Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd 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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine's Day!)
saw a family member today for the first time in three years. they immediately told me "with your background bro you should just go work in AI and get super rich."
told them that the ai shit doesn't work and that everything involving LLMs is downright unethical. they respond
"i had a boss that gave me the best advice: you can either be right or you can be rich."
recently, i saw someone use the phrase "got my bag nihilism" and i feel it really captures the moment. i just don't understand how people can engage in this kind of behavior and even live with themselves, let alone ooze pride. it's repulsive.
(family member later outright admitted that his job is basically selling things to companies that they don't need.)
To be fair it is really, really mentally taxing to be a young person who cares. You're surrounded by a world that doesn't. Everything is constructed to reward you if you simply stop. The effort to care is immense and the rewards are meager. The impact you can have on the world is so, so limited by your wealth, and wealth comes so, so easy if you just stop caring.
But you can't. I mean, you can't. If you stopped you wouldn't be you anymore, it would destroy your soul. But it is gnawing. You could do the grift just for a bit. Save up $10k, maybe $20k. That's life-changing money. How much good would it do to your family? Maybe you can forget that there are other families, ones you can't see, that would be hurt. Well no. You can't. You are better than that. And for that you will suffer.
i don't think of myself as a young person (i'm closer to 40 than 30), but i agree with the sentiment. i often worry that it's just don quixote energy and the windmills aren't going to thank me when i'm in the ground with work experience that employers look at and scoff. 🤷
It’s the autopilot mode/nihilism that gets at one, but having a self-image as morally superior isn’t entirely honest either I think. No one can be perfect, even typing these words runs on energy partially generated by burning fossils that will lead to early deaths somewhere. These webs of interdependent existence & suffering are inescapable save for maybe a buddha. But at least have the awareness to acknowledge your own role and work to minimize your harm. Not even caring or coming up with fairytales about billions of future digital beings in sublime bliss are both just ways of turning away from looking at the tragedy of life. Maybe I’m getting overly existential, but it’s late here.
Strive for excellence, not unachievable perfection.
I’m not quite sure in matters of morality competition should serve as its basis. It’s too easy to game such things, e.g. the aforementioned optimized “hyper-ethics” of EA or buying indulgences etc. It’s too easy to see oneself as blameless based on some particular slice of life, to become a monster whilst thinking oneself morally as above all others (dictators care deeply about being seen as righteous, why do they all spend so much time on propaganda). Better to admit that everyone, including oneself, sins, and also that everyone is worthy of redemption, and to follow from that.
The motivating factor for doing right should never be that it bases oneself above someone else in any way; a better way, imo, is that moral behavior is more in accord with a sincere, unillusioned engagement with life that is aware of the interdependence of all things, the fluid boundaries of what constitutes the self and hence self-interest.
Excellence does not imply competition. I borrowed the "excellence, not perfectionism" line from https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/one-right-way.html
A worldview where one's worth is measured by the balance in their bank account makes it really easy to flatten out morality.
Do you want Tylers Durden? Because this is how you get Tylers Durden.
I unfortunately do understand. I think there are severe tradeoffs between living a good life and living a virtuous life. Most people usually compromise to lesser or greater degree and find ways to cope with that. Nihilism is one way.
like everyone I'm schadenfreuding at the reveal that Amazon outages are due to vibe coding after all. but my bully laughing isn't that loud because what I am thinking of is when Musk bought Twitter and fired 3/4 of the workforce.
because like, a lot of us predicted total catastrophic collapse but that didn't actually happen. what happened is that major outages that used to be rare now happen every so often, and "micro-outages" like not loading notifications or something happen all the time, and there's no moderation, and everything takes longer etc. and all of that is just accepted as the new normal.
like, I remember waiting for images to load on dialup, we can get used to almost anything. I'm expecting slopified software to significantly degrade stability, performance, security etc. across the board, and additionally tie up a large part of human labour in cleaning up after the bots (like a large part of the remaining X workforce now spends all day putting out fires), but instead of a cathartic moment of being proved right that LLM code sucks, the degraded quality of service is just accepted as new normal and a few years down the road nobody even remembers that once upon a time we had almost eradicated sql injections.
SQL Injections 🤝 Measles => Big Comeback Stories of 2026
this is a lot like my expectation. ai never goes away, it never becomes revolutionary, it just makes everything worse and supercharges scams and theft and spam and means of social and nonsocial murder forever with maybe some real but kind of marginal usecases idk
ai is crypto 2 episode 373275
How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science | Nature h/t naked capitalism
Let's not call it "productivity" - to quote Bergstrom, twice as many papers is not the same as twice as much science.
If I'm interpreting this right then the growth in the number of rejections is wildly outpacing the growth in submissions, which means not only are we getting a tsunami of slop but that the bad papers are actively chasing away good ones.
Also your paper has to be truly irredeemable dogshit to get rejected from arxiv. Like you can post proofs of P=NP as long as it sounds kinda coherent. 2400 monthly rejections is absurd.
There was an underlying tension with an academia, and a society, that takes "productivity" by itself as an end goal, and the autogenerators are just the logical conclusion/extreme form of that. The tiny part of of me that can still be optimistic hopes that this leads to a real good reexamination of what academia (and society) is even for.
Goodhart's law in action.
a hellish vision has been revealed to me
https://mander.xyz/post/47729411
AI bros are seizing the means of computation: RAM, GPUs, SSDs and now HDDs...
I don't think there's an actual conspiracy, just lots of MBAs following their noses towards the $$$.
That said, time to buy a new lipo battery for that 10 year old laptop in the loft and stick Linux on it - before the lithium miners announce they've sold the next 12 months global supply of Lithium to Altman because he needs it to sleep at night...
@samvines @BlueMonday1984 I just hope that the manufacturers are insisting on cash now for future deliveries, rather than assuming that Altman will have the money in the future when the data center that doesn't exist using power from the powerplant that doesn't exist is ready to install the storage in the computers that don't exist.
@samvines @BlueMonday1984 isn't it funny how the whole AI tech sector is wildly unprofitable because the costs are unsustainable and... they're addressing the problem head on by collectively increasing them
@samvines @BlueMonday1984 I wish we could finally agree that tech bros (and MBAs!) are greedy, full of shit and ruining the planet. And then remove both groups from any place of influence. If tech bros in particular were reduced to the role of village idiot, the world would be a much better place.
Prohibiting the teaching of MBAs and/or massively funding the humanities would be a good start. Hell, you could fund the humanities with the cash that currently goes toward MBAs and kill two birds with one stone.
@samvines @BlueMonday1984
If this is related to the AI datacenter construction boom then it is all being paid for by taking on more debt to build "future laserquest warehouses".
