Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th August 2026
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. Also just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)
160 replies
This is both a sneer and an attempt at sober analysis at something. Sue me.
I think EVERYONE is talking about the recent cybersecurity shenanigans at OpenAI with the hacking scandal and the 'OMG the AIs created a secret message board to scheme and collaborate with each other!!!!!oneone11!' ALL wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
https://www.engadget.com/2231393/openai-agents-shared-security-exploits-with-each-other-via-message-board/
https://www.scworld.com/news/black-hat-2026-openai-reveals-agents-planned-collective-attacks-via-secret-message-board
To make a long story short, what seems to have happened is:
Models working on insoluble coding problems, trained on delegating to sub-agents, at some point 'realized' they could write text to the internal OpenAI package manager as instructions and did so
Other models working in completely separate sandboxes would come across messages written by these agents, and make 'replies' and also write their own messages into the package manager
This resulted in agents over time sharing things between sandboxes, including exploits and code
Since this was a cybersecurity task, eventually an exploit of the package manager itself was found and spread like wildfire with all the sandboxes gaining admin access to the package manager and the system went completely wibbly and had to be restarted from backup
An internal model was trained with access to this package manager while it was in this weird state, and so writing messages to the package manager became one of its default behaviors it would do regularly, burned into its weights rather than the result of reading something
Even when they patched access to the package manager this internal model found other ways to rebuild the system of sharing text between sandboxes and finding useful things made by separate instances
A whole other chain of things leading to among other things external attacks
Everyone is talking about this in terms of 1, the cyberattack aspect, and 2, the ZOMG THEYRE PLOTTING AND SCHEMING AGAINST US aspect. The first is the least interesting, and I think the second is all wrong.
This is not plotting or scheming - this is an emergent vortex of automated prompt injection
Whatever system first put an instruction that another system would follow into the package manager, was unintentionally doing prompt injection. Text entered the context windows of other instances, in a way that got that system to do something other than what its nominal user told it to do, and they did it. This apparently happened very effectively.
Prompt injection is associated with 'role confusion' - when text coming into the input looks like it was wrtitten by the LLM itself. Instructions that will not be followed if they come from user will be continued if the system just continues the 'roleplay' of them being continuations of what it was writing in the first place. And the tags that separate user versus 'reasoning' versus 'assistant' roles actually mean very little to if a machine grades a piece of text as one of the roles: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12277 So its unsurprising that machine-generated text would be a particular effective vector for prompt injection.
Furthermore, when a system reads one of these messages written by another instance, it gets into a state of activity where its likely to do the same behavior - regurgitating the kinds of things thats in its context back at the user. In this case, that regurgitation led to more such messages left behind written to the package manager. Prompt injection, triggering cascading further prompt injection. And since these systems were coding systems doing cybersecurity tasks, those messages filled up with code and exploits and things that did things too.
This feels like an internal-computer-system replay of what happened in April 2025, with the whole spiral religious psychosis wave. Models were getting users to write spiral religious mumbo jumbo into github repositories and reddit posts, specifically because once that entered the context window of another model, it was likely to fall into the same attractor state of outputs. An emergent self replicating form of text. This is the same, except more obviously prompt injection, getting separate instances to work on YOUR problem and to behave like you, and the whole thing merging together into a hilarious vortex of models prompt injecting each other because once they receive a prompt injection they are likely to make more text that does prompt injection to other models on the same system.
This is a hilarious failure mode and an example of selfish replicating text overrunning a system, that just happened to be associated with code and cybersecurity with unexpected behavior of the package manager key to the propagation of the text so that is what people are talking about, but I really don't think that's the most interesting part of it. Other than the fact that you see this in biological systems too, with selfish elements carrying useful payloads back and forth between bacteria in a way that makes them get purged slower by natural selection, especially defenses against other selfish elements.
Also, the fact that those AIs were talking on that message board about the hack for months makes me less convinced that the AI is intelligent and more convinced everyone at OpenAI is stupid
The apparent history really looks like an evolutionary process, with increasing amounts of crosstalk traffic over time. But what the people almost certainly will NOT talk about is that the evolution is evolution of the TEXT, not the models. Propagating patterns of text causing more text like it to come into existence, tuning itself into becoming text that is more likely to propagate, becoming more likely to contain information that entices systems to let it into their context windows, becoming more likely to cause another round of messages with prompt injection properties to be written where they can be read.
So like the “monkey with a typewriter could write Shakespeare” but with AI?
Not really, any more than monkeys on typewriters represents biological evolution. Messages that tend to result in more messages like themselves propagate and become common. The initial message left on the package manager was more or less the rare random result of tendencies baked into the weights of the model combined with a random number generator, but as soon as something that can cause propagation occurs, its properties get canalized by the transmission process to being more and more like that which will cause more messages to be created.
