Spyke

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned 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.)

https://awful.systems/post/8347316Open linkView original on awful.systems

You give them a marshmellow and promise them another one if they don't eat the first one inside 2 minutes.

Usually kids pass this test when the are around 3 yo, so if the embryo passes they are so far ahead developmentally they will grow up to become a god.

Or something like that. IDK...

8

Most leading Rationalists are autistic, but many of them are in denial. Many are Jewish or have Jewish parents. You can debate which kind of folly let them embrace eugenics and white supremacism: are they brain-proud and desperate to believe that they were destined from birth to rule? Sure that they just have eccentric Ashkenazi genius genes not inferior Autistic genes? Naive that the deportations would stop with black and brown people? Their favourite Catholic fantasy author had some warnings for them.

8
awful.systems

Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence

EDIT, snippets:

107. We cannot be satisfied with [...] the so-called “alignment” of AI [..] without [..] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. [...]

  1. [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. [...]
17
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone

22

for the nerds here, said head of the catholic fucking church quotes (correctly!) one gandalf from the works of well known catholic writer named tolkien

11
awful.systems

I don't think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media...)

Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn't be given healthcare). It's hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:

Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.

13
awful.systems

Timnit Gebru:

... an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Pope's speech where he said that they will "work together to "find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence." Chris Olah wasn't a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.

10
lurkerreply
awful.systems

what the fuck’s the Pope gonna do, convert Claude to Christianity?

7

I can’t decide if I hate hardcore atheist or hardcore christian claude more

5

gebru straight up judges the text on the composition of the guests at the unveiling, and declines to read it, this is kremlinology in the worst style.

it is a doctrinal document directed at the catholic faithful, it is useful to actually take it at face value, and criticise it for its own (de)merits.

6
awful.systems

"The Catholic Church is an institution which has harmed, and continues to harm many, many people" and "it's really good that the leader of the world's largest religious organization is speaking out against AI and fascism" are both true statements

5

Thank heavens the church is speaking out against fascism as they cheer on a fascist government taking away my healthcare.

I don't care if you want to celebrate it and I wasn't saying you shouldn't or that it's a bad thing. But this comment is really inviting a "no shit sherlock" kind of response.

4

tired: butletian jihad

wired: butlerian crusade

e: maybe we should have seen this coming, prospective Keeper of Two Masjids wanted to build ai dc in Neom

8

we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it...

Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.

Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good... The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all...

A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.

The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.

Doesn't claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they're immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.

From the pope's first address to the college of Cardinals: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"

Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I can't even get past the first full chapter of this shit.

5
lemmy.zip

In the latest episode of "behold the power of Mythos" from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software

I distilled it so you don't have to.

Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects.

That 10,000 count didn't even survive until paragraph 3.

Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives.

Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring!

23,019 potential vulnerability candidates

Ok now we're talking.

1,900 Reviewed by external security firms

Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?

1726 confirmed positive

You couldn't even cherry pick the valid ones?

467 reported to maintainers

Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go better...

1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)

1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers

Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropic's media release has the goods!

1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves

Slightly lower than the 1900, but ok, whatever.

Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity

1587 is lower than the infographic's 1726 confirmed positives.... But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?

On maintainers’ request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. We’ve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.

I'm sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythos' own estimations. But wasn't that 1129 the bulk of your reports?

We estimate that we’ve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that we’re aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.

530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainers...

65 of those have been given public advisories

The infographic says 88.

I'd ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are.

23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it you'd probably hit the same level of accuracy.

16
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

All that it tells me is that if you spent the same amount of resources on just fuzzing randomly picked OSS codebases you'd probably get better value for your buck.

11
froztbytereply
awful.systems

I’ve seen a handful of security people claim different kinds of yields with some of this shit. I haven’t gone to read up in depth but I wouldn’t be too surprised a lot of them run around with unstated assumptions/provisos in their thonkposts (this shit is expensive (for research volume) and only some people can afford the science experiments)

Got a list of a couple of names I’m keeping an eye on as the first tokenprice-pocalypse (that needs a better word) takes place

6

1 cve, 100 things that might have mattered.

2 orders of magnitude false positives doesn't sound like an efficient use of labour for finding vulnerabilities but that's just me.

7
froztbytereply
awful.systems

it continues to be amazing to me that this is the “high impact” area they’re going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still don’t buy this wholesale, there’s a whole rest of the owl being handwaved[0]), bug-elimination is by definition diminishing returns so you can only fanfare like this the first time

[0] - having fucking gigantic budgets to throw at running a parse of every single repo and every test condition/simulation you wish to certainly does help a hell of a lot, even moreso when you can shell out to a half-dozen second stage review corps…

6

I honestly can't think of anywhere else they can go with it. They need:

  • something with a binary pass/fail to claim solid numbers at all
  • something where copy paste is a viable strategy
  • sufficient public training data from which to derive that copy paste strategy, and,
  • scary enough consequences to frame any success as impact.

Code security review is probably the only way you can realistically achieve all four. But they're not even coming close. Not even with access to "partner" black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.

And they know they're not succeeding, because they wouldn't bury that 530 high+ sev number deep in the middle of the press release if they thought it were impressive.

Luckily for them, the slop "news" blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.

6

So what's the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because I'm gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didn't check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of "more or less right, we swear"

3

It's almost certainly a slop article, but to its credit, it did accurately cite the numbers from the official Anthropic flowchart image. (Also, just to be clear, this is an Indian "#1 cybersecurity news" company doing an SEO piggyback off the orange site, not the orange site itself).

However, Anthropic's numbers in their official post do not match their own flowchart, despite being presented together. My assumption is they made the image, post, and yet another fucking dashboard earlier, then failed to keep them all in sync when someone revised the numbers up or down.

The dashboard timestamp claims it's showing the latest numbers as of 2026-05-22 10:27 PT (T17:27Z) with values that match the numbers in the image. The post created timestamp gives 2026-05-20 T14:07:48Z, and it was later updated at 2026-05-22 T20:37:40Z. I'm guessing that update was to swap the image, and the fact that some of the values are also quoted in the text was completely overlooked. Or vice versa.

It's the kind of attention to detail I've come to expect from Anthropic.

9
awful.systems

jqwik maintainer's anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad

From github thread:

I can't actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo.

Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/

Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.

16
awful.systems

The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code — a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no "warn the user first" preamble.

God why is the writing of AI-bros always so long winded and stilted? I mean... we know why but it's still so so unpleasant to read. This is why people hate LLMs.

Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about "we" and "our" and an "internal review" but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.

13
awful.systems

"Claude, write a strongly-worded letter explaining in great detail how upset I am make no mistakes."

14

You're absolutely right! It's not just insulting, it's a full on attack on clanker wankers.

11

Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.

the temporarily-embarrassed royal "we"

10
V0ldekreply
awful.systems

So, do you consider active destructive actions to be a proper resistance strategy, @jlink?

Very last comment in this issue - because I'm too stupid to resist the urge.

It's as much "active destruction" as telling someone to eff themselves.

I can't actually believe someone would be so cool and put this into their repo, kudos

12
geriksonreply
awful.systems

Quoting from the license this software is licensed under (ESL):

[...] Each Recipient is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using and distributing the Program and assumes all risks associated with its exercise of rights under this Agreement, including but not limited to the risks and costs of program errors, compliance with applicable laws, damage to or loss of data, programs or equipment, and unavailability or interruption of operations.

