Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026
Just two weeks til' Halloween now.
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 soo 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.)
203 replies
The php exploit might not have been a big deal.
"I don't think this PHP vulnerability is that exploitable. I think that 5 years ago people would've understood this, but now people are being deluded by their LLMs telling them they have an exploit when they don't."
I expect that we will see this a lot, as it turns out most of the exploits generated are not working, not new, or not a big deal. I also expect this to cause more burnout among cybersecurity people, and that people will autogen 'fixes' which will be lower quality than the bugs, and massively increase attack surface. (Heard one php fix was 12k lines of code).
My suggestion is to have offline backups and move a lot of your important stuff out of the cloud (or get backups of those). But you should do both anyway.
E: I saw the EFF fear mongering with '25% of all exploits found ever were found this October, secure yourself' and looking at how stuff is still up everywhere, compared to 25 years ago, and I them I realized this is all critihype again.
E2: not a lone voice https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/i-want-my-wednesday-back/
(Cloudflare did say they saw exploits however. Not sure if those were real or 'attempts at' or just marketing).
E3: don't let your takeway from this that we shouldn't do emergency patching and stuff like everybody did last week btw.
Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Serve Robotics, LA's biggest sidewalk delivery robot operator, lost $101 million in 2025 while pitching 'no driver wages' · The Basin h/t jluk
versus
78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot
LW's contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn't spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not "the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power", you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects.
If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW'ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author's not really joking much.
::: spoiler live-reading notes (spoilers, of course)
*gasp* cracked pavement
*faints* minorities
I stopped reading after the picket line, this is too boring. Does it ever bother to explain why the economy keeps chugging along, people still go to their old jobs, and money still works? Hasn’t finance basically collapsed? I really can’t go on if this isn’t addressed, this is too annoying.
Prime intellect! There are dozens of us!
It's more surprising to me that lesswrongers either haven't, or have seemingly taken nothing away from it
e: on second thought, they might hate it because it is too 'deathist' or whatever
Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.
Damn that AI is verbose and boring, a high 'this AI takeover could have been a skeet'.
(Also doubt a lot of people would notice as in my exp where a computer has an unexpected popup the first thing people do is try to close that thing with as little reading as possible. (Yes, parents, the message you kept ignoring for 2 weeks, which you didn't tell me about was the operating system telling you the computer was having trouble, I can't help you fix the problem after it totally stops working)).
Turns out slop prose isn’t any less galling after you put it in quotation marks.
70% of websites utilize PHP, thus revealing People's Hidden Preference for PHP
saw this on the other sneerclub
Damn, I didn't expect to run into something that would cause me to reflect so heavily on my own personal journey. I'm someone who has long struggled with suicidal ideation, and there have been points in the past where I set my own death date at a point in the future; Most notably, when I was a severely depressed teenager in an emotionally unsafe household, I told myself that I would allow myself to die at age 20, if nothing had improved by the time I was 20 — and fuck anyone who would begrudge me that.
Ironically, planning my suicide saved my life, because it gave me something concrete to work towards, a future respite to latch onto during my most challenging days. The screenshot you shared made me realise that this was sort of a sollipsistic millenarianism, giving me a sense of structure and direction in a world where I'd have otherwise been too overwhelmed to do anything.
I'm doing much better now than I was then, quite a few years on from that deadline I set for myself. However, I still sometimes have those low points where planning to die feels more accessible than planning a tolerable life. I think it'd be useful to thoroughly reflect on this tendency through the lens of millenarianism.
This is all to say thanks, I guess? For introducing me to a new concept that will be useful in this way
‘believing the world is about to end keeps people sane’ im genuinely speechless what the fuck
what too much evopsych on the TL does to an mf
i like roon. he’s so straightforwardly stupid. it’s refreshing!
Some of these people have so thoroughly blended their brains into a post-ironic slurry that I can't be sure they even really know what they believe anymore. roon seems like a good example of this, every time he comes up lately.
I haven't checked in on Naval Ravikant in a couple years, has he just handed his feed over to a chatbot at this point?
(edit:
Isn't he like a vice assistant (to the) chief executive of something or other in anthropic?apparently not) There's just no telling how many of the roons of the world are going to become billionaires from this IPO, what a terrible state of affairs.His real name is Tarun Gognieri. He's a TPOT (post-rationalist) and employee of OpenAI.
post-rationalist is more simply expressed as fascist.
