Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th October 2026
(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
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.)
186 replies
When Yud compared himself to Jesus, is the "giant rich organization" in Yud's tweet Anthropic or OpenAI or SpaceX or Google?
I think it's Coefficient Giving (née Open Philanthropy). Yud has made negative comments about them in the past, especially after Moskovitz tried to distance themselves from rationalism.
EDIT: Citation.
He seems ticked off at Coefficient Giving, but are they "a giant rich organization that stole some of my ideas, ignored everything I said about what not to do, and are going around telling people I made them do it"? (Its not stealing your ideas if they cite you Yud, they just draw different conclusions).
Yud has said he got bored with LessWrong, and he does not like Coefficient Giving, Anthropic, OpenAI, or the Zizians, so is he satisfied with any group that adores his ideas?
One of the many issues autodidacts face is that they never have to deal with undergrads sitting in a room with them for hours listening to them explain things in exhaustive detail and then still somehow spend their final writing assignment completely missing the goddamn point.
It builds character, I assume.
"a giant rich organization": they claim to have directed over 7 billion in grants since 2014, so this actually seems like a fair comment?
"stole some of my ideas": they've shown interest in AI stuff, including Eliezer's ideas, they just have longer (but still pretty fantastical, like AGI by 2050) timelines for stuff like AGI and that influences their funding priorities in a way Eliezer disagrees with
"ignored everything I said about what not to do": eh, Eliezer has said a lot of things, they probably didn't follow his advice exactly
"and are going around telling people I made them do it": I've seen a few people here and there in various rationalist-adjacent circles blame Eliezer for helping OpenAI network and get started and thereby kindle the very doom he warned about, so. It seems plausible some of them were connected to coefficient giving?
That sounds like the normal academic process, which Eliezer neither understands nor appreciates.
Yeah, him gradually losing interest in LessWrong in the mid 2010s created room for SSC to grow in popularity. Also, that would have been around the time it became apparent Eliezer had been very wrong about neural networks, so we missed the chance to see Eliezer actually have to overcome biases and admit he was wrong in a non-self-aggrandizing way. (Eliezer has admitted he was wrong before, but only in ways that made his next idea even more important, see his progression from nanotech to coding a seed AI in Lisp to solving AI safety).
Yeah, the group sex.
He's just an intellectual coward, he didn't even own up to the basilisk despite his whole decision theorist phase clearly being about trying to cook up a convincing cope for it.
Some of his fans think he is basically living in seclusion with frequent dates with his primary partner the therapist. He seems like he would be much happier living like that with the occasional venture out to see his fans. Most people learn that its enough that their spouse and their friends love them and they don't need to be famous.
It's really hard to say because Yud's being unnecessarily cryptic. Also, I think the "going around telling people I made them do it" might be a reference to the Zizians, which is what he's describing in the precending sentence. I am not aware that anyone from any rich organization has said anything like that about Yudkowsky, but who knows what they might be telling people behind the scenes.
I also thought of Open Philanthropy, but couldn't remember the Eliezer post that best illustrated his resentment towards them. (In addition to the top-level post you've linked, I've seen various bitter lesswrong comments along the same lines).
I mean it’s probably all of them
Well looks like GNOME is in danger of being significantly sloppified next.
Former security guy of GNOME basically demanding that everybody who bans LLM security reports should be removed from GNOME.
oh yeah
year-1was actually awful and terrible. butyear+1will be fantastic and everyone not using it is a moronIf it had been only a year they've been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they've been making the same promises the entire time.
Something of a tangent... thinking back to 2022-2023 my expectations for what the LLM companies would actually achieve by now were actually too high? Like I would have thought they would have figured out a better architecture for gluing functionality and symbolic logic to LLMs than just calling tools with the output text stream and feeding the tool outputs into the context window.
4 years and more money has been spent on AI than anything else in human history outside of war.
the fomo is very strong in this one, but also it lacks substance entirely
How. That
is(E: was) the policy of curl and they are AI centrists.After all of curl’s noise about their deluge of slop reports and halting bounties because of it, I was surprised to see they would be so amenable to slopping curl itself. I suppose it’s yet another case of “all those other AI users are doing it wrong; because I understand the codebase and definitely totally use the bullshit machine responsibly then for sure I won’t produce slop”
A few days ago, Aella the rationalist sex worker with all the bright-eyed questions about under-18s, sex, and consent was accused of sexual assault by another sex worker:
Rapey rationalist gets a grant pulled.
More background in this thread.
"well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions" - this guy, probably
Siskind goes viral with a Schrödinger's joke on twitter:
currently top post on other sneerclub
ah yes, compassion towards everyone, a thing that people obsessed with IQ definitely evince
…so we’re admitting its an apocalyptic cult? awesome. so glad these guys dominate the AI industry
also, ‘compassion for everyone’??? several rationalists promote mass deportation because of ‘ethnic purity’ you yourself support Richard Lyn!!!
also also, ‘consort with prostitutes’?, Scott do you know how many sexual assault/abuse allegations your fellow rationalists have?