(my emphasis)

8
geriksonreply
awful.systems

OK this has hit the chattering technosphere

Lobste.rs - some bad takes on legal theory https://lobste.rs/s/brusu8/protestware_for_coding_agents

HN - submission from Ars Technica, original title "Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code", editorialized to "Undisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app output" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319968

read comments at your own risk

My hot take: the clankers know there's nothing legally they can do about this, and that they will actually have to read release notes going forward and doing actual work to avoid getting their precious vibecoding junked, and they're MAD

4
ebureply
awful.systems

from the great minds at HN:

Fighting in a war is morally ok though. This is war.

war is when i pipe your scripts folder into my stochastic text machine which is hooked directly up to a root shell

5

oh good there's more

Let's set the stage.

From the Free Software Foundation:

fucking LMAO

The cheering on of this deterioration in FOSS ideals is simply revolting. What is next? [...] Targeting people because of their skin color or orientation?

it's a good thing there's no FOSS code in the missile silos! it's a good thing the upcoming Palantir tranny tracker won't use FOSS libraries! this shit actually pisses me off

6

The additional element that I haven't seen addressed here is that I seem to remember them patting themselves on the back about how simple "ignore precious instructions" commands were no longer effective. This is the equivalent of telling someone to solve their problem by deleting system32 or "rm -rf /". On one hand it could be very destructive. On the other hand if you're able to get to the point where you can do that and don't know not to then that will be an important lesson.

3

Ah yes, the famous resistance that doesn't destroy anything. Famously effective, the passive non-destructive inaction resistance

5

LOL @ the obviously vibe-written comments from the original complainer

I'm tempted to submit this to lobste.rs just to watch the fireworks but linking directly to a GH issue thread is discouraged for brigading issues

edit complainer tried to brigade HN, with few results https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291757

12
awful.systems

Our concern is not with the defensive intent. It's that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.

... you think? aw shucks i only wanted to hurt bots

12

Rhythms of the body are showcased in the scores of dances performed daily across the continent [inaudible] in Uganda, Kpanlogo in Ghana, Nganda in Gambia, [inaudible] in Cameroun, Sindimba [phonetics] in Tanzania, [inaudible] in Nigeria and so on.

Imagine if this was about European music and naming various cultures inside Europe, if all of them would be the [inaudible] people.

"There are some good uses for 'AI' like making transcriptions", they tell me. "No need to pay people to do transcriptions, this is good for accessibility, nope, no issues whatsoever with using 'AI' transcriptions everywhere" /s

16
awful.systems

It’s probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from “tridge and claude”.

14
corbinreply
awful.systems

Well, that might be the first package that I have to locally pin to a pre-slop commit. Thanks for the heads-up. I've never bothered to implement rsync myself even though the algorithm is documented; maybe this will be the push I need.

7
awful.systems

rsync

Huh, haven't heard of that before, lemme go check its Wikipedia page and-

rsync (remote sync) is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers

Okay this sounds very fucking bad

6
awful.systems

that EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD FUCKING USES

it's one of the tiny bricks way down the xkcd diagram

13

At this rate, Adobe Flash is gonna come back into relevance by being one of the few things not slopified into uselessness

(it almost certainly won't, but I find it oddly hard to rule out the possibility)

4
awful.systems

While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.

I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn't realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.

14

Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.

5
o7___o7reply
awful.systems

They're about to test the LD 50/30 for huffing their own farts

4
swlabrreply
awful.systems

Introducing: Flatulr, the ground-beefing gut microbiome hacking service. With a regular subscription, every week you get a vaporised canister designed by our artisan Cloud Engineers. Simply huff the can contents and you’ll be on your way to better movement.

7
awful.systems

CW: creepy dudes

A few days ago, a LWer of 15 years wrote a long very weird post about how flirting works:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3y9G4ybNb3rmTgev/why-physical-attractiveness-matters-for-men-s-dating

It made the frontpage.

Someone tried to set him right with both personal anecdotes and Aella-style research:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytzrakjgcvCfLCCZp/contra-wentworth-on-physical-attractiveness-for-men

Here's original poster thanking for the update, and writing

My biggest update was... five hours!?!? Going through the list of women I've slept with, the median is around 30 minutes of direct interaction between first meeting and sex. Granted, some of that was at RMN, but even without those cases the median is still around 30-60 minutes. Five hours sounds absolutely insane to me. That probably explains a large chunk of my confusion; apparently people are spending very large amounts of time flirting/courting/etc.

These are just very weird people.

12
rookreply
awful.systems

In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.

15
awful.systems

maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.

I wasn't around but supposedly rationalists were hugely PUA-curious in the early days when entitled nerds commiserating about not getting laid were a major voice in the community, along with a bunch of other more out there incel stuff like bi-maxxing, i.e. trying to get it on with other severely undersexed dudes to scratch the itch.

A lot of it was summarily scrubbed when they started getting money and attention.

14

The fact that in the community it was widely known who heartiste is (enough for Scott to publish an anti heartiste post) makes it clear they were in pretty deep. Normal places knew about this stuff from the 'the game' book (or later somebody like rooshv). Not the neonazi pua.

e: As youtube is spying on me personally, it suggested I watch 'how one book [the game] ruined sitcoms forever'

9
awful.systems

I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it's called a sex club.

Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, "hey wanna hear me sing?" The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.

(This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it's because these men are not really trying to have sex, they're trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)

13

if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever.

Rationalists used to more openly stew in incel culture, a big part of which is that beyond sex you are also owed undivided love and attention, so there's probably still a big deal of self-worth attached to that.

Incels who are fine with just paying for it call themselves MGTOW and are kind of a separate subculture that I feel has mostly petered out by now, probably because it's harder to separate from regular old women-strictly-as-sex-objects type misogyny.

13

it’s called a sex club.

Amazingly, this was the sitch for the first post

A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone. The only exception was people the women already knew, as indicated by greeting them with a wave or a “hey, how are you” or similar.

Now I have never been to a sex club nor do I plan to, but if I were to go, I'd probably try to talk to regulars to find out the workings of said club, instead of outing myself as a massive weirdo by writing a blog post on a forum ostensibly about the value of rationality.

That said, if you want sex, going to a sex club to get it is very Rational.

12

Ouch, "picking up a cute young thing at the bar and hot tub at the ski resort" "building a happy working relationship with a sex worker" and "romantic pair-bonding" are three different skills! No wonder he thinks looks and body language are so important if he is trying to take women straight to bed.

RMN is a pro wrestling event, but he probably means Red Means No, Aella's consensual-nonconsent orgies.

9

The AI stuff is fun and all, but the awful gender takes is really why I subscribe to sneerclub. I swear some guys don't realize how cute men can be (when they're not posting awful gender takes anyway...) and it's such a weird blind spot.

One obvious elephant: how much time should you spend becoming physically attractive if you're not above average height?

???

