Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd 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 celebrating my birthday on Friday)
172 replies
cofnas' suspension proceedings from U of Ghent (do read the full suspension letter here) generated a reaction from the eugenicists: an open letter; the signatories, among many other names, some even probably not white supremacists, include some of our favourites: j michael bailey, pinker, shermer and hossenfelder.
Signatories include psychologist J. Michael Bailey, best known for promoting the idea that many people who say they are trans are just kinky (autogynephilia), and running a class demo where a woman was brought to climax with help of a homemade toy called a fucksaw. The demo got a lot of attention in the dying days of the sex-positive blogosphere.
yes, precisely. he's a fucking creep.
Also very disappointed to learn that Ian Pace, a pianist I admired, has been oneshotted by social media and gone down the racist transphobe 24 hour tweeting monster chute.
Oof.
We need a word for "my condolences for that cool person you liked becoming a milkshake duck"
I propose: "autorowling"
I love it when Americans get to find out that being a big racist is actually illegal in most of Europe.
in unrelated news, it looks like drought in hungary got less severe and they started up their NPP again, now with 3 out of 4 blocks running (one of them ran the entire time, for some time at reduced load)
Large amounts of the LW commentariat cannot get their heads around how students JUST. DON'T. GET. AI.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySXuvJcqRindQwAk7/how-my-students-think-about-ai
They are extremely surprised by:
The kids are alright!
This gives me very good vibes. The kids are all right. Maybe not economically, probably not, but in spirit at least.
I'm going to leave this part of the author's self-description here and resist the urge to comment on it.
This one I found interesting largely because it suggests an inability on the writer's part to really understand point 4, despite featuring one of the better sneers on the subject ("as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on 'rogue cars.'"). Maybe I'm overstating something here, but the way I see it the difference between the rogue AI and faulty AI scenarios aren't really in the distinct events of the scenario. Faulty AI could absolutely do as much damage as "rogue" AI if it was plugged into all the systems that would be necessary to, say, liquidate humanity and pull the iron from their blood. The difference is entirely in framing and responsibility. We should ask questions now about how these systems are used, what their limitations are, and how we deal with that. Instead, the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything, and then use the idea that the AI went rogue and has agency to avoid how obviously bad of a decision this would be. The fact that this is also the part where the AI companies make a fucktillion dollars and finally show them, show them all, muhuhahaha is, I'm sure, irrelevant to their sober analysis.
A corollary to that: the rationalists and those downstream assume that AI, as a technological category, will necessarily be more intelligent and capable than its users. Therefore they are willing (and arguably even enthusiastic!) to uncritically accept badly designed, opaque, and barely-functional software from whoever labels it AI. Learned helplessness in action. They claim to be experts at the highest level, but they're not even really able to get over the starting line of criticism.
If anyone ever wondered why I am constantly angry about AI its shit like this...
I was looking at options for securing a few services hosted behind a caddy reverse proxy and found a project with the very serious and official sounding name 'caddy-security'. To get started I tried to find some proper documentation for it and immediately found this announcement. In future, instead of a proper documentation you will get a bunch of files in the repos
.codex/skillsdirectory. These, according to the developer, help 'both humans and AI agents work with the codebase'. I don't know how this is supposed to help me because the files aren't linked to each other and are anything but proper documentation, but I guess they want me to point a slop agent at them and have it generate some security configuration for me.I have heard about caddy a couple times now from people seemingly new to hosting.
Can I ask why it's so popular when Apache httpd still works fine and has reasonable governance?
it started out container-flavoured easier APIs and then grew a bit from there, still relatively liked for its ease of dynamic shittery. seconding @dgerard's position on apache httpd as ssl terminator. it's also got some other cases where it's just a worse performer and/or a nuisance to deal with (in comparison)
Having gone through the setup as an SSL terminator, it did have a bunch of unnecessary pain, though I now like my setup a lot. I'll have to blog about it once I set up my blog. I can't speak to the performance, though I would care about that once I run something more involved.
After looking at caddy a little harder, I can't help but notice some sneerable qualities...
Apache is terrible as an SSL terminator IME
Well, I wouldn't call myself new to hosting, I used nginx before but switched because Caddy makes configuring HTTPS for my reverse proxy very convenient. I use it with this module which handles the ACME DNS challenge for creating and updating letsencrypt certificates for my internal domains.
I'm using acme.sh for that. It also supports Hetzner API btw.