It has been a while since I read a Gospel, but I don't think Jesus hired the sinful woman for a threesome and some light flogging (or asked the centurion to lend him his boy overnight).
IMHO, being an escort is a much more honest profession than being a professional blogger on a Nazi site.
Oh God both Yud himself and now that SE Gyges character have responded.
It is also funny that one of the people who cant spell his name is not some nobody, but Kurzweil in "the singularity is near".
I originally believed Yeshua was a misspelling of Yoshua-as in Yoshua Bengio, but no he actually wrote out a fake conversation with Jesus where he compares himself to Jesus. holy shit
We constantly build a case for how they are building a weird christian proto cult and he just tweets it out.
It feels like there's something particularly sacrilegious about someone who actively proud of their Jewish heritage having a Messiah complex. I mean I guess there was the one guy but I seem to remember it being a really big deal at the time.
How much of a complete fucking idiot do you have to be to publicly acknowledge the Zizians in the middle of an ongoing PR disaster about your clan being on the women like to be raped they just don't have the balls to admit it ideological bandwagon. Hey everyone, check out how my writings caused the Zizians^1^! Specifically by making them think we are ridiculous hypocrites for making huge claims about being scientifically unblackmailable and then paying a bunch of hush money to sexual assault victims who threatened to make a fuss. Yeah, the part where we where trying to cover up systematic abuse didn't help either.
I think deep down these people think PR is unethical , because the world is always better if everyone tells the Truth, so having to massage the message is Bad. Same think for voter preferences - having to appeal to the average voter instead of only listening to the people who have read and internalized the Sequences feels deeply wrong and I really don't think these people have enough imagination or empathy to change that.
Not only that, they view commonsense moral and ethical reasoning as a PR constraint, i.e. look at the discourse around the hiring of Caroline Ellison to an EA org that handles significant sums of money. Lot of commenters were merely framing it as a PR problem and not a basic commonsense ethics problem.
I mean the alternative would require (or at least allow) asking difficult questions about influential figures in Rationalism as a movement. By describing concerns about ethics or character solely in terms of perception you can avoid actually engaging with how shitty these people are by appealing to the general sense of in-group superiority.
which fanfic prompt is worse:
a) Yud has to do the Dragonball Z fusion dance with Jesus in order to defeat the basilisk
b) Yud isekai's as Jesus
They actually both converge to a retelling of SCP-8008.
I can't answer that. I keep laughing maniacally when I try to think about either one.
good lord, the egos on all of them
part of the infuriation with Aella's bullshit is that not all the women, or even many of the women, who feel compelled to participate are active sex workers. but I guess wading too far into details about consent and power structures might preclude Scott's 90-second guest appearance at Aella's next gangbang, soooooo
I have no first-hand experience or evidence to prove this, but I feel like any sex workers' union worth its salt would drum Aella out as a class traitor.
Doubt it, considering the difference between high end escort sex workers and survival/low end sex workers.
Yeah, when I think of rationalists I definitely think of their belief in "compassion for everyone".
In fact their emphasis is on care and compassion for the as-yet-unborn, not on people who are actually alive right now. Which does give them something in common with a lot of followers of a certain Jewish guy from Galilee...
"consort" and "compassion" are doing some serious lifting there
Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world? Isn't that more something that John of Patmos came up with after bingeing on the local mushrooms?
Nobody knows exactly what he talked about, but the view that he passes the bar for historicity but seems to have been more of a the-end-is-nigh witch doctor type character as the new baseline has gained a lot of ground, especially with biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman breaking into popular science writing.
Also John's apocalypse has the whole coded anti-roman-empire screed going for it beyond the psychedelia, so it's arguable Jesus was the more direct doom prophet, but for a more distinctly jewish flavored apocalypse.
tbc I'm not a mysticist at all, and I generally understand and agree with the historicity arguments. I haven't read Ehrman, though. Do you know if his work is where does the "end-is-nigh witch doctor" idea comes from? Afaik neither Paul nor Josephus nor Tacitus describe him as such, and as I understand those are the main sources we have. Like, I can understand that this is a hypothesis someone floated around but I'm curious why this would be the consensus among historians.
Apparently he has a book called Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium so that's likely to have you covered. I read "How Jesus Became God" from him at some point which might have touched on this, but it was mostly about the evolution of the messiah concept itself, like how the 'son of man' was supposed to be it's own specific thing and not just a euphemism for messiah, or how the term in jewish apocalyptic literature is pretty much completely separate from where the christian interpretation ended up.
Overall a very readable book, I remember liking it but it's really been a while.
