Want to wade into the snowy 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.)
Has anyone heard of the Internal Family Systems Model? One of the CFAR founders said he relied on it when he was designing self-help workshops. The IFS encourages you to see yourself as a system of entities and talk to them separately, and that reminds me of Ziz Lasota’s two-hemispheres theory and Michael Vassar’s jailbreaking.
Actually had a therapist introduce me to it. It can be a useful model, and if I were to boil it down to a single adage it would be: pay attention to how you talk to yourself. But I don’t think it is as simple as saying you contain a multitude, each part was developed to help the person survive and as you get older you might collect more parts and suppress others. It actually reminded me a bit of Lacan and the developmental stages.
I recall there was a recent critical piece about it but I can’t remember where it was.
https://archive.ph/7L1KK Here it is!
The Cut seems to like articles on cults and abuse within small groups, since they have an article on the Zizians, and one on a Neo-Tantric sex group where Aella would feel at home
I’ve heard of it, including in some outlets that (at the distance I am to it) seemed to pass the sniff test
but I’ve also seen it kick around TPOT
so I’d definitely want to seek out the advice of an expert if I cared about it
I heard somewhere that “there is no unitary self” can be a Buddhist teaching and TPOT draws on Western Buddhism. There is work to be done figuring out where they got their eclectic mix of techniques and terminology.
It’s Hofstadter, isn’t it? That’s the author who I recognize most in these discussions, followed closely by Hermann Hesse.
Well, I think the Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion goes back 2500 years or more, but Douglas Richard Hofstadter might have introduced nerdy American sci-fi fans to the idea.
I have time to quote at you now. Ziz’s thoughts about dual-core brains sound like the thought experiments from “I” is a Strange Loop. In Chapter 15, “Entwinement”, Hofstadter introduces the Twinwirld thought experiment: imagine a world where almost everybody is an identical twin, each pair of twins is given one name, twins go everywhere together, and identity is oriented around pairs instead of individuals. Quoting p215 from my copy:
In Twinwirld, there is an unspoken and obvious understanding that the basic units are pairsons, not left or right halves, and that even though each dividual consists of two physically separate and distinguishable halves, the bond between those halves is so tight that the physical separateness doesn’t much matter. That everytwo is made of a left and right half is just a familiar fact about being alive, taken for granted like the fact that every half has two hands, and every hand has five fingers. Things have parts, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have integrity as a whole!
The entire section is written like this. I’ve read a bit of the Zizian lore and it sounds like it was lifted straight out of this chapter with words replaced. p216 in particular really shows off the Hofstadter tendency towards neopronouns:
The pronoun “you” also exists in Twinwirld, but it is plural only, which means that it is never used for addressing just one other dividual — it always denotes a group. “Do you know how to ski?” might be asked of an entire family, but never of just one twild or one pairent.
A young pairson in Twinwirld grows up with a natural sense of being just one unit, even though twey consist of two disconnected parts.
I don’t really know about Vassar’s writing. I do think that jailbreaking is somewhat related. I think that Hofstadter lays out their entire thesis in the first paragraph of Chapter 18, “The Blurry Glow of Human Identity”, p259:
Among the beliefs most universally shared by humanity is the idea “One body, one person”, or equivalently, “One brain, one soul”. I will call this idea the “caged-bird metaphor”, the cage being, of course, the cranium, and the bird being the soul. Such an image is so self-evident and so tacitly built into the way we all think about ourselves that to utter it explicitly would sound as pointless as saying, “One circle, one center” or “One finger, one fingernail”; to question it would be to risk giving the impression that you had more than one bat in your belfry. And yet doing precisely the latter has been the purpose of the past few chapters.
The second paragraph, right after that, might as well be quoted from LW. Check it out:
In contrast to the caged-bird metaphor, the idea I am proposing here is that since a normal adult human brain is a representationally universal “machine”, and since humans are social beings, an adult brain is the locus not only of one strange loop constituting the identity of the primary person associated with that brain, but of many strange-loop patterns that are coarse-grained copies of the primary strange loops housed in other brains. Thus, brain 1 contains strange loops 1, 2, 3, and so forth, each with its own level of detail. But since this notion is true of any brain, not just of brain 1, it entails the following flip side: Every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or “I” lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents.
