Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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.)
Billionaires have a new start-up, Objection, that allows them to “sue” journalists by “summoning” them to a “tribunal” staffed by chatbots. They targeted journalist Gary Baum with their first “lawsuit”, which provoked Baum to write about them for the Hollywood Reporter. Like all vampires, upon being exposed to sunlight, founder Aron D’Souza
threw a hissy fithas shuttered everything “temporarily”.I don’t understand what the point of this business is, except to grift off the aggrieved rich failsons unable to handle the horribly difficult work of hiring a PR firm to smear the people they’re mad at. At first i thought that it could be to create a formal ‘social credit score’ for journalists and integrate it directly with different publications to quantify how mad the ruling class is with a given individual, in order to discredit them or bar them from work or chill their speech, as D’Souza implies here:
One of my final questions for D’Souza — who told me he’d been in a slew of talks with media owners about his venture (“I’m coming to New York next week to meet all the big guys”)
but that sort of thing happens already. Nobody who seriously challenges power is getting hired at The New York Times or The Washington Post. That’s just a top down directive from the owners. What is the point of this? it’s staggeringly stupid. Just shit talk these people in your private Signal GCs, guys. Andreessen and David Sacks and Karp will be happy to help you compose a peevish Xeet or a lawsuit. stop being weird losers.
Special mentions:
Then, of course, there are billionaires and their heirs. D’Souza believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”
god, journalism would be so much cooler if it could directly remove money from the accounts of the Idiot Rich. Alas.
“It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life.
oh lol
a truly magnificent feat of prompt engineering, coalesced into a single repository
https://github.com/thesysdev/make-no-mistakes
(do we accept snark from boosters? repo appears to function as a soft ad for a bespoke DSL and its surrounding tooling for LLMs to autoextrude.)
You know how the guardrails in the new anthropic models have been panned as overly sensitive?
Well now malware authors are including biology terms like “saccharide” in their source code to make llm powered scanners refuse to scan the code and let it past anyway
What a time to be alive
The first I heard of a project doing this was iocaine, an anti-scraper tool (that I think awful.systems uses??) which has module names like “sex_dungeon” and “GargleBargle” intended to make the codebase unmanageable to navigate for llm tooling. It’s pretty funny that this has become an established technique.
ig chucking in a segment of merck index (short entries with compound properties, 2000 pages of) to iocaine training corpus would trip it
Amazing stuff. LLM security is so cooked.
Edward W. Niedermeyer, who wrote the book on how Tesla is a tax fraud and pump-and-dump disguised as a car company, will livestream the SpaceX IPO Friday https://atmo.rsvp/p/niedermeyer.online/e/3mo23aiagjs3t The real drama will be spread over at least a month.
Remember, investing is about decades and national economies not days and individual companies. If you think the US stock market is going to become more like Russia’s than France’s, you can make a policy and act on it to reduce your stocks’ exposure to the Mega-IPOs.
So very excited for the biggest pump and dump in the history of consumer investing, brought to us by a man actively inciting race riots in northern ireland. Can’t wait for this afternoon 🙏
Hardly anyone who matters is on twitter any more so I think many policymakers (and most retail investors) don’t understand what Musk is tweeting every few minutes
New booster irl fanfic just dropped: https://europe2031.ai/
It openly admits to being an AI 2027 knockoff, although I will give it credit for having a much more grounded scenario (Europe in economic ruin compared to gloriously transformed China and USA, whereas AI 2027 described the world going full singularity) and having a longer timeline (5 years to economic transformation is relatively sane compared to 3 years for an AI God to be born)
Some highlights in sneering:
The hours Christian’s team pulled were insane – seventy- or eighty-hour weeks, people sleeping in the office.
One of the character’s is basically an idealized SV AI startup founder, complete with all the insane startup tropes like working the 80 work week to grind out success. Also the fact that his name was Christian and the sort of chiding pitying attitude he had towards the other character, Caroline kept making me think of Christian Gray and 50 Shades of Gray.
Someone mentioned, in passing, that they thought artificial general intelligence - AI that is better than any human at most tasks - was probably two or three years out.
This is something of a side note to this scenario, but it annoys me ever single time it comes up so I will keep complaining. The boosters have very willfully moved the goalposts. Wikipedia gives the definition as “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.” Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition to ‘most’ and not ‘all’ and swapped ‘cognitive tasks’ for ‘benchmarks and narrowly defined tasks’ and then claimed success and accused people insisting on the original definition of moving the goalposts.
Standalone American AI tools are considered a data-protection risk.
This ‘scenario’ has an ongoing theme of Europe foolishly being cautious around the risk to their data American AI companies present. It is hilarious this scenario mocks this attitude just a few days after Anthropic has made their policies towards users data even more openly contemptuous.