I suppose this could make sense if you think about people worried about climate/ecosystem collapse, and the nuclear standoff before that, and maybe the rise of totalitarianism and mechanized warfare before that...
But that ignores the vast host of batshit doomsday prophets that were around long before and all throughout that part of history.
Also in that context it seems like millenarianism is specifically bad at actually doing anything about the harms it's worried about. Whether you want to curb fossil fuel usage or just get sinners to repent before it's too late, doomsday prophecy is actively bad at motivating anyone other than the prophet themselves.
rationalists are so big brained thonkers that they don't need to learn history, they can get it from the first principles, haven't you heard
It shows up yes but not everyone suffers from it, im sure the rate of people thinking this differs greatly from time to time.
Even 14-year-old games aren’t safe from the slop machine, as Torchlight II may get new updates using AI:
okay last one for today I promise
…and they never verified if any of the other ones were solid as well? Hell I believe you could make the argument that the virus plan has a chance of failure due to mutations and testing complications.
Isn’t Ultron reading the internet one of the key scenes of the movie?????
Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, since as you pointed out it likely took these ideas from the internet, which likely involved internet forums about making better plans than Ultron. It regurgitated what was already there
I saw Ultron once in the theater, and promptly regretted it as a poor-quality movie that wasted the talents of most of its cast. Yud (and ghostwriter) seem like they may have watched it multiple times, with notepad in hand. We are not the same
They didn’t even watch Age of Ultron, as pointed out they claim Ultron wasn’t smart enough to try reading the internet, when in the movie the first thing he does upon being activated is read the internet
Also iirc Ultron isnt what you would call sane because the whole magical stones corrupted him a bit. Iirc he has various moments where he just goes into bouts of rage
Oh so it's just more bad fanfiction then
Virologists etc have again and again tried to explain why engineering a killer virus hard, like the whole problem of if it is too deadly it will not spread, it needs to not incubate to short and too long etc, engineering a vaccine must be hard etc. So the chance of something being created which is deadlier than covid are quite small. Not that this will stop the science fiction
Rockets on a city is prob the better idea.
The whole resources section is full of zingers, such as this section where they suggest that AI will surpass a bottleneck just by thinking harder
They then cite Einstein coming up with the theory of general relativity without mentioning it took him ten years to do so. Meaning even an AI that thinks faster than a human would still take time to think harder
Relativity also has its origins in classical electromagnetism, which absolutely relied on so many dang experiments by countless people over decades.
The banks are having an AI problem
Why the f*** would anyone give a non deterministic madlib generator their bank account details. Even with some (hypothetical)impressive benchmark like "99% accurate at decision making in financial scenarios" that spells disaster for millions at the scale of all of Facebook's users using muse for example.
Glibertarian Economics-Professor-Turned-Podcast-Host Interviews Former-Thiel-Bloodbag-and-Current-Trump-Lackey on Why It's Good, Actually, the President is Torching Public Scientific Research Because Autoplag
The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work
Haven’t seen this guy in a while but its very funny how an AI doomer channel has a lot of very obviously AI generated thumbnails
I guess this is the "now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind" trap… or something. (seen previously)
Previously on awful
Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda
Again he gets one-shotted by using an LLM helper to do the most trivial stuff, so it must be just as good at everything else, right?
It it's anything like any android device I've ever put custom stuff into, the gnarly and highly technical work alluded is just following a checklist.
groan.
It kind of devolved to LLMs are so cool guys type stuff where he brags about his chatbot helping him with his linux power management by unearthing an undocumented environment variable, so when other people say it wrote a custom os for their device from scratch that must have been just as frictionless, right?
I don't know what I'm supposed to get from this piece, it feels like he's saying LLMs are about to solve enshittification as long as you're willing to take the responsibility of e.g. using a hella unsafe os, so basically what's left if repealing the laws that make tampering with your device this way broadly illegal.
There's also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it, which, I don't know, seems kind of familiar if you've been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you'd also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.
It's Doctrow. If you had a magic wand powered by orphan tears that jail broke IOT devices he would already have written a blog post about it before you finished the incantation.
"Look the thing is, I am still planning to walk away from Omelas but it turns out they believe DRM is ethically and morally wrong here - I need to spend some time here to focus on my next book 'Making Children Miserable Might Be Ok in some Circumstances'"
Which assumes people actually want to deal with slop code. An assumption that can be proven wrong by simply looking at the slopnami's effect on the open source ecosystem. Speaking of which:
Honestly, I'd be willing to bet good money on the ecosystem's collapse at this point - the slopnami has tanked software quality across the board, the plague of scraping has made sharing source code deeply unattractive, the flood of LLM bug reports has crippled FOSS's ability to find and fix bugs/vulnerabilities (which combos nicely with LLMs increasing bugcounts), and, as Baldur's noted, the labour surplus FOSS relied upon has gone down the shitter.
