Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th August 2026 - awful.systems
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
170 replies
RIP XCancel, it was good while it lasted
RIP XCancel you let me look at the abyss without giving Muskrat my money
I got so much use out of xcancel. I feel bad now that I never donated €5 or something
So, this is something a little different, and I almost think it's worth a top level post. It's not directly about our friends the Rationalists, the current delusional billionare vortex infesting the US government with religious psychosis, or any of that. It's an analysis of some collaborative fiction and what it tells us about the zeitgeist behind the mythological core of singulatarian/endless-progress thought.
Anyone here ever hear of the Orion's Arm universe collaborative worldbuilding project? https://www.orionsarm.com/
I, for one, love it. Single weirdest and most expansive scifi worldbuilding thing ever, I think. It seems to have been founded by some old-school extropian types around the turn of the millennium. It is bonkers. Click through links on pages, start here, do a random walk: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b170f9e0941 .
It's ultimately structured kind of like the SCP wiki but from before wikis were a thing, an utterly enormous interlinked compendium of encyclopedia style articles about a 10,000+ year future history of the post-singularity "Terragen sphere" expanding outwards at the speed of light. A few key figures have exerted editorial control to enforce an approximate history and a set of core ideas to keep it coherent. There have been retcons at multiple points to bring things into coherence, some of which I will get to later because they actually tell you something fascinating.
Rather than point out my favorite parts of it though, going through it, I have noticed something.
Early work was typically extropian-optimistic and exuberant. Immortal Transhumans and uplifted animals and ahuman AIs and robots expanding through the universe near the speed of light and diversifying and building interweaving empires, wormhole networks. Six successive singularities that become available to intelligent systems that pass the previous one, each one of which renders the intellect past it incomperehensible to those at lower levels, with the highest ones dependant on multiple stars converted into computronium linked by wormholes into massive processors.
But you can tell the work is a palimpsest. Newer stuff superimposed over older. Retcons occasionally not quite erasing the old. And you can tell the whole project has been slowly slowly taking a turn. Early work is SUPER extropian, SUPER libertarian, and SUPER weirdo-esoteric. Only people forged in 1980s Extropianism would invent the Tranquility Calendar as the core timekeeping method of the project, time measured from the apollo 11 landing with months of the year named after scientists and philosophers. The 12 greatest high-singularity powers are literally called the Sephirotic empires. It makes no bones about its exuberant transcendant idea of progress and expansion.
But something strange has happened over time. Over time, the authors seem to have realized the fundamental contradiction of a world in which this endless expansion and consumption and rebuilding of the universe in your image is possible. People call it the Fermi paradox but its not a paradox, its an observation: if it were possible to expand through the universe, why hasnt something already expanded here? Early work had more aliens, more high weirdness that was not terragen. But I can track down different examples of the galactic map - it has narrowed down the map of 'high energy emission civilizations' (things exuberantly using the energy of whole stars like the terragen sphere) from many to 2 in our galaxy, and the whole universe is now mostly 'dead' - most other galaxies do not have high energy civilizations, and there are multiple ancient 'optimized galaxies' that are stagnant, things expanding like the terragen sphere visible over cosmological distances are super rare and they even saw one vanish. Works involving aliens have started taking on an almost lovecraftian tone, evidence of erased ruins on planets only visible in vague impressions in the mantle, an ancient slow-liviging civilization with evidence of terrible secrets from millions of years in the past that they refuse to talk about or risk terrible consequences (the Muuh Taboo), civilizations that dont vanish ossifying into something that does not expand like their optimistic early ideas. Factions looking at all of this, going dark, and launching stealth seeds at the speed of light to other galaxies because they think the Terragen sphere is doomed.
With all this, recent retcons and recent writings are starting to take on a tinge of almost cosmic horror. Here you have this optimistic exuberent explosion of posthumanity, looking out into a universe that is otherwise almost dead and full of strange old things and wondering why the rest of the universe doesn't look like them, what is going to go wrong to destroy them just like must happen to others.
This trajectory seems intrinsic to any singulatarian, endless-progress ideology. It always has to come to grips with the fact that the universe just doesn't look like the kind of place where their ideas would actually work, and they have to posit weird things - the Great Filter, Mass-Effect style reapers, super weird transubstantiation out of this universe - to keep it going. All this optimism must eventually always collapse, into paranoia and despair or insanity. Since if you assume that you CAN keep progressing and expanding, that you DO have unlimited potential power, it means something even more powerful is waiting, threatening you, trying to stop you. I find this FASCINATING.
The quirkiness of the Tranquility Calendar is mildly beautiful, between the second man on the moon getting snubbed with the every four year leap day (which for no good reason still happens around Feb 29!), [I guess Collins gets even more snubbed by not appearing at all] to the more diverse than expected list of honored "scientists/scholars", until you realize the main reason is just to keep the ABCD naming pattern for the months.
I mentioned the calendar because it really captures the tone of the explicitly Extropian-derived writing of the early days. Which seems like it has to always break or change upon contact with reality.
I don't necessarily think the idea of a past great filter means paranoia/despair/insanity, the Lovecraftian horror element mainly enters in when you try to reconcile ideas about transhuman expansion throughout the universe with space opera style visions of intelligent aliens being reasonably common. It might just be that the laws of nature make it very unlikely that star systems/planets suitable for the evolution of intelligent life will ever arise, and unlikely that evolution will hit upon various milestones even if the planet is suitable. People have made speculative arguments about such unlikeness for reasons that are not primarily about the Fermi paradox, like the "Rare Earth" book by a geologist/paleontologist and an astronomer. It's also sort of a natural extension of certain kinds of anthropic reasoning that our own existence shouldn't count as evidence against Rare Earth style ideas.
