Want to wade into the sandy 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.)
CW: Deutsch
Heise was gushing about (1) Google & OpenAI working together on tagging AI output and (2) camera-makers trying to push cryptographical attestations for real photographs.
Felt the need to point out that (1) is just fear of Habsburg-AI and (2) is a road to a DRM-like unworkable dystopia.
joke is on us, Heaven’s Gate picked the right time to exit.
A LWer of the female persuasion makes the entirely reasonable point that most screw-top openings are probably constructed by looking at median male grip strength, not female. But the real fun is in the comments, where people who can post comments on a blog are seemingly unfamiliar with opening jam jars.
spending way too much on GPUs is the spending way to much on mining rigs
at least dude didn’t burn his house down
HN, lobste.rs and LW are jizzing themselves over the
newspress release that ChatGPT[1] has disproven an Erdos[2] conjecture.no-one pauses to think this is a transparent attempt to goose interest in OpenAI before they commit an IPO
[1] I know it’s not literally ChatGPT, it’s an “internal model”
[2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o
[2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o
in afrikaans: “deelteken”
in english: I literally can never remember it, but I remember “umlaut”
It’s not a typical umlaut, (we have those in Swedish too), it’s like 2 sharp bunny ears
edit LOL it’s literally “double acute accent” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_acute_accent#Unicode
name in Hungarian: Erdős Pál
Apparently Hungarian has 4 different Os: O, Ó, Ö, Ő
oh that one, right!
I would expect both lobste.rs and LW to be open sewers of credulity here
In fairness, mathematicians here are like scientists at a magic show, i.e., ill suited to asking good critical questions. How much money did OpenAI burn to get what they say they got? How many false starts got quietly tossed in the circular file drawer? When, even, did their work start? It is easy for a company to say, for example, “We spent only three weeks on thus problem”, casually eliding months of prior effort (all that was the testing phase, you see, before a specific task had been settled upon…). OpenAI has no reason to be honest about anything like this. Indeed, a company will naturally get regular practice being dishonest by careful omission at every opportunity.
ChatGPT, the most heavily used AI service, gave wrong information in 46% of its answers, including making up an expenses scandal, giving inaccurate replies on voter eligibility rules and getting the date of the election wrong by two months.
Tired: Gell-Mann Amnesia
Wired: Altman Amnesia
Better than the original (in that it’s not a bad model of media literacy given slick packaging in order to support climate change denial)
altman amnesia is when you stop in your tracks because you hit monthly limit of tokens on 5th
SpaceX (+ Grok + twitter) submitted a request for an IPO to the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026036936/0001628280-26-036936-index.htm
SpaceX’s IPO filing has an unusual paragraph on page 235:
On January 13, 2026, our board approved the grant of 1 billion performance-based restricted shares of Class B common stock to Mr. Musk. The restricted shares vest upon (i) our achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 15 equal tranches and (ii) the Company’s establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, in each case, subject to Mr. Musk’s continued employment with us through the date on which achievement is certified by our board. For any tranche of the award to vest, both the applicable market capitalization milestone for such tranche and the human colony milestone must be met.
Until that happy day occurs the shares would be out of Mr. Musk’s hands and safe and secure under the custodianship of the dictator of SpaceX who is (assistant whispers in ears) huh.
Page 166 talks about the old dream of Lunar He3 for fusion power and quantum computing without saying any of those words because people might remember space advocates talking about lunar helium in the 1990s and 2000s:
Once resource utilization capabilities are proven feasible, we believe there is an opportunity to commercialize the harvesting and exportation of rare materials, which is estimated to be present on the Moon in quantities exceeding one million tons and has potential applications in future nuclear energy and quantum computing systems.
According to an HN poster, it mentions the Kardashev scale at least three times.
These are not serious people.
We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun. In the near term, we expect space-enabled technologies to enhance life on Earth through greater global connectivity and breakthroughs forged in the harsh environments of our solar system, leading to accelerating progress in energy and AI. As we build infrastructure in the Earth’s orbit, and potentially on the Moon, Mars and beyond, we believe we are capable of unlocking an era of unprecedented economic expansion, while also contributing to the safeguards of humanity’s future against existential risk. (source)
I keep seeing grown men with serious jobs thinking like I did as a fourteen-year-old playing with TTRPG vehicle-design rules. We need to figure out how to keep Earth habitable before we worry about building the Ringworld. The man who sabotaged high-speed rail in California wants this?
@CinnasVerses @o7___o7 I love how bros are just slipping #Kardashev Scale into things like some kind of garnish. Take 3D printing filament, for instance…
Crowning water as the solvent king should be an incredibly obvious move for a Type 1 Civilization in the Kardashev Scale.