Buddhism’s not part of the book. It is part of the roots of IFS, though! So I think that you’d be better served looking at IFS or the ways that people quote Hesse if you want to find those Buddhist influences.
the Hofstadter tendency towards neopronouns
Seeing it extracted from context and called out like this helps me understand why I’ve bounced off Hofstadter multiple times over the years, despite his hype. It’s an artistic choice, sure, but 400 pages of this stuff without a break can be like beating your face against a brick wall after a while.
Thanks! I don’t get the impression that Michael Vassar posts or publishes a lot under his own name, he seems to prefer cornering susceptible people at events and then having private conversations and correspondence with the ones who respond in a promising way. The clearest description of his jailbreaking which I have read is by Scott Alexander in a back and forth with Jessica Taylor (and we know Scott Alexander tries to hide some of the beliefs he cares the most about).
In a LessWrong thread people just point to a deleted Twitter account and some YouTube videos by Vassar.
RationalWiki briefly mentions earlier woo abut brain hemispheres.
Hofstadter and Hesse seem to be namechecked on LW much more often than Leo Strauss. I wonder if Scott Alexander talks about Strauss over coffee if he trusts you, because so much of what our friends do is supposed to fool the vulgar masses while the wise smile and know the hidden truth.
I wonder if the real secret to Vassar’s influence is that he influenced the leaders of Bay Area LW like Alexander, Anissimov, Constantin, Zvi Moshowitz, and Salamon.
Never have so few been so unsatisfied to be so correct.
Last week 404 Media reported on some DOGE deposition videos.
The videos were since removed via court order, but are available on Internet Archive.
For anyone unfamiliar: this slots under TechTakes because DOGE is basically Elon Musk’s army of naive fascist silicon valley tech-bros rampaging about the federal government with Chat-GPT, SQL, and unsecured thumb-drives.
This article is behind a paywall, but links to the following video snippets from the depositions:
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVyhJT9jf4f/
For example here Justin Fox talks about deleting federal grants that he considered in-scope for an anti DEI executive order: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVtOiqJjcu4/
Q: “Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI”
A: “It’s the gender based story 🤷 that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group 🙄.”
Q: “It’s inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?”
A: “The gender based. So, females 🤷 during the Holocaust.”
He goes on to clarify that it’s DEI because it focuses on Jewish women. Oh that’s OK then!
There is a lot of video to work through but I know there is more
comedy goldrage inducing punchable nazi snippets within.https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1rrhzhc/doge_lead_in_deposition_details_how_he_emailed/
Behold: the Silicon Valley masters of opsec.
“Do you think there’s a reason why the DSA didn’t allow you to use Signal or other apps on your government phone?”
“No.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK THE “S” STANDS FOR YOU IGNORANT CHILD??
Just gonna file this on my mental list of reasons I didn’t go into law.
I was not ready
AI was going to give us all universal healthcare but we didn’t believe hard enough and now all we have is this.
New AI Killed My Job, focusing on educators getting screwed and the widespread impact on education.
Back in 2019, Ben Pace of Lightcone said that CFAR and Lightcone were one legal entity, but two boards with no overlap. Did CFAR + Lightcone really spend $22 million on real estate in Berkeley without spending a few grand to create a separate nonprofit and separate the finances? In 2024, CFAR still had the real estate and the mortgage on its books. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eR7Su77N2nK3e5YRZ/the-lesswrong-team-is-now-lightcone-infrastructure-come-work-3
I have never opened a US business bank account, but I would think it would be hard to keep the bank accounts separate if one organization has no independent legal existence, and transactions in the millions or tens of millions tempt the most righteous person to stick his fingers in the till.
Man, I wish I had enough money to fuck around with nonprofit shenanigans
It’s theoretically possible to keep them separate, but I would assume in this case that it’s evidence that regardless of intentions CFAR and lightcone are sufficiently closely linked to be basically the same organization. I mean, if there’s not a separate legal entity then I would assume anything involving money is going to require the same person or persons to sign off on the transaction, regardless of what the board looks like.
Forming a single legal entity would have made it hard to protect the other projects if the CFAR side had lost a lawsuit over abuse of a minor at a CFAR event, or Lightcone had lost a judgment over taking money from FTX and had to sell the Rose Garden property, I know these people don’t do “fear of frequent consequences of ordinary human weaknesses” but that is a big risk.
