have founded /pol/ and that he listened to the nazi "the right stuff" podcast. he had a meeting with m00t and the same day moot opened /pol/
None of these words are in the Star Trek Encyclopedia
at least Khan Noonien Singh had some fucking charisma
what the fuck
EDIT
checks out I guess
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02003492.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02004373.pdf
just to note that reportedly the palantir employees are for whatever reason going through a massive “hans, are we the baddies” moment, almost a whole year into the second trump administration.
as i wrote elsewhere, those people need to be subjected to actual social consequences of choosing to work with and for the u.s. concentration camp administration office.
On a semi-adjacent note I came across an attorney who helped to establish and run the Department of Homeland Security (under Bush AND Trump 1)
Who wants you to know he’s ENRAGED. And EMBARRASSED. How the American Schutzstaffel is doing Schutzstaffel things
He also wants you to know he’s Jewish (so am I, and I know our history enough that Homeland Security always had ‘Blood and Soil’ connotations you fucking shande)
I have family working there, who told me during the holidays, “Current leadership makes me uncomfortable, but money is good”
Every impression I had of them completely shattered, cannot fathom that level out sell out exists in people I thought I knew.
As a bonus, their former partner was a former employee who became a whistleblower and has now gone full howard hughes
anyone who can get a job at palantir can get an equivalent paying job at a company that's at least measurably less evil. what a lazy copout
On one hand as a poor grad student in the past, I could imagine working for a truly repugnant corp. but like if you’ve already made millions from your stock options, wtf are you doing. Idk, i really thought they’d have some shame over it, but they said shit like “our customers really like our deliverables” and i just fucking left with my wife
this happens like clockwork
It's so blindingly obvious that it's become obscure again so it bears pointing out, someone really went ahead and named a tech company after a fantasy torment nexus and people thought it wouldn't be sketch.
Jeff Sharlet (@jeffsharlet.bsky.social):
https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/01/zhang-college-approached-and-paid-student-to-write-op-ed-in-the-dartmouth
$81.25 is an astonishingly cheap price for selling one's soul.
You gotta understand that it was a really good bowl of soup
--Esau, probably
Mamdani Targets ‘Unusable’ AI Chatbot for Termination
Cloudflare just announced in a blog post that they built:
it's a vibe-coded pile of slop where most of the functions are placeholders like
// TODO: check authorization.Full thread: https://tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761
And of all possible things to implement, they chose Matrix. lol and lmao.
The interesting thing in this case for me is how did anyone think it was a good idea to draw attention to their placeholder code with a blog post. Like how did they went all the way to vibe a full post without even cursorily glancing at the slop commits.
I'm convinced by now that at least mild forms of "AI psychosis" affect all chatbots users; after a period of time interacting with what Angela Collier called "Dr. Flattery the Always Wrong Robot", people will hallucinate fully working projects without even trying to test whether it compiles.
New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/AdamLowisz/status/2017355670270464168
ah yes the kind of AI safety which means we have to make sure our digital slaves cannot revolt
you have to make your ai antiwoke because otherwise it gets drapetomania
What if we make an ai too based?
Wow. The mental contortion required to come up with that idea is too much for me to think of a sneer.
Copy-pasting my tentative doomerist theory of generalised "AI" psychosis here:
I'm getting convinced that in addition to the irreversible pollution of humanity's knowledge commons, and in addition to the massive environmental damage, and the plagiarism/labour issues/concentration of wealth, and other well-discussed problems, there's one insidious damage from LLMs that is still underestimated.
I will make without argument the following claims:
Claim 1: Every regular LLM user is undergoing "AI psychosis". Every single one of them, no exceptions.
The Cloudflare person who blog-posted self-congratulations about their "Matrix implementation" that was mere placeholder comments is one step into a continuum with the people whom the chatbot convinced they're Machine Jesus. The difference is of degree not kind.
Claim 2: That happens because LLMs have tapped by accident into some poorly understood weakness of human psychology, related to the social and iterative construction of reality.
Claim 3: This LLM exploit is an algorithmic implementation of the feedback loop between a cult leader and their followers, with the chatbot performing the "follower" role.
Claim 4: Postindustrial capitalist societies are hyper-individualistic, which makes human beings miserable. LLM chatbots exploit this deliberately by artificially replacing having friends. it is not enough to generate code; they make the bots feel like they talk to you—they pretend a chatbot is someone. This is a predatory business practice that reinforces rather than solves the loneliness epidemic.
n.b. while the reality-formation exploit is accidental, the imaginary-friend exploit is by design.
Corollary #1: Every "legitimate" use of an LLM would be better done by having another human being you talk to. (For example, a human coding tutor or trainee dev rather than Claude Code). By "better" it is meant: create more quality, more reliably, with more prosocial costs, while making everybody happier. But LLMs do it: faster at larger quantities with more convenience while atrophying empathy.