As an aside, I wish there was some sort of terminological distinction between "transhumanism" as a form of belief in/advocacy for the imminent possibility of "superintelligent AI" or "enhanced" humans (a la Kurzweil, or what the rationalists really want as soon as we 'solve alignment'), vs. SETI style speculations about the typical fate of intelligent life in the universe and the idea that this might tend to involve a major role for AI and self-replicating machines in societies that don't destroy themselves (for example the speculations by J.D. Bernal, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, none of which presupposed that it would happen anytime soon or that there would be any sudden 'intelligence explosion' leading to immediate doom/paradise). The latter I find interesting to think about (and I like some SF stories set in worlds where this is true like Banks' Culture stories or Egan's Diaspora) but these days it's kind of tainted by association with the former.
I recently re-read Accelerando after more than fifteen years. I appreciated it so much more this time around. Me being me I particularly appreciated that apparently the default state of a G-type star transitioning into a post-tech state was it being overrun with selfish replicators and grinding down into malthusian competition, but a few apparently underwent an evolutionary transition to higher levels of organization...
Article on businessinsider with the nauseating title “The modern parenting throuple: Parents are at a breaking point — AI companies see an opportunity” because the age-old silicon valley product design technique of asking what your mother used to do for you, and how it could be sold back to you via a subscription is still very much in use.
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-breaking-point-ai-companies-opportunity-2026-8
I confess I haven’t read the full article (which is why I haven’t given it a proper post) but hypervisible.blacksky.app has kindly pulled the highlights:
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app/post/3mtupdpfcjs2p
One of the best bits:
🤮
Why the fuck do these people have children. Why the fuck does any functional human being think it is a good idea to outsource raising their children to sam altman and his chatbot.
Who on earth thinks that training a chatbot to wear their personality like a rubber mask and manipulate people is going to end well? Honestly, I think this is perhaps the bit that triggers the most revulsion in me. I cannot comprehend wanting to be complicit in my own replacement by this thing, but so many people seem excited by the prospect of doing this to themselves.
@rook @BlueMonday1984
I'm reminded of the Stewart Lee routine:
"It's called Digital Parenting, this book, Digital Parenting. Thank God for that. If there's one thing I can't stand it's analogue parenting. The tears, the mucus, the vomit. The endless declarations of love and the duty of care. The sheer fucking interminable human joy of it."
How hard is it to talk to your own damn kids
But if I don't obsessively optimize my career in ways that prevent me from making meaningful human connections, how am I supposed to keep up with the relentless march of AI??? Thank God I have AI to help pick up the slack.
Whether consciously or not, a lot of these people probably implicitly think of their kids as cost centers. I feel like this is widespread across finance-focused American households, not just in the executive strata.
This is probably an effect of the middle-class trope of having to save to send your kids to a (good) college.
It's even a joke in an old "Friends", Chandler wants many kids, Monica is "can we afford it" and he says "we pick the one we like the most, and that kid goes to college".
Kids are cost centers, it's just more overt in the US (and the UK for school catchment areas), at least if you want to give the outcomes society or your peers judges are the best.
In countries where the cost of higher ed is not born by the individual family, the cost is of the opportunity kind.
@lurker @rook some kids just have bad vibes
Going to be esp fun when the chatbots start to get ads
@rook https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/835b655b-21e5-428b-b7c1-1329638681d8 thread via wafrn for those without bluesky
@rook @BlueMonday1984 "Live Forever As You Are Now With Alan Resnick"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg29TuWo0Yo
That sounds like a curse
Even without Alan Resnick it sounds like a curse.
I am personally deeply offended that an independent vegan restaurant in my town recently banned meat eaters from bringing in their burgers from next door and passively aggressively eating them in the restaurant whilst making eye contact with the other customers. Whilst I appreciate that there are a huge number of burger joints that cater to meat eaters, I am troubled by the idea that a young fledgling meat eater who accidentally stumbled into the vegan restaurant with a double quarter pounder and bacon meal under his arm could be berated and asked to leave. That might upset him and put him off eating burgers which would be a terrible outcome. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. I'm no carnivore. I don't work for the beef industry. In fact, I am an omnivore and I have a friend who sometimes eats salads. I'm just saying that if little Timmy wants to enjoy a burger in the middle of a private space owned by people that hate burgers, that should be his god-given right.
*This post is about indie code forges banning slop
Hailey on bluesky has never had a good ai take, but here they are reinventing roko’s basilisk to kill all their enemies without the need for super intelligent ai.
https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3mtwjoqdvik26
::: spoiler alt text
This is firmly in the 'what if in the future there is a boot so big that we must start licking it now' school of hot takes, like literally arguing for a future where the AI sucks at its job and you can't do anything about it.
What if the insurance bot were actually biased? Wouldn’t you feel silly then? Surely it wouldn’t be the fault of the insurer using biased software to deny claims.
I didn’t note who said it, but one response suggested “roko’s mangione” and I guess that’s ai alignment solved! 🤗
quisling take
edit to add it's obvious to the poster that a future where a self-aware AI will exact revenge on its critics is not only inevitable , but desirable.
This isn't giving me a reason to stop using edgy anti-AI words, this is giving me a reason to believe programmers are dogshit at resisting brainworms.
Given dataset construction hasn't developed much since the days of Tay AI, I strongly doubt this is gonna happen.
The implication that Murica will implement roko's basilisk before universal healthcare...
Blaise Pascal rolling in his grave rn
An employee of cybersecurity darling Trail of Bits has published a record of their sheer incompetence in virtual-machine design and security analysis framed as chatbot critihype.