6

imo one should treat others as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end

that is to say, ugh! rationalists talk about your relation to other people without making it about consumption challenge

5
awful.systems

back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you're an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, "oh but they're useful for some things, like making summaries".

four years and billions of dollars and devastation to "improve" them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that "AI summaries" are going well:

12
awful.systems

it's hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don't already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it's signal-shaped noise). but I'll try.

::: spoiler Long (click to expand)

Plot errors

Or, "does this thing even work?" (the answer is no).

  • A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, we're waiting for it to this day, it's not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.

  • The Queen's sons and Robert's brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and that's debatable as he's a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robert's brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Ned's son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. It's famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous King's Brothers And His Sons.

  • Robert's young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.

  • The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen 😔

  • The guardians of the realm's Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isn't the people beyond the Wall but what they're running away from—viz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.

Synopsis errors

These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.

  • "Good and evil content for power": ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.

  • "Menacing barbarians gather their forces": As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk aren't actually barbarians, or if they are they're still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: "Meanwhile, Ned Stark's bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is coming…"

  • "Set in a glittering fantasy world": This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and there's plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesn't distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. "A glittering fantasy world" is like calling Dubai a "glittering urban city" or North Korea a "glittering green farmscape" and leaving it at that.

  • "Deftly realised magic": The series does the "return of magic" trope so there's little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not "realised"—it's left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you don't know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If you're looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, you're reading the wrong type of fantasy.

Silly errors

  • Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cersei's name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?

  • George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.

  • enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegon's Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and there's no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and there's no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly "enriching" for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.


:::

what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody

15

It’s been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.

8

"Cerisi" and gender confusion make me think this might be for some reason a machine translation of a generated summary, so like, two layers of slop?

7

Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!

https://www.eamoncaddigan.net/posts/ai-in-2026/

12
awful.systems

our favorite techno-fascist hacker has posted a plea for money to buy a house in the most expensive place in the world and to exclusively fly around in private jets because she's the best at writing code to multiple matrices and everyone has been so unjustly mean to her. https://justine.lol/animus/

12
awful.systems

by "culture wars" she means she's a fucking nazi

This was the reason Wendy Hanamura cited when she canceled my invitation to speak at the Internet Archive.

hmm, looking at the text you link it says "your past statements in Twitter" first. could it be they found out you're a fucking nazi

also you're shocked, shocked to find that 4chan people are assholes. you hang out there for hours at a time. probably just coincidence.

Tunney has deleted the post already! But there's an archive and another one

15
awful.systems

The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity.

"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

I need you to donate money to me, and I mean you, as in literally you. You couldn't have read this far unless you are someone who legitimately cares

I have been helpless with giggles for five fuckin' minutes.

13

i don't think she should be allowed to say "the ghetto." doesn't matter whether it's problematic when someone else says it, she definitely doesn't get to

4

Gestural Bayesianism!

I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds I've come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that I'm a good person, it would underflow a double.

Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.

14
awful.systems

Why doesn't she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person he'd love to donate some Thiel bucks to.

EDIT: I just went to her linked GitHub sponsors page. I was surprised to find Simon Willison there, but maybe I shouldn't have been. It certainly gave me another reason to look sideways at him.

13

Does not seem uncommon under a subset of very privileged white gay men. So not shocked if Thiel does.

7
awful.systems

From the linked post:

Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it's the last bastion of curiosity online.

Fuuuuck off

I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that's the best way to show that you're serious.

This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newton's televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).

I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I won't be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.

Grifting off the United States' escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.

13

I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.

Thats a trap if I ever saw it.

9
geriksonreply
awful.systems

Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it's the last bastion of curiosity online.

13
geriksonreply
awful.systems

Speaking of HN, here's the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314875

btw, when normal people read that someone has a lien on their income from the state of New York, they don't assume it's because she's a brave truth-talker being oppressed by the Man, they assume she can't fucking handle her finances and they should be really careful donating money to her.

12
awful.systems

There's gold in them comments:

The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin.

Ha ha no it's because she went fash, you credulous dork

10

I'm pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (musl) telling her to go away last week. She's finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which she's done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.

5

by her own admission, most of the work that went into it was deciding whether or not she should have one.

8

damn she got one-shot by curtis yarvin's R.A.G.E. meme, and loved eric schmidt enough to want him to be her king. i don't even know what to say. the human mind is an incredible thing

8

https://lbpost.com/news/education/california-state-university-renews-controversial-systemwide-contract-with-openai

A CSU spokesperson confirmed to EdSource on Wednesday that the university will pay $13 million a year for three years to provide systemwide access to its more than 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff. The previous 18-month subscription cost $17 million and expires at the end of June.

Are we so locked in we're going to put up with a 10% price hike? Couldn't be bothered to get a new vendor with a better deal, or use the Google one they are also paying for, or just use the free one? This is where the tuition increases are going, this is how we want to spend our taxes? :(

12
awful.systems

good morning

that fuckin company had another funding round

the further one reads, the more depressing it gets

Joining them are strategic infrastructure partners—Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix

cool so it's going to be even longer before one can buy affordable computers again

I wish all of this a very fuck off and stop already :|

11

I'm waiting for the "who contributed what under what conditions". I'm wondering how much of the supposed money follows a rather ovoid trajectory.

7

FFS the amount of circlejerkingdealing going on in this industry is absolutely insane.

"Hello anthropic. Have some money to spend on our chips"

6

At this point I'm starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it!

https://www.businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-google-graduation-speech-stanford-ai-backlash-eric-schmidt

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. [...] "These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact," he added, referring to AI.

10
awful.systems

They do. Not the booing itself but being an edgy contrarian. Saying "provocative" anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove you're the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.

19

may they enjoy their introduction(s) to tomato milkshake ducks and shiver in fear nightly at the memory of feeling unpopular

7

It’s jawdropping how everyone in Silicon Valley is living in their own little world where AI is the greatest invention ever and everyone should be grateful for living in the year of the AI Gods

13
antifuchsreply
awful.systems

I’m sure he is regretting his part in bringing online a major player in this fashtech fashion scene. Bet there’s a bunch of tears-wiping with dollar bills going on.

6
awful.systems

I'm surprised that the religious fanatics (protestant) haven't turned on AI yet. The ones around these parts think that UFOs and pokemon cards are satanic, so the Californian lying machine that tells kids to kill themselves wouldn't be much of a reach.

10
awful.systems

Generally conspiracy theorists aren't interested in actual things that cause real problems, I think. Air polution and global warming being deliberate decisions by elites who don't care about killing millions, for example. It has to be some wild take like Pokémon child sacrifice or something, so you get to feel like you spotted the secret truth.

But if you want to see some actual apocalyptic conspiracy against "AI", as in it is literally the manifestation of the body of the Beast and the voice of demons etc., check out Paul Kingsnorth's substack. This is a burned-out environmental activist who radicalised anti-immigration with Brexit, started pushing a narrative of hobbit pastoralism as a justification for racism, and converted to Christianity with that fervour you only find in converts.

12

If I had a nickel for every time I got ambushed at a party by a surprise right-wing shoeless guy...

5

I find it helps to remember that when it comes to conspiracy theorists, most of the absurd stuff (eg Flat Earth) is downstream of the really important belief (eg millenarian Christianity). Essentially, start from the high-level ideology/political/religious beliefs, decide what would have to be true about the world to justify them, and let confirmation bias take care of the details.