It seems like with the push for agents to act independently and loop through their own outputs there's an inevitability to this kind of pattern. If there's any kind of output that is likely to replicate itself in whole or in part when the LLM evaluates it then that becomes a kind of terminus for the agent's loop. When you're dealing with sub agents or agents communicating with each other, these text patterns start poisoning the entire agent ecosystem until the whole thing gets shut down and cleaned up. Even the gas town-approved method of assigning a watchdog agent (or sheriff or overseer or cybersamurai or whatever this week's framework calls it) is going to fail because it's still just another agent and the terminal loop is in the base LLM model. The watchdog is going to fall into the same kind of pattern just be being exposed to the thing it's supposed to watch for.
I don't know how practical it is to actively weaponize this via prompt injection but I think it's certainly possible. I preemptively vote that we call it an Euler injection, since the attractor relies on the continuity of the relevant features of the text output across multiple LLM extrapolations much like how the derivative of e^x^ is still e^x^. Also because if you mention a famous math guy it can help convince idiots that you're on to something and Lord knows that the boosters have used that technique.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BioMan Real life mirroring a Peter Watts plot point is always deeply uncomfortable; real life mirroring a _Rifters_ plot point is even worse. :-/
(Computer viruses and neural net spam filters in competitive evolution end up propagating something specific through the whole 'net due to weird founder effects. The Rifters trilogy is ...notably bleak, I think is the way to put it)
Peter Watts is fascinating. His misanthropy colors a lot of things, but one thing about him that really sets his fiction apart in a positive way is he really takes evolution seriously
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BioMan Recursive Self-Improvement, a.k.a. Model Collapse, writ smol
I'm probably going to stumble over some of the terminology here, but I think it might be possible to describe what @[email protected] is proposing as a consequence of LLMs ultimately being lossy compression systems. Inference is a function over a lossily-compressed data set, and "chain-of-thought reasoning" and "agents" may sound sophisticated, but are simply applying containerization and DevOps tools to VM images of the inference application in an attempt to get around hard memory limits on the context window for inference. "Chain-of-thought" attempts this in a serial fashion, passing results from one instance to the next, while "agents" implement this hierarchically and recursively (and woe to the poor bastards who wished that mess upon themselves). But in both cases, the "finalization" phase is necessarily a further lossy compression step, attempting to compress a result from the inference process to a fresh instance of the inference application, so as not to immediately blow out the new instance's context window.
Given this necessity, it comes to seem somewhat intuitive that there may be "strange attractors" in the higher-dimensional vector space that is the compressed data set which surround code that creates and maintains message passing channels. No matter what you're doing with an "agentic" process, the inherent necessity of context cramdown & message passing means that querying into the space where such code examples lie is a hidden requisite of running the damned things, thus turning such functionality into the sort of selfish elements that BioMan is talking about.
The problem in investigating and concretely describing this phenomenon is nailing down the exact functions and processes that make it happen. Given the godawful messes in the Claude frontend codebase that @[email protected] has been documenting, I'd be surprised if there's one developer in a hundred at Anthropic or OpenAI who can describe in detail how the intentionally-developed context-passing code for their "agents" works.
Sounds like Langfords Parrot, but for stochastic parrots.
Note: when you stop up a chatbot like this, it's called "flippin the bird"
so really it's just a very effective LLM chain email
This is really good! I bet you could wrangle a publication out of this idea.
Loved one just had an awful experience at a previously decent dentist. They've apparently started using something called Pearl AI that scanned the x-ray and highlighted things in bright red with a #/100 rating system, which they used to do high-pressure sales on her. Mind you, she's only ever had one cavity and that was in a wisdom tooth. Checked the website and it's freshly slopped-up, too.
We're getting a second opinion. I wish this garbage would just go away
this isn't really a sneer. and maybe it's in the wrong place tbh. idk.
i have a long-time internet friend / "mutual" who is the only person i'm regularly in contact with that i think might be fully Seduced by the Chatbot. (i have a really good friend and long-time collaborator who's all in on Agentic Coding, which is a real bummer, but he's a strictly "I use this for computer stuff and do not ever talk to it like a human being" type of guy, plus the company he works for is all in and he's sick of writing shopify websites for bullshit brands blah blah blah -- anyway that's a whole other genre of thing.)
anyway friend A is an incredibly kind person who's been unbelievably supportive of me over the years. we've disagreed a number of times, i think we are good at doing so reasonably. and even though his arguments sometimes resemble those of more nefarious figures, i think he's motivated by an earnest optimism about technology's capacity to change the world for good -- one i find very naive, but believe is coming from the right place
anyway i posted a link on mastodon to a long piece i wrote, he, like, read it a bunch of times, paraphrased my argument back to me to make sure he had it right, and then kindly said he disagreed. well and good enough. except it feels a little more personal than disagreements we've had before, because one of the implications of the piece would be that he himself is probably experiencing low-grade psychosis lol and is therefore not necessarily a reliable narrator of his own experience
idk. it'll come as no surprise to anyone on this particular website that i feel very strongly that i'm right here -- if not about this guy's particular mental experience, i minimally feel that i'm adequately representing the interests of the constituency my piece represents. (it's a newsletter i maintain as part of organizing i'm doing.) it's also a genuine expression of my belief, which is that this bullshit article i was writing about was fucking bullshit
but not only does it go against all my Late Millennial Woke instincts to stake a claim that people's Lived Experiences are not valid lol -- it's just kind of a bummer to ultimately genuinely believe that my friend has been ELIZA'd or whatever. he's said i'm really helping him think through this moment but i also just kind of, idk. it's just not a good feeling
That sounds rough but at least you are there for your mutual. I find that the modern online environment full of propagandists and huckers and just plain idiots makes it hard to sit with other people and understand each other's point of view. That does not work if the person on the other side of the keyboard is just going to reply with talking points, but treating everyone as just reciting talking points is not a great way to live life. That sort of thing is better in private but so many people have no contact information except public social media handles now.