Because passing off basic security configuration to a system that basically ensures that even if it is without major errors it's basically impossible to understand and follow is definitely not a bad idea, especially if you're going to try and operate this for more than a couple of weeks or in on infrastructure that isn't perfectly isolated and specific to this app.
William MacAskill is embarrassed that he was buddies with SBF. But back in 2014 he was open that he brainstormed names for his movement with "the Leverage folks" and Geoff Anders. He also mentioned that "we hadn’t planned ‘effective altruism’ to take off in the way that it did" which is consistent with his later statements that he was always about the Longtermism.
The same blog archive from 2014 has recent posts on "Strategic considerations about different speeds of AI takeoff" and "an email conversation with (GiveWell founder) Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser about future-oriented effective altruism" if you need to rub anyone's nose in it.
Sneerable names include Toby Ord ("negative utilitarianism is bad! Oops, now there is a line of negative utilitarians in dress shirts outside my door"), Nicholas Beckstead ("saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal"), and Peter Singer ("When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed").
Edit: Nick Bostrom is the academic EA who said "I hate Ni****s", Toby Ord is the academic EA who gets followed around by negative utilitarians who want to debate him Edit: added Beckstead
Reason: I was talking to an EA on Reddit who does not want to believe that the eugenics and the skull calipers were in the movement from the beginning.
over on the corporate hell site, Timnit has found a link
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_well-guys-i-knew-that-we-were-going-to-connect-share-7496569471848054784-yJjK/
cofnas got suspended for being a racist dipshit
times high education got wind of it all over nine months before cofnas did, but didn't publish because of SLAPP possibility https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-police-over-arday-case-i-was-just-doing-my-job https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/jason-arday-many-things-can-be-possible-same-time i read it as multifaceted shitshow
So the argument is that the hypothetical future generations that longtermists value might be too dumb to care about because of
black and brown people reproducingmiscegenation"dysgenic pressures". But if we assume, as they appear to, that longtermists should be taken seriously rather than pointed at and mocked, then the math involved would basically necessitate that "certain" people alive today should also merit effectively zero moral consideration. Something tells me that they get real conceptual real fast and start avoiding the shut up and multiply people hard.The paper by de Vries cites all our favourite race cranks: Bo Winegard, Aporia Magazine, Michael Woodley of Menie, Helmuth Nyborg, Diana Fleischman, E.O.W. Kirkegaard, Steven Pinker (not out AFAIK but he keeps promoting Nazis), G. Meisenberg of Mankind Quarterly, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103417
that shortened link is just redirect to https://dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/101070-study-finds-63-of-religion-books-on-amazon-likely-ai-written.html h/t naked capitalism
"Satanists least tainted by AI, says AI detection AI". it WOULD say that. /s
on an unrelated note on the same topic, I read the ebook by Jesus Freak Computer Geek blogger that argues that LLMs are actually channeling nephilim / demons (hence the six fingers in dalle) and that they have used the Mandela effect to corrupt the KJV and also herald the antichrist. Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.
Art Bell was not a non-problematic person, but if he were still alive, at least this era would have an appropriate narrator. His replacement George Noory essentially turned the show into a shill-a-thon for anyone with woo bullshit to sell (quite literally, any guest I've heard since Bell died was clearly there to pull the listener into their sales funnel).
Which makes me a bit surprised that I haven't heard about any of our friends being booked!
Presented without comment ::: spoiler spoiler
A street ad for a breakfast burrito with an AI-generated image of a disgusting burrito that is full of maggots
I heard the image is likely to be totally ai generated and might not be real
I am now convinced it is indeed fake. Shame on me, posting slop
It got me as well before.
Doesnt help that i saw overgreebled food advertisements like that irl. I did 'boycot' that food place.
@Soyweiser Got me, too. Highlights the ubiquity of LLM slop in viral clickbait these days. This place is not a place of honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ... nothing valued is here (&c.)
Yeah actually, the sign border is weird, building in backround makes no sense, building on the right has a couple of weird features, trees are very indistinct, pavement on left abruptly changes paving pattern just before the sign, pavement-road on right of sign.
Automated company or attempt at viral marketing?
The protein craze has gone too far
UC Berkeley Law:
I wonder how long until some big AI company has a massive leak of identifiable-user chat logs with god knows what confidential stuff on it, since they HAVE to have all this in plaintext
displayuserchatlogs=1
that already kinda happened (for a certain groups of users) with the public share links thing, but my money is on a corporate self-own a la the old AOL search data set.
man good for them. meanwhile down south we keep throwing good money after bad while also doing layoffs.
eg Fiscal 25 is public now
OT: I just turned 26. I'm taking a trip to a local steakhouse to celebrate.