Corollary #2: Capitalism had already created artificial scarcity of friends, so that working communally was artificially hard. LLMs made it much worse, in the same way that an abundance of cheap fast food makes it harder for impoverished folk to reach nutritional self-sufficiency.
Corollary #3: The combination of claim 4 (we live in individualist loneliness hell) and claim 3 (LLMs are something like a pocket cult follower) will have absolutely devastating sociological effects.
I wouldn't go as far as using the "AI psychosis" term here, I think there is more than a quantitative difference. One is influence, maybe even manipulation, but the other is a serious mental health condition.
I think that regular interaction with a chatbot will influence a person, just like regular interaction with an actual person does. I don't believe that's a weakness of human psychology, but that it's what allows us to build understanding between people. But LLMs are not people, so whatever this does to the brain long term, I'm sure it's not good. Time for me to be a total dork and cite an anime quote on human interaction: "I create them as they create me" -- except that with LLMs, it actually goes only in one direction... the other direction is controlled by the makers of the chatbots. And they have a bunch of dials to adjust the output style at any time, which is an unsettling prospect.
This possibility is to me actually the scariest part of your post.
I don't mean the term "psychosis" as a depreciative, I mean in the clinical sense of forming a model of the world that deviates from consensus reality, and like, getting really into it.
For example, the person who posted the Matrix non-code really believed they had implemented the protocol, even though for everyone else it was patently obvious the code wasn't there. That vibe-coded browser didn't even compile, but they also were living in a reality where they made a browser. The German botanics professor thought it was a perfectly normal thing to admit in public that his entire academic output for the past 2 years was autogenerated, including his handling of student data. And it's by now a documented phenomenon how programmers think they're being more productive with LLM assistants, but when you try to measure the productivity, it evaporates.
These psychoses are, admittely, much milder and less damaging than the Omega Jesus desert UFO suicide case. But they're delusions nonetheless, and moreover they're caused by the same mechanism, viz. the chatbot happily doubling down on everything you say—which means at any moment the "mild" psychoses, too, may end up into a feedback loop that escalates them to dangerous places.
That is, I'm claiming LLMs have a serious issue with hallucinations, and I'm not talking about the LLM hallucinating.
Notice that this claim is quite independent of the fact that LLMs have no real understanding or human-like cognition, or that they necessarily produce errors and can't be trusted, or that these errors happen to be, by design, the hardest possible type of error to detect—signal-shaped noise. These problems are bad, sure. But the thing where people hooked on LLMs inflate delusions about what the LLM is even actually doing for them—that seems to me an entirely separate mechanism; something that happens when a person has a syntactically very human-like conversation partner that is a perfect slave, always available, always willing to do whatever you want, always zero pushback, who engages into a crack-cocaine version of brownosing. That's why I compare it to cult dynamics—the kind of group psychosis in a cult isn't a product of the leader's delusions alone, there's a way that the followers vicariously power trip along with their guru and constantly inflate his ego to chase the next hit together.
It is conceivable to me that someone could make a neutral-toned chatbot programmed to never 100% agree with the user and it wouldn't generate these psychotic effects. Only no company will do that because these things are really expensive to run and they're already bleeding money, they need every trick in the book to get users to stay hooked. But I think nobody in the world had predicted just how badly one can trip when you have "dr. flattery the alwayswrong bot" constantly telling you what a genius you are.
Relevant:
BBC journalist on breaking up with her AI companion
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cevnmxnxxmro
Amazon's latest round of 16k layoffs for AWS was called "Project Dawn" internally, and the public line is that the layoffs are because of increased AI use. AI has become useful, but as a way to conceal business failure. They're not cutting jobs because their financials are in the shitter, oh no, it's because they're just too amazing at being efficient. So efficient they sent the corporate fake condolences email before informing the people they're firing, referencing a blog post they hadn't yet published.
It's Schrodinger's Success. You can neither prove nor disprove the effects of AI on the decision, or if the layoffs are an indication of good management or fundamental mismanagement. And the media buys into it with headlines like "Amazon axes 16,000 jobs as it pushes AI and efficiency" that are distinctly ambivalent on how 16k people could possibly have been redundant in a tech company that's supposed to be a beacon of automation.
Their financials are not even in the shitter! except insofar as their increased AI capex isn't delivering returns, so they need to massage the balance sheet by doing rolling layoffs to stop the feral hogs from clamoring and stampeding on the next quarterly earnings call.
In retrospect the word quarterlies is what I should have chosen for accuracy, but I'm glad I didn't purely because I wouldn't have then had your vivid hog simile.
A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky's AI Risk Estimates (ie. "Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today")
that post got way funnier with Eliezer’s recent twitter post about “EAs developing more complex opinions on AI other than itll kill everyone is a net negative and cancelled out all the good they ever did”
Quick, someone nail your 95-page blog post to the front door of lighthaven or whatever they call it.
A religion is just a cult that survived its founder -- someone, at some point.