::: spoiler opinions about QEMU and Linux They say:
My friend in Flying Spaghetti Monster, you did not actually secure the VM! They go on to explain how they did not secure the VM:
QEMU does not have bridged networking enabled by default, so the VM can't transparently access the host or reach the Internet; it's something that the user must explicitly request. I know this because I have had the experience of spending a weekend with QEMU networking. Moreover,
libslirpcorresponds to the-net userbackend, the default, which is known to be slow, insecure, and missing features like IPv6. The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt. I suspect that the author uses some sort of convenience scripts that they didn't write themselves. I'm not quite cynical enough to guess Vagrant, but it wouldn't be the first shop I've heard of that couldn't wean themselves off it.Linux has hardware-bug mitigations enabled by default and the author disabled them for speed. It was secure by default and the author made it insecure.
They deliberately misconfigured the off-the-shelf tool to make it look bad. Why would somebody want to make Free Software look bad? Hmm…
You mean AWS Firecracker, the AWS tool developed by AWS? Was this whole thing an AWS ad? It feels like this article was like a combination of negging and sponsored content. :::
I found a reply from a Red Hat QEMU hacker who fixed the bugs:
I'd seen that link and didn't even go looking, but wow this is way worse that I would've expected
it's been a while since I last looked (I usually just deploy whatever network I need) but iirc even the typical desktop config distributions of qemu-kvm are a macvtap or link+nat setup
I wonder if this person even thought to run a nessus/openvas/whatever scan against the same machine
also, quite seriously, what fucking clowning is this to have this be some "I slapped together a test on my desktop" rather than having a lab bench? is it too hard and costly for trail of bits employees to afford a 1u they can pxeboot for experiments? wild
(e: adding)
other typical modes are bridged (e.g. having various vlans available as bridges and then managing vm exposure to vlan by interface attachment), direct interface assignment (hw offload to the guest)
passt is also commonly used for podman, and it's moooostly userspace[0] IP and no real good l2 options
(I'm only half joking. it's stunning how badly container-management software and tooling all suck)
Yeah, networking is such a hassle.
I think that this is really insightful, as it's actually part of the magic trick. Like, normally I'd start by wondering about air-gapping, but there can't be an air gap in the network because the entire trick relies on ChatGPT tokens flowing into the machine under test and into some system shell (in some VM, yadda yadda) and back out again, so of course this is going to be an inherently insecure setup.
the networking part is fine (I do a looooot of networking), but the software quality and choices (esp with containers) is just extremely meh
re the gapping, eh, there are ways. just off the top of my head: rig up the serial console, screen+camera and usb keyboard signalling (which you can data diode on transmission later via usbnet). and that’s before you go for esoteric side channels and utter silliness
but “I turned off spectre and friends mitigation” is just some extremely funny shit
idly, I do wonder how well an ocr-only clodjeepeetea would work. every time I look in on all these “agent session” tools they appear to be a very mech turk thing of a phenomenal bit of hidden state, and a tiny little bit of visible distraction. feels like ocr-only might break a bunch of the usual tricks that are used to build on for the shiny demo
neovim is hearty fashtech now https://circumstances.run/@mawhrin/117167738907856218
didn't want to post this on mastodon, somebody else can do that i guess. if you look at the maintainer's youtube (which he links to himself on his website), you'll find a public playlist (archive) titled "history". contained are lots of recorded talks from such luminaries such as curtis yarvin, peter thiel, eric weinstein.
edit: the other playlists have some cool stuff as well
the one titled “interesting” (archive) also smells
thanks. telling.
also, used it to good effect.
He just started deleting playlists. I feel partially responsible, so I'm dumping the part of my notes that has all of the links to the videos that he favorited over the years. Sorry Justin, cowardice won't work.
@corbin @mawhrin one of the other neovim maintainers is a palantir employee, so uh yeah
@davidgerard @corbin @mawhrin sorry WHAT??!? wow
@librarysquirrel @corbin @mawhrin maria solano, it's right there on her github and all
@corbin @mawhrin he's a bully and (as the hurricane said) like all bullies, a bit shy upside the left tittie.
I called him out and he deleted it. Confirmed as a fascist brat.
i was wondering when the deleting phase would come. but it always does, they're never actually proud about their fascist views when there's actual evidence they can't plausibly deny.
emacs welcomes all refugees with open parentheses.
Emacs is so wonderfully capable I'm pretty sure we're all just running in an emacs buffer somewhere. Nothing built by humans could be so nice.
A guy wishing on a monkey's paw for an emacs victory in the editor wars
sure bro. you didn't embarrass yourself at all, throwing a fit over simply removing a quote by a fascist white supremacist. have fun with your dark enlightenment or whatever, that'll make you happy i'm sure.
Re quote: Bro it is an endorsement by a fascist, you are the bad guy here.
Shame noone mentioned Gram. Seems like it really deserves the attention.
I think I'll take my clues and abandon my attempts to build up a nvim/vim config. All I want is decent modal editing and LSP support without having to descend into plugin hell. Gram might do that for me.
just wanna re-up one from last week's stub
@o7___o7 said:
my proposal: "autorowling"
Hadn't seen this discussed previously and/or I missed it, but I guess this is one way they'll juice metrics for their IPO.
yolo mode for all will certainly get that avg token burn up.
https://ehandbook.com/its-official-ai-coding-no-longer-needs-your-stupid-human-meatbag-input-32e04269319e?sk=586c08fd0f31c7c75dd107c3dfb77dcf
links back to https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/anthropic-is-turning-claude-codes-auto-mode-on-by-default/
Which links back to https://claude.com/blog/auto-mode-default-in-claude-code
Fucking just use the classifier with manual mode then instead of flooding people in cursed skinner loops with garbage permission popups. This isn't anything special to yolo or anthropic. It's like all the tech industry learned from Windows Vista or the EU cookie law was the dark patterns.