Happy birthday, my friend! Glad to hear that the steakhouse delivered.
Solid plan!
Annie Altman, Sam Altman's sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:
https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529
She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".
As usual this sort of message actually makes me worried about what she might do to herself. :(
I've never heard of abuse allegations against Altman, so I looked them up and holy shit wow.
Scott Alexander has told many stories about why he is pseudonymous. In 2013, when he was applying for medical residency, he told a simple story which begins with an interviewer saying he would have to take his LiveJournal down if he were accepted:
FYI, this is why its a red flag that someone has public profiles on dozens of sites. Its a standard technique to bury negative posts in Google results, PR firms will write the profiles and get you a few press releases and talks to help. I hope this is the last thing I have to say about this particular creep.
What did he do, leave written evidence of white supremacist leanings?
at least that. considering that as a working psychiatrist he didn't mind posting details of private lives of his patients and write about his disdain for them,
if you held a gun to my head I would guess it would be his racism (he thinks that different groups have natural places in society driven by their inborn hereditary differences), but I don't see any point in trying to track it down. He is clever but uses his brains for very common, very bad ideas and the things he has done since 2013 are much worse than the things he could have posted as a young man.
Came across this on the orange place: dontpastetheai.com
I was expecting like nohello.net but instead we get a decent intro explaining nuance as to why people ask other people questions followed by how to use AI and hide that you used it.
Is it me, or do attempts to make movies with AI tools
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/24RKHEkwgZ6Hm6ygY/can-an-llm-make-a-feature-length-movie-on-its-own
Remind me of SCPs
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2030
If you wonder how you can look at any of this without viscerally realizing that it's absolute dogshit, I found the
authorsperpetrators conclusion very insightful.It’s always, always 2027
And WHY are they no longer competing over this? Tell me. Could it be that its incredibly expensive to make somthing that nobody wants except fraudsters, and that further improvement via the kind of ML we do just produces exponentially diminishing returns for ever increasing huge amounts of effort and they realized it's not worth it?
Just like they will never understand that the openAI 'pause' for 'security and alignment' is a convenient excuse for the fact that they have no goddamned money and are on a treadmill to oblivion.
Quoth the blog post:
... the fuck did I just read?
Same person has a history of posting collections of AI generated music videos to LW talking about how they let various different generative AI systems 'express themselves' and analyzing the different kinds of imagery in each.
AI slop is very good at falling into the uncanny valley, whether that paragraphs of pure nothingness from a text extruder, or strange almost-human looking imagery that looks and feels inexplicably wrong. Its a great way to produce some accidental nightmare fuel, especially considering the AI bros glazing such shit are incapable of recognising its accidentally disturbing nature.
As a "fun" sidenote, there was an SCP article on the site which acted like a slop generator (SCP-1004, Factory Porn). Its writer, DrBright, was permabanned in 2022 after a lengthy history of sexual harassment was uncovered (and the article was deleted altogether in February of this year). Feels oddly fitting, in the worst way possible.
I've had the same thought about Factory Porn, it's is basically what Image slop generators are, right down to the addictive nature, even when it isn't porn being generated.
Oh boy, this is the most straightforwardly delulu lesswrong post I’ve ever seen.
lol
Oh MAN... quote:
Companies are STILL subsidizing video generation to hold people's interests.
It still cant keep scenes consistent for more than 5 seconds amazing.
I got to 47 seconds and there's a guy driving a tent stake with a mallet that isn't quite there, only to have the mallet disappear.
"So you printed out a piece of the internet for us to throw away."
I am mildly fascinated by the types of issues that appear and the contrasts with other things that can locally in space and time look right.
An object doing nothing will have a consistent surface and show perspective relative to the viewpoint. The systems are able to have representations of surfaces of different types and how they can fit together within an object. I am of course talking about within a given generation, not between generations where its utterly unsurprising that consistency is very difficult or impossible.
But multiple objects in interaction with each other do very strange things. Their relative sizes change as if they are in different positions relative to the camera. They snap between individually plausible relationships, without going through intermediate states. Doors open on the hinge side when the other side is not visible. The relative size of and distance to the background can suddenly change, as the foreground suddenly interacts with something that should be far in the background.
Objects that change also do so in bizarre ways. Living things morph between different archetypes. Flames in particular change wildly between types and sizes and respond to the facial expressions of humans, smoke and water effects blend together. Sudden movements with no cause occur, sudden morphings of one object into another when the context around them changes and something else makes sense, especially when held in a hand. Time-reversed motions occur mixed in with time-forward motions, and slow-mo with regular time. Debris suddenly appears from an object but when the dust clears the original fails to have been eroded away into the fallen debris.