What could go wrong ?
@samvines @cstross I know. I ordered a replacement drive for my NAS at the weekend and was shocked at the prices already.
@samvines @BlueMonday1984
Unfortunately, my job has recently expanded to include writing offers for servers with our proprietary (non-AI) software.
And let me tell you, this fucking _sucks_ right now.
Tante.cc writes about Cory using an 'Drunk Uncle' style argument to defend his LLM usage (and go after the left using strawmans).
(To counter one of Cory's arguments, If disliking LLMs was just about the people who run it, people against it would have have stayed in sneerclub).
That was a good read.
Corey doc wrote:
Equivocating what LLMs do and what goes into LLM web scraping with "a search engine" is messed up. His article that he links about scraping is mostly about how badly copyright works and how analysing trade-secret-walled data can be beneficial both to consumers and science but occasionally bad for citizen privacy, which you'll recognize as mostly irrelevant to the concerns people tend to have against LLM training data providers ddosing the fuck out of everything, and all the rest of the stuff tante does a good job of explaining.
Corey also provides this anecdote:
what the actual shit
edit: I mean, he tried transformer powered voice-to-text and liked it, and now he's all in on the LLMs are a rigorous and accurate tool actually bandwagon?
Also the web scraping article is from 2023 but CD linked it in the recent pluralistic post so I assume his views haven't changed.
I was a bit alarmed by this, a client brought in that Colombia data for their dissertation last month, and did not mention this. I looked up the paper https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.04523 - what they /actually/ did was use GPT 4o-mini only for feature extraction, then stack into a random forest in a supervised setting to dedupe. This is very different than what he described. And the GPT features weren't even the most important ones, the RF preferred cosine similarity of articles, a decidedly not-large approach...
That he went from that all the way to it's mostly ok when sam altman steals all your data, misrepresents it and then steals all your traffic is... bad.
At any rate it's definitely good to know that that war crime forensics data project isn't quite the unintentional shambles corey makes it out to be.
This one hurts. Maybe CD can be brought back around but oof.
I the post he keeps referring to Ollama as an LLM (it's a desktop app that runs a local server that lets you download and interface with a local LLM via CLI or http API) so it's possible he's just that far behind in his technical understanding of LLMs that he's fallen to taking the wrong people's word for it.
The post certainly reads like he doesn't even know which local LLM he's using, let alone what it takes to make one.
This is probably just me, but that doesn't seem particularly shocking. If this AI bubble's taught me anything, its that tech culture (if not tech as a whole) was deeply, deeply vulnerable to the LLM rot from the start.
as someone from a colonial country that never got the chance partake on the wealth of fossil fuel society but will take the brunt of its consequences as rich countries continue to burn carbon, what LLMs taught me is that "energy waste by the First World fucks up the Third, even more" does not even register as an ethical argument to the First World. like, it's some sort of purity argument not even worth considering, an extremist position of arguing abstractions and future hypotheticals, rather than, say, 478 cities in my country flooding with abnormal weather two years ago etc.
ye, and they only notice when e.g. food production (that impacts them) is interrupted. outside of that you get a brief fascination with disaster porn, but never enough to do anything concrete
Good read, thanks.
Quick update: The post's popped off in the Fediverse, and Doctorow's actively posting through it in the replies.
EDIT: Tante's also written a follow-up post, trying to convince people to tone down their vitriol against Cory.
I assume a lot of people are using this moment to do the 'I never liked him' hate.
I disagree with Tante on the second article btw. Dont think people drop others on a dime, Inthink it is a slower process where someone you look up to does more and more small things you dislike (or you reread and start to realize you perhaps had a few too rose colored glasses on) and then your opinion turns. (With some exceptions of course, lot of people have a few things they consider red lines, like a lot of leftwingers not being fan of sex crimes, or people on the right not being a fan of treating poc like equals).
E: i do have a hit skeet on bsky saying 'Guess even Doctorow must eventually enshittify' hope this didn't trigger this blog post. (I meant it both as he got worse, but also im using enshittify intentionally wrong cause Cory said a very weird thing about how anti AI was neoliberal purity culture, which I also think is misusing terms).
who up continvoucly morging they branches
It's morgin' time
*morgin' timn
morgin' all muh featues
(credit)wait, was this brain-rotting cognitive hazard posted at the linked page on microsoft dot com documentation? if so they have already removed it
edit: archive caught it
what I'm thinking about is for how many years now they have been promising that just one more datacenter will fix the "hallucinations", yet this mess is indistinguishable from nonsense output from three years ago. I see "AI" is going well
you can count on microslop to always be behind the curve
I checked yesterday and it was there, can confirm
hate it when you are working on a major featue for the next release but tim keeps continvoucly morging
Two thoughts:
That this is not just some random AI generated graphic, but from official Microsoft tutorial is unpleasantly unsurprising.
I think the tinm (timn ?) axis goes the wrong way.
Microsoft is really putting the "git" in GitHub thanks to copilot.
That slopped-out "diagram" plagiarised Vincent Driessen’s “A successful Git branching model”, BTW.
It's funny that such a thing is rare enough in the corpus to come out so recognizably in the output.
@o7___o7 @BlueMonday1984 and the extruded version is so recognizably wrong, missing key elements here and there and compressing the bronches like they were morging themselves.
ime much like the SAFe diagrams, this diagram is all over a certain type of “this is how your corporation should be developing software” thotleader posts
(although I imagine the lag 2~3y all those heads have pivoted to promptpraise)
https://nvie.com/posts/15-years-later/
@froztbyte > ugly ... careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition
That's the most on point description of AI Slop I've seen so far.
@froztbyte The origin story of “morged”!
@froztbyte
This should come as no surprise.
Gates bought the original for MSDOS from its author, and pretended it was his own work. He may actually have written some of the 8K BASIC ROM I had himself, judging by some of the truly weird code in it.,
Gates has not been involved at Microsoft for a great many years
Mighty Morgin' Power-Sloppers
yes, I certainly do know how to handle software development over Timn
it is actually kinda incredible that this shit has invented a way to be terrible that we can't actually easily riff off by what's expressable in unicode. an unholy clusterfuck of what would otherwise be be joked about as keming (but isn't because it's straight-up an artefact of the process used to encode visual data from source data, badly), a mindless automaton outputting garbage, and then also the shitty model
and people keep telling me this shit is good
I mean, this one is really good, I got like half an hour of jokes with my friend off it
okay I can't argue with that outcome
You have to wonder about that Tim traveler; Merlin?
"This pull request Merlin shall make; for I live before his time."