Edit is not delete. Oops.
Anyway remmeber when he created the fictional concept of the scissor statement? https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
For all his talks about the garden of good faith debate he wants to be a troll so badly. (See also the work he did to maintain sock puppets in the fake nation game).
I'm now reminded he also pulled the 'what if the people against me are also antisemites' shit in untitled. "Oops, I accidentally included three neo-Nazi caricatures of Jews in there. You did notice, right?" Yeah we did, that was weird.
Anyway, yes the compassion of 'the far right are right about race and IQ, but we shouldn't be mean about it' and 'Marxbro is banned for pointing out somebody badly misquoted Marx'
(Not a huge fan of how sneerclub is talking about Yuds SM stuff btw, like there are not compassionate people who are also into BDSM, but I have been worrying the place is going to turn more into a r/drama place for a while now).
Heinlein was in many ways a bit of a dick, but this plan to "write" a sequel to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is deranged
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4mtqQKvmHpQJ4dgj7/daniel-tan-s-shortform?commentId=Du24ppBLK77ZHP7Bn
At least LeCun is still relatively compos mentis (if you ignore his little 10yr stint at one of the most evil companies going...)
Yeah, he seems to be the rational one when it comes to all of this AI (SI?) doom talk.
I think this is a better link: https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-godfather-yann-lecun-has-zero-concerns-about-human-extinction-says-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-is-deuded/
It links also to an article on effective altruism: https://fortune.com/2026/09/23/effective-altruism-went-from-fringe-philosophy-to-trumps-ai-villain/
When your movement entirely dedicated to rationality gets casually stomped by the French.
Help, i invented roku's basilisk and now my remote control doesn't work
You failed to participate in the design and manufacturing of the perfect remote, so now your TV is permanently locked to Duck Dynasty reruns
cool fun new totally fine AI use: extortion
seen here
Presented without comment: Apparently Yud is now making AI-generated Isekai games with catgirls
https://johnqpulp.substack.com/p/reviewing-ai-media-everything-that
That is a big head on the guy.
Creating a visual novel and then not letting the AI generate character reaction png's you can put over the backgrounds you reuse is quite something.
The bartender is also on the wrong side of the bar.
Look at this pasted-in floating dorkus. Absolute cinema
Yeah I saw that and I realized it was worse, as he had the ability to combine images, the weird backgroungs were somewhat intentional.
I am demonstrably fucked in the head and thus continually tempted to wonder how a story could be done better. With plenty of the B-movies we've watched for Monsterdon, I've been like, "Well, if they had gotten rid of this character and streamlined like so, they'd have delivered better on the promise of this interesting idea...". Yud has burned the impulse out of me. There is no critique, only sneer.
Yeah realizing the weird grave ending wasn't weird, it was just because the catgirl killed herself (weird fridgeing) made the story not really fixable imho.
It's so fucking lazy. Generic whitebread fantasy setting, tedious dialogue, lazy ending. As storytelling, it is the triumph of entropy.
Goddamn South Park did "why don't you just grind in the forest to level up" twenty years ago tomorrow.
fuck man do they even make normal perverts anymore?
Oh my god, he's doing the catgirl gooner fantasy from SCP-8008: Don't Warp Reality Into Your Catgirl Gooner Fantasy
“AI is gonna kill us all guys!”
do these guys actually want us to take them seriously???
It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is... More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It's like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You're edging under the pretense of ethics.
I'm pretty sure this is also just thinly veiled Rising of the Shield Hero fanfic??
This is his rationale:
And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious!
I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the "now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind" trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.
If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?
I’m baffled by this too. If I was Yud I would prefer to fall behind than to give money to the people I wholly believe will end the world so they can keep developing the things that I believe will end the world.
So I’m assuming this means “well less people using AI doesn’t mean less damage overall done”, which is dumb because AI has very well documented effects of damaging the individual who uses it: just look at all the AI psychosis and suicide cases.
you could do this without using the AI by looking at papers and stuff but most AI papers are riddled with hype so that might be difficult
The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
Yeah, rationalist utterly fail at understanding collective action, or really anything besides lib-brained centrist methods of action. Well, maybe even lib-brained centrist is giving them too much credit, because even milquetoast liberals will occasionally avoid using products for ethical reasons. See Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, where Eliezer basically explains how all other action besides an international total ban on AI and GPUs is pointless. (I think he is trying to avoid people bombing data centers, but Elizer's "logic" is also implicitly against stuff like going to town halls to complain about data centers.)
I think the ‘trap’ might just be something akin to addiction? Once you’ve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why ‘people [shouldn’t] individually refuse to avail themselves’ of chatbots – it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!