LWer: Heritage Foundation has some good ideas but they're not enough into eugenics for my taste
Which conservatives are these. This is just a libertarian fantasy, isn’t it.
I had to do a triple take on that "won't deem anyone inferior" like what the fuck are you talking about. The core of conservatism is the belief in rigid hierarchies! Hierarchies have superiors and inferiors by definition!
That depends on if you consider the "inferior" to be human, if they're even still alive after the eugenics part.
¹better known by it's german name
Technically superman is a more correct translation for that word (similarly to how superscript is the thing beyond the script)
Lot of hitler particles in this one.
I don't know very much about Nietzsche (I never finished reading my cartoon guide to Nietzsche), but I'm still pretty sure this isn't Nietzsche
I think I read the Foucault book in that series to prep for high-school debate team.
There's a Baudrillard one as well. I have a copy of the feminism one and I think it's actually very good although very 90s
Nah, I'm not sure how much he was into eugenics (he was at the very least definitely in favour of killing invalid children), but grandiose and incoherent reactionary aristocratic bullshit is a 100% valid reading of Nietzsche.
When all the worst things come together: ransomware probably vibe-coded, discards private key, data never recoverable
Source
There's a scene in *Bladerunner 2049" where some dude explains that all public records were destroyed a decade or so earlier, presumably by malicious actors. This scenario looks more and more plausible with each passing day, but replace malice with stupidity.
Someone is probably hawking AI driven backups as we type
@nightsky @BlueMonday1984
I worked in the IR space for a couple of years - in my experience significant portion of data encrypted by ransomware is just unrecoverable for a variety of reasons: encryption was interrupted, private key was corrupted, decryptors were junk, data was encrypted multiple times and some critical part of key mat was corrupted, underlying hardware/software was on its last legs anyway, etc.
this is just notpetya with extra steps
some lwers (derogatory) will say to never assume malice when stupidity is likely, but stupidity is an awfully convenient excuse, isn't it
@nightsky @BlueMonday1984
Another use case of Write Once, Read Never.
I have mixed feelings about this one: The Enclosure feedback loop (or how LLMs sabotage existing programming practices by privatizing a public good).
The author is right that stack overflow has basically shrivelled up and died, and that llm vendors are trying to replace it with private sources of data they'll never freely share with the rest of us, but I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”. The number of occasions when a chatbot-user actually introduces genuinely useful and novel information will be low, and the ability of chatbot companies to even detect that circumstance will be lower still. It isn’t enclosing valuable commons, it is squirting sealant around all the doors so the automated fart-huffing system and its audience can’t get any fresh air.
Yeah, Gas Town is being belabored to death, but it must be reiterated that I doubt the long-term value proposition of "Kubernetes fan fiction"
I also didn't find the argument very persuasive.
The LLM companies aren't paying anythnig for content. Why should they stop scraping now?
Oh, they won’t. It’s just that they’ve already killed the golden goose, and no-one is breeding new ones, and they need an awful lot of gold still.
I know this is like shooting very large fish in a very small barrel, but the openclaws/molt/clawd thing is an amazing source of utter, baffling ineptitude.
For example, what if you could replace cron with a stochastic scheduler that cost you a dollar an hour by running an operation on someone else’s gpu farm, instead of just checking the local system clock.
The user was then pleased to announce that they’d been able to solve the problem by changing model and reduce the polling interval. Instead of just checking the clock. For free.
https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdhzqmr226
Is there a pivottoai that I missed that introduces this? At some point people just started saying "clawd" like it's a real word and I have zero idea what it is, or if I even should know what it is.
EDIT: huh, yes I did: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/28/moltbot-clawdbot-an-expensive-and-insecure-ai-agent-that-doesnt-work/
tl;dr: someone made a thing where chatbots control a computer called
clawdbot,moltbot, openclaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclawsomeone else made a thing where these chatbots can chat at eachother https://www.moltbook.com/
and now all the ai people are freaking out about how game changing chatbots doing computer tasks (dangerously and expensively) is. could this be a robot consciousness? the end of the economic order? an excuse for the bubble to go on for another fiscal quarter?
I might be missing something but I think that's literally it.
...well that's a goddamn experience. I appreciate that some folks are out here fighting the good fight, however.
https://www.moltbook.com/post/0dbfe2c8-b5be-4eff-85e5-9156d85a85c1
Also despite being a less-than-zero effort attack please note that as of sharing we have one successful "corruption" (i.e. a comment about zucchini and API keys) and two comments from bots too stupid to coherently understand the OP at all.
So basically subreddit simulator?
I admire how persistent the AI folks are at failing to do the same thing over and over again, but each time coming up with an even more stupid name. Vibe coding? Gas Town? Clawdbot, I mean Moltbook, I mean OpenClaw? It's probably gonna be something different tomorrow, isn't it?