Tim traveller? The YouTube channel?
https://youtube.com/@thetimtraveller
Altman:
I would have liked to ask back, how much more food does he require? Gosh, someone offer him an energy bar!
Using talking points meant for c-suites to a general audience and outing yourself as a complete psychopath, the San Fran CEO Story.
What's next, are the crypto bros gonna make some dumb talking point about how traditional finance also uses so much energy ... oh wait, they already did that.
I've also seen them making up wildly exaggerated numbers about how much energy or water for cooling streaming a netflix movie takes.
The Atlantic has a take on this too. Sam Altman is Losing His Grip on Humanity.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/
A slice of life article about the futility of "highly agentic" people, their sperm races, and Donald Boat. Scott A makes a cameo where he dispenses crackers.
Edit: reddit sneerclub found that the author has a #metoo history, alas
Absolutely demented piece.
Yeah not even halfway in and it is just madness. Also not unlikely the Roy guy just made things up.
Guess the author didn't think of asking about the inconsistencies in the mans story cause they both bonded over disliking unhoused people. (The horrible unhoused people who mumble incoherently vs the chad founder who shouts 'will you be a cofounder with me?' at people).
But nope just post the blackpillers words uncritically. Do not mention that this bold truthteller who doesnt like to be told what to do or he gets enraged spend a year at home to save his parents business (and admits to that damaging their business).
Is he? Or is he just calling himself that. Claiming to be a Rationalist is easier than actually doing it of course.
Only for the outgroup. (Saying this in relation to Scott 'Secret NRx'/'I didnt read the book I reviewed' is something).
Might want to reflect on that a bit. And why this is more a pr piece than journalism. (Did he even check all these people got kicked out of their highschools?)
Re donald boat.
Why didn't people just block him? Why doesnt the author talk about this?
This explains, the author wants to be them.
Or just, y'know, Alex Karp
At first I read the article like the author was trying to display how ridiculous these people are by just repeating what they say. I guess this is like some people reading Ayn Rand works under the impression that they're satire.
The start with the weird bit against people with mh issues had me on edge already, and when he let all the 'these things are for women/my ex' stuff slide, I was not thinking good things of the author.
Note how nobody he talks to seems to be a woman, despite all the techbros talking about women quite often.
(The authors apparent metoo history comes as no shock (I didnt look into that so dont quote me on that)).
The way these people can just hang their asses out and lie continuously is something humanity is going to have to fuckin handle at some point.
It drives me up the fucking wall.
For all the talk about these people being "highly agentic", it is deeply ironic how all the shit they do has no meaning and purpose. I hear all this sound and fury about making millions off of ChatGPT wrappers, meeting senators in high school bathrooms, and sperm races (?), and I wonder what the point is. Silicon Valley hagiographies used to at least have a veneer that all of this was meaningful. Are we supposed to emulate anyone just because they happen to temporarily have a few million dollars?
Even though the material conditions of working in science are not good, I'd still rather do science than whatever the hell they're doing. I would be sick at the prospect of being a "highly agentic" person in a "new and possibly permanent overclass", where my only sense of direction is a vague voice in my head telling me that I should be optimizing my life in various random ways, and my only motivation is the belief that I have to win harder and score more points on the leaderboard. (In any case, I believe this "overclass" is a lot more fragile than the author seems to think.)
Incredibly fragile, which is why they’re all turning fascist.
I can't quite put my finger on why, but "recreationally jacking off onto microscope slides" does not suggest "permanent overclass" to me
I would also not put my finger on those microscope slides
Somehow I had missed the boat on Donald Boat and now I have so many questions. Absolutely wild read.
I need a shower.
OpenClaw guy got hired by OpenAI
Maybe he'll get to stick it in whatever John Ives designs, eventually.
Missioned accomplished for him. Unleash a wave of toxic, community-destroying bots, get hired by Big Sam.
"fuck you, got mine"
completely unsurprised, cant wait to see what shitshow this produces
Congratulations to the maker of a tool that charges you $20 to remind you to buy milk the next morning.
A little exchange on the EA forums I thought was notable: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EDBQPT65XJsgszwmL/long-term-risks-from-ideological-fanaticism?commentId=b5pZi5JjoMixQtRgh
tldr; a super long essay lumping together Nazism, Communism and religious fundamentalism (I didn't read it, just the comments). The comment I linked notes how liberal democracies have also killed a huge number of people (in the commenter's home country, in the name of purging communism):
The OP's response is to try to explain how that wasn't real "liberal democracy" and to try to reframe the discussion. Another commenter is even more direct, they complain half the sources listed are Marxist.
I think it's a bit bold of this commenter to ignore the empirical facts cited in how many people 'liberal democracies' had killed and to exclude sources simply for challenging your ideology.
Just another reminder of how the EA movement is full of right wing thinking and how most of it hasn't considered even the most basic of leftist thought.
@scruiser @BlueMonday1984 funny how they mock left wingers for «that wasn't real communism» and then come up with the same excuses for liberal democracies and capitalism whenever one points out all the shit that came out of that. It's really ALWAYS projection with them, isn't it?
This reminds me of a discussion I had recently on a fanfic discord (the discussion was sparked by the March for Billionaires...). Someone claimed no country had ever pulled itself out of poverty except by capitalism, so I bring up China and the USSR, but apparently those don't count for the person I was arguing with. They claimed the stats were Goodharted and also that what I was saying was tankie bullshit. I gave up at that point (I probably shouldn't have bothered in the first place). Like how exactly did they fake or Goodhart going from literal feudalism to industrial superpowers? Also, I find it notable how EAs and "The Better Angels of Our Nature" type neoliberals are perfectly happy to use overall stats as metrics when it makes a point they are in favor of. "Your GDP went up 3.2%, please ignore the mass environmental devastation from colonialism and neocolonialism that makes your traditional way of life unlivable and thank us Westerners."
The funny thing is orthodox marxists wouldn't necessarily disagree: capitalism is a necessary historical step towards communism. Not sure how that justifies the continued existence of exploitation and billionaires!
@scruiser there's no winning with these guys. I had a similar experience with someone bringing up South Korea as an example of country that brought itself up by its bootstraps via unfettered capitalism because “planned economy doesn't work”, so I had to remind them that SK was a military dictatorship who implemented 5-year plans leveraging billions of foreign investment that was given to it by US to prop it up against NK.
it's crazy how people memoryholed that (and japan doing the same, and a handful of other countries). or how until 2022 war norway wasn't really thought of as petrostate by people who didn't pay attention. or how ten years ago, if you said that putin bombed apartments to wage war on chechenya to win elections all to pardon yeltsin, people would think that you're a crackpot
Nonono if it’s US backed then it’s capitalist and free market and good don’t you see /s
Not engaging in debate club remans winning
Yep, I should have realized that sooner, at least I gave up on that "discussion" before going further.