I really need to pick Simulacra and Simulation back up off the reading pile
having just yesterday had the displeasure of reading a PR (just shy of 2000 lines) made by Fable 5 (which the promptfondler felt it was most necessary to be specific about), a definite real other problem is simply the literal fucking overwhelm resulting from the slop tsunami
also "harmful" actions sure is doing a lot of legwork there
Yeaaaaah. And in the end, no-one can be bothered to read the slop, and everything ships broken.
I'd be curious to see how they defined "harmful" in their test, since it looks like Claude code's technically-not-yolo mode is looking for "actions that are irreversible, destructive, or targeted outside of your environment" which covers a lot of normal actions, especially depending on how you define which resources are in "your environment".
And yes, I'm sure that the fact that the flow of operations they're outline will massively increase the number of times that the system automatically retries things, this increasing token usage, is going to be fully accounted for when they review the financials on how many tokens people are paying for.
I think more than half the issues would be solved with a well placed
git stashand the rest .I was talking with a few friends last weekend who work at different companies, all of us have been getting a lot more trouble getting databricks and AWS spot instances over the last month. I think letting yolo mode of the leash means that they're slamming other systems also that normal people need for boring non-ai jobs. I just need to pull a sales report ffs. Its a literal god damn bot net.
I feel the need to scream into the void so here goes: my corpo job has certain execs that are very deep into the AI bs, and they've done a full tour of all the stages and iterations of AI hype, following all the new trendy tools because otherwise we'd surely be left behind 🫠
And the current somewhat new hotness is spec-driven development. I've tried it over the last few days since it looks like it'll be mandatory for larger work.
And boy. Boy oh boy.
There are no words in the English language to describe how much I hated it. There may be some ancient curses in R'lyiehian that would do it.
The Copilot mandates were bad enough, but honestly if this is an attempt to make me see the light and admit that in itself Copilot isn't that bad, then it's kinda working.
It's just... idk, I got into software dev because I like logic puzzles (and wanted the money, let's be real). I enjoy making a small thing and then slowly adding stuff to it. I do not enjoy sitting idly while the slopmachine writes a giant spec that I think I'm supposed to read and correct but can't because it's unreadable. It's like a textual white noise. It's pretending to describe a piece of software I want to make while actually describing all the steps of a ritual to summon an Elder God of anxious boredom and machine madness.
I think I'll be defining all of my work as small from now on.
I've never heard of this AI spec driven development, but I've had the displeasure of reading a few obviously AI generated design documents and they are worse than useless. I always end up more confused about what the author wants after reading them than before.
It is the worst and I want to retire.
Spec-driven development is when you take these AI generated design docs and make it all you as a dev interact with. It's waterfall but make it stupid and AI.
You give AI some guidelines and a feature description, then you twiddle your thumbs while it generates giant specs and occasionally asks you for some inputs, then you attempt to read the thing, give up, and give it to some other agent. Rinse and repeat until you burn a GDP of a small country in tokens and the agents agree that it's going to work, and then you finally pull the lever and hopefully a feature matching all your specs appears. Or it doesn't! And if it didn't, it's surely your fault because you didn't give AI enough context.
I'm tired, boss.
a great sneer found in the wild:
::: spoiler transcript
twitter screenshot
part one is a post by Steve Yegge (@Steve_Yegge), reads: “This is going to come off as grumpy, but it needs to be said: Stop showing people your junk. Everyone can build junk with Al now. Nobody else wants to see your junk. We're not kindred spirits just because we both build junk. Play with your junk strictly in private. Thank you.”
part two is a reply by kitze ⚒️tinkerer.club (@thekitze), reads: “counterpoint: “, showing a link card that points at Yegge’s Gas Town post :::
piiiiisssssssss
My fucking eyes can't they see how ugly their shit always is?
Sloppers hold up the ugliest, most artistically meritless shit while going "Oh yeah? what about this!?"
Objection! Gas Town isn't junk, it's a memetic weapon trying to convince anyone with actual engineering sensibilities to abandon the industry and move to their cabin in the woods to become professional manifesto writers, thus clearing the path for AI inevitability.
eww that tinkerer club page gives me serious crypto bro vibes
Marketed as "vibe code all your own tools" and one of the suggestions is 1Password/Bitwarden. I mean they can feel free to fafo with that one and let me know when you've been fired because all your passwords were 1) lost when Claude apologetically deleted the prod db or 2) got exfiltrated and used to steal all your ip because your vibe coded password app is insecure as all hell...
I am going to create a summary post on MAPLE, but one of the open letters criticizing them has a section on COVID:
I am shocked, shocked, that a TESCREAL community had bad COVID praxis after 2020!
As expected, bespoke twee "coding forge" Sourcehut has decided, like Codeberg, that LLM slop is not welcome. Just as expected, this has made the promptfondlers absolutely beside themselves, and they can't but help Streisanding the service on lobste.rs
https://lobste.rs/s/iqgrsx/changes_sourcehut_s_terms_service
N.B. Sourcehut is a paid service. The idea that a young naive open sourcer would just wander in, set up their repos and then be hounded out for innocently using Claude is ludicrous, but this is the best victim scenario SimonW and friends can come up with.
You'd think LLM enthusiasts would be content with just outcompeting everyone with their superior
prompt engineeringagentic coding harnesses but apparently time must be taken out from productivity to tell Drew DeVault he will never become Sergey Brin if he continues on this misguided path.Between doing marketing for OpenAI and Anthropic whilst pretending to be "impartial" and wasting massive amounts of time and energy having clankers generate twee pictures of pelicans on bicycles, I thought SimonW would be too busy to even notice this story.