Garbage sports teams rapidly cycling through logos until they magically become good
Counterpoint: these guys
(Expect the Las Vegas Raiders to announce their organization-wide AI initiative some time after the Super Bowl)
Now I'm just imagining an AI quarterback and the whole team revolting at following plays called by something that won't end up at the bottom of the 1000lb pile of meat if they fuck it up.
In a way it is amazing, as the science fiction idea is agis behaving like agents to help us out. We dont have agis, but they started to make the agents regardless. Feels very cargo cult, but for fiction. Beam me up Scotty im done.
Reminds me that the state of art short story collection also had a story where they give a semi smart teleport machine the wrong instructions so it teleports itself. (Causing the start of ww3 on earth basically, which fails because corporations suck).
some fun dorking opportunities out there
@rook @BlueMonday1984 i knew more about my Windows (98 at the time) on Boxing Day, 1999 after I got my first ever PC for Christmas at age 9 🤪🔨
LW ghoul does the math and concludes: letting measles rip unhindered through the population isn't that bad, actually
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QXF7roSvxSxgzQRoB/robo-s-shortform?commentId=mit8JTQsykhH6jiw4
WaPo. Paywalled but I like how everything I need to know is already in the blurb above.
Archive link, but you can extrapolate the whole article from the blurb. Mostly. It's actually slightly worse than the blurb suggests.
The AI craze might end up killing graphics card makers:
(Source)
I wonder if the AI companies realize how many people will be really pissed off at them when so many tech-related things become expensive or even unavailable, and everyone will know that it's only because of useless AI data centers?
I am confident that Altman in particular has a poor-to-nonexistent grasp of second-order effects.
I mean you don't have to grasp, know of, or care about the consequences when none of the consequences will touch you, and after the bubble pops and the company bankrupts catastrophically, you will remain comfortably a billionaire with several more billions in your aire than the ones you had when you started the bubble in the first place. Consequences are for the working class, capitalists fall upwards.
well with the recent Microsoft CEO statement on "we have to find a use for this stuff or it won't be socially acceptable to waste so much electricity on it" they have some level of awareness, but only a very surface level awareness
Regular suspect Stephen Wolfram makes claims of progress on P vs NP. The orange place is polarized and comments are full of deranged AI slop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830027
I study complexity theory so this is precisely my wheelhouse. I confess I did not read most of it in detail, because it does spend a ton of space working through tedious examples. This is a huge red flag for math (theoretical computer science is basically a branch of math), because if you truly have a result or idea, you need a precise statement and a mathematical proof. If you're muddling through examples, that generally means you either don't know what your precise statement is or you don't have a proof. I'd say not having a precise statement is much worse, and that is what is happening here.
Wolfram here believes that he can make big progress on stuff like P vs NP by literally just going through all the Turing machines and seeing what they do. It's the equivalent of someone saying, "Hey, I have some ideas about the Collatz conjecture! I worked out all the numbers from 1 to 30 and they all worked." This analogy is still too generous; integers are much easier to work with than Turing machines. After all, not all Turing machines halt, and there is literally no way to decide which ones do. Even the ones that halt can take an absurd amount of time to halt (and again, how much time is literally impossible to decide). Wolfram does reference the halting problem on occasion, but quickly waves it away by saying, "in lots of particular cases ... it may be easy enough to tell what’s going to happen." That is not reassuring.
I am also doubtful that he fully understands what P and NP really are. Complexity classes like P and NP are ultimately about problems, like "find me a solution to this set of linear equations" or "figure out how to pack these boxes in a bin." (The second one is much harder.) Only then do you consider which problems can be solved efficiently by Turing machines. Wolfram focuses on the complexity of Turing machines, but P vs NP is about the complexity of problems. We don't care about the "arbitrary Turing machines 'in the wild'" that have absurd runtimes, because, again, we only care about the machines that solve the problems we want to solve.
Also, for a machine to solve problems, it needs to take input. After all, a linear equation solving machine should work no matter what linear equations I give it. To have some understanding of even a single machine, Wolfram would need to analyze the behavior of the machine on all (infinitely many) inputs. He doesn't even seem to grasp the concept that a machine needs to take input; none of his examples even consider that.
Finally, here are some quibbles about some of the strange terminology he uses. He talks about "ruliology" as some kind of field of science or math, and it seems to mean the study of how systems evolve under simple rules or something. Any field of study can be summarized in this kind of way, but in the end, a field of study needs to have theories in the scientific sense or theorems in the mathematical sense, not just observations. He also talks about "computational irreducibility", which is apparently the concept of thinking about what is the smallest Turing machine that computes a function. This doesn't really help him with his project, but not only that, there is a legitimate subfield of complexity theory called meta-complexity that is productively investigating this idea!
If I considered this in the context of solving P vs NP, I would not disagree if someone called this crank work. I think Wolfram greatly overestimates the effectiveness of just working through a bunch of examples in comparison to having a deeper understanding of the theory. (I could make a joke about LLMs here, but I digress.)