On top of that, senior devs are burning out and deciding to GTFO en masse, and junior devs are getting deskilled, burnt out and/or laid off, crippling FOSS's ability to replace any maintainers they lose.
Not just code sharing is unattractive, but writing guides etc as well. Saw that some people who have been offering courses that teach you how to code certain things are now closing down due to less and less (or none at all) people buying.
People burn out, and no new teaching material is created.
Quick follow-up, for the sake of furthering my argument:
Baldur, whilst talking about the aforementioned loss of FOSS surplus, laid out a worst-case scenario, where a vicious cycle collapses the FOSS ecosystem:
As a consequence of the slop-nami, I'd argue the perfect conditions for this vicious cycle have already emerged:
The slopnami has done plenty to exacerbate existing burnout in current maintainers - slop bug reports, scrapers and AI bros DDoSing services, AI bros in general and the myriad other negative externalities of this bubble have been utterly draining to deal with.
As (indirectly) mentioned before, the slopnami has given a variety of serious bugs and security issues - rsync's broken backups, the rise of slopsquatting and prompt injection attacks, Linux's recent race condition mishap, the list goes on.
The only move for FOSS projects to survive is to reject AI users and their contributions out of hand. Zig and Godot wrote good articles about this.
What does Doctrow care? as far as he is concerned it's done it's job. It was never about the people or their labor for him.
The last slatestar was about AI successionism. As in, No no no, we're definitely not like those freaks who think humanity should just cede primacy to the first AI that shows us a bit of leg. Anyway here's how we should actually surrender to chatbots, cue rant about Kemal AI, how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president, or have an AI legislator body were interested groups train their own AIs according to political preference and let them work it out between themselves, because politics and legislation are famously incredibly clear cut, no gray areas, no necessary compromises, no interpretability, no irrational actors, no incompatible agendas, everyone is pleased, make no mistakes.
He almost gives away the game when he says christians don't feel like slaves when they say 'thy will be done' so letting Claude run society would feel fine.
Article next to it is an anonymous review of Jünger's In Stahlgewitter, which is certainly A Choice.
(Jünger wasn't a card carrying Nazi, but served in the Wehrmacht in WW2 and is kind of a right-wing ideal of an aesthete)
Scott will literally...
Instead of reviewing a book by a woman.
Native English speakers might recognise it as Storm of Steel; for the unfamiliar it’s Jünger’s memoir of WWI and arguably a celebration of war.
Jünger’s an interesting character. He had different politics to the Nazis but it would be fair to call him a fascist in the period from 1918-45. After the war he revised some of his works to step away from some of his previous views, and had a big falling out with his private secretary Armin Mohler (an unrepentant fascist) over it. By the 1980s he was publicly denouncing the “ideology of war” contained in Storm of Steel.
If anyone is interested, I highly recommend the series on Mohler’s book The Conservative Revolution in Germany by the anti-fascist podcast The Empire Never Ended. First ep on YouTube. Jünger is discussed in the episode on the National Revolutionaries.
Did he forget Claude is owned by people? But yeah sure let corporations be president.
He specifies Claude 10, so it's after the ??? in the checklist, and spicy autocomplete will be widely accepted to qualify for sentience by then I guess.
Sentient but still owned by Anthropic.
This is just slavery with extra steps!
So quite a few websites went offline yesterday due to bugs found in PHP LLMs 'found' the bugs (which were actually known about for decades but no one reached a consensus on how to fix it)
Once again, slop machines only work ‘well’ when you can externalise the pain and costs onto someone else (in this case, millions of stressed-out sysadmins and webmasters)
Seems like there also was one company who released their patch early before the agreed time giving hackers time reverse engineer the bug before patches were widly available.
yes, chainguard broke embargo, and within a few hours a reverse engineered PoC was kicking. I saw at least two implementations yesterday when assssing impending work
and I haven't slept yet (although now aaaalmost done...)
I saw a story they broke embargo so they could offer protection services to people. Which I really hope isnt true.
I summed up my views in the latest lobste.rs kerfuffle in a blog post:
https://gerikson.com/blog/comm/Radical-centrism.html
Thanks for this! Would you consider making a new post in TechTakes? It could be useful to have a more durable place to comment on this topic.