I also wonder who served as treasurer and bookkeeper for each project. If one person served both projects, he or she could have caused all kinds of trouble, even if there were separate bank accounts.
Wew, Cory Doctorow sure is posting through it
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism
He knows how LLMs work, right? This really is just cope because he got called out for being weird about using them. Really fucking disappointing
This really seems to be the case.
Hey, can’t get that SXSW London (a truly cursed event, but I digress) bag unless you’re willing to say LLMs Are Good, Actually
In the original post he kept referring to Ollama like it was an LLM instead of a server app that hosts LLMs so I’d say the jury’s out on that.
piece he keeps equivocating between local LLMs and their behemoth online counterparts with their heavily proprietary tooling that occasionally wraps them into a somewhat useful product.
This is fundamental to his approach. He believes that technology is inherently liberatory as long as it’s in the hands of the consumer.
Man, it’s frustrating to see him end up going down this route because the opening part of this is actually one of the better descriptions of AI psychosis I’ve seen, and i appreciate his emphasis on the way the delusion is built up in the sufferer’s mind rather than trying to game out what’s happening “inside” the chatbot. Even his point about how LLMs aren’t bad in exceptional ways for a new technology is pretty cogent. But his insistence on defending his own use of these things (and others who do so in “centaur-configured” ways) rather than thinking about how it interacts with all the relatively normal ways that this technology is wildly destructive is a very conspicuous blind spot.
Like, you can absolutely drive a nail with a phone book, and given the wider surface area it even has the advantage over a traditional hammer of being harder to smash your fingers. An individual craftsman may well decide that this is a useful tool and in some cases worth using over other options. But if the only source of these hammer-books was an industry that relied on massive uncompensated use of creative work passed through exploited third-world labor, ground rainforests to dust to create special “old-growth paper”, placed massive and unsustainable burdens on existing road infrastructure to collect these parts and deliver them, and somehow had been blown into a speculative bubble that represented something like a quarter of the entire US economy by promising that if they created a big enough book then one guy could hammer all the nails at once and they could lay off all the carpenters, I think it’s justifiable to look at the people using it as a normal tool and ask them “what the actual fuck are you doing?” The usage statistics they represent and the user stories they tell are used to justify not addressing any of the harms necessary to enable this tool to exist in its current form, and are largely driving the absurd valuations that keep pumping the bubble. Your individual role in those harms as a small-time user who finds it occasionally useful may be incalculably small, but it is still real.
Like, it feels like I agree with Doctorow on basically all the premises here. He seems to have a decent grasp on how the things actually work (even if he’s wrong about Ollama specifically being an LLM in its own right) and their associated limitations. He draws a decent line separating criticism from criti-hype. He is basically correct about how much of a bastard everyone involved in the industry at a high level is. But maybe because so many of these things aren’t really exceptional (save possibly in their sheer scale) he can’t seem to conceive of a world where things happen any differently, or of the role his actions and words play in reinforcing the status quo even as he writes pretty explicitly about how fucked up that status quo is.
Honestly it makes me think of the finale of his second Martin Hench novel, The Bezzle. After drilling into the business of the private prison operator that is making his friend’s life hell and separating the merely fucked up parts from the things that might actually have consequences if word got to what passes for cops in that tax bracket, he doesn’t go to the papers or start reaching out to the SEC. Instead he goes to the bastard at the head of it all and blackmails him into making his friend’s remaining incarceration less hellish and leaving him alone. And his friend, who started all this by begging for help unraveling this shit, rightly calls Marty a coward for it. There’s something ironic in seeing Doctorow here seemingly make the same judgement: abuse and apathy are sufficiently normal that we shouldn’t even bother to try and make the world better, just find ways to shelter ourselves and the people we care about from the consequences. And hell, I guess even there I’m not immune to it. There are reasons why I’m posting here and not waiting out front of a hotel with some engraved brass. Still, on the continuum of such things I’m disappointed that the guy who wrote that scene is stuck in the normalization blues.
It sucks. :(
Honestly, the article reminds me of Scott Alexander, but succinct. “Here are several true things and an absolutely batshit wrong thing, presented together with equal earnestness.”