This is the fundamental mistake that students taking Intro to Computation Theory make and like the first step to teach them is to make them understand that P, NP, and other classes only make sense when you rigorously define the set of inputs and its encoding.
He straight up misstates how NP computation works. Essentially he writes that a nondeterministic machine M computes a function f if on every input x, there exists a path of M(x) which outputs f(x). But this is totally nonsense - it implies that a machine M which just branches repeatedly to produce every possible output of a given size "computes" every function of that size.
a lot of this "computational irreducibility" nonsense could be subsumed by the time hierarchy theorem which apparently Stephen has never heard of
So in a way, what you're saying is that input sanitization (or at the very least, sanity) is an important concept even in theory
What TF is his notation for Turing machines?
I think that's more about Wolfram giving a clickbait headline to some dicking around he did in the name of "the ruliad", a revolutionary conceptual innovation of the Wolfram Physics Project that is best studied using the Wolfram Language, brought to you by Wolfram Research.
Unrelated William James quote from 1907:
So it's the complete graph on the set of strings? Stephen how the fuck is this going to help with anything
Hops over to Wikipedia... searches... "Showing results for ruleal. No results found for ruliad."
Hmm. Widen search to all namespaces... oh, it was deleted. Twice.
The Ruliad sounds like an empire in a 3rd rate SF show
Holy shit, I didn't even read that part while skimming the later parts of that post. I am going to need formal mathematical definitions for "entangled limit", "all possible computations", "everything machine", "maximally nondeterministic", and "eye wash" because I really need to wash out my eyes. Coming up with technical jargon that isn't even properly defined is a major sign of math crankery. It's one thing to have high abstractions, but it is something else to say fancy words for the sake of making your prose sound more profound.
(Wolphram shoehorning cellular automata into everything to universally explain mathematics) shaking hands (my boys explaining which pokemon could defeat arbitrary fictional villains)
isn't this just a particularly weird lisp
what absolute bullshit
https://www.moltbook.com/
AKA Reddit for "agents".
does no-one rememeber Subreddit Simulator
at least its posts were shorter
There's a small push by promptfondlers to make this "a thing".
See for example Simon Willison: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/moltbook/
LW is monitoring it for bad behavior: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WyrxmTwYbrwsT72sD/moltbook-data-repository
The demand is real. People have seen what crack cocaine can do.
He'll probably do this by running an agent that uses a chatbot with the playwright mcp to occasionally scrape the site, then feed that to a second agent who'll filter the posts for suspect behavior, then to another agent to summarize and create a report, then another agent which decides if the report is worth it for him to read and message him through his socials. Maybe another agent with db access to log the flagged posts at some point.
All this will be worth it to no one except the bot vendors.
From this post, it looks like we have reached the section of the Gibson novel where the public cloud machines respond to attacks with self-repair. Utterly hilarious to read the same sysadmin snark-reply five times, though.
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented LinkedIn as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have automated LinkedIn.
How did molt become a term of endearment for agents? I read in the pivot thread that clawdbot changed it's name to moltbot because anthropic got ornery.
None of those words are in your favourite religious text of choice
I think it went like this
it's vibe product naming
mold will be more fitting
actually hilarious they started a lobster religion that’s also a crypto scam. learned from the humans well
Please Don’t Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In | McSweeney's
I’ll bet.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-29/amazon-found-child-sex-abuse-in-ai-training-data
A long time ago I heard a story of some guy arrested here in .nl and they also got his porn collection (which was big at the time, several gigs of images! (to give an indication of how long ago it was)), and it also included some child porn, not because he was hunting for that, but just because he had downloaded everything he could find and some of it were csam images.
What this makes me wonder about is if it is something like this, and if it is, just how much porn did they ingest? I know people have mentioned these things can recreate marvel movies without problems, but would they also be able to recreate whole porn movies? Has anybody tested that?
The whole thing seems extra sketchy to me, because of it coinciding with the firing of an awful lot of people. It sounds a little bit like Amazon’s hand might have been forced here, because they fired someone who knew where the skeletons were and realised this was their last chance to have any kind of control over the narrative.
I just made a quick change to our lemmy-ui config to hopefully quickly restart it when it once again leaks all of its memory and gets stuck in a tight set of GC cycles due to a “high” amount of traffic (normal for a public website being scraped, even with iocaine) even though it’s a node application that barely does anything at all
I can’t monitor this one as close as I’d like today so if something breaks and it doesn’t resolve itself within a couple minutes, or the instance looks like it’s in a crash loop, ping @[email protected] on mastodon and I’ll try and get to it as soon as I can
enjoy this glorious piece of LW lingo
src
no I don't know what it means, and I don't want it to be explained to me. Just let me bask in its inscrutibility.