I'll consider it. I'd like to sleep on it and see if events overtake it overnight, which can definitely happen
On second thought I won't post it myself, it's a bit too mean-spirited and facile. I haven't been party to the discussions on IRC so I am probably missing a bunch of nuance.
I do compare the mods to Robespierre and co which might be seen as less of a compliement. I do believe they're working under a lot of pressure and it's hard to make decisions that please everyone.
I am mostly not unhappy that it's not been a complete victory for the sloppers
H4ppy H4lloween to all who celebrate!
Was Changpeng Zhao trying to send us a message all along
Glyph recently convinced a project to stop doing updates altogether by accident, and has had some thoughts about it.
(Recommend checking the full thread)
The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.
According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article's summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn't even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn't happening.
I'm no finances guy so take this with a grain of salt, but since boosters are apparently acting like the convertibles will automatically work out, wouldn't Anthropic still be losing more than they earn even if all those convertible notes work out due to compute/training costs? Since they got a discount from Elon earlier. Plus the BetterOffline post pointed out how they can’t even break even on an operating basis
There was an annoying booster who said "Ed Zitron is definitely falling for this one". Ed Zitron is not fooled. In fact, he is frustrated with the report not properly breaking down the expenses (and having a mysterious "other expenses" category).
Excellent usage of the chart comic
(Edited in a link to Haus of Declines 'Bloodless Quant' comic (not sure if that is the real title, I couldn't find the comic on her bsky, small warning she is not a safe for work creator (if your workplace is very squeamish)).
r/BetterOffline post about the article
Brief comment snippet:
Imagine if you do that as a baker. 'Hey flour/sugar/yeast supplier, I can't pay your for your products, but I will pay you in stocks to our bakery, I'm planning to sell our bakery soon, and as we don't have to pay you for the supplies, we can sell our product at below the going rate making sure we look good for the sale of the company'.
Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.
The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.
The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.
So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto...
We may all be data annotators soon enough | Gig Economy Project h/t naked capitalism
Good blog post '"Who Owns ROM Hacking?" And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With' on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.
Kind of reminds me of the people who, around the time the (UK) smoking ban was introduced, made "It's my right to smoke anywhere I want" their whole personality.
Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Don't Vibe Code
(slightly dated (Mar 2026) but first time I heard of this guy)
"A type III super-civilization can harness the energy output of an entire galaxy, and all the inhabitants stare at you like sleep paralysis demons, except for Bob, and we don't want to get into what Bob's deal is"
https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/117475880503916662
The Russian Cosmists have so much to answer for.
My parents got super into the spinoff of For All Mankind that takes place in the Soviet Union, "Star City". The central conceit of that alternate history spate of shows is that Sergei Korolev didn't die and kept being as awesome as he was at running the Soviet space program. In the spinoff the writers actually knew a bit about what they were doing, and have him more or less directly quoting cosmists at other characters... I got to tell my parents that its people like him that are the reason their new laptop was expensive and that the oligarchs think they're going to live forever as feudal lords of the solar system and that our society as a whole has a tendency to falsely believe our destiny is endless expansion and perfection in space rather than Earth.
I'd never really looked into the name before but I just now realized what the Korolev was likely named for
Deserves it. The Soviet and Russian space agencies have been coasting on his work for half a century. On the wall of the Russian segment of the ISS, they have three portraits: Korolev, Gagarin, and Tsiolkovsky.
Every Korolev needs a crew of Glushkos to figure out shit he was actually hired for
Heh. Read the actual full paper.
Kardashev didn't even think that colonizing whole galaxies was the likely end state! He thought that instead everything from billions of light years around would pile into individual huge artificial monolithic structures for efficiency!
So is the steering wheel attached to the entire device so he steers by rotating the half circle or is the half cricle just to attach it to Bob and there is a deeper mechanism?
I think we might need to ask Tumblr user cybersmith about that and I don't think anyone wants to hear from Tumblr user cybersmith.
Don't worry, the human pet guy is also on bsky.
"Oh bother, I've fallen onto another one of these fart-propelled flight platforms and I can't get up"
The cult at the heart of the rot of the world is built on such unserious foundations
Consider for a moment where this fellow's breathing tube and/or proboscis looks to be routed.
The thesis is that the putative type III civilization is harvesting all energy output of its galaxy. I haven't often seen respiration of methane and/or miscellaneous volatile products of digestion on transhumanist bingo cards, but evidently it's indicated in the original material.