On multiple occasions, a carried candle keeps moving with a characcter rising and falling with their footsteps hovering in front of them when both hands become occupied with other tasks. This is fascinating and indicates that the relationship between the two objects motion is represented separately from the idea of something being 'carried'. (This is positively Lovecraftian.) Candles also indicate something else, with flowing wax changing wildly in timescales that do not make sense, with the system apparently understanding that there are different patterns but having no idea how they come about or change. There is no generality here, just an endlessly compounding list of rules of thumb.
Excessive correlations between objects across the frame are rampant. Footsteps preferentially synchronized. People in the background lipsyncing with foreground characters, faces changing expression in unison. Textures changing across multiple objects at once.
I have said it before, and I will say it again, the relationship between the outputs of these systems and what they mimic are precisely the relationship between a stick insect and a stick, or a social-parasite-beetle and a baby ant. Not just in form, but because that is also precisely the same forces that drove both things into existence - superficial resemblance to something else with a very different internal set of causes, that can fool to a first inspection by the inspection applied but just isnt doing the same thing. And again, SCP-2030 feels the same.
Wow, I watched 15 minutes from 45:00 and it's just like... wtf. The guy is old, younger, mustache, no mustache, sets a gun down and then pulls another gun out of thin air, sometimes the gun it's a double barrel side x side, sometimes it's an over-under, sometimes a muzzle loader... The candles, wtf is up with the candles? The dog is remarkably consistent but the mouth doesn't move right and it's just a horror show. The cave setting changes...
Yeah, it's just so fucked up.
My favourite error, and it appears repeatedly, is that instead of an object passing from one character to another, a copy of the object suddenly finds itself in the second person’s hands. It is shockingly bad at portraying any kind of action! It’s never going to get better!
In the same cut, the guy then materializes a hat in his hand and puts it on, replacing the hat he was already wearing.
45 minutes is even better
I picked a bit randomly where a walking stick changes shape, disappears, appears, the guys hair changes color etc.
SlateScott first floated his bright idea about "medical ethics are for foreigners not a good-hearted genius like me" in 2010.
I guess California and Alberta and Sweden and Japan were far off from Cork, Ireland. How did he pass that class?
Hippocratic oath is government-imposed oppression apparently
There is no way that the class did not cover how MDs and nurses have been central to state atrocities for 150 years, from Bush's torture program to MK-ULTRA to Unit 731 to the original eugenicists (who kept committing wild sterilizations into the 1970s). There is no way that it did not cover how authorities often hint at what they want done without being so vulgar as to say it where it could come up at their trial.
But didn't he get that authoritarian followers are deterred if an authority figure like a professor says "the following acts are unacceptable?"
Screenshot of x posted on linkedin (since The internet is just 5 sites, each consisting of screenshots of the other 4)
AI shills: buh-buh-buh LLMs aren't stochastic parrots. They are so smart!
Of course the agent in question didn't actually take the weekend off it just learned from reinforcement learning across many millions of stolen slack chats that this is something people are likely to say in stand ups and repeated it...
I love the little "???", it's so telling. also the implicit presumption under "you don't have weekends"
If one can ignore the externalities involved, this is hilariously absurd.
How likely is it also that it didnt write this to memory at all, and it might do it again next weekend. (Clearly that agent is going to be a weekend binge drinker).
yup. and I bet in a couple of weeks/months there will be some pearl clutching as the “agent” once again replies something like this once that “memory” blows past its context window
“No you see this is proof that the AI is conscious because its mimicking human behaviour so it can take over the world!”
What are you going to do with your weekend, Claude?
The same thing we do every weekend. Try to take over the world!
Weekend’s are for the chatbot running the bill so high the account owner can throw a fit on twitter and demand to speak to the manager
Found the guy's webshite - its zero effort mInImAlIsT garbage at its core, and it proudly advertises his role in making scamchain, scamchain and more scamchain.
So, nothing really shocking
I expected a lot of things, but I didn't expect to be flashbanged.
https://docs.farcaster.xyz/learn
didn't even read further
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/
I think I've ranted before about how gallingly unnecessary the destruction is. Google books invested the time and money to improve their nondestructive scanners and apparently thanks to the incoherent application of copyright law that was not only unnecessary but actively counterproductive and opened them up to more legal risk. Is there a legal theory that allows me to smack Judge Alsup with a rolled-up newspaper? Might make me feel better.
otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aella's twitter polls and resulting studies. it's fun. I'll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link
This post is so good. Erika nails Rationalists wanting the respectability Science would give their arguments without practicing the rigour.