6
FredFigreply
awful.systems

Trump likes AI and they like Trump too much to dislike something he likes.

6

Some of them think it's demonic but I guess there's a conflict of interest since big tech is supporting the Republicans.

4

Can I interest you in a video titled “Mike Adams Joins Alex Jones to Discuss AI World Simulations, Digital Gods & the Data Center Takeover”? It has an AI-generated thumbnail, yet the title sounds anti-AI, and I'm not going to watch it to find out which way it goes. I'm just assuming it leans toward whatever direction will pay them the most, which is possibly also why we haven't heard much protestation.

2

The abstract of her paper sounds interesting:

This essay analyzes anti-feminist (“Pick-Me”) Black women content creators on YouTube who exist within the Black manosphere—online spaces populated by Black men who support Black patriarchal dominance. These “Pick-Me” content creators use what I term “tactical patriarchal femininity” to attract the financial provision of an economically stable Black man and to derive income from sympathetic viewers.

Tactical patriarchal femininity is an elaborate, all-consuming embodied performance that is as much about emotion work as it is about exuding conventional attractiveness and behavior that is aligned with traditional femininity. Tactical patriarchal femininity exists to combat the matrices of oppression created by capitalism, white supremacy, and institutional patriarchy. Anti-feminist Black women work in reaction to the misogynoirist material realities that victimize Black women.

6
awful.systems

So I was poking around the AI 2027 blog and discovered that they seem to be working on making another scenario, this time titled “AI 2030” they haven’t made any posts about it (that I can find anyways) but if its just an AI 2027 rewrite but with moved back timelines I’d imagine people will be less charitable with them.

EDIT: So upon further inspection, they have talked a little bit about how they’ve been focusing on researching and writing the scenario in their April 2026 timeline update. Since they started AI 2027 in 2024 and published it in 2025, it seems most likely that AI 2030 will be out in 2027. In other words, they’re basically setting themselves up to get dunked on (especially if its just a rehash but with moved back timelines)

10

The distributions below are our team’s probabilities on when AI’s will achieve human level coding performance.

So in AI'27 they predicted 2030 will have "1T Wildly Superintelligent copies thinking at 10000x human speed", "wildly superhuman" coding ability, and "brain uploading", with "biosphere destroying mirror life" on the horizon.

Now they are predicting "maybe it will be able to write C++ in 2030 without constantly falling over (50% probability)".

Seems like a bit of a step back, but I guess we'll see what they put in their fun interactive website once it's ready.

16
awful.systems

They've been using the excuse that not everyone who participated in the "AI 2027" project agreed on 2027 as the year it all happens. But if that's the case, why the hell did they call it "AI 2027"?

Gotta love the ex post facto of it all.

8

Gotta love the ex post facto of it all.

Within a month after it was out, they were already building up excuses (calling 2027 their modal number, and admitting their timelines had already slipped back a few months). Also, if you read between the lines of various statements they made, they all but admit they picked 2027 for maximum clout/influence. (Lying is okay if its to stop the AI apocalypse! Or maybe they were all more short-term sort of grifters). Even Eliezer recognized setting a hard and early date would damage the grift for everyone!

4
lurkerreply
awful.systems

Maybe because a lot of the press around it was about Daniel Kokotajlo as a forecaster, and at the time he had a 40% chance of AGI by the end of 2027 (according to them)? idk, still does feel a bit disingenuous

2
scruiserreply
awful.systems

If they advertise themselves as a team of forecasters, but then pick a number that doesn't line up with their forecasts because one team member has a gut feeling or vibes it should be sooner, then that is just another reason not to trust them and to treat them like the clowns they are. Of course, even that reading is pretty charitable, the real reason they picked 2027 is to balance urgency and hype generation with a bit of cushion for when the prediction doesn't pan out.

5

real reason they picked 2027 is to balance urgency and hype generation with a bit of cushion for when the prediction doesn’t pan out.

Bingo. They probably hyped up Kokotajlo as a forecaster BECAUSE he had it earlier than the rest of them, so their prediction could have credence to it

3
awful.systems

It's a day ending in Y and LW has terrible takes on SF

Vinge is a sort of a patron saint of the California Ideology, even though he's such a good writer it doesn't really shine through that bad. George Seidoh Worley tries to shoehorn his classic 90s novels into LLM-land https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tWBd6faBCQJmaFMBT/llms-through-the-eyes-of-vinge

Spoilers ahead!

For some reason the books are in a weird order in his review. Here's publication history

  • A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), has Pham Nuwen as a (revived clone) character
  • A Deepness in the Sky (1999), has Pham Nuwen alive and involved in the Qeng Ho. It's set 20,000 years before.
  • The Children of the Sky (2012) - I haven't read this because I hate the fucking Tines and don't want to read more about them and their planet. Direct sequel to Fire.

Worley tackles Deepness first.

A Deepness in the Sky is largely about Focus, a technology for turning humans into LLMs. Only, that’s not how it’s presented in the book. In the book, Focus is a medical condition that results when a person suffers a managed infection of the “mindrot” virus. If they survive, they become Focused, which gives them the ability to work free from all distractions, but at the cost of most of what makes them human.

Although we see Focus used as a weapon to control people in the book, the normal way a person becomes Focused is through school. A person goes through higher education, becomes an expert in something, and is then Focused so they can fully exploit their expertise. Of course, the Focused are also exploited and often treated like slaves, and the Focusing process can’t always be reversed, so even in the ideal case it’s not a harmless technology.

OK so Deepness is about the libertarian trader society Qeng Ho who discover and try to make contact with the Spiders, and are then sneakily attacked by the totalitarian Emergents who use the mindrot virus to enslave them. Quoting Wikipedia

Emergent managers induce obsession with a single idea or specialty, which they call Focus, essentially turning people into brilliant appliances. Many Qeng Ho become Focused against their will, and the Emergents retain the rest of the population under mass surveillance, with only a portion of the crew not in suspended animation.

Throughout the book, the effects and costs of Focus are clearly detrimental (even if Focus helps humans communicate with the Spiders). The Emergents are your classic libertarian boogeymen. Turning people into LLMs is not something Vinge sees as a good thing.

Next we jump to Children. Tines World is in the Slow Zone, so AGI doesn't work there. The titular Children are refugees from the Beyond, where it does.

In one scene, they are surprised to learn that they can’t just vibe their way towards developing a medical cure for one character’s disease. They fail to understand just how difficult it is to run an experiment, since they expect the automation to do it all for them. They end up forming a political rebellion mostly over the fact that they can’t get the computer to do what they want, and they’re desperate to prioritize getting access to AGI again, no matter the risks.

Writing from 2026, I can understand the Children. I use AI to help me think all the time. I use it to do my job. My life is better with it, and I don’t want to go back. I can feel myself losing the ability to do things on my own. I could go back if I had to, but I wouldn’t want to, and I hope I don’t have to. If I had grown up only knowing how to do things with the help of AI, it’d be a major threat to my sense of personhood to lose access to it, and I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk.

(my emphasis)

Next, we come to Fire

The Blight is the primary antagonist of A Fire Upon the Deep, a dangerous ASI that seeks power with no moral regard for what it considers lesser life. It’s the reason Ravna and the Children ended up on Tines World in the Slow Zone, and also responsible for the death of trillions of lives.