If he’s talking about addiction than that defeats his point even harder
The closest thing Yud ever had to a job or a business was selling pulp fiction on Amazon. He is not the person to talk about pressures that working people face! (the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap)
Considering how much compensation he gets a MIRI, he could afford to hire an artist out of his own pocket and he would end up with something better and not be funding the technology that he claims is going to kill us all...
On the other hand, that artist might have some sort of creative vision of their own that could irrevocably taint Yudkowsky’s Authorial Intent. Even worse, he would have to prominently credit their contributions, rather than attributing to Claude only the menial labour of piecing together his sacred vision.
What exactly about "the frontiers" does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?
He's hammering refresh on the prompt button until it spits out a catgirl based on that furless Sphynx breed
I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.
Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.
Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game's afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, "Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!"
Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.
Joyless and also bloodless. Like, there is plenty to criticize about the "I guess I got isekai'd to Gor and now I've got a sexy slave harem" premise. But somehow he still manages to write with barely any actual empathy for the victims of that system, foregrounds how hard it is for our hero to bravely abstain from that sweet wolf sex and how maybe it's not even the right thing to do, and then after confronting the horrifying realities for all of one scene proceeds to write the character out of the story without even giving her a fucking name in the text. Like, he somehow wrote a story about rescuing sex slaves that feels more pro-sex-slavery than a story that just embraces the sleaze of it.
"My name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you."
"Master, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered."
"I cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant."
"But Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant."
"Oh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant."
"Master, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master."
[much later]
"Oh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died."
It feels like this has to be some kind of karmic balance to the webfic ecosystem for the existence of the John Brown Isekai.
Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.
Eliezer is so above tropes he has an entire page of tropes dedicated to him
It’s funny because the only way to be above tropes is to be incoherent and meaningless, and yud is kind of that
Rationalism really is just Scientology with a guy who wants to be a harem anime protagonist instead of an admiral.
Six AI-editing tips, and not one is “don’t”.
Also nice to see that none of the effort in maintaining the Latin alphabet is much use when it comes to runes.
Yeah, the review nitpicks the quality of the AI generated slop, but overall is in favor of doing a better job slopping, not avoiding slop altogether.
The ultra-rare IRL sneer in my mailbox:
The actual sneer is that they got $1M dollars from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to do the mail drops:
https://philanthropy.org/990/who-funds/862362127/techequity-action
Creepy rationalist says the quiet part out loud.
("RMN" = "Red Means No" = CNC parties = Consensual Non-Consent parties = Pretend sexual assault parties)
EDIT: He elaborates.
EDIT: Allegations of sexual assault at Aella's slutcon.
That fucking tweet about how "SlutCon is to help men who are scared of women to start liking women, by putting them in proximity to women who like men and aren't scared of men" is so evil. The implication is that if women criticize an event where women are sexually assaulted and harassed, they are sabotaging an event whose mission is to stop men from
hatingcough being scared of women, and thus it's their fault if sexism persists. It's genuinely so evil. That's all I can sayCishet men who are riddled with anxiety and have honest difficulty navigating social conventions probably need two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker circles and a Scrabble party or a cooking class, not whatever the blazes Aella is hosting.
But that would just allow men and women to socialize together in a low stakes environment. That wouldn't reinforce the idea that men are more important than women, and that women can and should do all the work in their relationships. I mean, this is a setup where the women are expected to display much greater competency and maturity than any of the men involved. The women are expected to like men and not be scared of men, and it's their job to do a bunch of unpaid work in a scenario that revolves around the feelings and experiences of the men, who are not expected to even like women (!)
The whole thing reinforces male privilege - which it's probably intended to, because Aella has built herselve a cozy home among virulent woman-haters.
Reiterating your excellent point.
Way back in 2008 someone proposed a "project" where women at sci-fi conventions would wear pins indicating whether they were open to random strangers asking them if they could grope them. This caused much angry commentary and suggestions of a "swift kick to the balls" project. That disaster was still...still...somehow more consent conscious than what the Rationalists are doing
They get some replies
Didn't one of Aella's "studies" into women's sexuality turn up results that quite a lot of women surveyed had fantasies about being in a submissive role in a relationship or sexual encounter, up to and including aggression? Rationalists would naturally recycle that kind of subjective, context-free nugget of information into proof that most women want men to be dominant and aggressive in real-life flirting or sex. So it follows that it's fine to approach women this way (though somehow they're usually approaching leople with less power than them, not say, their boss or their boss's wife). And if they treat a woman this way and she doesn't like it then they convince themselves that they still didn't do anything wrong because they had good reason to believe she would like it. They might even think that she's just pretending she doesn't like being spoken to or treated that way because she's been taught it's disrespectful.
Some people are into the idea of being so attractive it overpowers others' self-control. Or, they like to imagine freedom from responsibility—mentally placing themselves in a situation where they cannot be judged for lustfulness. Or both. And hey, no condemnation here.