The infrastructure story is just as grim. The largest AI supercomputer in the US runs at 1,250 megawatts. The largest in Europe runs at eighty-three.
So I couldn’t a single convenient quote for it, but an ongoing point of idiocy of this scenario is that it takes the ‘planned’ American AI data center build-out completely for granted, assuming all the currently released numbers are true, the plans will be met on schedule, and data center build up over the next 5 years will radically surpass them. Ed Zitron has pretty much shown all three of these stages of purported numbers are complete bullshit.
Up to this point, everything we’ve said has happened – with only Caroline’s and Christian’s personal stories representing fictional elements. From here on out, we start speculating. We no longer single out individual AI companies, and instead refer to made-up actors: Atlas for the leading American AI company, Helios for the leading European company, and Zimo for the leading Chinese one.
They are even copying AI 2027’s stupid shtick of coyly swapping out names instead of referring to real companies!
Works councils slow the deep adoption of powerful AI tools; employment protections make it hard to let go of staff whose jobs can be automated and whose labour force would be needed in parts of the labour market that faces shortages.
Pretty much the pitch of this whole thing is “Europe needs to copy America’s lack of labor laws or other regulations”. I wonder if the authors of this fanfic even believe their own spin of other ‘parts of the labor market faces shortage, so firing everyone to put in AI is actually a good thing’ or if it is just a shallow attempt to appease people who find mass layoffs heartless and disruptive.
But Europe has one last card to play. After five years of failing to build a frontier AI sector, it still owns the one bottleneck which the entire race runs through. ASML remains the only company in the world capable of building the EUV lithography equipment that is used to print cutting-edge chips. Without access to its machines, the US could not keep extending its lead in AI; with access to its machines, China would likely have caught up some time ago.
So this scenario correctly acknowledges one of the bottlenecks Europe controls, but then somehow envisions the US being able to strong-arm Europe not to leverage it against them and to cut China out? Have the authors not been paying attention to the US shitting away its soft power (and showing cracks in its hard power with running out of patriot missiles) over the two Trump terms?
Europe’s slide into irrelevance was not inevitable. Even in 2026, the continent could still have changed course, had it shown the courage and political will to take drastic measures.
By courage and political will they mean slashing apart labor laws, environmental protections, and other regulations and dumping public money into AI to draw capital investment into Europe. The epilogue is some fantasy bullshit with moon domes made possible by all the American AI advances.
Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition
They do this with everything, because the tech doesnt hold up to the dreams, a lot of things get diluted. Esp noticably when they compared llms to humans learning and instead of noting llm advancements they talked down how humans learned.
See also the fields reaction to the chinese room thought experiment.
I love the deep lack of specificity in “other sectors of the economy facing shortages”. Either you have to acknowledge that you’re talking about the cafe economy and gig economy and those sectors aren’t so much facing labor shortages as much as leveraging the worker’s chronic underemployment to keep costs down or you’re making shit up wholesale. Also please note that American companies are already finding that as the investor capital subsidies run out it’s often cheaper to hire a person than pay the token costs to do the job with AI.
Zefram Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive in 2063, these guys need to be moving their timelines forward, not backward!
We are already a few years behind on the planned AI destroying the world
I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because apparently that’s the latest date Kurzweil gives for his Singularity™ (can’t be arsed to go reread his book and double-check, my copy was a PDF that came via the high seas 5 computers ago anyway)
Everybody remember Frontiers, the publisher that brought us the rat dck pck? Well guess what…
https://bsky.app/profile/michael-okun.bsky.social/post/3mnxkxte55s25
Sigh.
ACM will no longer require disclosure of the use of #generativeAI in writing papers… an absolutely terrible change by the @ACM Publications Board to the Policy on Authorship. Yes, this will give ACM more papers. No, the ideology of “number go up” productivism is not the path to responsible, ecological or ethical computing, but to irrelevance.
I signed up for ACM last year, just hit my expiry (like, today), and truly don’t know if I want to renew
it’s been an extreme avenue of generative hype, constantly pushing talks, books, etc. I have no idea how they square it with the ethical pledge
By not thinking about it, one presumes.
I wanted to give you a high five for telling APS where to go. That was rad as hell.
Link for that development, in case anyone missed it:
https://awful.systems/post/8263538/11477939
I did, indeed, turn them down, and I told the journal why.
A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. They’re probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.
Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.
All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI “audience immersive presentations” where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.
Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).
was there an ownership change or something? this is atrocious
Sold to private equity a few years ago and then purchased by Sony most recently
I have some modest proposals for handling private equity but they would all probably count as fedposting. We still haven’t found a decent replacement for the market niche JoAnn fabrics occupied.
The slop startup dubs this “Audience Intelligence” and claims pixar experience. There are two “interactive movies” by them, Pickford AI. No employee there should even consider themselves adjacent to artists.