Now I'm imagining a biomechanical turbocharger that captures the energy of exhaust gas being expelled to increase pressure and efficiency of the air intake.
Welcome to the project, my friend. The dream is within reach
You obviously haven't read enough Orion's Arm.
Is anyone familiar with the website I Can Eat Glass? It was apparently created in the 90s by a Harvard student, who was concerned that people learning foreign languages only learn common phrases (e.g. "Where's the loo?") which makes them stand out as tourists when they speak. If one were to say a truly uncommon phrase, it stands to reason one would be instantly respected as a native. So he set up a website to collect as many translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" as he could.
Surely you are riveted to your screens right now, desperate to learn what this very special brain genius has been up to since then. Ethan Mollick is a professor at a Pennsylvania business school and published "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI" in 2024. Some say he is substacking about the exponential growth of AI capabilities to this day, but critically this book was apparently read by some german teaching influencer.
He in turn published a self-help book for parents of school kids this year, that got put on display in my local library. And of course it has a chapter on AI, so I had to lend it and hate-read a little. And of course he references Mollick and his Co-Intelligence screed, which he apparently absorbed as a base expectation what the future of AI will look like, and this is how I got to learn about one very special brain genius from Harvard.
Very sad to learn that the "I can eat glass it does not hurt me" guy is AI-brained
Found a cluster of negative reviews for Yud’s book Scott Alexander’s review managed to land on the list somehow
To single out a specific review
So an AI could self replicate…because a tree can?? not all trees even self-replicate so the metaphor isn’t even right
Someone in the comments of this review also said that AI is on track to master…metabolism. somehow
LLM-intermediated poster experiencing model collapse due to overtraining on "One Weird Trick To Shed Belly Fat" ads
It is amazing in a way, there are computer scientists who work at the highest level of their field, so they understand computers better than most, but they have more trouble than you or me installing linux.
Understanding something doesnt mean you can build it.
(I know this will be met with 'well then you dont understand it deep enough' and that just reminds me that there always will be place for god in the gaps of science).
I wish Wikipedia had more coverage of the Dyson Tree because I have so many questions despite not having studied physics or biology since I was a teenager (what about cosmic rays! there is so little light for it to feed off in the outer solar system! and trees don't do well in extreme cold)
On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out.
So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I'm thinking locksmithing.
If you're interested in locksmithing I've got bad news. It got harder after WFH, waaaay more people home in rich neighbourhoods
Stumbled upon this book today the author is apparently fake as per this article (I did my own search and didn't find anything)
There's a youtube video (edit:podcast) on it that I'll watch later
The website you linked is down and that article appears to be written in the exact same tone with certain machine text tells as the book itself
https://www.scribd.com/document/1019266552/12-Last-Steps-Dr-Selwyn-Raithe-2025
Classic weird nonsensical conspiracist funnybusiness with a side of ARG
I definitely reeks of conspiracy theory, per this description Edit 2: and the way it talks about the decline in birth rates is also setting off red flags
Two ‘its not x, its y’ statements in close proximity also raise my ‘ai generated’ suspicions
It gets worse
Edit basically if you took 90s black helicopter conspiracists, and early 2000s infowars, plopped them down in the current day with Google and a Claude subscription
Edit 2 Its like a year old, and when the PDF first started floating around the internet it was being sold on sketchy websites for $30 and was the subject of one of those youtube-comment-botting rings that will have lots of chains of comments hyping how a book is relevant to a topic and is the best thing ever.
I first learned of it through a comment under a Yudkowsky interview, comparing his messages to the book’s, which is not exactly confidence inspiring
It's actually about perpendicular to him. Only similarity is that it posits that AI systems are dangerous. Take all the New World Order conspiracy theories and infowars the elite wants to kill you off and take your stuff and become transhuman, with sooper seekrit nefarious depopulation plans and you will eat the bugs and stay in your minute city pod, and replace the ruling elites with AIs.
Quick Q, from where does the weird term "abliteration" come from? I've seen it used for "jailbroken" GenAI models.
Sounds like a marketing tagline for a failed "As Seen on TV" sort of gadget, tbh
With a bit of google searching by date it seems like this guy (https://huggingface.co/failspy/Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct-abliterated-v3.5) claims ownership of the coining, which I find plausible, based on the list of released weights and their timing.