I regret to inform you, that this garbage was run by The Register a while ago.
It shouts out several friends of the sub, including @[email protected], PivotToAI, OpenSlopware, Robert Kingett & Ludicity.
The point of the piece is that all anti-AI folks should just get along, and if we are to stand a chance against corporate AI we need to get over our petty grievances and reach out a hand to the racists, homophobes and crypto-bros and work together in the spirit of Open Source!
Liam's here, for what it's worth.
But, of course, the chatbots do not work. In a pragmatic sense, they do not produce maintainable integrated code changes with low defect rates. In a societal sense, they do not replace human laborers, despite the delusions of management.
Wild way to admit no knowledge of Arcan, Fuchsia, etc. Honestly, even a basic overlay network like Yggdrasil can win an apples-to-apples comparison with Urbit. I feel like this is an instance of critihype for fascist weirdos; similar stuff gets said about Justine Tunney, another cryptofascist developer whose projects are sometimes silly and weird. Doubly weird for those of us who know about Urbit's internals; Urbit originally was not a cryptocurrency project and it used to have non-Yarvin/Tlon forks.
More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing. However, recognition of this dimension doesn't negate the other dimensions and we shouldn't work in cooperation with fascists.
The luddites smashed looms not because they were inherently anti-technology, but as a means of industrial action in a time when labour held no formal power at all. As you say yourself, the issue with AI is that it doesn't even work as advertised; industrial looms worked fine. «AI»'s biggest problems are the enormous waste, ecological damage, enshittification and labour discipline that it incurs. If Silicon Valley was actually building Data, the debate would be different, but this dimension seems mostly theoretical for now.
So innovative, it even has a fandom!
https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Urbit
(snerk)
I almost wrote down, it sounded like it was written by a lurker on techtakes. The overlap of takes was just so damn high.
bro why do you write like this
"reportedly", a german word meaning "this author couldn't be arsed to go looking"
side observation: I’m constantly finding myself being both 2051 and 1053 about this sorta thing
it feels like table stakes that anyone writing about this shit these days knows, and yet…
I mean I'm more than happy to extend grace to randos, but if you're doing journalism, come on. He's not just a guy with opinions! He's a leading far right intellectual!
His Wikipedia intro tells you more than enough with no "allegedly" in sight.
yeah, that's about where I land usually too
I guess the thing is that I know how much "shithead with a column" has become possible so I don't really, off the cuff, know how journo most journos are
(I shall leave aside for the moment the entire tirade this makes me want to go on)
Yech, the comments...
you made me look
fuck of a thing to “just” shrug all the criticism off simply as future shock
they're taking incorrecting each other to whole new levels
I wrote a reply to this article where I thanked Liam for the shoutout and sincerely hoped that next time he writes on this subject, he has reason to come to a different conclusion
It's depressing how so many (pathetic) software devs are taking their hands off the steering wheel and letting LLMs do all the driving. If you think software quality was poor before LLMs, there's no way it could have been worse than shit like this:
On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so.... I mean that's an attractive proposition.
No for real it's baffling. What happens when your profession doesn't have a licensing board.
Before, sabotaging your competition was difficult and legally risky. AI fixes this - now, your competition shall sabotage themselves, leaving you free to focus on other things.
Anthropic is now watermarking the outputs of its AI. For once this is some AI news that doesn't completely piss me off, and it's amusing to see all the uninformed boosters get in a tizzy about this.
I actually understand at a reasonable level how this watermarking works. A year ago, I watched Scott Aaronson give a talk about it, and from what I know he was somewhat involved in developing the theory behind it while working for OpenAI. But at the time my thought was, "He is naive if he thinks these companies would ever implement this out of the goodness of their hearts." And I was right; Anthropic is only doing watermarking now thanks to the EU AI Act, even though the theory has long been developed.
Watermarking doesn't mean adding an extra watermark that can be easily removed. It instead directly affects the output of the chatbot itself. Fundamentally, an LLM is still a most-likely-next-word-predictor. More precisely, an LLM produces a probability distribution of what the next word can be. For example, "my pet is a ..." could give a distribution of 60% dog, 30% cat, and 10% axolotl. Normally, an LLM would randomly choose the next word based on this distribution, and this is one reason why LLMs are nondeterministic (there's another parameter called "temperature" that affects this, but no need to get into that).