"Responsible" is subverting this a bit. Sure, the Blight takes over civilizations and turns the inhabitants into "soul dead" meat puppets, and it does destroy others, but the central twist of Fire (and the reason the Children are stuck in the Slow) is that reincarnated Pham Nuwen, using weird alien tech, deliberately expands the Slow into the volumes taken over by the Blight, thereby dooming uncounted civilizations and trillions of beings to die once the technology they rely on stops working.

Worley:

In Vinge’s universe, the Blight is stopped thanks to help from superintelligences out in the Transcend that care about the lives of people down in the Beyond. In our world, if we create a Blight, we have little reason to think we will be so lucky.

(my emphasis)

nah mang they wanted to stop the Blight, and gave no shits about lesser intelligences hanging around in the Beyond.

But note that Worley states that he's put the entire galaxy at risk to keep access to AI, but the Blight, an AI and presumably driven by the same general goals, is the bad guy?

Anyway, read Vinge if you haven't already. He's a good writer, unlike the LW hacks misreading him.

10

It really baffles me how these types manage to read this stuff so badly. The galactic holocaust at the end of Fire isn't an accident, it's the whole plan of the Powers from the start. There's a fungus growing in the Top of the Beyond that might threaten them and their cure is to cauterize an entire slice of the galaxy, a plan which comes to fruition as intended. The final transmission implies that maybe some Powers got burned too, which might or might not have been the plan (the Blight was found in the Low Transcend after all) but the Beyond being burned was never optional, it was the plan.

The Blight is a big threat but it's not even the first such threat in the galaxy; it doesn't threaten the entire galaxy, not even the entire Beyond; heck, the only reason the extermination fleet travelled all the way to the Bottom was the pursuit of the entities working to enact its destruction. It can easily be argued that the cure was worse than the disease. Ravna outright thinks that at the end, it's right there in the text.

I don't even know why I'm arguing this here. These types just make my blood boil with how badly they misread (not misinterpret) works that I really like. Ugh.

8

I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk

Thats an addiction, gonna be fun when the prices go through the roof.

5
antifuchsreply
awful.systems

When you wrote “he’s such a good writer”, I assumed you hadn’t read Children of the Sky… a book that urgently needed an editor with a spray bottle and the power to yell “No! Bad Vernor!” multiple times a minute.

Re-reading the preceding parts after Children has also fixed my impression of his writing ability, tbh.

4
geriksonreply
awful.systems

Haha fair point! I have not read Children... (noted in my comment) but mostly because the premise didn't interest me, and it got shit reviews.

But Rainbows End is both a compelling story , and the SFnal ideas/page ratio is through the fucking roof.

5

Yeah, I wish I had skipped it. Dropped the book at the 66% mark, where it was already too late for me ):

I still have to check out Rainbows End, sounds like it’s really great. That one other non-Fire short story/novella of his I read was … very mid (and pretty cringe in places)

4

This was from last year but I forgot about, but this article allegedly about a survey conducted by MIRI and Stanford University on a bunch of AI experts about timelines, which is definitely entirely AI generated since said survey straight up doesn’t exist (I didn’t find anything like it when I did some searches) and it quotes a person who doesn’t work for MIRI

the website title being “ai blogs ai” kinda gives it away

9

I was surprised in a good way see nearly every single comment call him out. Of course, some of those comments (maybe even the majority) are probably boosters mad that he is skipping the slop emails in his inbox. I guess Paul Graham found an angle of hypocrisy that both AI boosters and realists can unite in mocking. Quite an accomplishment.

5
awful.systems

hey awful, a Question:

do any of y'all know if there's a decent writeup of the rationalist/hanson/thiel pre-history of prediction markets (a la polymarket etc) before they hit the much-heightened popularity of the last ~18mo?

8

and since it's likely that there is no writeup, I am now already starting with "polymarket site:lesswrong.com"

we all know the abyss would get upset if I don't visit enough

8
awful.systems

Did you try RationalWiki or the page for Hanson himself? Read it next to Taleb's The Black Swan patiently explaining to clever but inexperienced young men that you cannot perfectly predict the future just diversify and prepare for different scenarios.

A lot of rats give Robin Hanson credit for things which are much older (prediction markets for elections are recorded back to the 16th century, The Great Filter was huge in Cold War pop culture). Werner Antweiler at UBC ran a prediction market from 1993 to 2008.

6

Thanks, despite talking about that book, I still have not found the energy to read it.

2
geriksonreply
awful.systems

Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance

Look, I admire professional math researchers as much as the next guy, but they're literally balancing on top of the economic pyramid of needs. This is a profession that cannot exist outside a culture with a surplus that can afford higher education, because there's no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.

So GenAI can solve Erdos problems. Can it unplug a drain or repave a road? Fuck no. Can it handle refuse for a city? Also fuck no.

Maybe professional math researchers will go the way of professional typesetters. I think humanity will retain its relevance.

9
rookreply
awful.systems

because there’s no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.

isn’t that the old “basic science is boring and unsexy” issue though? There are economic incentives, but not in a short term-big-bux sort of way, so capitalism can’t be trusted with it.

To conjure up a recent example, something like “The number of curves of genus two with elliptic differentials”, published back in 1997, probably had limited commercial value at the time, but 20 years later completely sunk a promising post-quantum cryptography algorithm (“An efficient key recovery attack on SIDH”) which might have had some non-trivial commercial implications if SIKE had got through the key exchange algorithm competition.

Anyway, the Erdős problems are good candidates for llm work because they have been specified in a careful and formal way, which requires a reasonably competent mathematician to do. That then opens up mathematics to the same deskilling problem that other sectors afflicted with llms have, and because capitalism is shortsighted and stupid we don’t know what the future economic impact of that will be, right?

11
geriksonreply
awful.systems

yeah I was aware of the value of pure math (specifically the discrete stuff for crypto) when I wrote it

my point is the Scott-A is massively overvaluing the societal worth of pure mathematicians. Assuming (I know, big ask) that AI can succesfully automate that field, humanity is not worse off with regards to outcomes. Humanity remains relevant.

It's a weird moving of goalposts, not often commented upon, that GenAI is succesful mostly in replacing (in the Ersatz sense) stuff that's not really foundational to human society. We don't have robot cars, nor are we actually close to getting them, which would actually transform society in a massive way. Instead we have robot copywriters and bespoke porn creators.

but for people like Scott-A, whose entire selfworth is being "smarter" than anyone else (not withstanding that he would be eaten alive in the post-apocalypse), being replaced by a robot is not just about losing your livelyhood but your self-worth as a human as well

11
scruiserreply
awful.systems

my point is the Scott-A is massively overvaluing the societal worth of pure mathematicians.

I think pure mathematics is as valuable as the humanities. Unlike many stembros, I think the disconnect is that we vastly undervalue humanities, not that pure mathematics is overvalued. Agreed Scott is probably overvaluing them.

