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.)
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
they’re both worse
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.
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.
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.
new development in ontology: “the ontology that makes ai models valuable is american”
Actually the race-realism use last week, combined with this one, makes me realize that for them it’s just a fancy way of saying “world-view” [or what they consider to exist, and be true, which is not the craziest use of the word, but I would say unhelpful, and probably a small in-group marker].
It’s just a way of calling biases/prejudice legitimate.
And you know what, inasmuch the models have a “world-view” it IS annoyingly american in many ways. (at least the wrong kind of american.)
you gotta give him a morsel of credit, he’s got his buzzword and he’s stickin’ to it
“Our lethal capacities. Our ability to fight war.”
These are two different things. But I fear he doesn’t get that.
Chris Stokel-Walker at Fast Company reports:
High-level information about the private work of students and staff using ChatGPT Edu at several universities can be viewed by thousands of colleagues across their institutions due to a misunderstanding of what is being shared, according to a University of Oxford researcher who identified the issue.
The problem affects Codex Cloud Environments in ChatGPT Edu and exposes the names and some metadata associated with the public and private GitHub repositories that users within a university have connected to their ChatGPT Edu accounts. […] “Anyone at the university, or a large number of people at least—including me—can see a number of projects [people have] been working on with ChatGPT,” says Luc Rocher, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, who identified the issue and raised it with both the University of Oxford and OpenAI through responsible disclosure. He later approached Fast Company after what he felt was an inadequate response from both.
Just one of many reasons that the mere existence of “ChatGPT Edu” means that many people need to be tased in the nads
OT: an interesting musing I found on fedi:
DAIR, the AI-critical research organization founded by Timnit Gebru, is looking for a communications lead
I’m suing Grammarly over its paid AI feature that presented editing suggestions as if they came from me - and many other writers and journalists - without consent.
State law requires consent before someone’s name can be used for commercial purposes.
And here is the complaint, via evacide.
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.
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.
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…”
this is just wages paid in crypto but adapted to new era in a way that doesn’t make sense
Man, that harper piece is a full DnD alignment chart of the most online bay area weirdos you’ve ever seen.
“Selling your soul to the company store is not just fun, it is also invigorating!”
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.
FT reports from Amazon insiders that they’re investigating the role AI-assisted development has played in a spate of recent issues across both the store and AWS.
FT also links to several previous stories they’ve reported on related issues, and I haven’t had the time to breach the paywalls to read further, but the line that caught my eye was this:
The FT previously reported multiple Amazon engineers said their business units had to deal with a higher number of “Sev2s” — incidents requiring a rapid response to avoid product outages — each day as a result of job cuts.
To be honest, this is why I’m skeptical of the argument that the AI-linked job losses are a complete fabrication. Not because the systems are actually there to directly replace the lost workers, but because the decision-makers at these companies seem to legitimately believe that these new AI tools will let their remaining workforce cover any gaps left by the layoffs they wanted to do anyways. It sounds like Amazon is starting to feel the inverse relationship between efficiency and stability, and I expect it’s only a matter of time before the wider economy starts to feel it too. Whether the owning class recognizes what’s happening is, of course, a different story.
to follow this one up: there is now a new study about AI agents being dogshit at keeping code working over the long term
Unfortunately the paper structure screams “AI senpai, notice me!”
AI coding agents seem bad at this job yet, but if you optimize for our benchmark…
So oil prices are down again, and on nothing but a promise from Trump and a promise from the EU. The economy has proved remarkably resilient to me; the attack on Iran is like, wild nonsense number 17 that the USA regime did that I thought would trigger a major recession, and didn’t.
I mean don’t get me wrong, things are much worse now than 3 years ago, clearly. But they’re not like, Great Depression worse. They’re not even 2008 worse. It’s just a certain level of degradation (cost of living is higher, purchasing power is lower, concentration of wealth is higher etc.) that people got used to as the new normal. People can get used to lots of things.
To make the IT analogy, I think the global economy is like Twitter. Sure, it feels like a Jenga tower held up by thoughts and prayers, but it’s holding up. When Musk took over I really did think his catastrophic management philosophy would completely break Twitter, but no, it trudges on. Yes, moderation is now nonexistent, and I’m told it’s down more often, and often in “soft downtime” like notifications not working, or DMs, or some other feature, or it’s working but slow, and so on. But clearly the site is up most of the time and more or less functional. Users just get used to degraded quality as the new normal.
I predict AWS will 1) get slower and costlier thanks to “AI”, with higher downtime, at higher stress for the workers; 2) the leadership will refuse to see or admit or even consciously be aware of this; 3) the worsened services will be the new normal. I predict similar developments for the socioeconomic situation of the world, too; though I’m not ruling out a spiral into complete recession, either.
I somewhat agree although when the “other shoe drops” and these things start impacting the money men they may start to realise AI isn’t the magic cure they thought it was (he says kind of hopefully)
6 hours of downtime for Amazon shopping. A very simple back of a napkin calculation. They made $213.4bn in sales in q4 2025. So divide that by 90 days and then 24 hours and multiply by 6… We are talking a $0.26bn loss for 6 hours downtime… That is not an insignificant amount of money. I imagine most bosses would be screaming for heads having lost that much money in sane non-hyper-scaled businesses.
It’s also a trend that I don’t see stopping without a major structural change. I don’t think there’s a point at which they’re going to say “we’ve cut enough corners and are going to stop risking stability and service degradation.” The principal structure driving the economy, especially in the tech sector, is organized around looking for new corners to cut and insulating the people who make those choices from accountability for their actual consequences.
https://helenofdestroy.substack.com/p/grand-theft-reality h/t naked capitalism
Those interested in upgrading to the full RealityPlus™ experience will soon have not one but three styles of brain chip to choose from, expanding Big Parasite’s vertically-integrated propaganda pipeline into a perfect server-to-cerebrum delivery system while realizing the transhumanist dream of merging with the machines. Sam Altman’s brain-chip company is even called Merge Labs, because subtlety is for poor people. Yes, the guy who says human children waste more energy than OpenAI’s planet-liquidating data centers will be playing tug-of-war for direct access to your cognition with Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Coverage of this assault on privacy already reads like articles about AI from five years ago: You don’t want a brain implant? Are you some kind of Luddite? Better get over it: “avoiding brain-to-text devices will feel like avoiding smartphones.” It’s not like Meta’s underpaying African contractors to watch you through your augmented-reality Raybans while you shit or something. Why is Meta’s glasses project head Rocco Basilico seemingly named after Roko’s Basilisk, the AI bogeyman who will go back in time to torture you if you don’t help create it? Is Roko’s Basilisk…Jewish? Remember to smile for Sam Altman’s soul-sucking WorldCoin orb or you won’t get your UBI!
Really not liking the ratio of tech industry sneer to ZOG NWO thought control rant in this one, honestly. (Not to mention the latter gives way too much credence to the absolute nonsense brain chippers love to spout about neuroscience.)