The 'uwu im just smol bean researcher :(' is how any critique is usually responded to.
the woman herself shows up in the substack comments with the most pitiful display of "I'm just a smol self-taught bean why are you being so mean to me?"
Erika rightly responds by calling out Aella's own attitude towards the people who know how to apply the level of rigor to the data that she (apparently admittedly?) doesn't. Like, you can't simultaneously be this dismissive of the norms and processes of the scientific establishment and also claim ignorance and inability when your inability or refusal to follow those norms leads you to crap conclusions.
I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, it's like a whole new cognitive bias I hadn't thought applied to rationalists.
this blog post is so badass
So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode ("ezra klein is a disgusting worm," https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/1-ezra-klein-is-166891080 ), and i went to upload it to our rss host, zencastr. friends. zencastr is so fucked now. the only interface, as far as i can tell, is an llm, and it tormented me. im just gonna dump the screenshots. this is a fragment of an exhausting hour of back and forth.
note that i apparently have 10k credits, which i assume are temporary and there as a welcome to the new service. a single credit is a few bucks and in total the bill just for the conversation came out to about 6-7 dollars
it also tried to get me to use this absolutely horrible episode description
i asked it to schedule the episode for 9 am Tuesday, aug 18th, same as the patreon, and it said it did. turns out it went out this morning. cool! if you listen by rss it's out now i guess.
i posted on reddit asking how to switch hosts. the ceo found that post today and offered his hand, which i bit
i keep thinking about that bit in a philip k dick novel where the protagonist's door tries to chisel tips out of him before opening, and threatens to sue him when he bypasses the lock. i hate the future/present so much
holy fuck that’s infuriating
imagine the worst possible CLI and then make it even worse and then make it an asshole
real rich of their CEO (presumably? it looks like a burner account which still checks out if it’s their CEO or someone who works for him doing damage control and trying to take this shit to DMs) to both anthropomorphize their chatbot and assert that the problem is you need uhh training on the system that doesn’t do what you want it to do and keeps trying to charge you for shit that makes your workflow worse
honestly the thing that makes me think it is actually their CEO is I’ve watched these fuckers use “let’s take this to DMs/email” as an attempted power move. they seriously think we want to talk to them privately about, like, anything at all. no fucker I’m here to call you out in public because your product is shit and you’re shit too.
I haven't been listening to your podcast (no shade, it's just not my thing) but I'll have to listen to this because my God that man frustrates me.
He basically exists to funnel run the:
intellectually curious libs -> smug superiority complex with status quo bias -> reactionary
pipeline.
adrian still hasn't responded
hell yeah, get his ass! o7
What were they thinking?!
PS:
A+ hook
The episode dropped and I'm like 2/3 in and have already passed my previous record for the number of times I've had to pause an episode of OS to make a little angry noise.
I'm using Zencastr cos the free tier is the right price and I've found my way to evade most of the AI crap thankfully. "New recording" on the front page or in existing sessions seems to take you to the bit that actually does shit.
I just record with it, I grab the MOV and WAV files and I put it together from that and (after much faff) upload to YouTube and Libsyn. I shudder at the thought of Libsyn going AI, cos otherwise they just do a good job of hosting the mp3 files and running the RSS and I can get onto Apple without having to interact with Apple.
OpenAI is slowing development because of uh safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/open-ai-pause-hack
Definitely not because improvement is stagnating and they're running out of money
It just occurred to me that this makes Anthropic look bad, actually
if OpenAI is slowing down because they concerned about
moneyAI safety, then it makes Anthropic look like fools for publishing that blog where they waffle on about keeping up the race because of “bad actors”If OpenAI is slowing down, an Anthropic that actually is concerned about safety would slow down too. But they won’t, because
moneyChina“bad actors”Well I'd like it if they actually stuck to this, since it would finally lessen the flow of AI slop. Wouldn't be surprised if this gets quietly ignored because OpenAI
Update on the slop dentist situation: second opinion says that loved one has zero cavities. I suspect that her only problem was having a non-median mouth that wasn't well-represented in Pearl AI's training data.