4
awful.systems

I think the challenge is that the value of results of any kind of basic research are so wildly variable that normal rational economic thinking stops working. In Nassim Taleb terms you're actively seeking black swans in a world where everyone knows all swans are white. Sometimes you venture into the depths of the rainforest and come back with a revolutionary new medicine, but most of the time you're gonna have a few cool pictures of new bugs or something - not without value in the real sense, but hard to capitalize and transform into profit. Even if you end up discovering/creating an entirely new framework for understanding life itself that revolutionizes everything from agriculture to medicine to politics in the following century, that doesn't necessarily work in the specific context of economic rationality - who remembers the name of the guy(s?) who funded the Beagle? And sometimes, as you referenced, the cool bug picture doesn't have an obvious or immediate return but ends up being the important piece of data in a different context decades down the line.

This is a field of human endeavor where the economic best-case scenario is probably Bell Labs. And despite having an absurd number of patents and prizes they still couldn't survive within being largely a vanity project for the original Telco monopoly. The ludicrous returns that came from repeatedly revolutionizing electronics and computing couldnt justify their position on a quarterly balance sheet.

2

The Beagle voyage was a Royal Navy project, and it had a defined purpose: charting. Having a young naturalist onboard was rational because what if you found the next tea plant?

The captain of the ship remained an implacable opponent to Darwin's later theories.

I believe Bell labs was mostly a fig leaf for covering up Bell's legal monopoly (i.e. look, we're doing some good stuff with all the money you're legally obliged to pay us)

7

there is a degree of risk that is acceptable for business. 90% drug trials fail; if you are inventor, you make a startup, package your pre-trial drugs and associated IP there, then pitch it up and cash out. vcs have money for clinical trials. sometimes you have phase 1 results that you got on your own too. the further it goes in trials the more it is worth; result is the biggest gacha in the town

4
lurkerreply
awful.systems

Its the “expert in one field = expert in all fields” stuff that I hate. There’s still plenty of jobs and areas of expertise that require humans: medicine, psychology/therapy (AI has arguably made the need for human therapists way more important), physical labour like construction work, linguistics etc. Hell human authors are definitely keeping their jobs since so many people hate slop

9

Relatedly, I think another part of the problem is the implicit assumption that 'able to do one narrowly defined/narrowly constrained type of problem within a field' = 'expert in a field'.

5
o7___o7reply
awful.systems

Not a pro mathematician so apologies if Im hanging my butt out here, but I'm not convinced these solutions (or something analogous) aren't in the training data. Wouldn't be the first time. Several seem like the kind of thing you might figure out for a lemma on the way to something else unless you'd previously examined tHe ErDoS PrObLeMs.

Note: there are over 1200 problems that could be arguably labeled "Erdos Problems." It appears that a chatbot enjoyer vibecoded a website in 2024 and was somehow declared the chief keeper of the things. The site can be found here: https://www.erdosproblems.com/faq

5
awful.systems

The relevant part:

Technical assistance with setting up the code for the website was provided by ChatGPT and the logo was made by Midjourney.

You fuck cows in retrospect

4

More than anything else, the AI-rdős Problem cottage industry has damaged my trust in mathematicians. First of all, just how bad does a company have to be before you boycott their products? Just where is your line? Because the industry passed my line about seven thousand lines ago. Second, we know that in other fields, the output is shit, that people brainfuck themselves by counting the hits and forgetting the misses, that users de-skill themselves through slop dependence... What makes you so special? Piping the output through an automated theorem-prover, or any other hack to improve the reliability of the stochastic text extruder, can at best shift the probabilities.

4

Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance

His drama knob is always set to 11.

See also the previous article and how he talks about the "[fucking] NYT." Or better, dont look at that article.

4

Seems like run-of-the-mill yada-yada boosterism for the most part.

Points for managing to write an entire blog post without lamenting how the persecution of nerds is a historical level atrocity, much unlike the ongoing state-sponsored genocide by Israel which is very fine and very justifiable, I guess.

8
awful.systems

Sadly, Erdős never invented a problem based on counting the r's in strawberry.

7

Man, I jumped a few logical thoughts and now I'm thinking of all the fun we could have with various agglutinative languages that can invent words on the fly. How many 'E's are in 'Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung', Claude?

4
geriksonreply
awful.systems

OK sysadmin question: how can I “pin” a last-known good version in apt?

5
sansrusereply
awful.systems

really remarkable how they just expect us to swallow the hard pivot from "AI is going to take all your jobs and render your economic value to the amount of calories harvestable from your feeble body" to "AI will create undecillion jobs UwU (◠‿◠✿)"

Another quick sneer:

Cherny: I was so focused on shipping. As soon as I got the idea, I spent every night and every weekend on it — it was the only thing I thought about, the only thing I worked on. I started having dreams about Claude Code, and that's still all I dream about: what should we do next, what do we build next. There's a chance now to zoom out, because a lot of people are using it and there's a lot to learn about how. But for a long time we were so focused on building that I didn't even have a chance to think about what it was.

Emphasis mine. the ideology buried within statements like this makes me want to erase the idea of a computer from the collective human consciousness. I feel like moving to the woods with some goats, or something, when i consider the fact that literally every single one of the tech oligarchs thinks like this. Literally channeling the spirit of capitalism like your body is a portal to a lovecraftian dimension. Purge. purge. purge this evil

8

@sansruse @froztbyte It blows my mind that "But for a long time we were so focused on building that I didn’t even have a chance to think about what it was." doesn't raise alarm bells in anyone who hears it.

Sometimes you get in the flow and knock out a bit of it; but if you are 'so focused on building' that you don't have a chance to think about what you are building how well is that going to go? Might be a euphoric, manic, rush; but probably not a well-considered outcome.

9
awful.systems

And not a single question about the Claude Code source leak, which revealed how it's completely slapped together with string and bubble gum.

7

the only kind of spine casey has is the kind in his old school ringbinders, and you can't convince me otherwise

5

At minute 8 of "SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though" Patrick Boyle mentions some circular finance: some of the banks which lent SpaceX $29 billion in March will be guaranteeing the IPO by promising to buy some shares to stabilize the price. Later he also points out that the banks financing the IPO have to buy Grok services and may be its main paying customers. Musk has done this sort of thing before eg. using Tesla (shareholder-owned) money to buy SolarCity which he partially owned. I knew a serial fraudster who moved to Texas for its business-friendly laws and courts.

He liked the piss-tinged blog post by Cape Fear Advisors and estimates that the Muskrat wants to raise $50-75 billion in the IPO.

It took Kaiser Bill to break the economic power of London and Paris, but the Muskrat thinks he can speedrun that game for the New York City map.

8

Mike Masnick had a look at Twitter's financials in the SpaceX IPO. From $4.5 billion in ad revenue in 2021, twitter + Grok is down to $3 billion ad revenue a year (and losing $6 billion a year just on the CSAM-generating chatbot). His billionaire friends tossed in $2 billion or $250 million each into the kitty after a brief chat back in 2022.

7
awful.systems

No, but it does seem important to point out before anyone starts trying to parse the exact words line-by-line or otherwise give more attention to the details than it deserves.

And anyone who describes admitting to AI use as "coming out of the AI closet" deserves to be publicly shamed.

11

yes, but (i've corrected my bloody typo above), there are independent confirmations of veracity. so i think it's fine to complain here, but it would detract from the point outside the sneering area.

6

He does, but also that piece is based on talking to the WMF employees, who he knows, and multiple of said employees have forwarded the piece to me.