Also features molecular disintegration chamber for end-of-life management :neofox_floof_explode:
Molecular disintegration chambers also feature in those erotic horror comics I mentioned a few months ago! Cw cartoon sexuality, arguments that life is pointless, and Nick Bostrom
@CinnasVerses Rule34 for 3D printing is not something I had considered until a moment ago…
Hahaha good lord
We are going to harvest the entire Sun!! And then eat up the stars themselves!! For profit! Humanity shall be an ever-expanding Empire, grinding resources of the whole universe into shareholder value!!!
even their conmanship story is a depressing dystopia. have these people ever considering just chilling. get a girlfriend who plays drums, hang out with her jamming with a bass. watch a movie together, then go out for a walk. play boardgames with children. take up embroidery
I am ignorant of the Kardashev scale, is that measuring vibes or skulls?
plastic surgery
oops, no wait, that’s the Kardashian scale, sorry
Vibes…in space. It’s the sort of thing that a teenager who imprinted on Ringworld might worry about.
From wikipedia:
*A Type I civilization (planetary) is able to access all the energy available on its planet and store it for consumption.
*A Type II civilization (stellar) can directly consume a star’s energy, most likely through the use of a Dyson sphere.
*A Type III civilization (galactic) is able to capture all the energy emitted by its galaxy, and every object within it, such as every star, black hole, etc.
oh yeah, that happy horseshit.
Full Self- Parody. From p. 138:
We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of our Sun. In the near term, we expect space-enabled technologies to enhance life on Earth through greater global connectivity and breakthroughs forged in the harsh environments of our solar system, leading to accelerating progress in energy and AI. As we build infrastructure in the Earth’s orbit, and potentially on the Moon, Mars and beyond, we believe we are capable of unlocking an era of unprecedented economic expansion, while also contributing to the safeguards of humanity’s future against existential risk.
All this from the same kind of people who think shifting to Solar is “woke”.
Just wait until investors demand the satellites be powered by diesel instead of solar panels
We’re gonna create an entirely new type of star that supports itself against gravitational collapse by burning money.
GitHub got pwnd by a compromised VS Code extension. Internal repos were exfiltrated.
“You should assume that you’re being manipulated until they have better systems in place,” says Lily Ray, founder of the search engine optimisation (SEO) and AI search consultancy Algorythmic. "We’re moving towards this ‘one true answer’ world.
from here
on the one hand I’m all “save me from marketroids”, on the other all “oh so we’ve solved philosophy?”
dear god what a fucking sentence to be saying as a description of the moment. and I’d fucking bet they’re talking to their customers in the same terms/language
"We’re moving towards this ‘one true answer’ world.
This ugly little statement has been true ever since Twitter started eating mainstream media personalities’ brains. It’s why I consider the modern chatbot to be a direct design descendent of short-form social media – it’s giving you Twitter with zero pushback or hate. Beware anyone who thinks this is a good thing.
Edward W. Niedermeyer calls the plans to put SpaceX and OpenAI public at ludicrously inflated valuations and dump shares on index funds for real money BAGNAROK. American pension funds are starting to say out loud that this is a bad deal.
The officials - representing three of the top four largest public pension plans in the U.S. - objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including voting control over the stock, veto power over his own removal as CEO, and protections from litigation, including mandatory arbitration for SpaceX shareholder claims.
…
In their letter, the pension leaders urged SpaceX to adopt one-share, one-vote or sunset super-voting shares within seven years; install a majority-independent board and separate the CEO and chair roles; eliminate provisions protecting Musk from termination without his approval; scrap mandatory arbitration; and require independent approval of related-party transactions with Musk’s other companies.
“Precisely because SpaceX is poised to occupy a position of systemic importance in the public markets, and to become, through index inclusion, an unavoidable holding in our portfolios, its governance must at least adhere to the baseline protections upon which long-term institutional capital depends, rather than seeking to diminish them,” they wrote.
sunset super-voting shares within seven years
It’s taken 20 years to get this level of pushback on super-voting shares, and even then, the scam is still likely to go through. All of these people are whistling past the graveyard of eroding systemic legitimacy.
or sunset super-voting shares within seven years
weird number to pick given they might not last that long if felon and friends aren’t removed earlier on…
Here’s a story about a douchebag who lost because AI:
Wonkette: Creep Who Sued Women Who Warned Others Not To Date Him Loses Case Due To AI-Reliant Lawyer - “Finally, a good use for AI!”
The brief included no citation to any legislative findings, let alone any including the statute’s targets as the brief asserted. We could not find any reference to the phrases “amplified exposure and endangerment” or “cyber vigilantism” within the Doxing Act. There also are no legislative findings included in the codification of the Doxing Act, the session law, or any publicly available version of the bill. These mistakes and fictitious quotations bear the hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence.
Rationalists: we should always incorporate new data into our worldview
Also rationalists: I found some anthropology study of Australian First nations from 1899 and found it fascinating
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZM6pErzL7JwE3pkv/shortplav?commentId=zn2bXx2WmLmyGiefm
Of course they measured skulls.
See, it’s a good practice under the principle of charity to read as much fascist propaganda as you can and incorporate it into your worldview. It doesn’t matter who said things, but rather whether they’re true, and since you’re a rational agent you can surely evaluate each claim with perfect objecitivity. Digging a 19th-century eugenics study is expanding your objectivity score.