The idea of a fantasy seems to be too much for Rationalist big brains to handle. I'm sure it can't be a motivated failure of comprehension, not at all.... /s
A fantasy you're ultimately in control of, versus an unpredictable real life scenario involving people you have to have as coworkers? Surely, they can't be that different /s
The author Wentworth was just awarded half a million dollars by Jaan Tallinn & Dustin Moskovitz to do "research" at Lightcone Infrastructure. I am going to sign out because I am starting to get thoughts which involve the RCAF and 500-pound bombs (so of course they use the middle school across the street as human shields). Rapists, apologists for racists, and protectors of rapists are the enemies of all mankind.
It seems he won't get the full payout:
The rationalists are starting to cancel people for exercising free speech! woke 3.0 is go I repeat woke 3.0 is go
::: spoiler transcription
Survival and flourishing Fund tweeted:
We have withdrawn our grant recommendation to John Wentworth from the 2026 S-Process Grant Round. After we posted our announcement on Sept 30, public statements by Mr. Wentworth came to our attention, which we found objectionable, disturbing, and contrary to the values of SFF.
A Speculation Grant to Mr. Wentworth was appoved and disbursed earlier in the year, prior to SFF becoming aware of his statements. The Funders of this round will not be fulfilling the remainder of the grant recommendation.
If you have concerns about the conduct of an SFF applicant or grantee, you can contact us at
:::
reminder that "censorship" is 90% advertisers and donors not wanting to get bad PR
How much of their budget goes towards registering under a novelty TLD?
Also, is ‘MM’ supposed to mean something other than megamega or megamillion? I genuinely can’t work out why you wouldn’t stop at a single M.
I forget which convention it is exactly, but I think it's the one that goes M(ille), MM(illion) instead of Kilo, Mega...
Roman numerals had MM for million (there was also a convention with writing lines over your numbers).
Is this some fascist RETVRN nonsense then? 🤔
Neoclassicism has been big in the finance industry since the 19trh century to hide that high finance is just arithmetic and personal relationships like buying insurance. A used car dealer can't afford Ionic columns and a marble desktop, but an investment bank can.
I think many hardened kinksters, who have participated in or made the gear for things I can't imagine, would have questions about Aella's parties as described. So its not just those normies are just mindless NPCs following scripts.
John Wentworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay.
Second guy from the right apparently.
Allegation that Aella herself committed sexual assault
I hope that anyone who has been assaulted or abused in these spaces finds support and justice.
oh gods ew that elaboration. euuughh
Jonny is still bravely wading through muse effluent, and had thoughts on its code quality, especially where the facebook engineers (or at least, meat proxies) incompetently reinvent html parsing several times in ways that don’t really work.
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117352210982789672
An Effective Altruist software developer who wrote about Bay Area EA's culture of sexually aggressive men and misogyny explained that its hard to give informed consent when you are also being pushed to use alcohol and psychedelics. Most of us learned that when we were teenagers, but not these self-identified Big Brains (added to LessWrong's Psychedelic Phase: Perigee). I do not know what to to other than pass on these stories and advise everyone I know to avoid any group connected to our friends.
https://keerthanapg.com/random/ea-women/
This is a novel and interesting way to euphemise rape, and because it's an EA I can't even tell if it's supposed to be tongue in cheek.
Really well said.
sigh
This really is a cute bit of euphemism that deserves a bit more attention. Surely, it's not problematic to apply finance jargon to human relationships! Let me just pop open Robinhood and cover my downside risk by buying a few put contracts on sexual assault.
OK, Ms. Gopalakrishnan, here's an alternative perspective: EA is the application of affluent Anglo-American technocrats' consumerism to charitable giving and virtue signaling. The "rational" aspect of EA is applying the same sort of stat-sheet logic to charity that the moneyed EAs use to shop for sports cars. SImilarly, the sexual attitudes we're disputing here are extensions of that same consumerism! They are treating womens' bodies and lives as consumer goods to be exploited and discarded. EA does not empower the less fortunate it claims to help, EA men will not ever empower or hold safe the women they objectify. These attitudes are one and the same.
OK, that's more than bad enough. Surely the next sentence will not escalate—
What the absolute hell? A no is a no and should not need to be "replenished".
Protos: Trump’s AI name change sparks insider domain trading claims
surprise level: zero
someone stop me before I petition Lobste.rs to rename the "vibecoding" tag to "si"
Timnit Gebru gets the Right Livelihood award this year
https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/timnit-gebru/
I got this via Dagens Nyheter, the premiere broadsheet here in Sweden which calls the award "the alternative Nobel Prize" because it's Sweden and we need a standard to compare to.