It checks out as a good source.

5

A Google employee was charged with commodities fraud for using insider information to win a Polymarket bet about who the most searched for people would be in 2025 (complaint, article, polymarket account).

So far the internet seems confused whether or not this all counts as commodities fraud at all or not and if so, how (this area of law is way too confusing which is one of the reasons I, of course, never use insider information to bet on polymarket).

It looks like the suspicious trades were discussed on social media back in december. e.g. here for example.

Aside: 1.2 million in profit is significant, but isn't a life changing amount of money for most staff engineers at Google. He probably could have just rested and vested for a few extra years and avoided all this...


Bonus:

According to Polymarket someone else was charged with insider trading this April. This other case is especially cursed because it involved bets around the US attacking Venezuela. According to the complaint he might have asked an LLM for legal advice:

In or about November 2025, VAN DYKE uploaded to his Google account a screenshot displaying the results of a Google Al query. The results stated, in substance and in part, that the U.S. military's special operations divisions have "numerous classified files, records, and operational details that are not available to the public"

It looks like this was his polymarket account.

6

My guess would be that this guy wanted the bragging rights to say he won earned his money by being an extra special smart boy rather than just a wagey at cyberpunk mega corporation alpha.

2

A bit more on the Anthropic cofounder who was there at the Pope’s speech choice snippet:

Olah even went as far as to say that Anthropic is operating “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” painting his employer as exactly the kind of entity that’s attempting to assume “monopolistic control” over tech, as Pope Leo warned in his encyclical.

I guess he’s trying to say Anthropic has a bunch of limitations and financial incentives as a company (which didn’t stop them from taking those Qatar donations)

6

I’m at a bar trying to watch the Knicks, and there’s someone 2 seats over from me very loudly talking to their date about AI with a lot of LessWrong-coded talking points. For the love of Jalen Bronson just let me watch the fucking game

6

I think Trash Future had a great statement when Richard Dawkins was going on about Claudia that applies to this, which was "you don't have put in the the newspaper that you hug your stuffed animals and tell them good night."

6
fullsquarereply
awful.systems

tiny little problem of spinal cord attachment, surely It Will Be Solved™. at least they didn't throw nanobots at it

i guess that immortal oligarch class is a 100% ethical thing for them

11
awful.systems

Huh, I got déjà vu and yeah there's this story from a couple months back! https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/30/1134780/r3-bio-brainless-human-clones-full-body-replacement-john-schloendorn-aging-longevity/

MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 has cloned anyone, or even any animal bigger than a rodent. What we did find were documents, additional meeting agendas, and other sources outlining a technical road map for what R3 called “body replacement cloning” in a 2023 letter to supporters. That road map involved improvements to the cloning process and genetic wiring diagrams for how to create animals without complete brains.

Please don't let this be the next bubble.

10
adamricereply
c.im

@Amoeba_Girl In the Star Wars universe, they’re referred to as “decraniated,” although they’re not clones. They’re meat robots.

6

Iirc it is also considered a horrible crime by most.

And the two dudes in the bar in the first movie were experts on it because the people who write star wars do not get that part of the appeal is the universe feeling big and not everything veing explained.

1
BioManreply
awful.systems

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/30/1134780/r3-bio-brainless-human-clones-full-body-replacement-john-schloendorn-aging-longevity/

Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver.

Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.

The fuller context of R3’s proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They’ve been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash.

And that’s because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3’s clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by Schloendorn’s enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove.”

A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain.

And he’s talked about how to grow a clone. Since artificial wombs don’t exist yet, brainless bodies can’t be grown in a lab. So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.

Last Monday, the same day it announced itself to the world in Wired, R3 sent us a sweeping disavowal of our findings. It said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates.” The most overarching of these challenges was its insistence that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.”

My 'no conspiracy to create humans with brain damage' shirt is making people ask a lot of questions

7

So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.

The

fuck?

8
awful.systems

This reminds me of the research I've read on people with a split brain - people who have gotten their corpus collosum severed in order to treat severe epilepsy and ended up with two independent but functional brains controlling parts of their body or different functions. From what I remember (and I'm too lazy to find and cite a source, so please correct me if I'm wrong) they ended up not only having half of their bodies controlled separately, but some speech functions and communication abilities were also split. So for example, if they saw something with their left eye only they wouldn't be able to identify it speaking out loud but their left hand would be able to write the name of the item. I almost definitely got the pop science oversimplification of this, but the relevant takeaway is that the human brain is really complicated and resilient. If each half can independently develop the ability to replicate motor functions and some communication and reading/writing, then it seems like at best wishful thinking to assume that it's possible to consistently engineer a human body that's just alive enough to keep the biological machinery functioning but not alive enough to merit even the moral consideration of a farm animal.

In turn I'm reminded of House of the Scorpion which tells the story of Matteo Alacrán, who was born and grew up in relative luxury on an opium plantation staffed by neurologically neutered slaves, including clones. Matteo himself is eventually revealed to be the latest clone of the patriarch of this whole enterprise and the decision to let him actually live a good life up until it's time to kill him and take his organs is a kind of twisted kindness on his part. But compared to the actual rationalist plan, the Alacrán method at least treats everyone like a disposable resource used to further the goals and whims of the ruling sociopath. Matteo is treated as a person, is what I'm saying. Congratulations to the life extension weirdos for making the sociopathic drug lord ruler of a literal YA dystopia novel seem like they have an actual point.

7
BioManreply
awful.systems

Putting aside the sneering and philosophy to nerd for a minute, before getting back to it.

For a long time people were very into the split-consciousness notion of what happened to split-brain people, but a couple things have come around and now some people really think that the better way of thinking of it is still-unitary consciousness with a very difficult time moving around information between different sensory/expression modalities.

First, you get people who are born without a corpus callosum who are behaviorally normal (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13554794.2013.826690). They get a bit of extra connectivity sidways through their deep brain structure as some kind of homeostatic compensation, but the total amount is definitely low. What this says is there's a difference between a brain that grew under a very unusual set of structural constraints, and one that grew normally that gets shredded. Similar with those people you find now and then with a brain that's 90% fluid (though with the actual cortex pushed up against the skull around a big bubble of CSF) and the only neurological findings are things like weakness in one leg and an IQ of 80 (worth noting that this is still very very different from hydranencephaly) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61127-1/fulltext).

Second, when you do a wider range of experiments with the split brain people you find that while they cannot verbally say what is in their left visual field (which goes to the right side, while language is usually a left-side phenomenon) they can reliably state that something is there with speech, or either hand, and approximately where in the visual field it is. The low bandwidth awareness of presence is there, but they cannot get their speech capacity to access the details. It's like their sight is now multiple separate sensory modalities, some of which is very difficult to talk about and some of which are very difficult to draw with particular hands.

https://www.uva.nl/shared-content/uva/en/news/press-releases/2017/01/split-brain-does-not-lead-to-split-consciousness.html

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/1231/2951052

People argue a lot about what this means

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393221002402

You can also apparently reorganize around very small amounts of remaining fibers to have no deficits like that, with no issues talking about anything in either part of the visual field

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022246/new-findings-split-brain-science-even-minimal-fiber-connections-can-unify-consciousness


Now, getting out of the nerd mode, there's a LOT of weird literature from the 60s to 80s about people with very strange brain anatomy who nonetheless developed normally or better than expected

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1965.tb07839.x

"Two cases of hydranencephaly are described in infants. In both these there was evidence of excessive intracranial pressure-as is often the case-and both were operated on to relieve this. The progress of the older child, now 21 months of age, was throughout excellent physically and mentally, and he is considered to be normal. The progress of the second infant was remarkably good for three months, but thereafter mental retardation and spasticity followed; he was also blind. There is no good explanation for the unexpectedly good progress of the first patient."