Reading polemics from leftists too? lol no what are you talking about, they’re all irrational and biased
/s
Google released their new Gemini 3.5 “flash” model at I/O yesterday. For those who aren’t familiar, the “flash” model is typically marketed as the lower end and the “pro” model is the higher end for each given model generation.
The interesting thing here is that the new “flash” model is almost as expensive as the “pro” from the previous generation.
As my favourite “neutral-but-not-really” AI booster Simon Willison says:
This fits a trend: OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 was 2x the price of GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is around 1.46x the price of 4.6 when you take the new tokenizer into account.
It feels like all three of the major AI labs are starting to probe the price tolerance of their API customers.
Speed running enshittification - a process that typically only works when people are reliant on your product and have no other option than to pay the inflated price
presented without context, because it’s funnier that way: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=yE4Y2AoMPXGcTZw8B
took me a second to understand this isn’t meant as a funny prank idea
Another read (on substack) on the rising hatred of AI data centres and its political implications
same sl0bslack author has this piece (complete with punchy LLMisms)
https://thecycle.substack.com/p/please-stop-trying-to-murder-trump
Before his murder, Kirk was influential, sure. After his murder, he became something much bigger. A symbol. A martyr. Turning Point exploded with energy, attention, emotional intensity, and recruitment after his death. In death, Kirk became more powerful than he was alive. Now multiply that effect by a million and attach it to Donald Trump.
Uh didn’t I recently read how TPUSA has basically imploded just half a year since this dipshit got his head blown off (sorry “destroyed at a debate”)? Everyone with eyes to see could tell that the right jumped on this as a Reichstag fire analog, prepared to usher in a new consensus, but it fizzled out after a couple of weeks (unfortunately not before a number of people lost their jobs)
Trump is sui generis. He’s not a person universally beloved. He’s a deeply polarizing chaos agent who has twisted the right into his weird image, but the point is, that image is incoherent and changes with his moods daily. There’s no Trump ideology other than what’s in his Truth social feed at the moment.
Would he being assassinated bring peace and order to the land? No. Would it usher in a new thousand year Republican age? Also no. Would it be bad. Yes, but not as bad as this pseudo-leftist believes.
Also it goes without saying, don’t assassinate people.
At least the retiree who was jailed for 37 days for posting a meme has gotten a settlement:
kirk’s mentor died from covid before, but kirk was face of this org so it had to end this way. i think that fuentes tried to do entryism there with low degree of success. i only got reminded of this dipshit once after he died, 2w ago, nobody cares at this point about his org, it’s a spent force
I found the paragraph that best shows why I hate this:
Globalization became the symbolic villain for the collapse of blue-collar manufacturing communities in America. Entire towns watched factories disappear while political and economic elites insisted the disruption was both inevitable and beneficial.
This is a basically accurate description of what happened.
Whether every fear surrounding globalization was technically correct almost ceased to matter politically because millions of people experienced the same emotional reality: the economy was being reorganized for someone else’s benefit while their communities absorbed the damage.
Again, I this is actually a pretty salient description of what happened. Sure, maybe if you add everything up the benefits outweigh the costs in some abstract way, but it still hurts when those costs are imposed on you and yours without any input. The economic decision-makers decided to sacrifice those people’s livelihoods and their futures in exchange for number go up, and they knew it was happening even as they couldn’t do anything to stop them.
This whole piece acts like the backlash to outsourcing was irrational and dumb, like those salt-of-the-earth morons didn’t know what was good for them. But the author is either too deep in the neoliberal soup to recognize this as the wrong and cruel argument it is or they recognize this and lack the courage to commit to that position openly.
AI is increasingly becoming that same symbolic villain for white-collar America
Emphasis added. I don’t think the villainy behind these AI projects is symbolic at all. Symptomatic of deeper systemic problems maybe, but very real. People aren’t failing to grant this transformative technology it’s moment in the sun, they are clearly seeing the transformation that the tech oligarchs are trying to impose on them and doing their damndest to reject it. This still leaves a whole lot of fights left to decide what the future should look like, but I find it legitimately heartening to see so many people from so many different parts of society coming together and loudly declaring “Not this!”
this feels like a form of critihype but i haven’t read anything else by this person so i don’t know. Examples:
Artificial intelligence is entering public consciousness associated with layoffs, instability, replacement anxiety, corporate concentration, surveillance, and soaring resource consumption.
That is an extraordinarily dangerous emotional foundation for a transformative technology.
The commencement boos matter because they reveal how culturally toxic AI has already become among many young educated Americans. These students understand artificial intelligence well enough to fear it precisely because they already use it. They use it for papers, coding assistance, presentations, summaries, and research. They know the technology works. They know it is improving rapidly.
“oh no, people dislike this wonderful technology!! But it’s so wonderful!!”
Whether America ultimately requires these facilities to remain economically competitive may eventually become a legitimate policy debate, but politically that question is almost secondary.
“we really need this stuff guys, people are mad so it might not happen but it’s really really important so think of that too”
