Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 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…)
so like a fool I decided to search the web. specifically for which network protocol Lisp REPLs use these days (is it nREPL? or is that just a clojure thing with ambitions?)
and the first extremely SEOed result on ddg was this bizarre blend of an obscure research lisp from 2012 and LLM articles about how Lisp is used in mental health:
Numerous applications and tools are being developed to support mental health and wellness. Among the varied programming languages at the forefront, Lisp stands out due to its unique capabilities in cognitive modeling and behavior analysis.
so I know exactly what this is, but why is this? what even is the game here?
Here’s a screenshot of two screenshots of an AI bro getting humiliated:
the hawk tuah teapot is actually hysterical which is how I knew the poster was taking the piss
It would appear CNN was also at the eugenics conference? Why are all these mainstream news orgs at a 200-person event where all the speakers are eugenicists and racists?
https://bsky.app/profile/bmceuen.bsky.social/post/3lmmtefdl422j
And in response to an Atlantic subhead saying “Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus, but the left was mostly absent at a recent pro-natalism conference”:
yeah, weird that the left wasn’t present at the Fourteen Words conference
https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lmmqjx3fdc2e
I mean the left has been mostly absent from America in general since at least the Reagan years, so it’s not all that surprising.
They’re giving the American people what they voted for
Here’s a screenshot of a skeet of a screenshot of a tweet featuring an unusually shit take on WW2 by Moldbug:
transcript
skeet by Joe Stieb: Another tweet that should have ended with the first sentence.
Also, I guess I’m a “World War Two enjoyer”
tweet by Curtis Yarvin: There is very very extensive evidence of the Holocaust.
Unfortunately for WW2 enjoyers, the US and England did not go to war to stop the Holocaust. They went to war to stop the Axis plan for world conquest.
There is no evidence of the Axis plan for world conquest.
Oh gosh I looked up the post and that was a mistake. Actually Mr. Yarvin there is quote tweeting someone who dared, on twitter, to say that the Holocaust was real. The replies (including Yarvin’s incorrect & off topic nonsense) being about what you’d expect from twitter nowadays. So much Holocaust denial.
ironically many “WW2 enjoyers” are big fans of German hardware, uniforms and tactics…
The vibe I get is that by ‘enjoyers’ he means people who thought fighting the nazis in WW2 was morally justified.
Unusually shit take on WW2 but not an unusually shit take from Moldbug. Just the usual level of shit.
I think it’s accurate that the US and England didn’t join to stop the Holocaust. Sentence 3 is a little oversimplified, and sentence 4 is straight-up lunacy.
Old and busted: whitewashing hitlerism by pretending the holocaust didn’t happen.
New hotness: pretending the holocaust just sort of happened one day, completely unrelated to the explicit ideology of the people who planned and executed it and the regime that sanctioned it, and anyway they had their hands full defending themselves against unprovoked attacks by the so-called allies, who can blame them.
I checked the link, the thread elaborates a bit more:
to which my understanding is: this is absolutely true as well.
I found it too, it makes the point that Nazi Germany did nothing wrong in attcking other countries, stealing their products, and enslaving their people" is an argument Putin could have made.
Oh, but you see the axis powers only ever wanted to conquer most of Europe, North Africa, a bunch of islands in the Pacific, most of Southeast Asia, Korea and large parts of mainland China, which the allies would have been completely fine with. Nothing suggests they would actually go for full conquest victory. What is a “Lebensraum”? Is it a type of cheese?
Now hang on how many of those conquests were for actual land grab reasons and how many were because they expected people to take issue with starting massive offensive wars for land grab reasons, especially what with the declared intent to ethnically cleanse at least all of Eastern Europe. That’s definitely distinct from planning world conquest, right?
Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
(Blog post written by a crypto-turned-AI bro, but the observation is amusing.)
This one has anus in the name https://manus.im/
Making a startup named Sphinctr
Addition to that, why do some look like Goatse?
Class inheritance
education secretary linda mcmahon speaking about AI in schools. please enjoy
https://www.youtube.com/live/lxrg28zBv94?t=7567s
saw this at https://bsky.app/profile/joshkovensky.bsky.social/post/3lmfr3ssn5s2j, but I recommend watching first so you don’t spoil what you’re about to hear
hold the fucking phone. The secretary of education is the wife of VINCE FUCKING MCMAHON? I thought this was a “no relation” situation but no, it’s real.
If Democrats win the midterm I think they get to shave her head.
Don’t look up who the president is, it might come as a shock /s
Pre-watch: With the prior knowledge that her main job prior to this was wrestling promoter, the ol’ overtonussy is preeeetty loose
Post-watch: lol
overtonussy
Mods, crush his skull /j
oh good for once it’s not me thinking up the cursed word
I hate you so much for the word “overtonussy”.
You need to have levels in several subclasses of extremely online to even understand that.
[✅] “achievement” unclocked
Hello fellow memebuild enjoyer
You’re welcome!
Tired: AI
Wired (and delicious): A1
Slather us in steak sauce and serve with a baked fucking potato because we are so cooked.