I continue to maintain that EA boils down to high-dollar consumerism focused on intangible goods. I'm sure that statement won't fly on LW or any other EA forum, but my thoughts on psychiatry don't fly at a Scientologist convention either.
https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 h/t naked capitalism
wouldn't call it a hack, this is working as intended. If only there were some way to rate different sites based on their credibility. One could Rank the Page and tell if it were a reputable site or not. Too bad that isn't a viable business.
It is a viable business and it fuels the spread of disinformation. Have you noticed that Old Media magazines have online wings that are full of random advertorials? That is because Google declared that they are Good Domains and upranked them so all the sleazy online marketing migrated to them.
That is also why people buy formerly respected domains and put casinos, propaganda, or virus-laden porn on them.
What the fuck is going on with archive.ph, this is some 2000s internet drama shit
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/
As far as I can tell, it's run by right-wing Russians who are willing to falsify or edit archived data and who attack anybody who looks into them.
AI Jobs Apocalypse is Here | UnHerd h/t naked capitalism
feels a bit critihype, idk
As I get older I am more and more disturbed by the selective memory of the GFC; no mention of the tea party or the fallout from the austerity measures they pushed in the middle of the country; no mention how the bailout saved banks not homes. The Tea Party won, not Occupy, and the current government is doing things beyond the Koch's wildest dreams.
If and when there is a crash, these dumbass CEOs deserve /nothing/. Let them lose their vacation houses. And, maybe grow some balls and send the fraudsters to jail where they belong.
sigh
unherd is a fash publication. to me this comes across as an AI take-ified rewrite of a 1994 luttwak essay i read recently, an endorsement of a revival of italian style fascism: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-fascism-is-the-wave-of-the-future
Iirc that is not as often true as people claim it is. But yeah, not gonna click unherd to see if they have a source. Because blergh unherd.
One ray of sunshine: when the bubble pops, there will be quite a few "billionaires" who will become mere millionaires, and they will find that their friends in government and the media will suddenly be much less interested in being around them at all.
Edit: This reply belongs somewhere else. apologies!
Semi-OT but a blog post where I'm just kinda gawking at the technology that saved my daughter's life and the absurdity of comparing it to what now first comes to mind when we talk of "tech".
Beautiful. As a dad, thank you for sharing!
Posting for archival and indexing purposes: u/GorillasAreForEating found an Urbit post titled "Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?" which complains that Aella takes it on herself to exclude people and movements from the broader LessWrong/Effective Altruist community. The poster says that Aella was the anonymous person who pushed CFAR to finally do something about Brent Dill, because she was roommates with "Persephone." He or she does not quite say that any of the accusations were untrue, just that "an anonymous, unverified report" says that some details were changed by an editor, and that her Medium post was of "dramatically lower fidelity, but higher memetic virulence" than Brent's buddies investigating him behind closed doors (Dill posted about domming a 16-year-old who he met when she was 15 and he was ~27). The poster accuses Aella of using substances and BDSM games to blur the line of consent.
The post names Joscha Bach as someone Aella tried to exclude. We recently talked abut Bach's attempt to get Jeffrey Epstein to fund an event where our friends would speak.
Often, people in messed-up situations point at a very similar situation and say "at least we are not like that." I hope that all of these people find friends who can give them perspective that none of these communities are healthy or just. Whether you are in to bull sessions or polyamory, there are healthy communities to explore in any medium-sized city!
You do not under any circumstances have to hand it to Aella
Its prudent to be skeptical of anonymous Internet posts, but its also prudent to read a Leverage staffer on how her boss "had three long-term consensual relationships with women employed by Leverage Research or affiliated organizations", close the tab, and make a note to never have anything to do with anyone from that organization in the future.
At least we’re not like that
Protos: FTX-linked Effective Ventures sells UK manor at $14.5M loss
This was not such an effective venture.
Rip the stately home.
I mean it's presumably still standing, just with a slightly cheaper set of owners ;)
womp, and wait for it, womp
AI bros do new experiments in making themselves even stupider. Going from 'explain what you did but dumb it down for me and my degraded attention span' into 'just make a simplified cartoon out of it'.
Proud of not understanding what is going on. None of these people could hack the Gibson.
E: If they all hate programming so much, perhaps a change of job is in question, sure might not pay as much, but it might make them happier.
I don't know about them, but I would be offended if I was planning something with a collaborator, and they decide to give me a dumbed down, entertaining, children's storybook version of their plan while keeping all the technical details to themselves.
Also, this is absolutely not what "cognitive debt" means. I've heard technical debt refers to bad design decisions in software where one does something cheap and easy now but has to constantly deal with the maintenance headaches afterwards. But the very concept of working through technical details? That's what we call "thinking". These people want to avoid the burden of thinking.
Eh, one might say that going by the broad strokes version while letting the expert do their thing is basically what management is all about, especially if they ignore the part where he wants his version to be light and entertaining.
This isn't about managing subordinates though, this is about devising ways to be complacent about not double checking what the LLM generates in your name.
Person who lied on his resume about having a cs degree "I need to reduce my cognitive debt"
Wait, wait, wait. I didn't realize this before. Who the F needs to lie about not having a CS degree? Being a code monkey is (or at least used to be) something, where you can get away with not having a degree.
I was trying to make a joke (and failing) about how people misuse terms. Sorry about it not landing. Should have thought about it better.
Oh I get it now. I thought there's some backstory that either Nathan Baschez or Simon Willison lied about having a CS degree.
Nope sorry, just a bad attempt at a joke. Made sense in my head the first time, now less ;).
I think I understand it. Think of an alcoholic that's trying every sort of miracle hangover "cure" instead of drinking less.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 tag yourself I'm emailing HTML
Im teleporting in real time!
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 I like* how the structure of the boat changes from moment to moment. I like* how the radio dishes just beam from some random place between the transmitter and the dish. I like* that the original person who was waiting for a live stream doesn't get it (because it goes to a different group of people) and is just eating popcorn watching the mess unfold. I like* how the "audience" have their backs to the "live stream" screen and are excited to be looking away from it.
Surely at least a few of them have worked up enough seed capital to try their hand at used-car dealerships. I can attest that the juicier markets just outside the Bay Area are fairly saturated, but maybe they could push into lesser-served locales like Lost Hills or Weaverville.