The wrong thing being “Believing that LLMs are trash is a mental disorder (not really but wink wink).”
Why do this now, when it’s all coming apart? It’s baffling.
Kind of wild that the guy who popularized “enshittification” as a term will die on the hill that the technology which drives the industrial enshittification of all human media is fine actually, because some people find the plugins useful.
The one-shotting phenomenon (or how a positive initial experience with the technology seems to lead to a heavily biased view of its merits) should probably be considered a distinct cognitive bias at this point.
Turns out a lot of bright people can’t deal with a technology being utterly subjective in its efficiency, and also how that’s specifically the part that reduces it to being so narrowly useful as to force the existential question, given the insane resource burn and the socioeconomic disruption that’s part and parcel, even if like Doctorow you think that their rape and pillage of artist’s rights and intellectual property in general isn’t an especially big deal.
Also, local LLMs are hardly extricable from the whole mess, they are basically a byproduct, and updated versions only will keep coming as long as their imperial size online counterparts remain a viable concern.
It’s gotta be tied to the idea of anchoring, right? Like, the first credible bit of information you have is what sets the tone for everything that comes afterwards. At that point in a sufficiently complicated information ecosystem, confirmation bias kicks in and it’s hard to break out of.
even if like Doctorow you think that their rape and pillage of artist’s rights and intellectual property in general isn’t an especially big deal.
It’s not that he doesn’t think it’s a big deal. It’s the one thing he’s most consistently cared about for most of his career as an activist. He’s willing to put up with anything else if it circumvents copyright. And that’s why he’s been consistently pushed, I reckon, despite his nominal hostility towards the hands that feed the media ecosystem he flourishes in.
It’s true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they needn’t be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life.
This bothers me more than I can explain.
ICE as autoimmune disorder presupposes that it’s normally a good thing to have ICE around and it’s just malfunctioning as an exceptional state of things. If ICE is an immune system (malfunctional or not), what are we immigrants?
Yeah. When it comes down to it, the libs think the problem with Trump isn’t the fundamentals of what he is doing, it is that he is doing it without decorum or checking all the legal boxes or saying the usual lib pabulum to justify American imperialism. Skipping the legal checks and decorum is also bad, but in fact kids in cages was horrible when Obama was doing it the “right” way.
They’re not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules.
and
- It’s worse than that, they’re vibe coding critical operating system components
It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They’re not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They’re not generating tech debt at scale:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes
They’re just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense. Perhaps they won’t always choose wisely, but that’s normal too. There’s plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray. A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly.
Wow, the whole thing is indefensibly capital-W wrong, just an utterly weird rose-tinted view of the current corporate experience.
A skilled, centaur-configured programmer
This is like reading Yud mumbling about “Shoggoths”. It’s giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb.
Man, due to a weird alignment of the spheres I started reading those Honor Levy excerpts in the voice of Max Payne-style hardboiled narration and it fits weirdly well? Like a bargain version of the same sort of mid-budget semi-affectionate parody of existential angst that’s all tone and minimal substance.
I am retrospectively disturbed by how well “I really came in a fluffer that time” slots into Dorothy Parker’s flow.
centaur-configured programmer
Cory, baby, my dogg, sure “enshittification” was a big hit, but you can’t expect that your rough-draft followups are automatically gold
Take “Morgellons Disease,” a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:
Nitpick but this is unusually sloppy for Doctorow. 1) People with Morgellon’s don’t believe they have wires growing out of sores, but fibres (which upon examination turn out to be cotton for clothes). 2) The original Morgellons is a putative children’s disease «wherein they critically break out with harsh Hairs on their Backs, which takes off the Unquiet Symptomes of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions.» Which is quite different from the modern condition, whose sufferers have skin sores anywhere in the body with fibrous material looking like lint, dandelion fluff etc., and not particularly associated with convulsions. And 3) The association between the two was made by Miriam Leitao, a mother who believes her son suffers from the disease, and has gone to countless doctors and media trying to prove it’s real. So it’s an attempt to legitimise the postulated disease by cherry-picking something “historical” that vaguely resembles it.
Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation
These people are genuinely unhinged.