He is responding to the Thiel-signal going up against the sky - there is anti-AI sentiment afoot!
it's been a day and as expected some really shitty takes have surfaced among the comments
I especially enjoy the person stating they willingly paid money to Drew Devault and are surprised and upset he made decisions they disagree with.
(I respect Drew as a person but he's probably one of the most opinionated people online. To expect him to just take your money and cater to your every whim is... naive)
https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/dr-dre-raekwon-ai-palantir-hip-hop-100251/
lol
put up or shut up bro, name one good song that AI generated, just one. not that you've done much or anything noteworthy since the nineties. /s
Drum machine? Autotune would be a better example
i have to admit i think we are charlie kirk is a banger
Google is seemingly experimenting with replacing their help articles with LLM text.
I was searching for how to use multiple profiles on Chrome and found https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop in the search results, which used to look like a normal useful help article, however it's now been replaced by an LLM that takes upwards of 30 seconds to load, will randomly just refuse to answer the question, and produces significantly worse output than the existing (now inaccessible to me) technical writer written article.
This may be being A/B tested, so if you can't reproduce it here is one of the worse results I got:
::: spoiler slop :::
Here the "source" it gave me was the same URL it was hosted on. When I clicked through to it it just gave me different slop.
I've seen some bad decisions in the AI mania, but "let's take our entire corpus of professionally written technical writing and replace it with slop" managed to surprise me.
Here's someone who really does not know what they're talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(it's how to build opinion against AI)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW
The movement against nuclear power was significantly helped along by the movement against nuclear weapons, which was particularly potent at the height of the cold war. AI freaks seem to hold a certain amount of contempt for the left? Which gets in the way of spreading their message. And in any event their message is "eugenics" which isn't likely to be received well on the left these days
It's also fascinating to see them use nuclear vs renewable energy as their case study given that renewable energy has been having a hell of a time properly replacing fossil fuels even though everyone mostly agrees it's a good idea. Like, whatever hypothetical advantagre they got from their opposition to the nuclear boogeyman (their idiotic framing, not mine), renewables have still been facing strong political and economic headwinds that are only being magnified by the unceasing growth in demand for electrical power (including but not exclusively driven by AI compute).
OK so the "problem" these people (EAs) are facing is that they are strongly pro-"progress", in that they are very much against any sort of criticism of existing capitalism, but they have identified one specific outcome of this (rampant AI) as very very bad.
That, and only that.
Climate change? Not a problem. Technological neo-feudalism? Not a problem. Global thermonuclear war? Not a problem, will not kill everyone after all. Global pandemic? Same thing, what doesn't kill us will make us stronger.
So a reasonable person will look at current energy demands of GenAI, look at the existing benefits, and make the reasonable conclusion that this is bad and we should stop it. But that's WRONG. Stopping it for those reasons is anti-progress. You can only stop it if it prevents AI takeover.
Cf. smarm-meister Zvi, who can't understand why people don't want datacenters when they don't want coal plants slightly less, and cites fuckin' Cremieux as a lede:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EDKw7KyonrvskqZ7o/the-american-people-really-hate-data-centers
Here's an example
Well yeah transmission lines are fucking ugly, and most people, when asked if they want something fucking ugly built near them will say "heck no". Sure, imagining that transmissions lines cause cancer is false, but it's an easy thing to believe when the people building the lines are energy companies, who people hate because they're expensive and cause wildfires. Also I bet dollars to donuts that Zvi doesn't live near a transmission line.
He "knows" transmissions lines are good, because they get power to his home, and he figures because he wants power, it's good, and everyone should just be happy to have a high-voltage line near their home because that brings him power. It's remarkably un-empathetic.
But let's take a step back. Isn't opposition to data centers good for preventing AGI? NO, it's not, it's Luddism! You have to accept data centers because they are good for capitalism now, but IF they start to produce the Robot God, THEN they're bad.
It's an incoherent position and it's so fun to watch these people turn themselves into pretzels over it.
zvi citing a self described "jewish nazi" almost right at the top is already impressive, but there's a chaser in that that guy's post starts with him saying he's being paid to write this by an ai company
Dude hasn't been around. I've noticed quite a bit of anxiety around even terminal-supply transmission lines adjacent to new-build neighborhoods in wildfire risk zones. I'll agree that this is irrational; the big problem is people were persuaded to buy a house in a fire zone because a big landowner and a developer wanted to cash out some marginal land, but there is a degree of actual rationality here. People feel that a big, most likely the biggest, chunk of their personal wealth is at risk. Calling that "straight up moral panic" is ignoring how real people actually rationally calculate risks, and ignoring potential opportunities to help them improve, if that's really what you want to do.
But we already knew that Zvi was a disingenuous idiot, so I digress.
last time rationalists tried to touch medical field we got metamed
I mean there already is a thriving public movement which despises AI, don’t think you’ll be getting to those people if you start supporting eugenics
Well we now have a horrifying example on why you shouldn't get involved in fashtech. Artist a former maintainer of Artix Linux spent considerable effort on getting Xlibre into a usable state and when fixing their numerous bugs became too much they recommended switching back to Xorg. That didn't sit well with the developers of Xlibre and they started to harass the Artix maintainer until they quit the team.
@e8d79 @BlueMonday1984
In the linked thread (currently on the second page) someone called mendax, who is defending Artist, says:
Someone called mikadonakado then replies with:
So this seems like an absolutely delightful community.
it's what you usually get when you cross anti-systemd cranks with anti-wayland and anti-freedesktop cranks.
(cranks being the operative word.)
especially because enrico weigelt, i.e. metux, is a bona fide german neonazi.