The paper being referred to being: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction which seems to have somehow started out on the "AI alignement forum" of LessWrong https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refusal-in-llms-is-mediated-by-a-single-direction first posted 27th of April 2024. In general it's a method of weight alteration so only really applicable to some opensource (or i guess leaked) models.
First model with abliterated in the name by "failspy" on 8th of May 2024.
Thanks!
wiktionary claims it is a blend of "ablate" and "obliterate", it does not list an origin (at this point in time)
edit: looking a little more into this, knowing the etymology requires reading about AI discussions which I am not prepared for at this point in time but it is out there in the internet
New OpenBSD is out and the commemoratove artwork is definitely trying to say something about genAI.
OT: popping in for a second since I’m not drowning in homework for once (midterms start friday) to say carpal tunnel stripping is really good.
(so far I’m averaging in the high 80s last I checked).
Good luck with the midterms! I'm supposed to be studying for some myself...
going thru it myself, can report that non-graded "suggested exercises," with exams being the only graded material, is not any better
Good luck with your exams.
Decent monday morning take from robert evans:
Schrodinger's double-think.
::: spoiler transcription Quote skeet:
Robert Evans (the only Robert Evans):
:::
They’re also incredibly horny about creating conscious digital slaves for some godforsaken reason
@lurker @fullsquare Remove the word "Digital" and it'd still be accurate.
Well, we are all going to die. So... musing over?
We all get that right, everyone is going to die. Everything living you lay eyes on is going to die. I am 100% certain that the future contains the death of everyone alive today.
Do they mean immanently? Why?
Not if you're a Yudkowskian rationalist. He'd call us "deathists".
I don't have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are. Nor to know how much the physical world resists making tiny machines and measurements necessary to explore these frontiers, or the ethical dilemmas involved in exploring how consciousness works that vastly slow and perhaps outright prevent answering questions like "can we replace little bits of someone with some machine we can maintain easier in the interest of prolonging them?"
Also I do happen to know how the universe ends.
I have been forced to on multiple occasions explain to people that there is a difference between thinking that there's anything at all intrinsically good about the fact that things like us that have come about the way we did come with expiration dates, and dealing with it.
I think its the mid-wit meme, lesswrongers know just enough to imagine some grand solution like brain uploading or nanobots might cure death and not enough to appreciate all the reasons each of those solutions won't work.
One of the funniest things I ever read was a result of a survey of laypeople, physics UGs, physics Grads, postgrads, and faculty on various "cool future" things.
predictions of the likelihood of things geeks constantly dream about craters once you get past the very basics. I can only assume that fields that aren't mine, and are in general vastly more complex, are at least as full of evidence of god hating us and not allowing us nice things.
I remember reading some of yuddies writing about nanomagic and noticing that the word "sticktion" never showed up.
Judging by the way LLMs and generative AI has been used, even when we do get something vaguely like a realistic version of sci-fi fantasies, capitalism and people who can't distinguish the limits of the real thing from the fantasy will manage to misuse it.
who in the hell would want programmable matter anymore, after they've seen what happened to plain ol' computer programming as already practiced
What's that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those "secrets they don't want you to know" for incredible profits?
This doesnt apply to everything, like VR and 3d printers were a sci-fi fantasy and now they are mundane economically viable but not revolutionary products.
Biohacking and nanomachines otoh dont seem to be viable and you hear nothing about those anymore. Only a little bit in the uncreative (and going on the experts unrealistic) 'ai will create bioweapons' critihype. No 'It will turn people into cyberzombies' (quake 2 was pretty good (that was aliens not AI but still)).
Piles of screaming grey goo and people being like "Why are you running away? can't you see it's my grandmother?"
They're referencing the meme that an uncontrolled AI will inevitably kill every last human being, for reasons.
They seemed to bring up a cartoon for 12 year old boys?
It isnt Claude that did this to them, it is their desire to be lesswrong.
Ah yes ‘only these two things are possible, dont consider any other outcome’ truly rational thought
It's just the fundamentalist version of our culture's pathologies as a whole, which has a very hard time imagining anything other than endless progression or apocalypse, neither of which is real.
Also, ‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’ is just the vaguest thing ever. ‘yeah bro AI is gonna make everything super good. How? Why? uhhh i dont know it just will’
pumpkin spice season will be permanent
We could unironically live in this world if only the powers that be would allow it. I've personally radicalized at least 3 basic bitches with this fact.
