(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
An Effective Altruist software developer who wrote about Bay Area EA’s culture of sexually aggressive men and misogyny explained that its hard to give informed consent when you are also being pushed to use alcohol and psychedelics. Most of us learned that when we were teenagers, but not these self-identified Big Brains (added to LessWrong’s Psychedelic Phase: Perigee). I do not know what to to other than pass on these stories and advise everyone I know to avoid any group connected to our friends.
uncovered downside risk
This is a novel and interesting way to euphemise rape, and because it’s an EA I can’t even tell if it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek.
EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang. Akin to how EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it, red pill is an optimized sexual strategy with the humanity of women stripped from it.
Really well said.
Despite this culture, EA as a philosophy has a lot of good in it and they should fix this bug with some introspection
sigh
From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many men in EA.
OK, that’s more than bad enough. Surely the next sentence will not escalate—
Having to keep replenishing that ‘no’ becomes annoying very fast
What the absolute hell? A no is a no and should not need to be “replenished”.
Protos: Trump’s AI name change sparks insider domain trading claims
surprise level: zero
someone stop me before I petition Lobste.rs to rename the “vibecoding” tag to “si”
Jonny is still bravely wading through muse effluent, and had thoughts on its code quality, especially where the facebook engineers (or at least, meat proxies) incompetently reinvent html parsing several times in ways that don’t really work.
Meanwhile the people whose minds have been swiss cheesed by AI insist that this is because the code the LLMs write is hyper-efficient and TOO GOOD for us to read. These motherfuckers “solved” the code not working out of the box problem by strapping “a species-ending quantity of carbon emissions” worth of guess and check on top, tuned out, and when they look again they think they made a god that’s too powerful to understand, rather than a burst dam of dogshit that defies all understanding with its breathtakingly relentless volume of dogshit.
Timnit Gebru gets the Right Livelihood award this year
https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/timnit-gebru/
“For challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”
I got this via Dagens Nyheter, the premiere broadsheet here in Sweden which calls the award “the alternative Nobel Prize” because it’s Sweden and we need a standard to compare to.
Let’s see what the rats think of it. Yet another example of p0Lar1z@tion
Premium-quality sneer ran across my eyes recently: All A.I. Projects Are Digital Asbestos
this is literally just so they look busy with upcoming midterms
Over the past two years, having the food companies regulate themselves has not worked out.
Weaksauce but also the AI companies wanted regulatory capture and open weights models to be banned so this will have probably annoyed them somewhat
Not sure if this was posted here before: TL;DR: almost all the “AI can make bioweapons” literature comes ultimately from the Effective Altruists
Ahhh yes, my old friend, the uh, dia-, um, what was it again, oh, yeah, D’yer Mak’er back-to-the-future
tinfoil hat time:
I am reminded of reading how some rationalists argued for using bioweapons on “unaligned” frontier ai researchers, and also how the fbi has raided illegal suburban biolabs recently recently, and anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re starting a biolab.
Probably completely unconnected, but something in the zeitgeist, at least.
Anthropic: AI MIGHT KILL US ALL WITH A BIOWEAPON
Also Anthropic: starts an AI-run bio lab. If it’s run to the same standards as the cybersecurity division I can’t imagine it’s going to be particularly well-supervised.
Do you want to get T-Virus? Because this feels like how you get T-Virus.
A former disciple says that Soryu Forall startted out wanting to exterminate humanity with a bioweapon and only pivoting to enlightening humanity later on. S.E. Gyges or his chatbot were speculating when they accused a specific Rationalist of dreaming of omnicide, but the idea is circulating in the milieu.
That post is login-protected, what does it say?
handy tip: all of skeeter is open, and you can bypass the login gate with eg skyview.social
Somebody tracked down things related to the ‘AI bioweapons’ stuff and a lot of them are financed by EA/related orgs apparantly. There is a preprint: https://ironholds.org/resources/papers/aixbio_one.pdf
“We tracked the space financially, intellectually, and individually. Financially, 70% of the literature that disclosed funding was directly supported by EA orgs; 71% of the literature that didn’t disclose funding featured authors from funded orgs. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.”
What We Tell AI, a project collecting anonymous confessions about people’s AI use. Project was created by Synthetic Wisdom, a “emerging practice” dedicated to “public sense-making” about AI. It’s not clear who’s funding them (or if anyone is). The confessions are interesting even if I’m a little skeptical of the framing (chatbot use might be ubiquitous but it’s not inevitable).
new Odium Symposium. we look at Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel, and discuss the weaponization of antisemitism and the self-importance of writing a book of twitter screenshots. https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/25-y-word-170681755 or any podcast app
Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business.
