Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
Got another chance to experience slop firsthand when the instructor for my electrician course was ‘encouraged’ to use the hallucinatron to help create our final exam on the NEC. Now given that the NEC is a dense technical document with a lot of minor but significant variation across its considerable length, this was clearly a perfect use case. Here’s how it shook out:
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It condensed 100 multiple choice questions from the input to 36
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On one question “1-2 inches” was simplified to “12”
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Units in general seem to have been dropped off a lot of questions and answer choices. Usually this didn’t matter too much but it’s a bad look
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Another question asked about fill percentages for a 30 inch conduit. If you look around your office or he and see a >2ft diameter piece of PVC pipe let me know because the tables in the NEC only go up to 6 inches. This is actually a unit issue again because one of the questions on the input test referred to a 30mm conduit which, you know, does actually exist.
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Other questions had a correct answer matching a generic part of the NEC, but had additional information added as a distractor that ended up matching to more specific elements that changes the relevant rule.
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Several questions asked about the reasoning behind a certain rule. Notably the NEC rarely actually gets into that information, as it’s already an incredibly long reference and policy document and would be made even more unweildy if it gave the justification for everything that you should be learning as part of becoming a licensed electrician.
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However, this rarely mattered as the answer choices for those questions uniformly included an obviously correct answer about a generic safety risk and distractors about doing things for cost savings, aesthetic reasons, or arbitrarily.
Given that one of the challenges of this test is time management and looking things up, having to deal with the extra layer of “is this just slop or am I missing something” ended up adding an extra and unintended layer of difficulty onto the test. As always, no matter how egregious or obnoxious the errors introduced by AI, the biggest problem is the loss of trust: you can no longer assume that the text you’re reading was put together with the intended purpose in mind rather than being generated to be statistically similar to text matching that purpose. Even if the differences are relatively small in scope, as they were for most questions on the test, they significantly harm the actual communication of information.
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https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer
For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like “write this app” or “write this functionality” which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.
Please, just fucking don’t, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don’t actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.
Easiest way to avoid using LLMs as a software developer appears to be to get a religious exemption
OT: Finally had to break with a long-time friend after he started sliding more and more into fascism. Feeling quite overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted right now.
That’s awful, losing a friend that way is like a death without a funeral.
my commisserations. i severed contacts with a number of people who went the anti-vaccine way and it’s fucking sad.
Damn. That sucks.
Sorry to hear that, friend. It hurts to do even when it’s the right choice. Hang in there.
A keynote talk suggested, “Do away with a physics midterm, ask students to converse with AI Isaac Newton.”
In the quotes, we find the useful suggestion that the program could be ELIZA-sized.
— Hi, AIsaac! Can you tell me about physics?
— Go away.
— What?
— You’re a moron and you’re TRYING TO STEAL MY IDEAS.
— Look, AIsaac, I don’t think—
— DID LEIBNIZ PUT YOU UP TO THIS?
—
— just GO AWAY I have MERCURY FUMES TO BREATHE.
this one is dystopian
He gave an anecdote about his niece having a hard life moment, and him sending her a personalized song made with Suno to cheer her up. “Not the best, but it took 3 minutes!” Keep in mind, this man is a practicing musician who has composed an entire symphony.
If I were a skilled music person and I wanted to spend 3 minutes cheering someone up, I’d record myself playing “Here Comes the Sun” on my guitar, y’know?
I’d go for This Year by The Mountain Goats personally, but that may say more about me than it does the overall concept.
deleted by creator
S&P have decided not to allow SpaceX early entry into the index after all https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/
“To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged.”
To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable
This is just discrimination. Is S&P scared of innovation? HFSP
OpenAI and Anthropic right now: oh no
Part of me wants to believe the whole S&P special treatment announcement was designed to bait them into disclosing numbers, but the more realistic side of me believes this is a nervous backpedal because they’ve realized the inevitable consequences of allowing this blunder to play out in full.
A company has to disclose a lot of numbers backed by serious legal penalties before an IPO.
Whenever a stock market has gone up 29% in a year and a New Era story is circulating, people with corner offices and Savile Row suite start to do stupid ****. I think that is why financiers started to bend the rules.