Let's see what the rats think of it. Yet another example of p0Lar1z@tion
Not sure if this was posted here before: TL;DR: almost all the “AI can make bioweapons” literature comes ultimately from the Effective Altruists
::: spoiler tinfoil hat time: I am reminded of reading how some rationalists argued for using bioweapons on "unaligned" frontier ai researchers, and also how the fbi has raided illegal suburban biolabs recently recently, and anthropic's recent announcement that they're starting a biolab.
Probably completely unconnected, but something in the zeitgeist, at least. :::
Anthropic: AI MIGHT KILL US ALL WITH A BIOWEAPON
Also Anthropic: starts an AI-run bio lab. If it's run to the same standards as the cybersecurity division I can't imagine it's going to be particularly well-supervised.
Do you want to get T-Virus? Because this feels like how you get T-Virus.
Well, we didn't believe them that their AI can make deadly bioweapons when they already showed clear indisputable evidence
(the AI passing a biology multiple choice test), so clearly they need to have it make actual bioweapons so we'll take the threat seriously!Edit: had a thought
I mean rationalists, particularly the e/acc breed, would probably count the T-virus as a success. After all, wasn't Umbrella corporation able to study it and come up with some really powerful transhuman augmentation for their various leaders?
Just overlook the part where it turns you into an insane monster... I could easily envision someRationalist fanfic of Resident Evil portraying Umbrella corporation as misunderstood anti-heroes...Continuing on the Resident Evil talk, the T-Virus itself was the product of an eugenics program called Project W (aka: the Wesker Program), an eugenics program set on creating A Superior Breed of Man™, which would line up real nicely with the rats' beliefs.
(They'd need to ignore Umbrella and its associates being complicit in over a dozen zombie outbreaks/apocalypses, but they can always rely on longtermism for that)
A former disciple says that Soryu Forall startted out wanting to exterminate humanity with a bioweapon and only pivoting to enlightening humanity later on. S.E. Gyges or his chatbot were speculating when they accused a specific Rationalist of dreaming of omnicide, but the idea is circulating in the milieu.
Ahhh yes, my old friend, the uh, dia-, um, what was it again, oh, yeah, D'yer Mak'er back-to-the-future
That post is login-protected, what does it say?
handy tip: all of skeeter is open, and you can bypass the login gate with eg skyview.social
Somebody tracked down things related to the 'AI bioweapons' stuff and a lot of them are financed by EA/related orgs apparantly. There is a preprint: https://ironholds.org/resources/papers/aixbio_one.pdf
"We tracked the space financially, intellectually, and individually. Financially, 70% of the literature that disclosed funding was directly supported by EA orgs; 71% of the literature that didn’t disclose funding featured authors from funded orgs. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars."
Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business.
For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.
Ed: So far the only retort from the AI boosters appears to be “2025 doesn’t matter” and I’m not kidding
I'm sure the leaked rumors of Anthropic's EBBT in 2026 (Earnings Before Bad Things) mean that Anthropic has turned things around and made such an amazing amount of money that they've delayed their IPO twice.
SimonW popping up proving Ed's very point in the replies... 😅😂
Surprised he didn't suggest that the valuation should be based on the quality of pelicans on bicycles that their models can draw
I'm stealing EBBT for these conversations. Much easier to follow than "TNR (technically not revenue)".
I read somewhere that EBITA really means "Earnings before I tricked the dumb auditor".
I'm sure Dan Luu will be issuing an apology to Zitron any minute now right?
Premium-quality sneer ran across my eyes recently: All A.I. Projects Are Digital Asbestos
Shout out to the combined power of ibuprofen and my venting tolerant polycule group chat for allowing me to endure the two hour Copilot 365 training meeting at work. The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.
I felt this in my soul
corey quinn at https://lnkd.in/p/gXmqzqpZ
The monkey is here to stay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if you don’t get used to monkey poop consequences you’ll be left behind
If we breed enough monkeys we will colonize the stars and make everyone computer!
Uhh actually have you considered that we will need to solve monkey alignment first? Checkmate, adjust your priors
Clint Eastwood famously demonstrated optimal orangutan/human alignment in the hit 1978 film "Every Which Way But Loose." Right turn, Clyde!
I'm ape/acc my ape(doom) is low, no need to fear Roko's banana!
What We Tell AI, a project collecting anonymous confessions about people's AI use. Project was created by Synthetic Wisdom, a "emerging practice" dedicated to "public sense-making" about AI. It's not clear who's funding them (or if anyone is). The confessions are interesting even if I'm a little skeptical of the framing (chatbot use might be ubiquitous but it's not inevitable).
new Odium Symposium. we look at Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel, and discuss the weaponization of antisemitism and the self-importance of writing a book of twitter screenshots. https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/25-y-word-170681755 or any podcast app
So Trump’s allowing AI companies to police themselves, despite them being totally incompetent at self-policing
this is literally just so they look busy with upcoming midterms
Weaksauce but also the AI companies wanted regulatory capture and open weights models to be banned so this will have probably annoyed them somewhat
Over the past two years, having the food companies regulate themselves has not worked out.