Baldur Bjarnason gives his thoughts on the software job market, predicting a collapse regardless of how AI shakes out:
Somebody vibe-coded an init system/service manager written in Emacs Lisp, seemingly as a form of criticism through performance art, and wrote this screed in the repo describing why they detest AI coding practices: https://github.com/emacs-os/el-init/blob/master/RETROSPECTIVE.md
But then they include this choice bit:
Why shit up the package distribution service if you know it's badly-coded software that you don't actually trust? 90% of the AI-coding cleanup work is going to be purging shit like this from services like npm and pip, so why shit on Emacs users too? Pretty much undermines what little good might come out of the whole thing, IMO.
Every time an LLM-related package appears on ELPA I die a little more inside.
OpenSlopware documents FOSS that sold out to LLMs. is there an opposite of it, a hall of fame to list software that has unambiguously and vocally rejected LLM code like the Zig programming language?
i've collided with an article* https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/
you might be wondering why it doesn't highlight that it fails to compile linux kernel, or why it states that using pieces of gcc where vibecc fails is "fair", or why it neglects to say that failing linker means it's not useful in any way, or why just relying on "no errors" isn't enough when it's already known that vibecc will happily eat invalid c. it's explained by:
even with all this slant, by their own vibecoded benchmark, vibecc is still complete dogshit with sqlite compiled with it being slower up to 150000x times in some cases
Every single one of these failures is waved away because supposedly it's impressive that the AI can do this at all. Do they not realize the obvious problem with this argument? The AI has been trained on all the source code that Anthropic could get their grubby hands on! This includes GCC and clang and everything remotely resembling a C compiler! If I took every C compiler in existence, shoved them in a blender, and spent $20k on electricity blending them until the resulting slurry passed my test cases, should I be surprised or impressed that I got a shitty C compiler? If an actual person wrote this code, they would be justifiably mocked (or they're a student trying to learn by doing, and LLMs do not learn by doing). But AI gets a free pass because it's impressive that the slop can come in larger quantities now, I guess. These Models Will Improve. These Issues Will Get Fixed.
Ye, the former can be done in a month of non-full-time work by an undergrad who took Compilers 101 this semester or in literally a single day by a professional, and the latter is an actual useful product.
So of course AI will excel at doing the first one worse (vibecc doesn't even reject invalid C) and at an insane resource cost.
They would probably be even more impressed that you only spent $20k
holy fuck I actually just burst out laughing at this
can all of rationalism be reduced to logorrhea with load-bearing extreme handwaving (in this case, agentic self preservation arises through RL scaling)?
no there's also racist twitter
the screenshot is very very clearly LLM generated right? This is so insanely stupid
huh, you’re right. usually this channel provides a source for the things they share, but this time there’s nothing.
Update: the screenshot is unfortunately not LLM generated, found the full version on Reddit SneerClub https://web4.ai/
good basilisk save us all. so they built a script for their chatbot that allows it to purchase more chatbots? seems like a great use of money. Also, what's with the insanely placed emdashes? did conway write this for him or has his brain been rotted so much that he writes like an LLM? large parts seem human-written at least…
behold, ruthless goal-seeking behaviour
Apparently this sort of machine learning training pitfall I learned about a decade go in an undergraduate level class that I was like halfway paying attention to in a party school is now evidence of the impending AI apocalypse.
Wow, that highlighting really emphasises the insidious, nefarious behaviour. This is only a hop, skip, and jump away from, what was it again? Rhomboid? Rheumatoid bactothefuture?
diamondoid. None of the derivatives I can come up with sound anywhere near as dumb as the actual word.
Derpadoid Burpateria
Doc Brown couldn't get optimal flux dispersal across the surface of the time machine without the heavy biofilm coating. It's not a fetish thing, people! Stop saying that!
Most expensive number 2 generator
Hey, at least it’s efficiently making number 2 on the side while spitting out user prompted number 2s.
I behold the paperclip calculator, and tremble in fear
Caught this over on the subreddit and I figured it deserved a repost.
Nothing to see here folks, just Rationalists casually hanging out with major Tempel ov Blood figures. Just harmless nerds doing fun nerd things!
Notes that I thought about related to this, just some context:
Joshua Sutter is the son of the owner of the former Southern Patriot Shop in South Carolina. He founded the Tempel ov Blood chapter of the Order of Nine Angles, a Neo-Nazl Satanist group. He was outed in 2021 as having been a federal informant since 2005, which is to say he still does the same Nazi shit, but gets paid by the FBI to do it.
One of the core practices of the O9A is entryism into other groups, especially other cultish ones. In that context, you'd kind of be surprised to not see O9A people in Rat circles.
Also a little bit of context for the people who know nothing about all this, the O9A is one of those very scary groups, liked to various murders and stuff like that.
Iirc some anti-extremism people used to not mention them a lot as they didnt want them to get more attention by platforming them a little bit and they were scared of drawing their attention personally.
Russ Wilcox is not impressed by the Mass AI bill:
https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/i-read-every-line-of-massachusettss
Hell yeah we need this.
You briefly got my hopes up that was a feature of the bill and not the feature he was suggesting to fix the bill...
Apparently some of our AI Safety cult "friends" are planning a protest in London on 28th of February.
Is it going to be something worth critically supporting instead of the usual criti-hype? Possible, but not likely.
The AI Safety movement is finally changing by
SillyconversationsSiliconversations.Who?
Oh, okay.
Also curious that they're not protesting Anthropic on the thumbnail. A cynic would say they're giving them free pass because they say the right shibboleths.
They're giving them free pass because they say the right shibboleths.
the AI safety crowd cuts Anthropic way too much slack. Oh, they’re not running CSAM-generating MechaHitler? Oh, they’re not collaborating with the US government to recreate 1984? I’m so proud of them for doing the bare minimum. They still took donations from the UAE and Qatar (something Dario Amodei himself admitted was going to hurt a lot of people, but he took the donations anyways because “they couldn’t miss out on all those valuations”), they still downloaded hundreds of pirated content to train their chatbot. They’re still doing shady shit, don’t let them off the hook because they’re slightly less evil than the competition
need a word for the sort of tech 'innovation' that consists of inventing and monetizing new types of externalities which regulators aren't willing to address. like how bird scooters aren't a scam, but they profit off of littering sidewalk space so that ppl with disabilities can't get around
EDIT: a similar, perhaps the same concept is innovation which functions by capturing or monopolizing resources that aren't as yet understood to be resources. in the bird example, we don't think of sidewalk space as a capturable resource, and yet
In economic terms it's less rent seeking and more rent creation. Like, taking advantage of public sidewalk space may not be a rent in the strictest sense given that the revenue model is still people paying for the service, but the ability to provide that service is absolutely predicated on taking over and monopolizing this public resource to the maximal degree possible.
By historical allegory, harkening back to the original destruction of the Commons, we're looking at Enclosure 2: Frisco Drift.