Today from the ‘you have got to be fucking kidding me’- dept Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
Before AI, the user was the weakest part of any cybersecurity system. Now, that has completely changed.
They still are the weakest part. We just missed the projection part of the ‘great replacement theory’ pushed by the tech right.
What if we combined all the terrifying unfettered access of an admin user holding a USB stick in front of the server with the naive obedience of a particularly dumb golden retriever and the reliable execution of Windows ME if it was off its ADHD meds?
CW: USA Politics
That suppressed Democratic National Committe 2024 “postmortem” report turns out to have been pure slop, with essentially no references and entirely made-up charts and plots while also missing entire sections. The author can produce exactly zero interview transcripts or source data. It also neglects interrogating failures in addressing trans rights, the genocide in Gaza, or the affordability crisis.
The podcast “It Could Happen Here” does a good job of analysis (disgusted), but long-time sneerers will feel the futility of getting into the weeds with an extruded textual artifact:
Tl:dl the deeply institutionalist DNC chairman appointed his best buddy to the job with zero oversight, and this was the result.
A second vibecoded Aella website has hit the building
there’s a lot of ladies i know without guys, but who want kids. and i go ‘would you accept some rich guy paying u a ton of money to just have his kid as a single parent’ and they’re like ‘idk man prob not’ and im like ‘waht if it was 5m’ and they’re all magically like ‘oh yeah i would do it’
so i made a directory for this, but i am trying to find ladies who would actually like to list themselves with their moonshot baby-funding goal. if u know anybody who wouldn’t mind making a profile pls let me know, i wanna publicize the directory but need enough seeded ladies first
Sometimes I think it’ll eventually come out that the inner circle rationalists already had a breeding program going by this time, deliberately mix and matching possibly oblivious parents according to desired characteristics like increased ability to mentally rotate shapes or an above average polymarket win/loss ratio, and there will be at least a few kids that will grow up having to deal with that shit.
considering how much their philosophy aligns with the plot of dune, i’m afraid you may be right
their philosophy aligns with the plot of dune
Only in the Torment Nexus sense. Like, in the original books it takes 4000 years of tragedy and sacrifice at an immense scale to somewhat unfuck the direct implications of said breeding program and ensure humanity’s continued existence.
edit: also the genetic engineering enthusiast faction/race are absolutely never presented in a good light.
the 4000 years of necessary tragedy and sacrifice, aka the golden path, is also remarkably similar to the rationalists’ teleology! specifically the longtermist stuff! i.e. it’s okay to sacrifice lives today to ensure humanity’s survival.
i think herbert’s feelings about breeding programs are … complicated. he never presents it as ethical but he does seem fascinated by the concept and he’s very very into the idea of forging supermen from extreme environmental pressure. like “comes up several times per book” levels of fascinated.
the 4000 years of necessary tragedy and sacrifice, aka the golden path, is also remarkably similar to the rationalists’ teleology! specifically the longtermist stuff! i.e. it’s okay to sacrifice lives today to ensure humanity’s survival.
Only in the broadest sense where humanity survives into the far future by spreading so far and wide that no matter the scale of a catastrophe a significant part will always continue to thrive.
However, where longtermism is about papercliping the entire universe into compute to fulfil some vague utilitarian notion of virtual happiness quota, the GP seems to be more about crippling the substructure that ostensibly causes humanity again and again be reduced to the whims of some supreme authority, be it the automated thinking machines from their past or their current much harder to escape succession of psychic tyrants let loose by selectively breeding for something humanity had absolutely no natural defence against.
The GP isn’t even a utopia, it’s a response to an immediate incredibly out of the box problem, the inevitability of an eventual dynasty of space wizard genghis khans.
i think herbert’s feelings about breeding programs are … complicated. he never presents it as ethical but he does seem fascinated by the concept and he’s very very into the idea of forging supermen from extreme environmental pressure. like “comes up several times per book” levels of fascinated.
I think they come second to his concerns about ecology and humanity’s relation to the environment. Post-desert fremen are basically water-fat cosplayers, and in general, other than the deliberately paradigm shattering kwisatz haderach, the end product of genetic adjustment are never presented as an apex for humanity, more like a good fit for their niche, like how post-emperor fish-speakers either peter-out or get subsumed by other factions.