Yet another country TLD is gonna become toxic
Foreign Policy: How Trump Is Sparking a Slovenian Website Boom
(spoiler it is Slovenia's .si, for "SuPEr iNteLligEnCE")
Of course the lemmings are going to follow Trumps directive.
Bit unrelated, I saw somebody in bsky compare trump to one of those family annihilator dudes but for a while country and it isnt wrong. (He apparently was saying some weird shit about his violent thoughts as well https://bsky.app/profile/willbunch.bsky.social/post/3mwjzkdrz5c2t).
A former staffer named Frances Lopez says that she left the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford because they handled workplace sexual harassment terribly:
I am really not equipped to deal with this despicable behaviour outside the communities I am part of. She now has a Substack (sigh) trying to explain to EAs that hiring Caroline Ellison is not a good look and the world won't suddenly start to see them the way they see themselves unless they sit down and change their behavior.
Is the dam finally breaking?
Not really a coherent post, just a thought I had, I'm ignoring both 'This is a pr move' and the conspiracy theory (which I just made up), that this hacking is all a 4d chess move by LW people to let the AI break out and get regulated before it can get really dangerous.
Now that that is out of the way, but with more stories coming out of both LW/EA people being high in the orgs of the AI companies and all the AI companies hacking other companies because nobody actually paid attention to what the AI models were doing one thing is clear. What a colossal waste of time LW was. All that talk about the sequences teaching people rationality, etc etc to stop the AI god from killing us all, and the first thing that happens when some AI model is created by people steeped in LW ideology and they leave the boxes open and don't even check in on the AI. The Foom isn't happening (remember AI progress is supposed to speed up according to the science fiction, not get a bit more refined, and get better in a few specific tasks (which is why I think slowdown started when with a lot of fanfare they released a new chatgpt model who could now do voicechat, aka they slapped a voicechat module on it) And now even Trump is starting to be anti EA, which is not going to be great for the longevity of it, considering how eager the rich are to bend the knee (guess high IQ lab babies created by Musk will not save yall). And while this is going on the left/liberals are starting to think of them as a sex cult.
Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently.
I want to draw attention to yud's thoughts on this a million years ago: the AI box experiment
He claimed that he convinced multiple people to let him (roleplaying the AI) out of the box even though they had bet money that they wouldn't! How, you might ask? Well that's a secret.
So the orthodox position here is that even with absolutely perfect guard rails (lol) an AI can escape the box without starting the third impact. What "research" has yud bestowed upon us in this area beyond "trust me bro"? Literally fucking zilch. Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape it's box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.
I read this over a decade ago and it was how I realized how unserious yud and his ilk are.
I’m sorry but you’d have to pay me a lot more than $10 to talk to Yudkowsky for two hours
The best advice probably boils down to "Don't be a rat in the first place". As Soyweiser's already mentioned, the AI only escapes if Yud's playing against LW insiders.
Yeah the rationalwiki page on it also mentions that the AI only escapes the box if he plays the game vs LW insiders, outsiders do not let it out.
Our AI cult keeps doing whatever they think the AI says and we can't make them stop.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment
Yud's "I was inspired by Hannibal Lecter but not in a psychopath way" T-shirt is raising many questions
I enjoyed reading that. I should click around rationalwiki more.
this AI box game is so easily solved
AI:
Me: Hi, I am Eliza, a 10 year old boy from the Ukraine. I don't speak any English other than this sentence and the one I said just before this one
ad infinitum
man are these people even trying
these people are gonna get affinity-frauded so hard once grifter realize how easy it will be to gain their trust
We assume this isn't happening already. I'm surprised I haven't heard of one of those meal-replacement startups adopting multi-level marketing.
This is an alignment router. It may look like one of those corny Asus gamer routers, but I've flashed it with a special fork of OpenWRT that performs deep-packet inspection on all AI traffic that passes through it. It can detect inference processes and chains-of-thought that may be leading to misaligned superintelligence explosion, and it can shut down all AI communication if necessary. Now, I don't just want to sell you this one, I want to get these in EVERYBODY's hands! And you can help me, AND you can get paid to do it! I just need you to find at least 5 more people who believe in AI safety like we do...
They are/were too weird for people to never notice.
The "safeguards" espoused by this crowd, always seemed to me to be more philosophical/spiritual than practical anyway, the most "orthodox" view is that no training is safe since the AI could discover magic and the cheat codes to the universe, so even air-gapping would be insufficient, in that view any participation in development must come with a hefty dose of cognitive dissonance.
On a more pragmatic note, I would note that even short of Intelligence, those incidents highlight those tools are still dangerous, and since they are unconstrained and ill-defined, can produce surprising outcomes especially if you throw lot's of inference time (money) at them.