Because it is nice to have something entertaining for a change:
https://bsky.app/profile/willsmith.fun/post/3lmi2bjrao22t
Wow, that latest chat with Adam Patrick Murray about the Nintendo Switch 2 was quite the ride! The bit on the console’s dock secrets and the MicroSD Express storage had me glued. It’s amazing to see how these tech advancements are sculpting new landscapes.
Speaking of tech wizardry, have you thought about having Christian Perry on the show? As the CEO of Undetectable AI, he’s taken the whole generative AI world by storm, much like the Switch 2 is taking over gaming news! With over 15 million users and standing as a top AI writing tool, Christian’s insights into AI’s hidden workings promise to intrigue your audience, especially when it comes to how his tools seamlessly pass for human writing without tripping any detectors like GPTzero
Undetectable AI, everyone. Astounding.
New piece from 404 Media: Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”
On a related note, Baldur Bjarnason has chimed in noting how he called this exact shit happening:
Remember when I told you that using these LLMs was like giving US tech a bigotry dial for all your writing?
I feel like some of the doomers are already setting things up to pivot when their most major recent prophecy (AI 2027) fails:
From here:
(My modal timeline has loss of control of Earth mostly happening in 2028, rather than late 2027, but nitpicking at that scale hardly matters.)
It starts with some rationalist jargon to say the author agrees but one year later…
AI 2027 knows this. Their scenario is unrealistically smooth. If they added a couple weird, impactful events, it would be more realistic in its weirdness, but of course it would be simultaneously less realistic in that those particular events are unlikely to occur. This is why the modal narrative, which is more likely than any other particular story, centers around loss of human control the end of 2027, but the median narrative is probably around 2030 or 2031.
Further walking the timeline back, adding qualifiers and exceptions that the authors of AI 2027 somehow didn’t explain before. Also, the reason AI 2027 didn’t have any mention of Trump blowing up the timeline doing insane shit is because Scott (and maybe some of the other authors, idk) like glazing Trump.
I expect the bottlenecks to pinch harder, and for 4x algorithmic progress to be an overestimate…
No shit, that is what every software engineering blogging about LLMs (even the credulous ones) say, even allowing LLMs get better at raw code writing! Maybe this author is better in touch with reality than most lesswrongers…
…but not by much.
Nope, they still have insane expectations.
Most of my disagreements are quibbles
Then why did you bother writing this? Anyway, I feel like this author has set themselves up to claim credit when it’s December 2027 and none of AI 2027’s predictions are true. They’ll exaggerate their “quibbles” into successful predictions of problems in the AI 2027 timeline, while overlooking the extent to which they agreed.
I’ll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff, and -100 for not realizing the real reason why Scott didn’t include any call out of that in AI 2027.
I’ll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff
+10 bayes points
Has someone on LW already proposed a BayesCoin or have I just figured out how to steal lunch money from all rationalists at once
it’s a fucking harry potter reference
HP fanfic but house points are crypto and the chocolate frog cards are NFTs tracked on a magical blockchain
Non Fungible Toads
Edit: this is a nonsequitur, but my wife just shared this with me and it is delightful
Without looking it up i can tell you that coin already exists and the value has crashed already
With a name like that and lesswrong to springboard it’s popularity, BayesCoin should be good for at least one cycle of pump and dump/rug-pull.
Do some actual programming work (or at least write a “white paper”) on tying it into a prediction market on the blockchain and you’ve got rationalist catnip, they should be all over it, you could do a few cycles of pumping and dumping before the final rug pull.
New animation (1:20) by theforestjar about AI art.
Some dark urge found me skim-reading a recent AI doomer blog post. I was startled awake by this most unsettling passage:
My wife wrote a letter to our infant daughter recently. It concluded:
I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]
Though the theoretical possibility had always been percolating somewhere in the back of my mind, it wasn’t until now that I viscerally realized that P(doomers reproducing) was greater than zero. And with other doomers no less.
Left brooding on this development, I drudged along until-
BAhahaha what the fuck
I can’t. This is beyond parody.Completely lost it here. Nothing could have prepared me for the poorly handwritten wrist tattoo.
Creating space for miracles
Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.Oh how rational! Willing to entertain the idea that maybe, theoretically, the doomsday prediction could be off by a few days?
I’m not sure that I ever strongly felt that I would die at eighty or so. I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.
This guy thought he was getting clean but he was actually replacing weed with heroin
I really convinced myself that “doomsday cult” was hyperbole but uhh, nope, it’s 107% real.I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.
My dude you’re so, so, sooo close to realising it, you should spontaneously quantum-tunnel into self-awareness any second now
The storm rages within
Yet I hold F to pay respects
Also, man why do I click on these links and read the LWers comments. It’s always insufferable people being like, “woe is us, to be cursed with the forbidden knowledge of AI doom, we are all such deep thinkers, the lay person simply could not understand the danger of ai” like bruv it aint that deep, i think i can summarize it as follows:
hits blunt “bruv, imagine if you were a porkrind, you wouldn’t be able to tell why a person is eating a hotdog, ai will be like we are to a porkchop, and to get more hotdogs humans will find a way to turn the sun into a meat casing, this is the principle of intestinal convergence”
Literally saw another comment where one of them accused the other of being a “super intelligence denier” (i.e., heretic) for suggesting maybe we should wait till the robot swarms coming over the hills before we declare its game over.