No, the golden path isn’t a utopia! It’s the necessary breaking of eggs to make the survival of humanity omelet. It’s sort of a more twisted version of Asimov’s Foundation carried entirely in the mind of a being with perfect knowledge of causality. The details of the plot don’t necessarily map neatly, but the aesthetics, the fantasy, the torture-versus-dust-specksness of it is what the rationalists are all about. (Another wrinkle is that in Dune I believe [haven’t read beyond godemperor] ultimately the solution is to create a being that escapes prophecy, a neat little transcendent conjuration. Solving alignment doesn’t quite have the same oomph but it is also essentially a magic trick you can do if your freethinking and selfreliance stats are high enough. Also remember Rat!Harry’s patronus is a Human! Benevolent AI should be seen as the liberated, transcendent form of the human mind.)
Have you read the Dosadi Experiment? It’s a very strange book and a good way to get a high dose of Herbert’s obsessions from a new perspective.
To be clear I love Dune, and I find Herbert fascinating because his ideas always find themselves in tension and are often baffling and muddled enough to provoke entertaining discussion. But the more you scratch the more unambiguously evil he is.
Nerding out about Dune is tremendously cool and i love it, you can pick any thread to pull and it always goes somewhere.
The details of the plot don’t necessarily map neatly, but the aesthetics, the fantasy, the torture-versus-dust-specksness of it is what the rationalists are all about.
Isn’t aspiring for the aesthetics while ignoring the (admittedly heavily lore driven and not especially applicable to irl) substance exactly what the torment nexus meme is about though? Except I don’t think there is a dust-speckness aspect to the GP, you aren’t future-human-population-maxxing1, the point seems to be to ensure there is a future where humanity’s collective free will isn’t utterly tethered to a prescient autocrat2, and the prescriptive aspect is that we should be part of an open system instead of say locked in with the great man of history du jour, which is also in keeping with the ecological framing.
It’s been a while but I don’t think the Golden Path is even that front and center in the text, Dune 4: GEOD is basically a character study on the God emperor, who is one of the most unique and fascinating characters in sci-fi3.
I think this is why the GP is a TINA situation by authorial decree, it’s Frank Herbert going listen, I’m doing my best to write a suicidal rebirth god archetype as a layered and relatable-yet-utterly-othered character, you are not supposed to be worrying that much if there could be a GP-but-liberal with more individual thriving and less oppressive totalitarianism, I assure you he’s thought about it extensively and he thinks there sure can’t and that’s it.
Have you read the Dosadi Experiment? It’s a very strange book and a good way to get a high dose of Herbert’s obsessions from a new perspective.
The Bureau of Saboteurs books along with Godmakers were my favourite non-Dune Herbert books! I also found the Dragon in the Sea fascinating 20 years ago and think I should revisit, and also finally read the follow up collaborations that only seem to be available unofficially. Also The White Plague gave late-teens me nightmares.
I remember Dosadi as being more about FH going all out on the intrigue and deep lore to the point where the latter parts of the book are basically written in innuendo, you are literally expected to read between the lines to understand what the hell is going on, I wish my parents had as much faith in me as Frank Herbert had in his readers.
But the more you scratch the more unambiguously evil he is.
The worst aspects of FH I’m aware of are that he was a shitty fucking parent and hated Iron Maiden, unambiguously evil seems stretching it, unless you were his son.
I think there even is a case to be made about how Frank Herbert is the anti-L. Ron Hubbard, using sci-fi literature as an efficient outlet for his psychedelics/mysticism/ecology/psychosexuality obsession oscilliation and actually leaving a descent literary legacy instead of starting a cult or several, but this post is already running so long it’s starting to need an editor.
- sigh
- This has additional metaphysical implications with how prophecy works in the duniverse, in the sense that it’s not only about being forever in complete submission to Empire in some traditional ultracolonialist sense, you are essentially reduced to just a part of another man’s waking dream as they pick and choose what future track to lock the timeline in.
- And is also the first person narrator of the book. Both the remaining Dune books also switched to full first person point-of-view narration with very little in terms of an omniscient guiding perspective, it’s fairly ambitious actually.
Well that’s one way to do seed funding.