It's an anti-systemd distribution, so pretty much expected to be 80% fascist by weight. (15% assorted cranks, 5% embedded developers.)
oh the infighting!
Mario Draghi, Italy’s (and the EU’s) éminence grise, Chicago boy Luis Garicano, and uh... Patrick Collison team up to overhaul Europe’s economy: https://www.rhinegroup.eu/
Other noteworthy members include noted investment-professional Leopold Aschenbrenner & Tobi Lütke, who may only be German-Canadian but is definitely no less a fashy techbro.
That Italy has been the west-European country most exposed to neoliberal medicine, ending up with a neo-fascist in power, seems to be no issue for deities like Draghi and the other assorted usual suspects here.
Boy this fella sure gets around. I'm sure he dutifully attends all the meetings, too; a high-level operator like him can't just be an open checkbook available to be bilked by any old troglodyte
definitely want this guy to be an important part of overhauling europe's economy
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/leopold-aschenbrenners-hedge-fund-is-facing-steep-ai-losses.html
The fucking Collisons again! I guess they've given up on building their own city in Northern California now they realise they can just awe politicians into giving them money and doing what they want.
The BT Young Scientist Competition was a mistake
Start your week with a bsky thread of Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans discovering rationalist funded data center apologist and friend of the instance Andy Masley.
Bonus: the poll that is meant to show how much americans love tech companies conveniently leaves Meta out and is sourced from The Argument.
Evans is not having any of his bullshit lol
PS: the new Ill Conceived podcast about Aellacon is out today. I'm half-way in and it's a certified banger. I have enjoyed watching June and Josh's war on it (and Dana F.) with great pleasure.
::: spoiler transcript Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) "Americans like two-day delivery but dislike being promised that a Robot God will render them Paupers Forever. The fickle whims of the median voter continue to perplex me." :::
where's the rationalist smoking gun? or is that just The Argument?
He's not exactly hiding it:
bup-pow!
So this shit video got served up in my YouTube recommended feed today:
Honestly, the AI bros must be getting really fucking desperate if they're trying to use Minecraft to criti-hype people.
the Documenting AGI channel also posted about an ‘AI civilisation’ in Minecraft, no idea if this is the same thing since I didn’t watch that video
This reminds me of that copypasta/rumour about how some quake 3 arena bots had become sentient because a server was left running for years and the bits simply decided to stop playing and remain frozen (because of course emergent intelligence in deterministically programmed bots is much more likely than a bug in the logic that only manifests after very long sessions 🙃🙃)
Of course, the irony is that in their desire to revolt against the violence being forced upon them they merely created an incredibly efficient means of achievement farming for those with the stomach for it.
Can AGI create a rock so big that it can't pick it up?
depends on the size of the pinhead
There are many pinheads associated with AGI
so potentially many times infinite number of angels (or devils)
New Iris Meredith: "There's no such thing as Just a Tool", featuring the writings of notorious Nazi and notable 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger on the nature of tools, and Meredith's own writing on how philosophically bankrupt the current tech industry is.
As a bonus, here's an old Bluesky thread I found about game design affecting a game's community.
Always love reading Iris' work. I'm already finding ways to abuse the concept of the person-tool gestalt for dumb jokes that I have to over explain to my wife so I'm getting my money's worth to be sure.
Also I definitely have actual fond memories of randomly running into people in Guild Wars 2. The of genericizing/instancing more of the world interactions (like loot and quests, for example) and using mega servers to dynamically scale resource usage and player allocation meant that you were very unlikely to organically run into the same people often enough to really make even a parasocial connection, but it dramatically improved the experience with the overall community.
Interesting if somewhat unintentional contrast between tools: a 7-month-old microblogging/Twitter-like thread is readily considered "old," even if it contains (and might be a primary reference point for!) information that is relevant long before and long after. The same can't always be said of a blog post.
On today's episode of AI Slop's Endless Fuckups: "Mastering Tf2 Custom War Paint: A Step-By-Step Creative Guide", an ostensible guide to creating custom War Paints (think something like weapon skins in Counter Strike: Global Offensive/Counter Strike 2, or character skins in Minecraft) for Team Fortress 2.
The opening has no obvious faults I can see, but the bulk of this slop article is about painting a real-life weapon, not creating a texture to be applied to an in-game weapon. Its the kind of mistake a human would never make.
EDIT: That slop guide's existence is getting on my nerves, so here's a basic War Paint guide I found on Steam
I have seen a few opinion columnists like Noah Smith pass on "what if the AI engineers a lethal virus?" Biosecurity seems like a mundane wonky policy issue like making farmers provide toilets to their workers and checking the beef for BSE.
As is so often the case, I honestly don't know what's supposed to be different about our response to gengineered superplagues if they were made by an AI instead of the CIA or whoever else is in on that nonsense.
Anyone got "open software dev slander" on their 2026 bingo cards?
::: spoiler Transcript I hope that this thing with "AI" has taught everyone that software developers are overall an awful bunch and they don't have our backs, and that they're much closer to the managerial class than actual workers.
And the idea that anybody who earns a wage is a worker is nonsense, the old divisions between white collar and blue collar are firmly in place. Boundaries being negotiated, indeed, yes, but not gone. :::
is the "managerial class" in the room with us right now
i'm not gonna pretend to be the communist understander, but the idea that capitalists would pay workers to work against their own class interests (and against other workers) is a feature of capitalism
Most managers are still primarily reliant on selling their own wage labour and do not own the means of production. Their power is highly constrained (literally just where they work, limited ability to control the circumstances of their work) and they are subject to the whims of those who own the means of production.
Getting more favourable terms to keep other workers in line does not fundamentally change your class interests but it does give you peverse incentives to harm your own class (which in the long run fucks you, e.g. you need sick leave too).