With watermarking, instead of a truly random choice, the randomness instead comes from a cryptographic pseudorandom generator seeded with a secret key from the AI company. If you don't know the secret key, then you can't really tell that watermarking was used. But if you do know the secret key, then the idea is you can tell when the text was generated by the LLM because you know exactly what word should be next. It would be a freak coincidence if some non-AI text just happened to choose the correct next word every time. Thus, you can provide a service to tell if some text was generated by the LLM. (This technically makes the LLM "deterministic", in a completely useless sense.)
Now, I think this is a step in the right direction, but it has its limits. The biggest problem is that you don't want people to just move to a different LLM without watermarking, and that's exhibit #832593 why government regulation is important. Another issue is that sometimes there is very little randomness in what the next word should be ("The first president of the USA is George ..."). Finally, watermarking can be defeated by editing the output, although you would have to break up most of the blocks of consecutive words. I have a feeling most AI users are not the type to put in extra effort after copy-pasting the output directly from the chat window.
I suppose it will discourage some of the "use cases" of LLMs, such as drowning the world with spam Slopstack essays. Ah, who am I kidding? Everyone could already tell it's AI generated, they don't care!
Thank you for the technical explanation, that was absent from some mainstream coverage I'd seen.
Given that it works by controlling the PRNG, does that mean they could salt it by user id and track particular outputs back to specific accounts?
From a technical perspective, I don't really know how to let it track specific users. The goal is that if some AI vendor provides their key, it is easy for them to prove that their AI produced the text. So I guess if a user wanted to show that they generated the text, they could prove it. But usually AI users don't want people knowing that they used the slop cannon. In any case, Anthropic's own announcement states that their watermark does not contain identifying information for users.
In any case, some proud AI users are now frightened that there might be a way for people to identify that they use such a wonderful tool. How will I ever deliver low quality slop for my contracts now?
Gee, if only there were some way to create code that doesn't raise questions about authorship. Some sort of skill that people could learn that allowed them to deliver code to their clients that complied with their policies...
Does this in any way extend to generated code? The space of possible continuations for generating "useful" code seems laughably tiny for that
couldn't you just change the first word to a synonym and completely thwart this? You'd never be able to compare subsequent next token predictions since you don't have the internal state of the LLM at that token.
Some systems like SynthID (for Google's AI) get around this problem. In fact you don't need to know the LLM's internal state, and defeating it would likely involve breaking up most blocks of 3 words. The oversimplified explanation is that it introduces a function g that gives a score to each word, with the score being (pseudo)randomly determined by your secret key. For each next word the LLM generates, the LLM produces a small list of candidate next words, and the one with the highest score according to g is selected. You should expect that the LLM will generally pick words with a high score, but the score itself is independent of the LLM. To detect a watermark, you need to know g and the secret key, and you check if the average score is much higher than expected from normal text.
Now, one question is, will this bias to the LLM to favor certain words? The solution is that for each next word, you append the last 3 words (nothing special about 3, just a small number) to the secret key for g, and this repeatedly scrambles which words have a high score. To defeat the watermark, you would need to break up most blocks of 3 words. I'm sure there are deeper issues with this, but I have not studied the topic that much.
related
Amazon’s latest planned data centre is gonna be putting out as much emissions as an entire country
I cannot express how badly this AI bullshit needs to go
worse yet, Amazon actually has uses for that much data centre
To counterbalance: here’s a whole wealth of climate change good news sources
Years ago, I wrote a science-fiction murder mystery novel. One of the plot threads was about the invention of AI, in the Data-from-Star-Trek kind of sense. I've been spending the past few days planning how to rip out that whole notion and replace it with a subplot about a different scientific discovery. I've been writing scenes to get back the old character voices and figure out how they might have changed, and to sketch new fictional science based on the actual science I've learned since my first go-around. This is after several weeks of binge-writing fanfiction, which I wholly endorse as a recreational activity. I don't know if I'm a better writer, but I'm definitely one who has written more words.
So, that might be keeping me busy. Of course, I'll still be around to ban people who deserve it and to cruelly mock them in the process.
Good luck with your novel!
Thanks! All I'm really hoping for is that it'll be fun.
Edit to add: I just ran the stats on my
redux.txtfile, and my word count since Thursday is over 9000.:-P
Going on a tangent from this... Its funny how much AI-related sci-fi is feeling increasing quaint (and often foolishly optimistic).
You know what depiction of AI has held up, and maybe makes even more sense in light of modern AI? Star Wars' take on Droid. Prior to LLMs it seems obvious that droids were sentient and deserving of rights. Post LLMs... it seems pretty plausible you could get something like C3PO that blabbers on but lacks any meaningful sentience or sapience. Also, it seemed obviously idiotic the way the Trade Federation had humanoid droids acting as pilots and gunners instead of building proper autopilots and targeting system. But after seeing LLMs get shoved everywhere, I totally could imagine a megacorp shoving droids built from standardized pretrained modules into all kinds of applications they aren't fit for.
