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 many projects and small websites I’m aware of are being overtaxed by shitty LLM scrapers these days, it feels like an intentional attack. I guess the idea of ai can’t fail, it can only be failed; and so its profiteers must sabotage anything that indicates it’s not beneficial/necessary.
since the name popped up elsewhere: what’s the feel on venkatesh rao?
(I often see the name in 🚩 places, but dunno if that’s because the areas or because the person)
We talked about that on r/sneerclub in the past, can’t recall the specific consensus. Seems post-rational, has innovation on rationalism from binary ‘object vs meta’ to 2x2 grids.
A classic example of the “AI can’t be dumb because humans are dumb too” trope, Pokemon Red edition:
I mean, it’s obviously true that games have their own internal structures and languages that aren’t always obvious without knowledge or context, and the FireRed comparison is a neat case where you can see that language improving as designers have both more tools (here meaning colors and pixels) and also more experience in using them. But also even in the LW thread they mention that when humans run into that kind of problem they don’t just act randomly for 6 hours. Either they came up with some systematic approach for solving the problem, they walked away from the game to ask for help, or something else. Also you have the metacognition to be able to understand easily “that rug at the bottom marks the exit” once it’s explained, which I’m pretty sure the LLM doesn’t have the ability to process. It’s not even like a particularly dumb 6-year-old. Even if it’s prone to similar levels of over matching and pattern recognition errors, the 6-year-old has an actual conscious brain to help solve those problems. The whole thing shows once again that pattern recognition and reproduction can get you impressively far in terms of imitating thought, but there’s a world of difference between that imitation and the real deal.
this is so embarrassing. “you say Claude is less capable than a typical six year old? yeah well what if the six year old is notably stupid? did you think of that?”
Instead of increasing the capabilities of llms a lot of work is done in the field of downplaying human capabilities to make llms look better in comparison. You would assume that the ‘be aware of biasses, and learn to think rationally’ place would notice this trap. But nope, nobody reads the sequences anymore. (E: for the people not in the know, the sequences is the Rationalist bible written by Yud (extremely verbose, the new bits are not good and the good bits are not new) used here as a joke, reading it (and saying you should) used to be part of the cultic milieu of LW).
LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.
Claude couldn’t exit the house at the beginning of Pokémon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore it’s dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldn’t figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!
The CAPTCHA failed to load properly for me at first, and then was mega slow. Quality custom implementation of a (wrapper around a) CAPTCHA, millions of EA money well spent.
Without a captcha the AIs would be trained on cutting edge AI alignment research like “videogames are unintuitive sometimes”, and this would greatly increase the chance of P(Doom).
New piece from Brian Merchant: So the LA Times replaced me with an AI that defends the KKK
This “insight” tool gives a very incisive critique of the opinion-page journalism we’ve been seeing lately. Oddly enough, not the kind of critique you’d see printed on an opinion page.
I hate that this shit has an established name now.
Do we have any experts on Wikipedian article-deletion practices around here? Because that looks really thinly sourced.
To sorta repeat a prediction of mine, shit like this is gonna tank the public image of coding as a profession.
Inevitable software issues aside, “vibe coding” as a concept undermines any notion of coding as being a difficult/skillful thing, making it sound like coders are doing the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That the software produced by this method is inevitably derivative, dogshit or derivative dogshit is gonna help damage coding’s image, too.
AI is going to wreck the world without even being asked to turn things into paperclips. Just giving all coders out of the loop performance problems.
Recommending a piece I ran across: I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
ok so on the one hand fuck solitary confinement on the other hand
On one hand, torture. On the other hand if you wanted to throw a billionaire crypto grifter into the Omelas hole I’m pretty sure I’d take a few weeks before I started caring.
LMAOU
truly the podcasting bros are the most oppressed minority in america
(also it looks like a bit more than the usual audience numbers for carlson channel, but it’s only one day so it’s kinda a bit more than nobody watched it. but it’s much less than when he openly pandered to schizos, cryptobros or vatniks)
State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas”
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-foreign-student-visas-hamas
Odds that this catches some Israeli nationalists in the net because they were posting about Hamas and arguing with the supposed sympathizers? Given their moves to gut the bureaucracy I can’t imagine they have the manpower to have a human person review all the people this is going to flag.
occasionally mentioned here Jan Marsalek implicated in surveillance (sometimes comically bad) and planned murder of journalists who crossed him https://theins.press/en/inv/279034 https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/07/uk-court-convicts-three-bulgarians-of-spying-for-russia
we live in hell https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-global
(this is compounded by how some segment of heavy ai boosters/users - former cryptobros, but not only them - were already immersed in this particular bubble)
Ow look the thing I worried about on r/scc (yes I know my own fault for touching it) which could not happen ‘because you dont understand how llms work’ happend.
This just hit my inbox (and spurred me to unsubscribe from future BuiltIn slop) and man, so tired of this sort of mindless drivel. Like companies still have trouble with basic application and management processes, but magic robot will fix? Fucking hell.
Interesting to see if he gets one.
I believe Trump is A-OK with pay for play for pardons, but what’s the actual price? Something flew by where people were buying a one-to-one with him for $5M, but that’s basically “private”. A pardon of someone as high-profile as SBF has to be worth the reputation hit. Can SBF and/or his family swing it? Would SBF be a good ally/toady of Trump?
Somehow I don’t see it. Unlike UIrich, a lot of people lost real money when FTX imploded. There wasn’t that much sympathy for him from crapto huggers. And let’s not forget he’s an autistic Jew, not a clear hero for the people who have Trump’s ear.
Tuckers quest for a second facial expression continues. The help he got from Ben Stiller turned out to be not effective at all.
New thread from Ed Zitron, focusing on the general trashfire that is CoreWeave. Jumping straight to the money-shot, he noted how the company is losing money selling shovels in the gold rush:
You want my off-the-cuff prediction, CoreWeave will probably be treated as the Leyman Brothers of the 2020s, an unofficial mascot of everything wrong with Wall Street (if not the world) during the AI bubble.
Nvidia’s current downturn is probably moreso due to the disastrous launch of it’s 5000 series rather than AI.
If it was AI I’m guessing the drop would be larger.
it’s possibly a distinction without a meaningful difference, but I wouldn’t say they’re selling shovels - this shit is more like renting out shovels. or maybe timeshare?
I’d love to see a postmortem on deals and development… I have some suspicions on how it all got in this mess to start with (largely “if we sink piles of capex now to corner the market on the magical future, we can totes make it through 5y!” type variations), but I want to see if I’m right
see the funny thing is that ms et al are walking back/scaling down their deployment plans, but that’s all partial on the whole. microsoft isn’t going to completely explode overnight the moment everyone groks llms are trash, even though they’re gonna take a hit
the entities like coreweave whose entire existence is predicated on the fairy tale, however…
(I am still worried about the multi-industry downstream impact of when this shit finally pops though, it is going to be nasty)
I didn’t know a16z was so devoted to developing new hires! Don’t you just love to see it.
During the trial, Penny’s defense brought in a forensic pathologist who claimed that Neely hadn’t died from being choked but from a “combination of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, sickle cell trait and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint,
I get that defense attorneys have to work with what they have but goodness am I tired of this argument.
“Your honor the deceased did not die from being shot through the temple, but due to having chronic migraines and exposure to second hand smoke 3 years ago and also walking towards the bullet thus increasing it’s relative velocity slighty”
It’s just racist as hell. A revival of excited delirium pseudoscience.
google stepping up their quest to disorganize the world’s information
what if, right, we made a search engine so good it became the verb for searching, and then we replaced it with a robot with a concussion