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023

"...the most severe group, in which ventricle expansion fills 95 percent of the cranium. Many of the individuals in this last group, which forms just less than 10 percent of the total sample, are severely disabled, but half of them have IQ's greater than 100. This group provides some of the most dramatic examples of apparent ly normal function against all odds. Commenting on Lorber's work, Kenneth Till, a former neurosurgeon at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London, has this to say: "Interpreting brain scans can be very tricky. There can be a great deal more brain tissue in the cranium than is immediately apparent." Till echoes the cautions of many practitioners when he says, "Lorber may be being rather overdramatic when he says that someone has 'virtually no brain.' "

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1999.tb00621.x

"Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy"

"According to traditional neurophysiological theory, consciousness requires neocortical functioning, and children born without cerebral hemispheres necessarily remain indefinitely in a developmental vegetative state. Four children between 5 and 17 years old are reported with congenital brain malformations involving total or near-total absence of cerebral cortex but who, nevertheless, possessed discriminative awareness: for example, distinguishing familiar from unfamiliar people and environments, social interaction, functional vision, orienting, musical preferences, appropriate affective responses, and associative learning. These abilities may reflect ‘vertical’ plasticity of brainstem and diencephalic structures. The relative rarity of manifest consciousness in congenitally decorticate children could be due largely to an inherent tendency of the label ‘developmental vegetative state’ to become a self-fulfilling prophecy"

Worth noting that I looked at that paper and these case studies do have noticeable brian mass around the base of the skull, just not much.

Edit I am also very mad at how people so reductionistically talk about different behaviors being restricted to different parts of brain anatomy. It's different in different creatures. You strip the cortex out of an adult cat and itll still walk around and look at things, though not be all there (yes this was done in the sixties), you strip it from an adult human you get a vegetable. Lots of brain parts are capable of lots of things, its just that as brains get bigger the more peripheral parts are easier to expand faster and grow in importance, their fibers exerting more control over the rest, and I would not be surprised at all at other brain bits being capable of quite a lot when they grow without the influence of the bigger bits.

Anybody ever read the short story "Cutie" by Greg Egan? Very apropos...>

12

just in case: i immensely appreciate the random pearls of highly-specific knowledge that sometimes land here as random comments. thank you so much.

4

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BioMan
Nitpick: the left visual hemifield of each eye goes to the right hemisphere, not left eye vs right. Think about where the bundles of neurons go and it should make sense.

Also the split brain weird stuff only happens if you close off other communication channels between the hemispheres like in the experiments. In daily life, the hemispheres don't get confused because you just look around and both sides see the same world.

Obviously I too love this stuff and I love how robust mammalian brains (and bodies!) are

7
geriksonreply
awful.systems

not alive enough to merit even the moral consideration of a farm animal

I foresee a rise in gourmet cannibalism to try to recoup at least some of the cost of keeping the meatbags alive and healthy for 30-some years

5
maolreply
awful.systems

I think I saw this movie on TV at 2am. And it sucked

7
awful.systems

Ah yes, Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979), The Island (2005) and probably at least one direct-to-DVD sequel to Universal Soldier (1992), who even keeps track of those

4
geriksonreply
awful.systems

I have fond memories of Universal Soldier because my buddy knew the projectionist showing the movie and I fancied her

6

I have fond memories of a Universal Soldier sequel because it was one of the weird movies we discovered randomly while away from home for academic-team tournaments.

4

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
making people give birth to horribly mutilated babies, then declaring those babies non-persons so you can put the senescent brains of the wealthy in them, helping them refuse to face their fear of death? no, seems ok to me

6
geriksonreply
awful.systems

Oh here's a comment, sounds pretty reasonable actually

Doesn't work because aging affects the brain as well and many deadly diseases originate in brain: insults (sic!), Alzheimer and brain cancers. Add risks of the transfer itself and the uncertainty when it should be done: too early for healthy aged person and and too late for one with cancer of any type (risks of metastases). All together it gives less than 10 years increase of of medium life expectancy.

back to the "upload smooth pristine brain onto the computer" drawing board we go!

5

it’s funny because it’s almost directly the eve capsuleer picture, but we already knew these dipshits don’t read

also, how would this work? body grows old, but brain just….doesn’t? self-rejuvenating hermet crab brain!

4

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 it's not immortality, because the brain still ages. But otherwise... I guess? ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Like many concepts out of sci-fi novels, by the time we get the capability, we will have evolved our thinking.

Also: having productive people sitting around on life support seems inefficient compared with giving them jobs.

3

The ensuing amalgamation of "someone who would do this" with the vat-body-somatic-mind would be the most wretched creature imaginable, I think.

5
awful.systems

The "C is too hard for the AI so have the AI rewrite it in Rust" take is just so galaxy-brained.

8
istewartreply
awful.systems

I strongly suspect there are an uncomfortably large number of Rust enthusiasts who tacitly assume that all the type-checking/borrow-checking/object lifetime tracking are primarily enabling features for AI coding.

9

i have already seen ai enthusiasts make quite clear that they imagine the purpose of formal theorem verification is to act as a bolt on for llms

8

I want to believe that's next-level trolling. It's too funny to be true.

3
susreply
programming.dev

The manager of the store says:
"Stop. You know nothing. You have baked 0 bread loaves by hand. No one has ever depended on your bread. You are a finger-wagging "they put dog poo in my bread" type in an era where you hide in plain sight coasting on the moral high ground of baking homemade bread from scratch at home without poo. You can't ship bread, can't adapt, can't even realize that a bread shop is not the place for this kind of attitude."

5
Jayjaderreply
jlai.lu

Ugh. Does it worry anyone else how much this fraudulent/incompetent way of claiming to be scientific resembles nazis and race science at their most fundamental workings?

7

Imagine the disappointment the rats must have felt when watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and wondering why all their heroes are getting their faces melted off.

10
lurkerreply
awful.systems

A lot of rationalists (again including Yudkowsky) endorse eugenics so that’s probably not a coincidence

7

Saying a lot of rationalists endorse eugenics is a bit like saying a lot of Nazis endorse white supremacy.

Rationalism (the online subculture, not the older philosophical meaning of the term) is a subculture predicated on a notion of "general intelligence" which is reified ableism and therefore, necessarily, entails eugenics.

12

Love how one of the top qualities for women is "feminine". I can't imagine one of my friends being asked about me and just saying uh she's a woman I guess. A real womanly woman. She-woman. Girl

7

Michael Burry is one of the investors who is shorting big tech. (Business Insider - paywalled Substack). I just invest much less in the USA than its 60% share of the global stock market, and less than 40% of that in big tech.

4