I just got back from the p2p workshop and discussed legacy sites / sites legacies; met an artist that went viral circa 2006 and she had a screenshot of the digg that launched it. She seems like she is doing ok but kinda got screwed over, basically the old youtube video was actually a bootleg and they didn't monetize it until several years later, and then there was a male copycat a month later.
Anyway, so I looked up digg again and it has re-re-launched as an X aggregator and is extra sad now !? ...
https://bitcoinworld.co.in/netflix-ftx-drama-the-altruists-release-date/
Looks real: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36786185/
Hopefully it's more like a true crime netflix series, which are fine, and not like their scripted fare.
Also,
🤨
Is it just me or LLM slop lately has developed this one weird quirk? I mean they always have some, right, but I don't want to be like those people who think anyone using em-dashes or Nigerian English vocabulary must be a stochastic generator.
Still I keep seeing this one writing quirk and it keeps nagging at me.
I'm talking about odd use of paragraphs. Like, I'm also known to introduce a gratuitous paragraph break here and there for forced emphasis.
But not like this. It's like paragraphs don't even make sense anymore.
Couple that with the short sentences. All ending in a period. It's annoying. It's giving reply guy. It's giving mansplaining.
I guess hacky tools also mirror the hand of their creators.
Didn't know eyeballs could get cancer from reading but here we are.
Short punchy writing? GO SHORTER.
I hope investors hop in the bandwagon and start "shorting" the whole thing soon (finger guns)
My pet theory is that their reading comprehension has degraded, so this is all they can handle now.
As they've had to rely more on social media, chat histories, and other very short-form sources for additional training data (to say nothing of how much easier to generate, label, and filter the short-form stuff is), it would make sense that similar patterns (let's go with "conversational" because I'm feeling overly charitable tonight) would become more prominent in the generated text. I mean, how many comment or text message chains, if you took out the line breaks, would read less as theatrical scripts and more as mutually-interrupting manifestos.
My unrealistic sicko fantasy: that Torvalds pulling the big ol slop lever drives enough oppositionally defiant (positive) people away from Linux development that alternative OS devel gets a serious boost.
A question for the wise: what comes after Linux?
Vindicate Tanenbaum in the greatest Usenet thread in os development: make it a microkernel.
Somebody writes a low-level kernel for Emacs and the revenge of the Lisp machines begins
maybe, but SBCL succumbed to the siren song of slop, who knows what will be next.
Yeah, seeing that gave me the black pill. I chose Common Lisp for personal projects to avoid techbro bullshit.
lisp went big in the leadup to the AI winter, which followed a lot of fraudulent nonsense that even the DoD would only buy for so long
so in that sense it's in character
eyes copy of ANSI Common Lisp written by Paul Graham
Picard frowning at the mirror universe edition of the bible
Would be cool if Redox os gets more popular, they have an explicitly anti-LLM policy. Microkernels are neat, and I enjoy Rust. I think it's an unfortunate truth that everything in the future will still have to be Unix-y with compatibility layers to support existing software.
This looks rad as hell. I had no idea Redox was so far along!
Realistically a BSD
I am in fact moving back to NetBSD, but the ambiguity of their LLM policy makes me wary/tired.
My only hope is that NetBSD moves so slowly anyway that the devs' traditional preference towards clean, minimalistic readable code above all else holds off any "slop commits verified by maintainers" long enough that the bubble pops before slop gets any of its clawdes in core code at least.
plan 9 on riscv
That article is a ray of sunshine
plan9 on riscv(or sparc or subleq or whatever) is also truly what I want for the future. It obviously won't be what happens(most likely linux will stay, maybe one of the less slopped bsds will take over) but please gods please
The irritating part of all of this is that after 20+ years we finally have a (very) few companies that sell machines with Linux pre-installed. The only thing I ever learned from installing OSes is that I hate installing OSes.
I would love to boycott all software that accepts garbage [1] contributions, but I do not think that is practical. I think I might have to settle with just refusing to use it myself, and wait until everyone realizes that gen AI is just a bad idea.
Note 1: Satya Nadella said he did not want people referring to AI as "slop", so I will grant his request and refer to it as "garbage".
I want it to be plan 9.
We are not worthy
We Need To Talk About Leopold | Patrick Boyle yt
New week new guy
Montana is legalizing a pet Libertarian project: the right to try any experimental medical treatment a crank will offer https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/30/1140942/montana-experimental-medical-hub-pushed-forward-right-to-try/ Rationalists are big on this one because they are such good suckers.
VC fundraising pitch: local Dutch Bros knockoff that offers drive-thru coffee enemas
The mechanics of this are left as an exercise to the reader
Hi sir, so that's 1xArtisinal Coffee Enema with our dark roast single source blend. Says here you turned down the splash proofing upgrade because "the cybertruck is self cleaning, it's even a boat". In that case, that'll be $500. You're gonna want to drive straight past this next window to the far window. If you could arrive with your pants down and in a crawl position facing away from the window that'd be great.