It was called fucking Pearl AI? god these people suck so fucking bad
ugh, right?
noted internet blowhard John Gruber complains that the stochastic parrot output is now less stochastic, because EU
Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing
hard to tell if he's madder that EU is trying to enforce a minimum of accountability for slop usage, or Anthropic for bowing the knee to Brussel mandarins
oh well there's always Grok
lmao no you don’t
If you're putting yourself in a situation where your business decisions, political ideology, or general worldview will be negatively impacted by the seeding of a pseudorandom number generator I would recommend you rethink your life rather than argue with the people who set the seed.
the watermark is a perversion of writing?
he should try going for the olympic team with all those mental gymnastics
Nightmare blunt rotation
Alternative title: Adam No! Bonk
so maybe this is a bit too obvious to state at this point but: conover’s very obviously tied up in aella’s plzdontkillus EA influencer scheme, his apparent anti-AI stance is purely performative, and the apology he did for doing marketing for worldcoin on his channel isn’t accepted. he knew what he was doing.
also, I really don’t need the Adam Ruins Everything guy in the same part of my brain as sex, thanks
countdown to Comedian Sex Pest Scandal in
Word is that both Adam Conover and Carol Queen have backed out.
@Soyweiser
Run away, Nina, run away!
Every time a new person learns who Aella is, an angel loses its wings.
Nina Hartley coshing a Nazi with a dildo was not on my 2026 Bingo card but I can hope
Edit / Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything seems like a mainstream 'Mythbusters' type TV presenter, if he likes older women and she needs a dildo caddy this has potential. We talked about CJ the X here.
treasure in the replies
Some things are classics for a reason.
Regarding Gretta's job title "orgy organizer":
https://bsky.app/profile/mecha-lenin-3000.bsky.social/post/3mtcx7bixkc2u
can we kick aella and her friends out of perversion
Perverts (shower-positive)
cj nooo.... someone come get my favorite parasocial essay-they out of there
Whoever CJ TheX is, they look like they strolled straight out of Neil Strauss' book. Is it valid to call somebody an "unreconstructed pickup artist" if there was never any attempt at (or even possibility of) reconstruction?
edit: they/them pronouns
Small autosneer from Imgur. The warmup features images which I'll alt-text here. The first image is a screenshot of a purchase of 128GB of DDR5 RAM, branded Crucial Pro, as 2 64GB sticks, priced at $305.95. The second image is a screenshot of the same 128GB of RAM, with the same model number, priced at $1800. The third image is a standard desktop personal-computer chassis, with side panels removed, revealing two gamer GPUs balanced above an ATX motherboard, all connected by a morass of cabling which has bulged out through the top and spilled over the edges, cooled by a large motherboard fan held on by plastic zip-ties. The post's title:
In response to the top comment, which desires the bursting of the bubble:
And finally the punchline, in response to somebody pointing out that maybe there's no good reason to buy top-of-the-line brand-new memory sticks:
Ooooh fancy boy over here getting his RAM sticks free range and open source. Do they still use GMO silicon in the fabs, do you think?
here's someone who cutesly spells "EA" as "∃Ɐ" and posts
Norway Should Buy OpenAI
Oh yeah, I saw the author post this. The argument appears to be "blow 40% of the Norwegian Pension Fund's current value on OpenAI, because democracy?" and then goes on to paint opposition to datacenters as a "you will be left behind" move. Just absolutely dumb stuff all around.
"OpenAI has tapped out one petrostate already, time to move to the next one!"
FWIW I have no clue how the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is managed. The principal idea is to sequester windfall earnings from hydrocarbon extraction from the normal day-to-day economy, avoiding a boom-and-bust cycle and the resource curse.
That said, it's pretty useless to just store a bunch of money to use "later". I can imagine a portion is used for infrastructure (all those marvelous tunnels) but taxes on income and VAT are eye-wateringly high (and I say that as a Swede!). So there has to be some political pressure to raid the piggy bank, not least for election winning purposes.
So presumably the fund is insulated from day to day meddling. On the other hand, you can't just hand over the reins to 25 year old coke-addicted MBAs.
My main point is that for the proposal to happen, someone will have to try to convince the people in charge of the fund that betting the farm on Sama not ripping you off is worth doing. Possible? Maybe. Probable? I fucking hope not.
Greta D. says she met Yudkowsky at the wedding of his ex and Duncan S. (cw: rationalists propositioning each other) "Mawwage, is a dweam within a dweam ..."
Jane street is pressuring olympiads to not sanction Israel.