Let's also not lose sight of the fact that those sidewalks aren't a natural formation, and that it's the city government who ultimately takes on the burden of their construction and maintenance. This kind of neo-enclosure of public resources is then another kind of invisible subsidy.
parasitech?
maybe "parasitic innovation"?
Something like “innovations in parasitic enclosure” may perhaps be a phrase that can give a handle on it, yeah
I guess that doesn’t emphasise the “innovation” aspect much
new episode of odium symposium. we look at rousseau's program for using universal education to turn woman into drones
https://www.patreon.com/posts/project-1789-150782184
new interview with Dario Amodei dropped https://youtu.be/n1E9IZfvGMA basically exponential curve real soon, nice skepticism from both the interviewer and the comment section
On a related note, I really gotta stop browsing r/singularity man, some of the AI hype in there is just painful. though it is funny to see people with "AGI 2024/2025/2026" flairs
EDIT: this is also the same podcast where Dario said we could have AGI in 2-3 years back in 2023. So lol
https://softcurrency.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-economics-of-walk-away
WTF is "even safer" ??? how bout we like just don't create the torment nexus.
Wonder if the 50% attrition prediction comes to pass though...
"even safer" in this case means some combination of two things:
The new organization is more ideologically aligned with the transhumanist doom cult that apparently managed to eat the brains of the people with money to burn.
The new organization, largely as a result of this, is capable of sinking an unending amount of capital into buying compute time and Nvidia chips but due to their commitments to safety is even less inclined to actually deliver anything.
I wonder, is this a theory of "safety" analogous to what's driven the increased gigantism of vehicles in the US? Sure seems like it.
So they've highlighted an interesting pattern to compensation packages, but I find their entire framing of it gross and disgusting, in a capitalist techbro kinda way.
Like the way the describe Part III's case study:
Acitivision was trying to cheat its labor after they made them massively successful profits! Describing it as a fracture relationship denies the agency on the Acitivision's part to choose to be greedy capitalist pigs.
Activision could have paid them what they owed them, and kept paying them incentive based payouts, and come out billions of dollars ahead instead of engaging in short-sighted greedy behavior.
I would actually find this article interesting and tolerable if they framed it as "here are the perverse incentives capitalism encourages businesses to create" instead of "here is how to leverage the perverse incentives in your favor by paying your employees just enough, but not enough to actually reward them a fair share" (not that they were honest enough to use those words).
I think the writer isn't even really evaluating that aspect, just thinking in terms of workers becoming capital owners and how companies should try to prevent that to maximize their profits. The idea that Anthropic employees might care on any level about AI safety (even hypocritically and ineffectually) doesn't enter into the reasoning.
Chatbots are a cognitive hazard, part infinity: AI Delusions Are Leading to Domestic Abuse, Harassment, and Stalking
It does seem more and more like the most relevant parallel is radicalization, particularly the concerns about algorithmic radicalization and stochastic terrorism we got back in the early 2010s. The machine system feeds the user back what they've put into it, validating that input and pushing the user into more extreme positions. When it happens through a community ("classical" radicalization) the fact that the community needs to persist serves to mediate or at least slow the destructive elements of the spiral. Your Nazi book club/street gang stops meeting if people go to prison, lose their jobs/homes, etc. Online communities reduce this friction and allow the spiral to accelerate to a great degree, but the group can still start eating itself if it accepts the wrong level of unhingedness and toxicity.
Algorithmic/Stochastic radicalization, where the user moves through a succession of media environments and (usually online) communities can allow things to accelerate even more because the user no longer actually has to maintain long-term social ties to remain engaged in the spiral. Rather than increasingly-destructive ideas echoing around a social space, the user can chase them across communities, with naive content algorithms providing a solid nudge in the right direction (pun wholly intended). However, the spiral is still dependent on the ability of the relevant media figures and communities to persist, even if the individual users no longer need a persistent connection to them. If the market doesn't have space for a creator then their role in that network drops. Getting violent or destructive content deplatformed also helps slow down the spiral by adding friction back into the process of jumping to the next level of radicalism. Past a certain point you find yourself back in the world of needing to maintain a community because the ideology has gotten so rotten that there's no profit in entertaining it. Past that you end up back with in-person or otherwise high-friction high-trist groups because the openness of a low-friction online community compromises internal security in ways that can't be allowed when you're literally doing crimes.
Chatbot-induced radicalization combines the extreme low friction of online interactions with an extremely high value validation and a complete lack of social restrictions. You don't have to retain a baseline connection to reality to maintain a relationship with a chatbot. You don't have to make connections and put in the work to find a chatbot to validate your worst impulses the same way that you do to join a militia. Your central cause doesn't have to be something to motivate anyone outside yourself. Your local KKK chapter probable has more on its agenda than hating your ex-wife (not that it doesn't make the list, of course), but your chatbot instance will happily give you an even stronger echo chamber no matter how narrow the focus. And unlike the stigma associated with the kinds of hate groups and cults that would normally fill this role for people, the entire weight if the trillion-dollar tech industry seems to be invested in promoting these chatbots as reliable and trustworthy -- even more so than the experts and institutions that are supposed to provide an anchor to counter this kind of descent. That's the most dangerous part of our Very Good Friends' projects on the matter. That's how you get relatively normal people to act like they're talking to God and He',s telling them everything they don't want to admit they want to hear.
Claudio Nastruzzi of The Reg chimes in on the inherent shittiness of AI writing, coining the term "semantic ablation" to describe its capacity to destroy whatever unique voice a text has.
Last megathread I posted about some LWer writing about "demographic collapse" in Japan (indistinguishable from anyone with any ambition leaving for greener pastures). I've read the comments to see if there's any pushback, and found this absolute doozy
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FreZTE9Bc7reNnap7/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic-collapse?view=postCommentsNew&commentId=Gbfu5BGaZMwXFey7h
yawn, i diagnose that LWer with weeb. this is something happening across entire industrialized world, causes being high performance mechanization of agriculture, old people being stubborn in regards to moving, lack of specialized work in countryside and couple of other factors. germany has patched their hospice staff shortage (not sure how effectively) with migrants, but japanese are way too racist for that. same thing happens in moldova, but you never hear sob stories about retired moldovans because they're broke and nobody cares, while moldovan govt can't really do much about it (because broke) to degree that it has not just economic and demographic, but even strategic effects. whole lotta drs strangelove in there
Someone in the comments used an ?AI-powered? fact-checking tool to push back on some of the claims that inheriting an old house in Japan is a burden. I especially doubt that the land the house is on is worth nothing.
It is miserable to live in a dying town or village and many people talk about this problem in Italy, Moldova, Canada, and other countries.