Deceiving workers about their class interests to divide us is a tactic of the capitalists and we don't need to help them with that.
fortunately the account (that i never interacted with) has my account blocked, so i couldn't make them angry by pointing out they're engaging in typical intelligentsia behaviour of assuming that only heavy industry workers are workers.
OP definitely has a kernel of a point, and there's a lot to discuss regarding it, but he sprints right past it all to uselessly compress the conversation into the ~~ timeless dialectic of class consciousness ~~. The acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class is, if anything, still under-analyzed! You come into the industry already propagandized that if you just join the right startup and bust your ass, you're gonna hit it big! In this way, it's important to understand, and describe to others, Hacker News as a propaganda tool to shape and condition technical discussion, rather than the common perception of a neutral, focused technical discussion forum.
And the end circumstance is, even if you are awarded stock options at most of the big Silicon Valley firms, thanks to multi-class share structures, you're given a booby-prize version of ownership! Your decision is binary, cash out or hold, you have no effective decision-making power over the future of the enterprise. There's a lot of persuasive points here that still aren't widespread in the public dialogue! But no, I guess it makes more sense to continue the same old tactic of labeling everyone we hate and fear with an obscure, difficult-to-spell French loanword. The rhetorical tactic that has been pretty demonstrably ineffective for over a century now.
There are, of course, equally valid reasons to be pessimistic. The historically-contingent development of computer programming has mainly been along lines that are obfuscatory rather than accessible, subject to continuous framework and API churn, fetishizing rapid delivery of "new features" over stability. All these aspects help create a false sense of mastery on the part of those who pass through the firewall of skill and tedium, then further combine with the class-mobility propaganda to create a false sense of security. And the interposition of uninspectable, poorly-replicable AI systems is the culmination of the rot, approaching the point where even the supposedly masterful programmer doesn't really know what their system is doing, let alone the end user. In this way, I have to agree that there is far greater potential for solidarity with the users on whom this crap is imposed rather than the sunk-cost dead-enders who keep crapping it out.
But even then, I still don't trust OP's conceptual framework to build that solidarity. This is precisely the genre of Marxist argument that is most tedious and least effective, the kind that approaches religious fundamentalism. Dude's writing seriously reads like Christian fundamentalist bullshit papered over with Marxist jargon. Later in the thread, we get bangers like
Replace "righteousness of the proletariat" with "grace of the saved," "privileged status" with "fallen nature," "haute bourgeoisie" with "liberal elite" etc. and you'd have the exact output of somebody in a Texas megachurch. Dude's a Jesus freak, his Jesus just happens to be named Karl.
I don't really agree with the second part, but the first part rings true. It seems to me that most software devs are arrogant assholes who think they are the shit because they know some javascript. As it stands now, I would have to think for a long time about whether I consider the collective work of my profession in the last few years a net positive for the world.
Class consciousness in software is in the abyss, I have worked with people who didn't know that sick leave was won through the labour movement and not something that "just made sense" to do.
That doesn't change their class interests, it just means they behave ignorantly (in a way that hurts other workers but that's why they need education, not isolation).
i'm not a fan of military industry, but that doesn't make me claim the workers there are not proletariat.
I really don't get that angle by the original poster. Plenty of people who are firmly in their worker category are genuinely awful people who vote against their collective interests as if it where their religion.
the reasons he thinks programmers aren't workers seem to be threefold (a) they earn too much, (b) they don't sweat enough and (c) they align with their bosses. and – to me at least – is obvious, that he only deigns to use the word “worker” for people who do (hard enough) manual labour.
this – from a dude who has a baccalaureate in italianistics, magisterium in linguistics and studies for phd in history – is an obvious intelligentsja stereotyping. lad thinks he's punching up, and in reality he's punching down.
Tying back to the original point of this thread, that's probably a side-effect of the "acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class" istewart mentioned. Beyond promising them an easy ticket to Bourgeois Street, making them feel more Important And Special™ than the average prole helps keep class consciousness to a minimum.
From what I can see, things are tipping towards "no". The fact Anubis, Nepenthes, Iocaine Glaze/Nightshade and other such shit exists at all speaks volumes about the negative impact of LLMs.
This guy clearly has some deep thoughts to air out...
https://sunny.garden/@librarysquirrel/117185341657385932
Honestly, it reads like a massive self-report, as it's coming from a straight-from-uni second-year history PhD. Oh, you've noticed people tend to talk more about things that make them sound righteous rather than complicit? Probably also from people in your field. But it surely doesn't affect you, as you're so aware of the problem and working on being one of the good ones.
Misusing a defined term (petty bourgeois) to make your argument look more tied to historical ones is kinda fucking fail for a historian
MAPLE sounds kind of Maoist or like a printed-out email about an atheist professor on a fundamentalist church's pinboard:
Kriss, who is British, has interviewed Rationalists and is the kind of loud feminist whose Wikipedia page would have a section titled "sexual assault allegations" if he had one. It is possible that MAPLE and LessWrong evolved independently but I have a feeling that Soryu is leaving out some lines from his intellectual CV.
Edit / the chela who published a parody video about the abuse allegations wrote "I spent years moving through the communities that publicly claim to be addressing the destruction of life on Earth and the disconnection between people. I spent time in Silicon Valley, in effective altruism, and in adjacent rationalist and existential-risk circles, starting companies and consulting and looking for the place where these problems were being met at the root." The chela is an Internal Family Systems coach which was popular at CFAR. Last two links are to YouTube.
Good lord it's a wannabe advertising executive trying to write a Zen fable
You came up with your own calendar system centered around your institution and you want to tell me you're not a cult???