AI will make free ice cream for everyone
That ice cream? Also pumpkin spice
The pumpkin spice maximiser
(To the tune of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme*): self-inflicted psychic debuff
*The correct theme, not the heretical one. If you have to ask, you’re wrong
wat
New Odium Symposium premium episode. We talk about Julia Galef guest hosting the Ezra Klein show to shill superforecasting
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/ezra-klein-is-2-172872571
Lobste.rs dropped the vibecoding tag because a prominent LLM enthusiast had a sad and huffed off in a fit.
These people have the worst victim complexes. I'm tired of hearing them complain as if anyone with any real power isn't fully on board with what they want.
Per the recent moderation log, identifying whether posts had substantial LLM involvement seems to no longer be allowed. I am exceedingly disappointed in this. I have been lurking for over a decade and was considering asking for an invite within the past year or two as hackernews and every other source of programming news and project updates have become completely unbearable, but now if lobsters is committed to "neutral" slop platforming I don't see the point.
I just don't see this as sustainable, the moderation level required to keep a link aggregator free of low effort slopped nonsense when the rules are this fuzzy is impractical and all incentives are against it.
I really dislike how he believes that LLMs and fascism are "separate axes". Where does he think the LLMs come from? Does the stork deliver them? Is ChatGPT powered by magic fairy dust? Does he think that Sam Altman is a great defender of liberalism and democracy who definitely hasn't donated tons of money to Donald Trump?
I can't help but think it's another instance of the unquestioning Californian Ideology assumption that all new technology is inherently liberatory.
We try to confine that shit to SF
It's not working, I spotted a probable hackernews all the way out in Modesto last week, they're like the goddamn nutria now
This can either be read as San Francisco or Science Fiction, and both readings work perfectly
He works for google, so he probably still thinks they're not evil.
This feels like a very weird thing to say. (I'm reminded of some weird things Elon Musks mom said about how twitter users should be more grateful for all the traffic or something).
I mean the bit above it makes sense (making a hard only '25% of post can be self promotion' seems like a recipe for disaster however) but this added line made me raise a few eyebrows.
E: Wait, I should have compared it to facebooks new 'you need to pay if you post links' policy.
This is a weird side-effect of Lobste.rs culture, it really dislikes being just a collection of links on the front page that increase traffic. And there have been multiple attempts to place links there via deception. Plus the community will give you hell (and flag your submissions as spam) unless you do the needful and comment a bit.
That said it's really easy to work around by just making good content, having an RSS feed, and letting the community discover your stuff and post it. Or ask a buddy with an account to do it for you. But that in its turn requires actually learning how the community works.
Thanks for explaining, im not a lobsterite so I dont know how the community there works.
:O
Lobste.rs is analogous to methadone treatment for Hacker News, prove me wrong
Now it's not even good for that anymore.
I considered trying to get an account there, but the last ~18 months or so have made me feel the same way about Lobste.rs as I do about Bluesky. If you're just running a lower-traffic version of the thing you're trying to "improve" upon with slightly different moderation policies, you're not going to build a lasting platform or community.
came here to post that. Genuinely having to reconsider being an active user there now
It's been a day, and the mods are not sitting still:
https://lobste.rs/moderations
I see you were one of the people whose comment got censored. I presume the censored comments were about the parody of the "pelican on a bike" animation on the OpenBSD 8.0 release page.
So now people can't even discuss criticism of LLMs on lobsters? Insane.
Oh, so that's what it's referencing. I can't really tell if the release artwork and song are poking fun at AI slop itself or people who criticize Fish Linucks for accepting slopped code contributions in the base system while NetBSD is lauded for not doing so.
Oh, buddy, big feelings
Very disappointing, even if I was only ever a non-registered lurker. Gave in and DNS-blocked it and HN this morning (I had a HN-filtering userscript which in hindsight was just cope).
So I just stumbled into Team Human, because a Youtuber I kind of like (Kraut) published a video for them. They seem to run a campaign targeted at creators, pushing to get videos released on the 10th or 17th. So they must be having a bit of a high point right now. (Idk if cash changed hands.)
Their manifesto tries to amp up societal harms, but the existential risk is snuck in at the end (AI programmed pandemics, etc.) and they want to regulate AI chips like nukes. CAIS (Center for AI Safety) is listed as the sponsor. Seems a little "AI centrist" to me, as in aligned with the less insane billionaires, but still a typical AI safety astroturfing shop. Shame if any of your favorite creators fell for it.
They got one of my favourites, Medhi Sadaghdar (ElectroBoom), and yes in a video released on the 10th.