Gary Marcus has been spamming out sneers at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic over the last 24h. He’s right but he’s such a knob about it. The first of his posts was a whopper where he just quoted himself predicting things correctly from like a year ago. It is nice to feel vindicated and say “I told you so” but it’s way too much. It reminds me of Juergen Schmidhuber who was famous on x-twitter for shouting “I ALREADY INVENTED THIS 30 YEARS AGO” every time a new notable paper came out of an AI Lab and whose name became a verb for “claiming credit for something”
He keeps going on about how we will have AGI but it won’t be via transformers. Dude why do we even need or want AGI? He comes so close to being “one of the good guys” and then shows his true colours every single time.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
We need salvation but it won’t come via rapture this decade
It might have come this decade, had they faithfully funded the path of symbolic AI, but instead they wandered around in the desert chasing the false idols of connectionism and deep learning.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
To solve biology and physics and live forever amongst the stars, obvs.
Or to allow a tiny elite to treat the rest of humanity like cattle since they no longer depend on them for physical and mental labour.
It’s striking how inimical to life itself the first statement is on its own. The people most obsessed with living for an eternity seem to be having the worst time of it. Yes, the Musks & Thiels are ungodly rich, but do they ever seem even basically well-adjusted? Inordinate wealth seems to come with commensurate insecurity.
massive bong rip musk is broadsides-ing the spacex ipo so hard not only because he’s desperate for cash (he is) but also because he wants to stick it to saltman after losing the recent court case
Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.
Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.
And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.
I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.
We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.
Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.
Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.
NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.
this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy
This is poetry, AI could never
Old: AI Winter
Bold: AI Ragnarok
Botterdamerung
Noice
AI Winter but with the same connotations as a nuclear one
The new Claude model will silently decide whether what you asked it to do is in line with anthropic ToS and silently corrupt your prompt if it doesn’t like what you’re asking. It’s couched as a “safety countermeasure” but it is presumably to stop Chinese labs trying to scrape synthetic data.
We’ve moved from ‘accidental’ hallucinations to deliberate misinformation and you’re paying $$$ for the privelige.
To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
Ken Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust
I know this outcome was inevitable after software became a mass market thing, but it’s still rather depressing.
Claude can now be silently nerfed. Anthropic has decided it won’t tell users when this happens.
considering how many habitual llm users can’t tell good from bad output anyway, they always could have done that
“You’re holding it wrong” as official policy
Wake up babe new genre definition just dropped
https://stoates.substack.com/p/programmer-science-fiction
Includes all the usual suspects, but notably doesn’t mention Ken MacLeod whose Fall Revolution series is probably too socialist[1]. Also avoids discussing Stross post-Singularity Sky.
[1] MacLeod’s Corporation Wars trilogy has immersive VR, artificial conciousness rebelling against authority, and literal p-zombies but is also very anti-fascist, so no wonder it’s not mentioned (also, it’s unfortunately not very good)
So there are a bunch of people on this forum more literary and authorial than I and I welcome any of them to correct me on this, but I’m skeptical of the whole project here of seeking to identify or define a new subgenre that is pushing speculative fiction as a whole forward. It’s always seemed to me like the real creative energy behind this kind of movement doesn’t originate from a defined subgenre as much as from a community of authors in conversation with each other. The identification and labeling comes afterwards as outsiders try to talk about it. In that sense, I don’t think he’s actually identifying that kind of community. Just naming a bunch of writers he likes, to the point of excluding several who he admits would be in this kind of community as defined but he just doesn’t like as much.
It’s been a while since I immersed myself in SF publishing but I think that older terms like “New Wave” and “cyberpunk” were basically marketing terms riding off the hits that spawned them. I believe they were a collaboration between the fandom, magazines and publishers - not in any structured way, but like in music, a term is used to encompass many different acts.
One slubstack does not a genre name, tho. And it’s broad enough to be meaningless. For example one of the first authors is Scott Alexander, who is not formally a programmer, just someone who hangs out online terminally. Vinge was a CS prof, but Banks afaik didn’t have any formal CS training. Ken McLeod worked as a programmer, as did Charles Stross.
SF is a nerd author paradise and nowadays nerds program, so … chicken and egg?
I’ve been programming computers since I was 10, and being a physicist even involved doing that professionally, so I hereby nominate my Daria–Hannibal crossover fic as programmer SF. It’s full of science fiction, both real and fictional.
Viral: “read a second book”
Spiral: “read a second Borges story”
The author of “Death and the Compass” and “Emma Zunz” is unrecognizable from the description there.
@gerikson @techtakes Technical nit-pick: “American hard science fiction space opera like Timelike Infinity is also influential”— Timelike Infinity was written by Steven Baxter who is *very* English indeed. Best contextualized as mid-period Interzone generation hitting its imperial phase.