For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.
Ed: So far the only retort from the AI boosters appears to be “2025 doesn’t matter” and I’m not kidding
I’m sure the leaked rumors of Anthropic’s EBBT in 2026 (Earnings Before Bad Things) mean that Anthropic has turned things around and made such an amazing amount of money that they’ve delayed their IPO twice.
I’m stealing EBBT for these conversations. Much easier to follow than “TNR (technically not revenue)”.
I read somewhere that EBITA really means “Earnings before I tricked the dumb auditor”.
SimonW popping up proving Ed’s very point in the replies… 😅😂
Surprised he didn’t suggest that the valuation should be based on the quality of pelicans on bicycles that their models can draw
I’m sure Dan Luu will be issuing an apology to Zitron any minute now right?
corey quinn at https://lnkd.in/p/gXmqzqpZ
I’m a man. I have a yellow hat. I also have a monkey. My track record of supervising this monkey is spotty at best, but that’s not important right now.
He is a very smart monkey. When you tell him to do something, he does it in a way that’s smarter than any monkey you’ve ever seen in your life. You had no idea monkeys were even capable of this level of greatness. Billions of dollars have now been poured into the economy, extolling the virtues and achievements of this incredible monkey. He can do things better than humans.
Cheaper than humans.
Get rid of the humans.
You don’t need the humans; you have the monkey. Okay, keep a couple of humans for guardrails; not too many. They’re expensive, and the monkey does it better anyway.
Suddenly it has come out that my monkey, in addition to being incredibly intelligent, has also been committing an escalating number of felonies. And also pooping. So much poop.
We are now in undefined times. Never before has a monkey committed a crime; our legal systems are completely unprepared to apportion blame to me, the man in the yellow hat who has once again failed to properly supervise his monkey. Who is responsible for this monkey’s shitty, shitty behavior? It is completely unknowable. Clearly, the entire legal system will need to be overhauled to address the concept of a monkey committing crimes.
Now please excuse me, I just got a call telling me that my teenager stole a car. Unfortunately I have a sneaking suspicion as to who is legally responsible here, and I dislike it. This is especially distressing, as the teenager has never made a cent for me in his life, yet I’m about to spend a boatload on criminal defense attorneys.
The monkey is here to stay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if you don’t get used to monkey poop consequences you’ll be left behind
If we breed enough monkeys we will colonize the stars and make everyone computer!
Uhh actually have you considered that we will need to solve monkey alignment first? Checkmate, adjust your priors
Clint Eastwood famously demonstrated optimal orangutan/human alignment in the hit 1978 film “Every Which Way But Loose.” Right turn, Clyde!
I’m ape/acc my ape(doom) is low, no need to fear Roko’s banana!
Shout out to the combined power of ibuprofen and my venting tolerant polycule group chat for allowing me to endure the two hour Copilot 365 training meeting at work. The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.
The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.
I felt this in my soul
Yet another country TLD is gonna become toxic
Foreign Policy: How Trump Is Sparking a Slovenian Website Boom
(spoiler it is Slovenia’s .si, for “SuPEr iNteLligEnCE”)
Of course the lemmings are going to follow Trumps directive.
Bit unrelated, I saw somebody in bsky compare trump to one of those family annihilator dudes but for a while country and it isnt wrong. (He apparently was saying some weird shit about his violent thoughts as well https://bsky.app/profile/willbunch.bsky.social/post/3mwjzkdrz5c2t).
A former staffer named Frances Lopez says that she left the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford because they handled workplace sexual harassment terribly:
After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients. … (The colleague) also discussed asking me out twice while we were colleagues, once through text and again at a CEA retreat. He assured CEA that, with everything I now know about Frances, I’m glad she said no.
I am really not equipped to deal with this despicable behaviour outside the communities I am part of. She now has a Substack (sigh) trying to explain to EAs that hiring Caroline Ellison is not a good look and the world won’t suddenly start to see them the way they see themselves unless they sit down and change their behavior.
Is the dam finally breaking?
https://thepointmag.substack.com/p/the-ivy-leagues-surrender-to-ai-is via naked capitalism
The idea that preparing students to succeed in an AI-saturated world requires reimagining college as an AI incubator is not a sign of technological acumen, but of tech illiteracy. An LLM is not an aircraft requiring years of training to operate.
not x but y, but a decent point