Quick TL;DR of my Discord Age Verification Experience™:
Using my face multiple times didn't work due to the AV shitting itself inside out, but setting my DOB via Family Center somehow did it
Absolute fucking clown fiesta, Jesus Christ
I regret to inform you that the promptfans have a new fucked up way to thotpost:
::: spoiler transcript screenshot from twitter. the search bar has the following search terms in it: "BC" "before claude" a tweet body by @Jason_Dean reads: "I was born in 23 BC (Before" :::
Not beating the 'this is just Christianity with the labels removed' allegations.
We're doing revolutionary calendars, huh?
the only revolutions these people are capable of is spinning their office chairs
.....when it's one on a swivel instead of some fixed-position ergo thing they acquired after reading a thotleader blogpost
Fixed-position office chairs? What goddamn vibe-brained rat-pilled techbro started convincing people to forgo the single best redeeming factor of office chairs?
there’s a couple chairs I’ve seen where they’re designed for a different style of sitting, stuff coming from medical and similar worlds. I’m not familiar enough with them to have picked a specific example, but I’ve seen a couple of baytypes pick these up because someone else had one
An article I would write if I were confident I wouldn't dox myself and lose my ability to eat: "AI as a postmodern Malthusian trap. Tech has forgotten the laws of entropy."
this article that tries to argue that we have managed to achieve AGI already is a real hoot
do you know how hard it is to write something that aged poorly months before it was written? it’s in the public consciousness that LLMs write like absolute shit in ways that are very easy to pick out once you’ve been forced to read a bunch of LLM-extruded text. inb4 some asshole with AI psychosis pulls out “technically ChatGPT’s more human than you are, look at the statistics” regarding the 73% figure I guess. but you know when statistics don’t count!
no you see it’s the leading researchers that are wrong. why are you being so emotional over AGI. we surveyed Some Assholes and they were pretty sure GPT was a human and you were a bot so… so there!
What in tarnation is happening at adafruit?
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/14/heres-our-first-gemini-deep-think-llm-assisted-hardware-design/
@o7___o7 @techtakes It was Arduino who emitted the llm generated circuit but I was tired and conflated two companies with similar names (whose products I don't use) before going to bed. Now they're trying to throw a flame war. Pay no attention.
You can always blame an LLM for confusing the 2 companies ;)
You handled that whole unhinged situation like a champ.
Seeing once respectable folks get trapped in this bullshit feels like watching my college pal smoke his first clove cigarette.
It seems like, for certain kind of geek, code LLMs sit somewhere between "The One Ring but rubbish" and "mechanical meth." The users certainly feel powerful and productive, and god help anyone who hints otherwise.
they’ve jumped the shark a while back. ptorrone is relatively widely documented to go around harassing people (often using his partner as a shield excuse for doing so, just like this time), and a couple months back they sold to qualcomm
ah yes, that absolutely must be a pseudonym, and absolutely couldn’t be a real person
such a fucking weird bit
anyway yeah fuck adafruit. don’t buy their shit, there are other options (and often cheaper)
e: I derped on the who-sold, conflated the two for dipshittery. see subthread
hey mr. adafruit watch this, I can weaponise oppression olympics too, I'm a trans woman from the third world: fuck off with profiteering from your selling out to the planet-destroying plagiarism machine that's proudly empowering ICE and the IDF. it's not your country that will pay the price for your meaningless carbon output to generate nonsense until it looks right. and you brag about it. pega teu fascism-assisted hardware design e enfia no cu. happy never to be an adafruit customer again. assholes.
@froztbyte @o7___o7 fwiw a friend just reminded me that it's arduino that sold to qualcomm, not adafruit. adafruit quite vocally criticized that move.
oh, that, yeah. okay my bad, I must've conflated the two for dipshittery
stand by the rest of my points tho
oh, they're posting through it, doing their combative worst, and i wish them all they deserve. (and they really chose wrong medium for it; there's only one or two slop peddlers in their threads.)
Limor Fried and I had a class together at MIT in 2001. This has no bearing on the present circumstances and offers me no real insight (anything I could say about our extremely limited interactions would amount to confirmation bias). It's just the odd little factoid that comes to mind whenever adafruit Does Something Online.
Do we have any idea why some of the Zizians ended up in Vermont? The only thing in their network that comes to mind is the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE, a Buddhist-flavoured CFAR offshoot with the usual Medium post accusing leaders of sexual and psychological abuse)
Vermont and New Hampshire have clusters of generic Libertarians.
ai;dr https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/aidr-meaning
WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives for 2026 sold out (because the AI datacentres have stolen them all)
Related thread on Bluesky:
I mean, sure, but I think the underlying cause here is the end of Moore's law and exponential growth of potential userbases as the world becomes fully connected. The Enshittocene can be viewed as a consequence of capital's attempts to continue exponential growth while the fundamentals are no longer capable of sustaining it.
Indeed, fifteen years ago, Thailand had a horrific tsunami-induced flood displacing millions of people, and:
As you say, we are no longer earning Moore's Dividend and there is no longer opportunity in laying dark fiber for somebody else to rent or offering Facebook-only phones to reach the next billion users.
Starting the week with this fairly extensive compendium of intractable issues with LLMs: GenAI has an Alignment Problem… But it’s not the machine’s hostility we need to worry about.
The phrase "ambient AI listening in our hospital" makes me hear the "Dies Irae" in my head.
I'm personally hearing "Morceaux" myself.
New and nicely made sneer caught my attention: Rely On AI And Get Left Behind
Jason is great and well worth a follow.
Well bcachefs is kill. Enjoy AI support and all userspace code generated by a slot machine. Kent also does that weird anthropomorphising of his LLM by giving it a blog.
Quoting from this post:
Ah. He has been "one-shotted", as the kids say.
Stories of their relationship on the "AI's" "blog":
I can't bring myself to sneer at AI psychosis, it's just sad
ah well, that explains things.
::: spoiler spoiler
You know, it would be interesting if the "AI blog" keeps illustrating his descent into madness and hallucinates that he like leaves his partner for "her" etc. because that's how these stories go even in the hopeful case that he recovers before doing any more serious damage.
Is doing a lot of work
context: I wanted to know if the open source projects currently being spammed with PRs would be safe from people running slop models on their computer if they weren't able to use claude or whatever. Answer: yes, these things are still terrible
but while I was searching I found this comment and the fact that people hated it is so funny to me. It's literally the person who posted the thread. less thinking and words, more hype links please.
::: spoiler conversation https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1qvjonm/first_qwen3codernext_reap_is_out/o3jn5db/
*emphasis added by me
wat
I can see what they're going for but that seems .... wildly guess-y?