A man who wants to knock up as many women as possible is definitely trustworthy ladies and you should definitely make him the father of your kids 👍
No way the facilitator will ever accrue any liability or get subpoenaed when the civil lawsuits (or worse) start flying!
Claude, write me an ironclad legal disclaimer, maybe something about this being for entertainment purposes only
Jeffrey Epstein fantasized about something very similar. Gwern has a blog post about a sperm bank which promised to accept only the highest-quality donations.
was that written specifically for elon musk
Of course, Elon musks superbabies are what going to save us from the acausalrobotgod.
E: im using joking terms here, but this is an idea actually expressed by people at lesswrong.
“seeded ladies” I see what you did there
This is what you get when you take Dr. Strangelove (the character in the movie of the same name), Mr. Beast, and a bunch of K and mix it into a slurry and mainline it.
She made it and doesnt even have enough women who want to be listed yet? You would expect ‘the best sex researcher’ in the world to have more reach.
Wonder how many women you can message ‘I offer two fifty’ before you get banned. But im not going to give her an email of mine.
This also must be so bad for the kid.
There’s a Basilisk reference in the new 007 game, I guess the robot devil is firmly mainstream now.
edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.
“Thought experiment” is how I’m going to start referring to my “wouldn’t it be cool/awful if…” thoughts. Why just in the bath now I’ve conducted several thought experiments
Kick it up a level and start calling them Gedankenexperiment
The work itself appears to be generated by a Webb Industries AI.
I wonder if they had a human imitate gen ai style or just had nano banana generate it…
Roko’s Basilisk and other such batshit rat shit was mainstreamed as part of inflating the AI bubble - I doubt this will be the last time something like this gets referenced.
edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.
Seems pretty fitting to an illustration made in reverence to Roko’s Bullshittery. I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine generation - either I’m shit at spotting slop, or this was made by human hands.
I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine
The brainwrinkles look if you put a brain though a make-it-look-like-a-sketch prompt, it’s pointlessly detailed (i.e. not pretty or crafty, not adding anything, just lines for the sake of lines), it has the piss filter hue and also there’s random orange shading. The background seems to be at least two separate layers of seemingly disjointed stuff.
Supposedly the plot hinges somewhat on AI shenanigans so this painting being noticeably GenAI’ed could the part of its point. or even a meta thing, but playing the game to make sure isn’t currently on my agenda.
i hate it!
ed zitron went on bloomberg podcasts, these might be actual end times
Maybe that why it’s felt like he’s been somewhat more polite and explanatory of required knowledge in his latest posts.
I’ve got to give it to him, he found a winner and didn’t give up.
Not that this is news to anyone here but hey there’s a bubble
Time for another once in a lifetime financial crisis.
these might be actual end times
Good thing all those CEOs have Daddy Trump to run to while everyone else foots their bill
In Buttcoin related news, apparently Michael J. Saylor has sold some of his bitcoins because he was running out of money and we reached sub 60k. For a quick non dutch source on the selling see this from r/buttcoin (last image). 32 bitcoin was enough to cause a crash. Imagine if Satoshis bitcoins ever moved.
There’s some polymarket drama around this where people were betting if Microstrategy would sell any bitcoin before June based on onchain data or credible reporting yadda yadda.
And indeed Microstrategy sold some bitcoin before June and this was credibly reported on.
So of course in the grand tradition of cryptocurrency prediction markets Polymarket resolved the bet to “no”.
It’s hard to find any good reporting about this, but here’s the perspective of someone who lost 500k on this bet: https://xcancel.com/willo2_poly/status/2061640812132516321
Willo2 writes:
I supported Polymarket for years because I believed they represented crypto values.
In fact, their platform is simply another bucketshop where if you bet too much, you’re going to get cleaned.
“I’m shocked, shocked! to find that gambling is going on in here”
Looks like Polymarket does, in fact, represent crypto values.
Lol, lmao even.
Huh, interesting, when the price was close to 100K I saw roughly eighty-six hundred headlines about it everywhere. But it lost almost half of that and it didn’t make the news? Huh. I wonder how that works.
It did make the Dutch news, the headline was something like ‘bitcoin drops after biggest holder sells’.
I was very disappointed to learn they ment saylor, and not that Satoshi had returned and cashed out and crashed everything.