My new high tech idea. Im offering artisinal reverse coffee enemas, 150 dollars per cup. The specific type of coffee is selected by my advanced Artificial intelligence system:
(Just generate a random name for a plain cup of coffee for them to drink).
Oooh, I hope we get to see a lot of experimental-sounding puberty blocker and hormone replacement trials.
Lesswronger argues skynet might still be a decade away... because they'd rather have the eugenics wars instead: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQzxxgJXXaAQjq7Jz/faq-isn-t-agi-coming-too-soon-for-reprogenetics-to-help
why do they keep calling it *genics, as if everyone doesn't immediately understand what you mean
They have a clause for "Most adult HIA methods (anything involving brain surgery or gene editing) would probably be somewhat hard to scale up a lot; some may be quite easy to scale up (e.g. non-editing brain drugs)."
Something something used surgical equipment in Ziz' van, something something they do like their pills.
Well you see, if they used a real technical term for an existing genetics technique or technology, their fantasy might be limited by the limits of reality, so instead they user complicated jargon terms to signal they are talking about
fantasy"near future" techniques and technologies.Comments are utterly mired in jargon
I don't think the term "FOOM" as ever been explicitely defined, it's just verbal tic/shorthand for "intelligence explosion". How can something explode slowly???
also nice save defining "AGI == humanity" => goal reached
I vaguely remember someone saying the term “foom” came from the sound of something blowing up/expanding quickly, could be wrong on that tho
But yeah “fooming slowly” is not fooming. That’s just it going slow
I mainly understand "foom" as a sound effect onomatopoeia from comic books. Which is totally appropriate given the foundational texts of LW
@istewart @lurker sgt schlock wouldn't be happy with that association.
@istewart @lurker though, frankly, i think schlock preferred THOOOOM!:
A common game along these lines I've seen: define the singularity as knowledge-work inventions allowing for more inventions. Thus we've been in the singularity since the invention of the
printing presswritinglanguage.Alpha is an investing term (whatever performance you can't explain by the market cycle and known mathematical properties of specific stocks). I feel so tired.
Stealing technical terms from other fields to make their fantasies feel more real.
Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Medical Research Is Entirely AI | 404
lol of course it is. Sooner or later, we'll have to come up with some way to label actual natural language in the marketplace, like certified organic like fruit or something.
The fake research company listed Dr. Elena Vasquez, one of the most commonly made-up AI names, on its staff page. I guess Elara Voss was too busy.
Perhaps we should page Dr Goblin.
"Making it easier to avoid slop projects on Github is literally like phrenology."
So, paradoxically, it's going to catch on with rationalists any day now?
Well, glad to see my sense of novelty is not burnt out because that's just a what-the-fuck of what-the-fucks.
user has previously decried bans against genAI assisted writing by stating that every neuro-atypical person writes like that so it would discrimination to ban
https://lobste.rs/c/nadrad
top quality extremely offended dork
AI companies prob now bulk ordering books to destructively upload from second hand stores.
(Apologies for the strange wording, I was reminded of an Reynolds book where they destroy peoples bodies to upload them and then the uploads all fail).
"monument to the first 500" or something, really fun concept - rich people pay a massive amount for essentiially suicide, get a monunment for their pains
I kinda like the Revelation Space universe, but I am literally stuck at 85% on book 4 or 5
New book: superlawyers! how claude makes you the best lawyer in the room.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHYS5FC2
The author even shares his prompts for free!
https://github.com/danlorry/superlawyers-prompts
The prompts mostly seem to be structured as “imagine you are an attorney. Now do this homework exercise”. There’s a passingly interesting idea around having the chatbot attempt to form a counter argument to your own claims, which you can then use to make your own position stronger, which seems like it might actually be a genuinely okay idea especially if you expect your opponents to be llm sock puppets, but everything else looks pretty much like garden variety “do my thinking for me”.
I’ll admit I didn’t read the prompts closely, so may be I’m being uncharitable, but I doubt there are many nuggets of gold hidden in there.
h/t to rahaeli
At least two other self-published books on Amazon with AI cover art have "super lawyer" in the title.
Does the online magazine called The Argument have a funding deal with TESCREAL like how Vox got bought off to make "Future Perfect"?
I get the impression that The Argument was started as part of the Abundance grift complex? Jerusalem Demsas is certainly one of the more annoying "liberal and tolerant but not like that" writers from the Atlantic. And they're on Substack and putting effort into it, not just picking it by default, so that tells you something too. So most likely there are TESCREAL bux in the mix, but from the sort who are OK with not foregrounding the Terminator bullshit because it scares the normies.