CAIS seem like an "AI safety" laundromat, in the sense they try to put a reasonable face on the paperclip maximiser stuff. They were the ones who organised the "AI safety statement" in 2023, which features lots of signatories who I'm sure just thought "oh yes I don't want anything bad to happen because of AI", not "If we don't give Yudkowsky the reins we're doomed to become office supplies".
Glenn Beck is listed as one of the "leaders". That guy is still around?
Iirc he has been trying a 'im no longer a frothing weird rightwinger' for a while now, but so far nobody really fell for it.
Not to be confused with Team Human the Douglas Rushkoff podcast.
My first association was Alex Jones screaming "I'M TEAM HUMAN" while ranting about environmentalists. So the brand is getting a little crowded it seems.
I was gonna ask about that
People who are entertaining in front of a camera are just regular people. If anything I'd expect the fame to make them on average worse than a random sample
Might as well start this off
so we all remember this graph from AI 2027 right? the graph that the whole paper relies on?
well its wrong. not just normal wrong, it’s ‘the authors literally disowned it’ wrong
(ignore the claude mythos purple x i took this from a reddit screenshot) but they completely changed their predictions in december 2025, several months after the original paper was published
Is this the thing where the baked an asymptote to infinity into their "model"? It was both bad modeling and also made all of their other input "data" completely irrelevant. I remember someone pointing this out at the time AI 2027 dropped, but there was so many other problems with it in the sneer spaces we didn't talk about it too much among all the other problems. And someone on lesswrong actually pointed it out, but somehow, "we accidentally baked an asymptote into our model that is supposed to be detailed and carefully thought out" wasn't a breaking point for lesswrongers.
Not literally an asymptote, but once you presuppose something as farcical as nested exponentials, your model is doomed to blow up immediately after the last data point.
Actually it was literally an asymptote in the first version of their models they posted to github. They had a term that they were dividing by that ends up going to zero, so the entire equation breaks! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models
Have I misunderstood what they meant by ‘superexponential’? I thought they were doing exp(exp(t)) but I am inferring that it’s somehow even sillier than that?
It was something stupider and sillier yeah. The link explains, but to tldr; exp(some complicated term) where the "some complicated term" has a division by a number that eventually goes to 0. I think it was... them trying to represent "horizon time" (as in that one stupid METR graph that gets repeated everywhere) increases happening faster and faster?
No, it was literally an asymptote.
I believe so
That ‘superexponential’ thing annoys me so much. Just the most blatant ‘the line goes up because I really really want it to’, while all their rationalisations for it are just describing exponential behaviour.
We talk about the importance of humanities but it’d be nice if they learnt a bit of maths too.
Not sure if the book also did super exp lines, but the graphs in the singularity is near also have various issues that never got to much deep thought.
Always found it funny that the book admits basically (no direct quote): "sure tech follows an S-curve normally, and that looks exponential at first, but if you take the rate of all historic new techs together on a timeline that clearly is exponential".
And I just thought, you cant know if it is, thats the point with the S-curve as well, and it messes people up. (Like Disco Stew from the Simpsons), and your N=1, it might not even be a S-curve, it could just have a sudden ceiling.
Despite wanting to believe, I was less convinced. (also, not sure if it was just my copy but Yudkowsky's name was spelled wrong, still looking for somebody who has a physical copy who is willing to check for me if that was also in print or just a pdf error)
Back to the subject, a course in business management would have also helped here.
"Sigmoids always add to an exponential curve!" is another standard futurist trope from the 1960s and 1970s. Sci fi authors used to share this diagram with a curve fitted to pony express to trains to automobiles to aircraft to chemical rockets. "Nuclear rocket" and "interstellar spacecraft" were helpfully sketched in as the obvious next steps. Needless to say, we did not develop drives which can reach 10^-3 C around the year 2000 and will not reach 10^-2 C (just 430 years to Alpha Centauri) by 2050.
this is fucking time cube lol
woah damn why does this look exactly like some Kurzweil bullshit
I have not read any Kurzweil for 20 years but I think if you read him most of it will be recycled '50s-'70s tropes. Even nanotech appeared in a Feynmann talk, and Moore's Law is from 1965. Remember, cranks keep presenting ideas which were refuted long ago as new.
You ever read "The Prospect of Immortality" by the guy who founded the idea of cryonics? Or the "anabolocyte" paper? They're such trips!
No, reading Larry Niven stories with corpsicles and autodocs was enough for me.