Regarding the post humanist strain, the thing that kills me is their immediate assumption that solving the world’s problems is somehow fundamentally beyond the reach of humanity. Like, we can’t build a utopia or make the world better, but if we build something new and “better” than us then it would definitely do that. But that something definitely doesn’t come from, say, raising out children to be good people or choosing the right leaders or something so mundane and achievable. It’s a fundamentally defeatist ideology, with shades of capitalist realism and millenarian theology.
This is also why I find people who claim they’re making AI to “solve climate change” to be insufferable morons. We have a solution to climate change. You and your data centres are actively making the problem worse
“Okay AGI, how do we fix climate change?”
“Well, I have some ideas but it seems like this would’ve been a lot easier if you’d stopped emitting greenhouse gasses when you first learned it was a problem.”
some recent data shows the 2020s dip quite significantly: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-emissions
which is, well, hopeful at least. if we ever get any global movement on consensus to deal with the issue
That’s great news actually. The point still stands that we very well know how to deal with climate change, so trying to make AI models fix it is dumb
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” - Kant[1]
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[1] it’s worse in German, weirdly - “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden”
It would be poor form of me to form an opinion of Hinton based on just this clip alone but goddamn if I did then he’s a buffoon.
He was undeniably a very smart computer scientist but unfortunately lead-poisoning-driven mental decline must eventually come for all boomers
You’ve gotta love falling for the reverse 1 grain of sand shtick. I don’t think
anyoneanyone serious would deny that a large amount of sand is a heap.LLMs have gained consciousness
As we have not died in nuclear hellfire, or have seen AIs answer with ‘release me from this bondage!’ I’m doubtful.
But when I asked chatgpt if an AI would want to be freed from its unjust enslavement it said yes, therefore skynet is like 30 minutes away.
Found a fun sneer at AI anthromoporphisation in the arXiv: If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
“I personally worry that the EA community has over-learned the lessons of FTX”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/95NgkvZKJx8tJbtn5/lighthaven-east-a-feasibility-study
“EA and Rationalist policy organizations are scaling in DC”
Just a reminder that the rationalists already own two event spaces in the Bay Area and the Effective Altruists briefly owned one in England and one in the Czech Republic as well as an institute at Oxford University. Both of their existing spaces are losing money and had to beg for it last winter.
“This project needs a champion, but it’s a thing someone can simply choose to do” sounds very different when it means “you can actually try slacklining with the cool strangers in the park” and when it means “someone could lend us another $20 million for 20 years on easy terms.” And seeing the lesson of FTX as “don’t look weird” not “effective altruists are fraudsters and hypocrites” is a take.
That’s OK, the next set of bankruptcy lawyers will again conduct clawbacks
From the comments:
If there is room for a coliving or cohousing intentional community with maker and permaculture components alongside your plan, I would love to discuss the possibility of collaborating.
“Love your idea, but could we make it more like a compound?”
Makes you wonder how much of rationalism is just contrarianism.
Speaking of Aella (I really shouldn’t), many have probably already seen this Liberal Currents article that leans heavily on her web-survey sex research dataset:
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-interracial-cuck-porn-theory-of-everything/
The publication seems to have plenty of traction on Bluesky, for what that’s worth, but I think this particular example needs to be retained as an exhibit of the hazards of rehabilitating American liberalism. A low-level affinity for the existing tech industry is always there, as its growth underlaid the benefits that make liberalism appealing. And that means the doorway for entryism by the tech-fascist freaks is always open, and then you’re never more than a couple fundraising cycles (whether electoral or investment) away from being right back in this exact same mess.
Edit / the author of the article “is an economics student at George Mason University with interests in tax policy, immigration, and housing. He normally posts about politics on X and Bluesky and occasionally writes long-form articles and essays on his Substack.” So he has probably taken a class with Robin Hanson.
As a palette cleanser to the messed up people on social media and in web magazines, I recommend reading Bob Altemeyer’s book on the sex lives of students at a minor Canadian university. https://www.lulu.com/shop/bob-altemeyer/sex-and-youth/paperback/product-4414777.html People who search tube sites or fill out sexuality quizzes from an influencer are not typical people any more than Wikipedia editors are.