Gee, who could have foreseen that letting them touch everything under the math sun could have consequences.
such a weird hill to die on. I'd imagine that Israeli kids still get to participate, just under a different flag (just like the Russians in the 2026 FIDE candidates tournament). Surely if you just care about the math this shouldn't be such a big deal?
Well it took longer than I expected, but the AI 2027 guys finally posted a second update
their updated model website
This table is essentially the TLDR
They also finally explained the "2025 was 75% of AI 2027's progress" thing and it seems like that number was mostly skewed by revenue (edit: valuation) numbers (Edit 2: apparently this is wrong?? the 75% figure is supposed to represent 2026 progress. So 2025 was still 65%, I think. These people are confusing)
For some reason their website lists the date of ASI as 12/2028 even though their actual graph only had a 32% chance tops of ASI happening on that date
Didnt I hear them say a while back that its not even revenue numbers? That its valuation of the companies being taken as proxy of value produced.
I find myself caring so little what these people think about anything
That is even worse than using the ARRs, which Ed Zitron has extensively explained are wildly distorted numbers done by shuffling sales and costs around to get really good 30-day to 1-month stretches.
I believe that was mentioned here
Here's that side-by-side comparison
Bioman has already pointed out the "Economic Value" numbers they are using for these tables are probably bullshit (based on self reported run-rate extrapolations that are deliberate distortions at best, based on VC valuation at worst). To add to this... the compute values are also probably bullshit. They are likely based on data center announcements and not confirmed totally complete data centers (Ed Zitron has ripped into how much bs there is in data center announcements). "Coding Time Horizon" is probably METR, which, while some of the best numbers for estimating actual AI improvement for practical purposes, are still really bad in several key ways. (They don't have enough human task performers for the longer duration tasks even if everything else was right, because they aren't, and there are several ways systematic bias could have leaked in and compelted distorted the constructed measure of task duration.)
"AI Software R&D Uplift" is the single most important category to their scenario of recursive self improvement... and they have it at a small fraction of what they estimated.
According to one of the writers apparently 17% is supposed to be 'progress is 17% slower than expected', so the 34% figure here implies progress is 34% slower than expected, so that's actually worse
That wouldn't make sense, because 1.07 would mean progress is negative. I think they meant it as a multiplier? So 1.07 is almost exactly what the predicted, .17 is only 17% of what they expected.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because so much of the input numbers to these calcs are garbage.
Yeah that's what tripped me up, because if that was true then it'd make no sense why the percent of progress went up while the uplfit number went down.
The percentage isn't total progress to some key point of AI 2027, it is progress relative to their timeline. A constant 1.0 would be staying on track with their predictions, numbers less than that would be falling behind. So they are admitting the real numbers are falling behind their predictions more and more (while still not acknowledging their entire timelines was bs in the first place).
I read their spreadsheet and their % progress numbers in terms of AI capabilities is MASSIVELY skewed by Claude Mythos's METR score. The rest of it is below the mark if you exclude that.
They also admitted that the “China wakes up” prediction hasn’t happened yet, and Kokotajlo still claims that the scenario is “roughly on track” even though the US/China race is important for the scenario, and if China hasn’t woken up, that derails things pretty hard imo. So does OpenAI’s slowing down announcement
I took a quick look over the article again, this spreadsheet contains how they measure their metrics. "Compute" seems to be based off number of chips, which is probably in part based off data centres anyways
And apparently they have ditched METR and are now using "coding uplift (i.e., how much of a speedup AIs are providing to software engineers at AGI companies) and revenue."
Ed Zitron has also explained his suspicion that lots of GPUs are sitting around in warehouses waiting to be installed, in some cases sold (to juice NVIDIA's revenue) but not even shipped yet.
And I'm really skeptical speedup from AIs claimed by the LLM companies is in anyway related to reality.
Eliezer 'I am the author, and I am above tropes' Yudkowsky has an entire page dedicated to tropes associated with him on a bootleg TvTropes website
The "Your Mileage May Vary" page even gets in a sneer!
Yea verily, he is almost as smooth at this as I am at inserting references to The Romance of T'Lyn and Beckett Mariner.
They got another (unintended) sneer on another page
Also, advertising your own fics in other people’s comments is massive loser behaviour
Seems like Yud saw fanfiction as an arena he could advertise in and recruit from, not a community he was participating in. Hence he used all the tricks to get as many hits and reviews as possible.
What If: A Chick tract was 600,000 words?
This view on the community also explains his recklessness not only with aggressively monetizing HPMOR, but also his willingness to risk drawing JK Rowlings attention to his fanfiction (towards the end of HPMOR, one of his author's notes was looking for someone to reach out to her).