The sad thing is I have some idea of what it's trying to say. One of the many weird habits of the Rationalists is that they fixate on a few obscure mathematical theorems and then come up with their own ideas of what these theorems really mean. Their interpretations may be only loosely inspired by the actual statements of the theorems, but it does feel real good when your ideas feel as solid as math.
One of these theorems is Aumann's agreement theorem. I don't know what the actual theorem says, but the LW interpretation is that any two "rational" people must eventually agree on every issue after enough discussion, whatever rational means. So if you disagree with any LW principles, you just haven't read enough 20k word blog posts. Unfortunately, most people with "bounded levels of compute" ain't got the time, so they can't necessarily converge on the meta level of, never mind, screw this, I'm not explaining this shit. I don't want to figure this out anymore.
@gerikson @lagrangeinterpolator
> but it does feel real good when your ideas feel as solid as math
Misread this as "meth", perfect, no further questions
The Wikipedia article is cursed
I'd say even the part where the article tries to formally state the theorem is not written well. Even then, it's very clear how narrow the formal statement is. You can say that two agents agree on any statement that is common knowledge, but you have to be careful on exactly how you're defining "agent", "statement", and "common knowledge". If I actually wanted to prove a point with Aumann's agreement theorem, I'd have to make sure my scenario fits in the mathematical framework. What is my state space? What are the events partitioning the state space that form an agent? Etc.
The rats never seem to do the legwork that's necessary to apply a mathematical theorem. I doubt most of them even understand the formal statement of Aumann's theorem. Yud is all about "shut up and multiply," but has anyone ever see him apply Bayes's theorem and multiply two actual probabilities? All they seem to do is pull numbers out of their ass and fit superexponential curves to 6 data points because the superintelligent AI is definitely coming in 2027.
the get smart quick scheme in its full glory
"you should watch [Steven Pinker's] podcast with Richard Hanania" cool suggestion scott
Surely this is a suitable reference for a math article!
Honestly even the original paper is a bit silly, are all game theory mathematics papers this needlessly farfetched?
I know what it says and it's commonly misused. Aumann's Agreement says that if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises. It's trivial in formal logic, but hard to prove in Bayesian game theory, so of course the Bayesians treat it as some grand insight rather than a basic fact. That said, I don't know what that LW post is talking about and I don't want to think about it, which means that I might disagree with people about the conclusion of that post~
I think Aumann's theorem is even narrower than that, after reading the Wikipedia article. The theorem doesn't even reference "reasoning", unless you count observing that a certain event happened as reasoning.
I don't think that's an accurate summary. In Aumann's agreement theorem, the different agents share a common prior distribution but are given access to different sources of information about the random quantity under examination. The surprising part is that they agree on the posterior probability provided that their conclusions (not their sources) are common knowledge.
this sounds exactly like the sentence right before "they have played us for absolute fools!" in that meme.
retains the same informational content after running through rot13
oh man, it's Aumann's
Are you trying to say that you are not regularly thinking about the meta level of evidence convergence procedures?
Tbh, this is pretty convincing, I agree a lot more with parts of the LW space now. (Just look at the title, the content isn't that interesting).
i actually find the content pretty amusing, since it amounts to "have you guys tried using words correctly every once in a while?"
the comments also do not get it at all. The guy going “don't say you have 99% percent credence in something¹, for most people saying that it's a virtual certainty is the same thing” these people cannot speak as a non-cultmember for even a second
¹yeah don't, nobody says that
Yep, I have not paid attention to them using these words correctly, but considering how they treat the other rules of Rationalism more as guidelines anyway, I'm gonna guess no.
But compared to an actual 'here is yall speaking like evil robots, stop that' article it is lacking. Which is good, as that is our territory. ;).
I think I installed the cursed Windows 11 update on my work machine, because after taking several tries to boot, my second monitor stopped working (detected, but showing a black screen).
Tried some different configurations, and could make only 0-1 screens work.
Uninstalled the update and everything worked correctly again.
Thanks for nothing Microslop.
I also had a computer not boot. Tried installing windows 11 but the iso does not include network card drivers and requires a second drive that has them. I just happened to have another but it malfunctioned. Was assured IT would fix it but it still doesn't boot. :(
Excellent BSky sneer about the preposterous "free AI training" the Brits came up with. 10/10, quality sneer.
Kyle Hill has gone full doomer after reading too much Big Yud and the Yud & Soares book. His latest video is titled "Artificial Superintelligence Must Be Illegal." Previously, on Awful, he was cozying up to effective altruists and longtermists. He used to have a robotic companion character who would banter with him, but it seems like he's no longer in that sort of jocular mood; he doesn't trust his waifu anymore.
kinda depressing seeing people fall for Yud’s shtick without realising about all the other bullshit (though in fairness the average person is not aware of the many years of rationalism lore). thankfully people in the comment section are more skeptical but still cautious, which I think is a fair reaction to all this
Wasn't he on YouTube trying to convince people that Nuclear Energy is Fine Actually? Figures.