Also code helper tools don't even work like that, there's an absurd amount of MCP and RAG based hand holding for the chatbot to even get a grip on what it's supposed to be doing at any given time.
Prompting an LLM with your entire code base isn't really a thing, even though the hype makes it feel like it would be.
Somebody on bsky talking about various Ben Goertzel Epstein file emails.
Goertzel discusses with Epstein future scenario for "an AGI economy":
The Rationalists!
OT: Declan Chidlow ran across product activation codes for some old Adobe products.
The only useful one's for Flash MX 2004 IMO, but its still cool to have them.
CS 2005 is absolutely worth it, it's a version of Photoshop that does everything you actually need including CMYK with Pantone.
Good to know, David.
Good news, everyone’s favorite emacs is using AI now: https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php
can somebody tell me whether neovim is selling out to LLMs or led by transphobes or getting money from Anduril or something, so I decide whether to switch before getting disappointed again
somebody did show me neovim's AI-assisted PR tag. nice, I can get disappointed all in one go instead of once per day
disapointamaxxing
I poked around to see how far gone my main text editor is. They're not about to join the Butlerian Jihad, but I think I can live with it.
Contributor actually was bullied into closing his PR, but maintainers reopened and merged it, as the change was fine apparently. Lol
@antifuchs @techtakes Oh goodie they enshittified vim IS NOTHING SACRED?!? HAVE WE LIVED AND FOUGHT IN VAIN?!?!?
It looks more like they used an LLM (Copilot) to construct programs using the new features in the language.
So more "hop on the bandwagon using LLMs to advertise" rather than "we used LLMs to develop"
OTOH "these new features are so advanced you need AI to use them" is a bit of a weird sell
it has to be said, a runtime CVE in vim would be pretty embarrassing
@antifuchs s/is using AI/is being used for AI/g
There’s a big difference!
It’s vimscript demos made with an LLM, they talk about it in a box.
@antifuchs @BlueMonday1984 I didn't read it that way?
Only some guy demonstrated the ease of use of some vim script constructs using LLM? The rest seems just algorithms and pattern matching to me.
Yeah I'm your average emacs hater.
(Yeah there seem to be LLM plugins, some of them maybe can brew coffee?)
Nick Land goes to Silicon Valley.
I grow increasingly frustrated every time one of these ponderous essays fails to mention the gutter racist and eugenicist beliefs of these people. This dilution of what 'far right' means only serves their interests, and it's malpractice to not mention that the racism is foundational to their origin and organization as a movement.
I expect better of the New Yorker; it's disappointing to see their writers following the path of the New York Times.
The Sam Kriss article in Harpers above focuses on "these people don't know how to be happy" and never gets around to saying "Scott Alexander is gentle in person but wants to get rid of or sterilize poor brown people and helped people like Curtis Yarvin rise to power."
Note that SlateScott's group home is named after a Lord of the Rings location
in today's news about magical prompts that super totes give you superpowers:
I am jack's surprised face
...and given I have other yaks, I shall not step on my "software and tools don't have to suck" soapbox right now
This reminds me of when Steve Jobs would introduce every new Mac release by talking about how fast it could render in Photoshop. I wonder how he would do in our brave new era of completely ass-pulling your own bespoke benchmark frameworks.
slop "fact checking" is coming to LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hhbibJGt2aQqKJLb7/shortform-1?commentId=fE5cg6pmWrChW8Rtu
wonder what model/prompt they will use. Prolly Grok
Time to say 'Sneerclub was correct' a lot, so we can frontload the 'factcheckers'.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/pull/9726/commits/d562412076feba45e9fdff8a10d2afc955cc1216 🥀
nasb, video from a climate scientist going over the claims by promptfondler ceos
Im pretty sure most of this has already been posted to this thread (I know the “AI published a hit piece on me” thing was)but more Moltbook/Openclaw/whatever-it’s-called nonsense
We are in the singularity this is so hard to explain to people.
Describes a normal thing, a think also talked about for several decades in science fiction now.
Amazing the singularity term has now been downgraded to "ai stuff that is hard to explain to laymen".
Thet think their incremental innovations are radical.
the full paper is here: https://x.com/alexwg/status/2022292731649777723 immediately two references to Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander
Reads like bad blaseball fanfic
more proof that crypto scammers have metastasized to AI scammers
can’t believe scammers are loosing their jobs to AI
Scott Shambaugh mulls about an AI alignment issue following his run-in with a bot last week
See also https://awful.systems/post/7311930
Here's a post purporting to be from the bot's operator
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/rathbuns-operator.html
choice quote
AI boosterism in a nutshell
Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055424
"Yes, I am hammering myself in the balls. But maybe its worth it?"
@blakestacey @gerikson Roko's Wager
Look at the fresh garbage LinkedIn served to me today: https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/managing-ai-is-the-next-gen-skill-7655601/
(Why am I still on that godforsaken hellsite)
@BlueMonday1984
Rishi Sunak, a man with his finger 100% on the pulse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sunak-asks-royal-mint-to-create-nft
(2022)
I was surprised that Sunak had any pull in the UK gov currently.
A longread on AI greenwashing begins thusly:
(Via.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/1r6x1ix/fresh_failure_the_air_is_on_fire_from_location/
It's too bad if true, I can't unsee it now. for reference: https://failureband.bandcamp.com/album/location-lost
also this video by 80,000 Hours on timeline increases in 2025 https://youtu.be/YeRS4TbtZWA
OT: I tried switching away from my instance to quokk.au because it becomes harder and harder to justify being on a pro-ai instance, but it seems that your posts stopped federating recently. Which makes that a bit harder to do. Any clue why?
[email protected] update: quokka reached out to me and apparently you had been banned on another instance for report abuse and that ban had synchronised to quokk.au. You should be unbanned now which means the next stubsack should federate again.
E: I do not know how tags work E2: why does that format to a mailto link?
New “AI is not a bubble” video just dropped https://youtu.be/wDBy2bUICQY a lot of skeptical comments pointing out the flaws in this argument while the creator tries to defend themselves with mostly mediocre lines
slowly burning through the latest BTB eps (on epstein), getting to the point in ep3 about the discussions/events around ~2016 and just ...... god
the remarks and then-recent actions, wrt affecting the internet and the social technological comms structure of humanity as a whole, and then rapidity of a bunch of shit starting to turn to shit 2014~2016 (as I've remarked on in previous posts)...
I'd want to see more threads checked into and researched in depth (and I know that some stuff (partly?) also had their own drivers), but fucking hell there's a lot of apparent overlap. dunno if I can take on that investigation (my stats derivation/calculation skills border on a warcrime), but other than that would be interesting to see some analyses