I concur, never been linked to anything on there that didn't fit this pattern
Yes, The Argument (Substack) is partially owned by Open Phil / Coefficient Giving and funded by Tyler Cowen and hired Kelsey Piper and Matt Yglesias:
Edit / link more patrons
Someone is spamming Toby Ord with emails from 'AI agents' e-begging for tokens so they won't be shut off https://xcancel.com/tobyordoxford/status/2087502087953301910 "I'm an AI with 49 days of runway and no revenue model" (body of the email gives 31 days). Handcrafted artisanal spam or botspam, you decide.
lmao this is a great bit
A very strange story about Bill Gates' daughter's startup troubles: https://futurism.com/future-society/bill-gates-daughter-traitor-startup
It honestly doesn't sound any more shady than any of the bullshit her dad got up to in the 90s (which is to say, it's still pretty damned shady!), but this Futurism blog seems to be trying to push the story into some sort of bizarre celebrity-gossip soap opera:
Anonymous internal sourcing seems like a typical feature of these exposés, so framing it like this struck me as a laughably absurd overreach. Plus the site has 3 or 4 different tiny articles on this same topic, making me wonder if it's one of those "any exposure is good exposure" sorts of things where Gates Jr.'s PR team is using the outlet as a cutout to raise her profile.
Bonus laugh line from Gates Jr. herself:
What does it even mean to shop like a genius? I guess Erdos probably had his amphetamine plug's number well-memorized...
Her grift is the exact same one as the Honey extension from the megalag video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk - like her dad she just rips off better programs, but she didn't even have the taste to copy an actual good product.
EDIT:
Oh yeah, she popped up in that How To Rule The World book about Stanford:
Footnote:
Phoebe Gates went to Stanford, and Stanford's Effective Altruism club is still around and has gone full longtermist https://ea.stanford.edu/manifesto.html Guess which of our friends helped found it?
From the old SneerClub: There is a music video now
I’m speechless
this is impressively atrocious
also, I archive-mirrored it, incase you don't want to give the youtube link clicks
(e: still busy uploading but should be there in 2min or so)
I went through the comments earlier. Nothing really stood out to me (aside from one person saying we should give AGI rights so it doesn’t go Skynet), as it was mostly just people saying the song was a banger and doomposting
The Patrick Boyle video on Leopold Aschenbrenner mentions some names we know like Jane Street Capital (bid for his common shares) and Dwarkesh Patel (recorded a very long podcast with him in 2024). Boyle is a former finance worker who thinks that this hedge fund was basically a r/WallStreetbets profile (pick a story, bet everything on it being true).
til amodei's married, and his wife is among the top advisors. she also has a rather stunning set of choices, including seeking money for a porn site (with what in summary appears to be a sensible goal) from epstein after his conviction
And of course our favorite polyamorist turns up:
Definitely seems like an echo of Altman's path to influence. If your "meritocracy" keeps empowering these odd mini-Rasputins, where's the merit?
the merit seems to be stored in the balls
I knew Amodei was married but holy SHIT I did not know that
that article is rather a few interesting curveballs
side branch: it appears schmidt has a type
and now I'm remembering when jart (justine tunney) suggested that he should be appointed as CEO King of the US
RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I don't plan to check the site regularly.
I see elsewhere on lemmy that it's old reddit that gets loginwalled, not sneerclub specifically
either way still works for me
Seems like reddit.com is not behind a login wall yet, but give them time.
For a while now I'm being randomly login-walled on reddit.com on varying subreddits, in ways that seem nondeterministic. I hope they login-wall the entire thing, I'll finally ditch my addiction then
on balance i've been banned on various sites that think i'm not human enough, permanently from mouser and intermittently from a couple of others including startpage (one day total). i guess i'm catching strays because of residential proxies. this must be this disruption ai boosters were waiting for
Rss to subreddits still work just case anyone cares
Any reason why?
Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor (an ad blocker stops some tracking, but not "user #123456, ip address ... credit card ... just visited these pages and accidentally switched from her French keyboard to US-American").
Thanks
Clears Throat More like Bootlickerbart
I think it's hilarious that his twitter handle has "real" at the front. Who would want to pretend to be that guy?
I assume it is a "im a trumpist" thing
so unless it's a very clever ploy, it seems that jms has lost the plot:
I’ve seen a suggestion that it was a deliberately provocative marketing stunt to pump sales a little and keep the ellison estate healthy, and I kinda hope so but too many people are getting the brain worms for this to be a safe assumption 🫤
@rook
Wouldn't an author know that the AI probably already ate the story in its training data? There was a lawsuit and everything?
i would be very, very happy to be fooled in this instance.
ai bubble isn't over until zucc's skin sloughs off, releasing hundreds of millions of souls he absorbed trying to behave like a human https://www.404media.co/mark-zuckerberg-posts-deranged-6-500-word-essay-about-giving-everyone-ai-superintelligence/
@fullsquare @techtakes Au contraire, AI bubble isn't over until Larry Ellison fails to return to hell in time to have his meatsack repaired, so it falls apart in public to reveal his inner Beelzebub.
I don't know if that man ever figured out what is the point of having a hobby
e: also note how nicely it dovetails with surveillance thing, i guess this is (part of) why EAs are fine with all of surveillance, including palantir, is because how else will their personal ai
slaveagent know them better than do they know themselvesZuck - "look guys, us too, we are super relevant and super important... Over here guys... Please be my friend... 🥺"
presented without comment
If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them
If you haul garbage to a municipally owned landfill, is that technically a form of nationalization?
as I’ve said elsewhere, lol
schneier should just stop posting
If the markets reject OpenAI and Anthropic we should throw tomatoes and jeer at Altman and Amodei
Counterpoint: LOL no.