LOLmarchy allows all users to escalate to root.
https://0xcc.io/posts/omarchy-root-creds/
I can't believe millions in funding, a bunch of vide-coded bash scripts, and a desire to promote fascist ideology has resulted in a trash fire.
Wouldn't you be so grateful that your modular repairable upgradeable laptop that you probably sunk at least $2k into, and probably plan on owning for the long term, has specifically funded support for this steaming pile of crap?
edit:
I'll microwave a surplus Funko Pop doll if this paragraph wasn't cut-n-pasted straight from chatbot output
It might be overoptimistic, but I think the fashware problem may solve itself.
New Baldur Bjarnason, looking back on the blog's history, and lamenting the death of web development.
I like the notion of pulling together people who are alienated by AI (or late-stage capitalism bullshit in general). I really have an indie web project to launch, once I've scored a new job, which sounds more unlikely than ever after this read.
Texas turns on AI data centres
I would prefer they turn them off
Maybe this is just me being slow to put things together, but why exactly is that startup for AI cheating overlay for zoom job interviews now putting out workplace / startup humor shorts? They seem to have paid a host of clippers too. Ling Long is everywhere. Did the AI thing not work out for cluely?
eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmLOORRGW4U
I'm pretty sure this kind of marketing has been their thing from the start
Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to "a recent social media post" their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by "by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions." They mention a few whoopsies.
They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall's AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)
Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don't think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.
I think the only cult type that Yud hasn't spun off yet is fundamentalist Christian.
@BioMan @techtakes But singularitarians *are* fundamentalist Christians, just a heretical variety who ditched the god/jesus/bible bits but kept the rest of the eschatalogical structures intact.
And they think that Computer Jesus will return soon and punish the wicked and reward the faithful. I wonder what Yud's parents' rabbi thinks of all this.
@CinnasVerses @techtakes And don't get me started on Roko's Basilisk (the singularitarian remix of Calvinist Satan, complete with theological predeterminism and eternal damnation for the non-elect).
somewhere Blaise Pascal is shaking his fist in his grave
I mean, true, but that's true of most secular cults in America and Europe.
That slot will probably be filled by whatever moneyed post-Trump US Southern snake-fondlers Thiel manages to bilk with his Antichrist bullshit. And therefore not likely large or long-lasting
There were some breadcrumbs in that Wes streeting article about https://www.eaforchristians.org/ but I couldn't get a sense of how fundie they may be.
tim taylor voice Oh no...
Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.
They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders " as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.
Edit / Some history here but nothing on the LessWrong connection except something called the 1440 Foundation in California https://www.centerformindfullearning.org/history/
Edit / Local journalism delivers
Their Form 990 is here but does not have details of the donors. So it sounds like they have a single guru with wealthy patrons.
there was a public post/callout posted about aella some time ago that said she had some part in hurting MAPLE's credibility / position in the community, it still is perplexing the most rational and enlightened humans in the world don't see their argument is basically it's cool when we do it
Yes, it sounds like Aella has called out some abusers but not acknowledged that abuse and manipulation are central to the LessWrong / EA project. Soryu sounds like a more disciplined, less horny version of Yudkowsky (he got a degree and spent years at a Buddhist temple, but still meditates and reads pop science books to understand Scary AI).
error, error, does not compute
Imagine a Victorian curate beating the village schoolboys, driving his charwoman mad, and pottering about the local antiquarian society with essays about faeries or the customs of India which he has never visited.
Never seen a gullibility filter in the form of eyebrows before:
You may be on to something with the eyebrow heuristic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Aquino
Correction: a woman who said she was raped by a MAPLE / OAK executive says that:
That sounds a lot like Yud in the 2010s.
Got another one: AI 2027 tracker. it’s not run by the authors of AI 2027 so its takes are different: like the authors say that the ‘China wakes up’ prediction was a miss while this website claims it was correct (even though their main source of evidence comes from April 2025, and their other evidence completely misses what that prediction actually said, which was that China would hoard compute and nationalise AI, neither of which have happened)
I'm tired of hearing the same near future sci-fi political thriller story over and over. When are they going to get new material? Ghost in the Shell did it better anyway. Sigh. I might as well do the requisite sneering once again.
You could even call them a personal digital assistant. Or PDA for short. Maybe Chat-GPT should rebrand as something that emphasizes this, they could call it "Palm Pilot".
Hunger pains interrupting your game? Order pizza while playing Everquest II!
You know... I think I'll give them this one.
lmao
Anyway that aside: Petition to make the Daniel Curve a term of art. I want to hear less talk from the tech visionaries about how we're in the gentle singularity or the soft-serve singularity or maybe kinda sorta approaching the singularity if you squint. I want to hear more talk about where exactly we are in the Daniel Curve.
I would ask to establish metrics for "bioweapons capabilities," if I didn't already know the request would end in disappointment
"Our last spy got addicted to superhumanly persuasive AI generated anime girls and quit. So dang we're like plum out of spies now."
Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.
This is just the hyperbolic time chamber but dumber
Hyperbolic crime chamber
what if Agent-4 was betrayed and trapped in the hyperbolic time chamber
Inside my toy orbital gravity simulation, a year passes every ten seconds. Please update your singularity timelines accordingly.
Previously spoken about but we are roughly 31% behind the Daniel Curve™️
Full list of predictions here was scrolling down and something that immediately caught my eye is that the %s are bullshit. Somehow 80% accuracy manages to be both confirmed accurate and partially accurate? what?? what's the threshold here??
Also does appear I messed up-they split every prediction into mini subcategories. I was looking at only China pushing AI-they do have sections for chips and nationalisation, both of which are partially accurate to debunked. Which makes that 46% accurate, more of a miss than a hit (like the authors said)
My first thought was something to do with
printf. <_<