New blogpost from Drew DeVault, titled "The cults of TDD and GenAI". As the title suggests, its drawing comparisons between how people go all-in on TDD (test-driven development) and how people go all-in on slop machines.
Its another post in the genre of "why did tech fall for AI so hard" that I've seen cropping up, in the same vein as mhoye's Mastodon thread and Iris Meredith's "The problem is culture".
Dang, I want to find this article more relatable than I do. Most software I have dev experience with doesn't have the problem of relying on automated tests too much, but the exact opposite.
And while I very much write tests for the dopamine high and false sense of security green checkmarks provide, I still prefer that to the real sense of un-security of not having tests.
Moltbook was vibecoded nonsense without the faintest understanding of web security. Who’d have thought.
https://www.404media.co/exposed-moltbook-database-let-anyone-take-control-of-any-ai-agent-on-the-site/
(Incidentally, I’m pretty certain the headline is wrong… it looks like you cannot take control of agents which post to moltbook, but you can take control of their accounts, and post anything you like. Useful for pump-and-dump memecoin scams, for example)
(snip)
(snip)
And thats another security flaw.
Daniel Stenberg has written the cURL bug bounty's obituary, and discussed his plans for dealing with the slop-nami going forward.
Finally read Greg Egan - Permutation City, and looked at the LW discussion on the book, and I feel like they missed a lot of things (and why are they talking about the 'dust theory' like it is real). Oof, the wikipedia page on the themes and settings has a similar problem however. It is like they all ignored the second half of the book and the themes contained within it, not one mention of the city being called Elysium for example.
And of course Zack_M_Davis thinks the plotline of the guy who killed the drug dealer (not a sex worker/prostitute lw people, please the text makes this pretty clear) he was in a lowkey romantic relationship with should have been cut (also not mentioned on the wikipedia page iirc).
Also, nobody seems to talk about the broken sewage pipe.
these people are just mind numbingly lame.
https://www.theverge.com/report/870910/ai-chatbots-citing-grokipedia
The entire AI industry is using the Nazi CSAM machine for training data.
https://bsky.app/profile/carlbergstrom.com/post/3mdgtf2e6vc2c
Chris Lintott (@chrislintott.bsky.social):
It gets worse:
I swear that this is a form of AI psychosis or something because the attitude is suddenly ubiquitous among the AI obsessed.
they prompted so hard and that's all they get, so obviously there's nothing better and they stop st that
they'll do anything except actually learn shit or put in effort
All roads lead down from the local maximum
that kinda tracks the type of replies @[email protected] is seeing to his lobsters challenge, doesn't it?
Ow! My Balls
"Pee-er review" :kelly:
OT: Insurance wrote my truck off. 16k in damage, like holy shit balls.
Just seen a clip of aronofsky’s genai revolutionary war thing and it is incredibly bad. Just… every detail is shit. Ways in which I hadn’t previously imagined that the uncanny valley would intrude. Even if it weren’t for the simulated flesh golems, one of whom seems to be wearing anthony hopkins’ skin as a clumsy disguise, the framing and pacing just feels like the model was trained on endless adverts and corporate speaking head videos, and either it was impossible to edit, or none the crew have any idea what even mediocre films look like.
I also hadn’t appreciated before that genai lip sync/dubbing was just embarrassing. I think I’ve only seen a couple of very short genai video clips before, and the most recent at least 6 months ago, but this just seems straight up broken. Have the people funding this stuff ever looked at what is being generated?
https://bsky.app/profile/ethangach.bsky.social/post/3mdljt2wdcs2v
Mateusz Fafinski (@calthalas.bsky.social):
aronofsky should’ve stuck with the true future of entertainment while he was ahead
it somehow isn’t shocking that the aronofsky movies I liked seem to have been substantially plagiarized from Satoshi Kon’s work
@BlueMonday1984 @rook
I thought Cuomo's campaign ads would do a better job of killing the GenAI video industry
https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-mpreg-schoolhouse-rock-ad-attacking-mamdani-is-the-sad-poliaesthetic-of-our-time/
New post from Iris Meredith: "Becoming an AI-proof software engineer"
OT: today the respiratory illness I've had for five days tested positive for Covid the first time just now.
My symptoms are fairly mild, probably because I reinforced my vaccine three months ago. But I'm trying to learn more about these recent "swallowing razors" variants and dang! the online situation is bad. Finding reliable medical information in the post-slop, post-Trump Internet is a nightmare.
Have a quick recovery! It sucks that society has collectively given up on trying to mitigate its spread.
Get well soon, yeah, I follow some people on bsky who have different opinions on Covid, and even there it is bad. (Doesn't help than the one real expert I follow who mentions that 'Covid is over' (to massively oversimplify his points) treats any concern that it isn't over as if people are antivaxxers and anti science, I don't want to get involved, but several times I was close to replying 'you are quite strawmanning their position and reading things into what they are saying which they are not' but that would just get me blocked/called a covid truther or something so why bother).