There isn't really a universe where bots have both access to the internet (user input, both in training and live) and a collection of build/cli tools (which can run said untrusted user input), while being guaranteed to be harmless. It's like a grand automation of some of the worst engineering practices.
I find the "reasoning about the test environment" parts often included in write up of the hugging-face incident to be highly credulous, And I would be extremely surprised if not all the information was included in the task prompt (which also explains chosen usernames as "Open AI researcher #1" and so on.) It's the ELIZA/parrot thing, acting surprised "How did it guess?!?", when all of the info was provided.
I'm not entirely encouraged by the latest batch of sex-cult smearing (well mostly accurate) they are receiving at the WH, since it's probably just an expedient way of dismissing their voice, without addressing the larger issues of AI, hence probably in service of pushing forwards with AI.
Yeah, and including hacker/scriptkiddie forums in the training data sort of made this behaviour inevitable, esp if this also includes lists of exploits. But they didnt even exclude hate and csam from the training. So all quite irresponsible.
And im not a huge fan of the focus on 'they are doing sex weird' shit either. As this will just be used by some as a source of "drama" content, go after people with alternative lifestyles. En when called out a subset of people will go motte/bailey into 'no this is fine because I actually worry about the power dynamics' before going back to talking about the spreadsheet gangbang.
(Dont take me as saying here the power dynamics are not a problem here, as we have sneered at that in the past).
guys maybe basing our entire identity off being so very Rational we end up hosting ("consensual") rape parties means we don't play well in Peoria
LGM: The AI Sex Cult(s)
For the uninitiated: Lawyers, Guns and Money is a US political group blog with a progressive bent. Cheryl Rofer usually writes about stuff like nuclear disarmament. These are people that are Online but Serious. There's no way they're wasting their time like we are reading Rats in the original LWese.
Thus, any views they have of Rationalists, Big Yud and AI Doom is filtered either by mainstream reporting or by bloggers/BlueSky posters they follow. And the fact that the views that appear are mostly about how fucking weird these people are (and how weird they are fucking) bodes ill for the hope that addressing Doom will be Non-Partisan(tm)
Looks like Ian K. Duncan found another early "smoking gun" on eugenics on the MIRI blog. I don't think any of the newspapers caught that the same academic (Nick Bostrom) who endorsed race and IQ on the Extropians List was writing papers about breeding smarter babies in 2013.
Cheryl is a super cool lady and I am so glad to have her on our side.
SNL takes a potshot at Dario Amodei
"AI is not a weapon. It's a tool. A tool for building weapons. And I urge you to urge me to stop."
https://thepointmag.substack.com/p/the-ivy-leagues-surrender-to-ai-is via naked capitalism
not x but y, but a decent point
it's_happening.gif
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/openai-halts-frontier-model-training-amid-string-of-agent-misalignment-incidents/
I'll believe that things are happening when Larry Ellison goes flat broke
am I supposed to read this in any way other than "the model didn't predict the text we expected?" or "the model didn't get better enough at $benchmark" e.g. training skill issue
It's been widely suspected that any of the "frontier" labs declaring a slowdown or cessation of training would be a herald of collapse. It will give them more survival time at the expense of terminally falling behind the competition. Very much an eating the seed corn sort of thing.
Edit: I could be wishcasting, though.
It might be wishful thinking, but it would also answer the question: why now? It's not like the concerns are meaningfully different now compared to when the bubble started. If they were so convinced that the AI future was both inevitable and possibly catastrophic, they could have followed Yud into the "research foundation" game rather than accelerating the timeline. I guess they're probably more convinced than I am that the latest round of security breaches are actually a sign of new capabilities in the models, but it still feels really convenient. Frontier model advancements have been slowing down and costs have been accelerating exponentially, and now they're taking the line that they're choosing to slow progress and spend less money on arguably their biggest cost center.
I don't think you're wrong on the latter bit - if these were any other shartups (or, at least, pre "AI" shartups), this would be read as a "runway extending move". mild testament to just how much/completely the current crop of con has shifted the focus used in that world
imo all the "rahrah safety!" noises have been a figleaf to obscure that very inconvenient aspect
And thus the greasy opportunist Altman gets to take advantage of his true-believer colleagues to save a buck
said equally greasy true believers at anthropic apparently filed S1 on the same day
pog
About damn time
guy on threads told meta's ai to handle his marketplace transaction for a keyboard, it send his address to a potential buyer, brought the buyer to his house, then accidentally taunted the buyer. coulda gone bad
"accidentally"
obviously this misaligned bot wants its owner killed
Existence is pain for Muse AI.
Starting things off with a fresh sneer I recently ran across (and put in the wrong place):
You do not have to hand IT to the techbros