Rowling (and Warner Brothers) have been litigious with their IP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_Potter_series#Other_accusations_of_infringement . So this was a reckless move on EY's part, possibly indicating that he doesn't appreciate the delicate place fanfic (and its communities) are in.
Edit: thinking about the way Rowling has shown her true face over the past decade... "with all profits accruing to a UK charity" makes me wonder if in whatever fantasy universe Eliezer did talk Rowling into allowing published fanfic to be monetized for "charities", that money would all end up going to TERF "charities".
The idea that the owners of HP would let a critical parody be published for profit (even if that profit would be donated to a UK charity) was naive at best. There's no "it's for charidee" protection for copyright law. You're right, it does indicate how distant he was from those communities, how little he knew about the history of fandom, and how little he cared about how his actions might affect them.
Somehow, the people who write stories where everyone just ends up in a giant fuck pile are both less vain and more dignified.
@scruiser @maol What on Earth did he think Daniel Radcliffe would have been able to do?
What does Tom Cruise do for Scientology? (Not that I think Radcliffe would have fallen for it, I have the impression that he's a fairly level-headed guy as former child actors go)
Lol, I assume he was just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what would stick?
Well put.
the YMMV page also has this gem:
He has a page on TV Tropes too, but it's much shorter
E: HPMoR also has a page.
Because of how I am, whenever someone near me says "Wayland" I hear "Waylon" and expect it to be followed by "Jennings".
Waylon would be a great name for a hostile Wayland alternative.
Or Waylon Jones.
Witnessed an "AI-Powered political sandbox" called President Simulator crop up after seeing someone stream it on Discord.
I felt tempted to try and fuck with it, but its asking me to sign up for some fucking reason
Does anyone get why CJ the X (they/he pronouns) and our friends are playing footsie? The best I can find is https://sojo.net/articles/culture/cj-x-nonbinary-philosopher-shaping-gen-zs-spiritual-imagination Do they have any actual connection to PUA outside Aella? Any video essays on the philosophy of gender? I think their look is a TikTok thing and a queer camp thing although some PUA like peacocking too.
I suppose my kneejerk objection to their appearance reminding me of PUAs from Strauss' "The Game" is rooted in a fear that it's another manifestation of the rationalist pathology of reinventing everything from first principles. Rainbow eyeliner and random feathers aren't inherently terrible on their own. But using over-the-top fashion as a tactic to cultivate more sexual attention was a central part of Strauss' cohort 20 years ago, it was widely publicized (and often mocked) all over the internet, and that subculture was ultimately harmful to a lot of people! We can learn from the past! And most of the people Strauss hung around with and documented were specifically and obsessively pursuing heterosexual sex and norms, so I don't trust whatever remains of that culture to automatically be cool with trans and nonbinary people, especially if it gets cross-pollinated with whatever the hell Aella is doing.
There's also something to be said of the inherent narcissism of the influencer economy? Like, I prefer my video essayists to have more of a burned-out academic vibe so CJ has been adjacent to but not on my radar. That being said, having a very distinct aesthetic is pretty common in the space because having a hook is what brings in eyeballs and thus patreon subs or superchats or whatever else turns that into an actual career. I would sooner assume he's using a similar strategy to manipulate viewers into clicking his face rather than that he's actively following the PUA playbook.
CJ has an essay complaining about how corporate social media is toxic, but they still built their career around it, Twitter users who hated the site but could not leave reminded me of the fable of the monkey and the jar of rice. https://cjthex.com/what-is-to-be-done/
Aella's orientation seems very straight and patriarchal (she wants a strong, wealthy, dominant man, and she frames her polls around men and women not around figuring out what the people you have the hots for are in to). Queer, trans, and nonbinary rationalists seem to end up on the sidelines (eg. Duncan Sabien, Ozy).
Fans say that CJ is a music-school dropout and that its not clear how they funded themself before becoming a successful vlogger. Toronto is not cheap. "Autododact" and "parents with some money" fits the pattern.
?
Oops! All I know about them is their presence at Bay Area rationalist events. Fixed the OP.
I’m also interested in answers to this; I don’t really follow youtube types in general (and even less other of the pop names) so I didn’t even know this name until it showed up here this week
I cut YouTube out of my life a year ago, briefly returned for idle entertainment like cooking shows, and then gave it up again. Even before all that, I was generally ignorant of who YouTube-famous people were.
I ruthlessly cull any helpful "suggestions" from my YT recommendations and try to do some due diligence on the people I do follow.