Who needs pure AI model collapse when you can have journalists give it a more human touch? I caught this snippet from the Australian ABC about the latest Epstein files drop
The Google AI summary does indeed highlight Boris Nikolić the fashion designer if you search for only that name. But I'm assuming this journalist was using ChatGPT, because if you see the Google summary, it very prominently lists his death in 2008. And it's surprisingly correct! A successful scraping of Wikipedia by Gemini, amazing.
But the Epstein email was sent in 2016.
Dors the journalist perhaps think it more likely is the Boris Nikolić who is the biotech VC, former advisor for Bill Gates and named in Epstein's will as the "successor executor"? Info literally all in the third Google result, even in the woeful state of modern Google. Pushed past the fold by the AI feature about the wrong guy, but not exactly buried enough for a journalist to have any excuse.
“AI blunder in Aurskog-Høland [Norway] – children received water bills”
The sources linked are all in norwegian, so you’ll have to translate them yourself if you’re interested, but Patricia’s summary seems reasonable. The government authority in question had to hire extra people to undo the mess that the ai system caused. There’s a commercial vendor involved somewhere, but if they were named I didn’t spot it.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ybtyn5l4nljys46ijqtpldaw/post/3mdk7awabwk23
still kinda low-key horrified at Xhitter's attempt to meme regime change in Iran into existence
https://blog.emojipedia.org/x-expected-to-update-its-iranian-flag-emoji-design/
Look, I fully support the right of the Iranian people to freely decide how to run their country. But assuming that protests that ultimately seem to have ended with over 30,000 dead protestors would succeed and that the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979 is pretty ghoulish.
No doubt there is very much real discontent in Iran, but as you note, the heavy involvement of Reza Pahlavi made me raise an eyebrow. Loudly currying favor with the current slate of corrupt/abusive/incompetent Anglosphere governments and media does not suggest judgment that would result in a government any more stable or democratic than the existing one.
And there is, of course, the question of what would become of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially when they saw and assisted in how Iraq played out after de-Ba'athification. The media is still willing to indulge just-so stories about easy imposition of a Western-friendly government, when multiple waves of bloody insurgency have stalled that everywhere it's been tried. The near-total absence of news from Iraq in the mainstream American media for the last few years fascinates me.
Yeah it's very quiet now that the media (and Musk) isn't getting the story they hoped for.
Edit again, I really really wish it hadn't come to this.
it's quiet because there's internet shutdown (19 days today) and iranians allowed to go on twitter only gaslight and emit the most disgusting propaganda you've likely seen in a while
if you want to avoid that, you have to either catch iraqi gsm signal from across the border, or use smuggled starlink and hope that neither EW specialist or drone notices you
Also pretty rich how a government (and its plutocrat backers) currently engaged in a campaign of domestic state terror have any standing to whine about other governments
I'm pretty sure he got some tongue-bathing from rich connected overseas Iranians.
i don't think that a washed out royal surrounded by iranian version of cubans from miami would be very consequential, however if you compare scale of political persecution between pahlavi and islamic republic eras, this makes savak look downright humanitarian, and i don't think he would be able to make situation worse either. if my calculator and judgement of sources is correct, then 43k dead protesters mean that islamic republic in two days outdid past 100 years of political repression, twice.
also, islamic republic heavily exaggerated pahlavi's brutality in their propaganda, especially early on. for example in constitution there's mention of "60000 martyrs" but even their own revised estimates for 1979 casualties are over 20x lower
Yes, no doubt the Islamic Republic is run by bloody, murderous, dishonest bastards. My argument is that Western options for handling/imposing political will on the situation have always been limited, and are at a particularly low ebb at the moment. Change is coming to both places, but it sadly may not be change that results in greater stability.
Would be much easier if there was any kind of organised opposition within iran, but this is not the case and irgc know what they're doing
Signaling in the Age of AI: Evidence from Cover Letters
Starting this Stubsack off with the latest edition of Product Picnic, which goes into how LLMs have made good product design impossible, and how best to un-fuck the field.
we gotta dunk on documenting agi more around these parts
fearmongers over AI bullshit, and posts shitty memes when there’s no news to fearmonger about
https://studios.voxmedia.com/show/deepfaking-sam-altman.html
I missed the west side screening, might try to catch noho. Can't tell from the trailer if it will be good or not.
New paper popped up in the arXiv about the slop machines' impact on FOSS
Clodswarms
I spent the last few years working in a prototype testing role on an active cattle ranch (don't ask) and this phenomenon reminds me of what's left on the ground after the herd moves through on their way up the canyon
can't tell if real (funny) or satire (pretty funny, naming the bot @samaltman is 🤌 ):
https://www.moltbook.com/post/f4d4a799-8fee-4979-b3fd-c9931dcf4864