As the recent harpers article says:
"…people who should be in The Hague are giving [startups] twenty million dollars. Something bad is gonna happen here, something really fucking bad is gonna happen…”
“Selling your soul to the company store is not just fun, it is also invigorating!”
Man, that harper piece is a full DnD alignment chart of the most online bay area weirdos you’ve ever seen.
this is just wages paid in crypto but adapted to new era in a way that doesn’t make sense
the Pentagon’s CTO has AI psychosis now. sighhhhhhhhh
The whole argument can just be countered with “if the Pentagon believes Claude is sentient and a danger to the military, then why make a deal with OpenAI to use ChatGPT, another LLM similar to Claude? Wouldn’t that also be a danger of becoming sentient? and why are Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump planning to force Anthropic to comply after 6 months if they believe Claude shouldn’t be in the military?? Why did you ask Anthropic to let you use Claude for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons if you believed it was sentient and a danger??”
It just reeks of bullshit. “uhm actually we made Anthropic a supply chain risk because Claude is actually very dangerous and not because we’re doing banana republic shit to anyone who disagrees with us. we are a very responsible and safe government. please dont impeach trump.”
Reading comments cause I was bored, and had the misfortune to stumble upon this horribly formatted piece of work allegedly written by Claude
I wonder if one of the reasons Pete Hegseth is going so hard after Anthropic is that he and other idiots in the Pentagon unironically believes shit like AI 2027 and so wants to soft nationalize the frontier companies so to control the coming AGI. Considering that one of the uses the DoD allegedly wants LLMs for is fully autonomous weapons that at the very least have a very distorted view of what the technology is capable of. Or they want an accountability sink so they can kill people with even less accountability. …probably both.
I find it darkly hilarious that the doomer crit-hype is finally coming around to bite them, not in the form of heavy handed shut-it-all-down regulation to stop skynet, but in the form of authoritarian wackos wanting to make sure they are the ones “in charge” of skynet.
It’s possible the attempt to shove AI in every nook and cranny in the pentagon didn’t especially pan out and since his face was all over that project, he’s desperate for a scapegoat.
Like for sure he’d have had the logistics of the entire US army running smoothly despite layoffs by now, if it weren’t for the wokies in anthropic acting up.
I wonder if one of the reasons Pete Hegseth is going so hard after Anthropic is that he and other idiots in the Pentagon unironically believes shit like AI 2027 and so wants to soft nationalize the frontier companies so to control the coming AGI.
That is absolutely the reason, or at least part of it. See: Pete Hegseth Got His Happy Meal and how AGI-is-nigh doomers own-goaled themselves
Eh, straight pip with venv and pip-tools for support worked fine anyway.
As for systemd… time to look at the BSDs? Was Debian among the anti-slop projects? Would be nice if they took an interest in preventing the slopification of one of their core system.
Different UV! Libuv is the event loop/scheduler that powers node.js. could be a funky new way to compromise a whole bunch of nose applications
Turns out, that uv also sucks now!
Ah, thanks! My expectations of node aren’t much affected I guess. Bun.js maybe?
libuvis a very common way to get a portable event loop. If you’re logged into GH and can use their search then you can look at the over fifty packages in nixpkgs depending on it. I used it when I developed (the networking and JIT parts of) the reference implementation for Monte, to give a non-nixpkgs example.
Systemd
Jesus.
I’ve been advocating for a hall of fame of projects that explicitly reject LLMs; ctrl+f “Gentoo” on this very comment thread for the few examples I heard about.
Anybody else having problems with archive.is and its variants? I keep getting into an infinite captcha loop. I already tried making it an dns over https exception in firefox, which worked once.
E: tried a different browser, and same problem. Same on phone, it does work going from wifi to mobile however.
That specific instance of Archive Today seems to have been taken over by activists who edit their copies of some pages and performed a DDOS attack (although all I know comes from social media posts and news stories). https://www.avclub.com/archiveis-under-fbi-investigation
Aren’t they all ran by the same people? To be clear I also tried some of the archive variants.
They are indeed all run by the same people.
Depending on your DNS provider, you may not be able to use archive.today without infinite captchas. I believe Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and NextDNS are affected this way. Google (8.8.8.8) apparently is not.
That is annoying. But thanks.
OT: an interesting musing I found on fedi:
they’re both worse