Oh that tattoo is regrettable
At the start they state
The disappointment of imminent death is all the more crushing because just a few years ago researchers announced breakthrough discoveries that suggested [existing, adult] humans could have healthspans of thousands of years. To drop the analogy, here I’m talking about my transhumanist beliefs. The laws of physics don’t demand that humans slowly decay and die at eighty. It is within our engineering prowess to defeat death, and until recently I thought we might just do that, and I and my loved ones would live for millennia, becoming post-human superbeings.
This is, frankly, bonkers. I’d rate the following in descending order of probability
- worldwide societal collapse due to climate change
- we develop an AI that will kill us all for unspecified reasons
- we establish viable self-sustaining societies outside the limits of Earth
- we develop techniques that allow everyone to live effectively forever
If the first happens, it removes the material requirements for the latter things to happen. This is an extreme form of “denial of the flesh”, the inability to realize that without food or water no-one will be working on AI or life extension tech.
“Im 99% sure I will die in the next year because of super duper intelligence, but in a world where that doesnt happen i plan to live 1000 years” surely is a forecast. Surprised they don’t break their own necks on the whiplash from this take.
:'( sad one. feel bad for the bebe, being raised by insane people.
Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.
This line actually really annoys me, because they are already set up for moving the end date on their doomsday prediction as needed while still maintaining their overall doomerism.
I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]
When “The world is gonna end soon so let’s just rawdog from now on” gets real
Teach your children to envy the dead
yet I hold
space for it
Rupi Kaur should sue
Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic. Unfortunately it also looks like the distinctive AI art style was pretty key to preventing the usual set of AI generated image “tells”. Mirrors, hands, teeth, etc are all very visibly wrong.
Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic.
This entire enterprise is just shamanry, we are like two steps away from “throwing a goat into a volcano makes your next prompt more realistic”
deleted by creator
Some more low effort image posting. This zine was in Connolly Books for free. I’m not sure who the author is, but I thought the text was spot on and the illustrations were great. Sorry for no captions/transcriptions
Tired: Propaganda of the deed
Wired: Propaganda of the Sneer
Samizdat of the Sneer?I don’t think whoever wrote this zine goes here, but they should!
Otoh having different groups of the sneer, sneercells (no wait that name needs work) if you will. Can also be useful, esp as authoritarianism etc increases. (Not that I think govs would go after us, apart from an infiltration risk).
E: Hell, I myself am prob a risk factor. First the Dutch secret service should have file on me (else they are not doing their job, I was active in student activism, and did STEM (which also had an active (and targeted for infiltration, we know because counterhacks) hacker group) education (a known terrorism risk increaser), before my faulty brain wiring caused me to drop off the map a bit, and I know several of these groups have been targeted for infiltration recently, and long ago). I also have had just too many official twitter police accounts follow me and then unfollow me without liking a single post for it to be just a coincidence (three times being enemy action). Of course, I’m now old and passive, so if they still think I’m a risk they certainly are not doing their job (I could be a source of information however). But this is enough for me to consider that my real life identity is known enough to be a risk. And this is just about the Dutch police/secret service, there is also the risk of TracingWoodGrains like people trying to get all up in your (social) networks to try and get validation from themotte. And I have read enough stories about cybercriminals that you need to think about this stuff long before it is actually needed, also I’m paranoid.
One more pic:
Subtle dig on Nick Land not being relevant anymore considering that drawing is of him 30+ years ago.
What does he look like now? I shudder to think.
BALD
Moldbug really is the one exception here isn’t he?
And the least deserving too!
From according to yt, that was him in 2017. This is the clearest I could (quickly) find, others are just low res webcam things.
Yowza.
Time waits for nobody.
context
Okay, one more pic, the back cover. Can’t say how reliable these sources are.
Any idea why the flag reassembles the Swiss one (the proportions are wrong though)?
It’s the network state flag. Which I presume is based on the Swiss flag, because they are horny for the idea of a small, rich, well-connected country that profits from mass murder and exploitation.
Oh, I only knew of some of it, thanks
Evgeny Morozov: The New Legislators of Silicon Valley
Thus, what appears as intellectual fast food – the ultra-processed thought-nuggets deep fried in venture capital – often conceals wholesome ingredients sourced from a gourmet pantry of quite some sophistication.
What am I even reading.
Cognitive dissonance
Also, cognitive dysentery
Lol yeah I was thinking about either posting about cognitive dissonance or mentioning that trying to find the kernels of corn in shit still means you are digging through shit. Cognitive dysentery is so much better.
As a wise friend of mine said years ago, when hipsters drinking PBR were having a cultural moment, “You can say you’re drinking piss beer ‘ironically’, but at the end of the day, you’re still drinking piss beer.”