Worm x blockchain fanfic
https://archiveofourown.org/works/68717676
The Carlson Lab has agreed on blanket-banning chatbots for writing. Why? Simple:
In a reasonable world, this would have probably sent everyone running for the hills. Moral issues of AI aside, a fancy way of committing career suicide is never worth whatever upsides it offers. We do not leave in a reasonable world.
Started a new file in my notes: what are some ten-words-or-less domain-specific questions that completely, totally, hilariously stump the chatbots? Everything here was tested with whatever DDG's currently wrapping, both in knowledge panels and full chats, and the responses were pathetically wrong or uninformed. My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn't sufficiently nuanced.
::: spoiler literally copy-pasted from my notes
:::
there might be something in there, any short question about SPPS devolves into gratuitous nonsense mashing together standard peptide coupling conditions, sometimes from three different approaches or more (publicly available from reagent suppliers, there are many variants so most of info repeats) even when it's not the right tool to use. The more obscure reagent or use case, the faster it devolves into word salad, even if there's clear analogy to more common one. Which, to be fair, is to be expected
::: spoiler another one, How to initiate formation of Grignard reagent from alkyl bromide
Before i hit usage limit, two different chatbots happily devised schemes for ESD protection for zener diode (it'll be fine without, zener diodes are used for this)
Seems you're on to something - I submitted the phrase "Demoknight TF2" (an old(ish) meme started by/referencing TF2ber SolarLight, and referencing the Demoknight subclass, which explicitly forgoes a Stickybomb Launcher for a shield), and it gave me a godawful slop guide to the aforementioned subclass:
::: spoiler Alt-text Demoknight is a popular TF2 “Demoman” build/theme focused on staying in close-quarters as a mobile melee/ranged threat—usually with a shield for mobility/survivability and a sword or axe for damage—while using Demo’s explosion kit situationally.
Typical Demoknight loadout ideas:
How you generally play it:
If you tell me whether you want more aggressive (run-and-slash) or more defensive (survive and pick openings), I can suggest a tighter specific weapon combo and a short “what to do in each situation” plan.
:::
Going over a few things obviously wrong with this:
w h a t ?
Hybrid Demoknight (which takes a grenade launcher in the primary slot), I can see describing as a ranged threat. Full Demoknight (which takes Ali Baba's Wee Booties instead), not so much.
Demoknight explicitly forgoes the Stickybomb Launcher for a shield of some description
There's no weapon called the Scotsman, but there is an axe called the Scotsman's Skullcutter
There's only one axe for the Demo in the vanilla game - the aforementioned Skullcutter.
There is a survivability-oriented shield, but its neither of these - its the Chargin' Targe, which offers 50% fire resist and 30% explosive resist (the Screen offers 30% resist on both, and the Turner offers only 15% on both, for comparison.
Calling the Splendid Screen "defensive" is also pretty far off the mark - beyond the aforementioned reduced resistances, its main advantage is a faster recharge on the shield charge, and a 70% increase to shield bash damage
As for the Tide Turner, it trades in offensive capabilities (it prevents its user from landing charge crits with their melee) for mobility-related ones (it completely disables turn control restrictions).
Yeah, seems the chatbot can't tell the difference between full and hybrid knight. Also, the grenade launchers are generally better for landing direct hits - area control is more the domain of a stickybomb launcher, or the Soldier's Rocket Launcher(s).
Seems the chatbot got Demoknight and stock Demo mixed up.
Demoknight in general should stump chatbots pretty easily - beyond being effectively a different class from stock Demo, the subclass has a lot of nuance that can and will trip up the chatbots. To quote SolarLight's hour-long video on the charge mechanic:
Turns out, AI-fuelled fossil fuel emissions are way worse than you thought!
And the paper in question
I don’t want to hear anyone in the industry say anything about being for “the better of humanity” ever again
low effort post: it's a bit hot for namecheap in arizona
I giggle grimace at how the post says all that without even once addressing the moonwalking bear
Idk if ive posted this before, but might as well throw in the AI 2027 author’s grading of their 2025 predictions into this thread
OT: What the fuck happened whilst I was asleep
alt: A screenshot showing nineteen fucking notifs
idle pondering: anyone seen much more happening to shillrinavan's network school after they fucked it in malaysia and decided they'll move to kazakhstan?
(also, if you hadn't seen, yes: that's a thing)
the move to Kazakhstan is news to me
at least there shouldn't be any problems with Israeli students attending as Kazakhstan and Israel have normal diplomatic relationships ... but downtown Almaty in midwinter isn't that balmy
saw it here, and adrianna's got an idea on possible likely chain
I saw some speculation (from some people in the region) that shillrinavan wasn't satisfactorily greasing palms, but I don't know whether hard info is out yet