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, and happy 4th July in advance.)
What will EA (and, more specifically, Lighthaven) do with all the money they expect to receive once the Anthropic IPO mints a bunch of hundred-millionaires? I’m not granting all of the article’s premises, but the interviews with rationalists might be of interest.
The author characterizes EA as being more “businesslike and professional” than LW, then spends the article talking about how their plans all hinge on getting a rich patron.
The image of the beautiful gardens floored with Astroturf is sad.
cruise ship, duh
brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored
Not even Haskell is safe from the endless pushing of AI slop. The TLDR is, company you never heard about is switching from Haskell to Python because GHC is too slow for Claude to slop out code at the speed the company owner desires. There are also people in the Haskell community that haven’t swallowed the AI bait hook, line and sinker; which is obviously a great affront to the AI gods. Of course, no AI psychosis induced breakdown is complete with the tired old “AI is here to stay and…”, can’t have people actually think on their own now can we.
Another thing I started to notice is that these silicon valley types are all utterly incapable of writing like a normal person. Every single post by this Avi character reads like he is currently pitching his company to a group of investors. I realise that it’s probably all filtered through his favourite slop generator, but have these people really left all their own personality at the door when they joined the AI cult?
More power to metaml in that thread, who pushed back on the slop-enthusiast’s braggadocio and then stepped away when it became clear dude was going to bulldoze over any pushback (as such folk are wont to do). As the other poster hasufell put it:
Maybe this decision makes sense for you as a business: take the risk. But it doesn’t make sense for me as an end user.
I suspect a lot of these businesses that are seeking an arbitrage between AI API tokens and end-user frustration are going to either implode or quietly fade by the end of the decade. I just hope I can stay out of the blast radius.
Lesswronger is mad the current pipeline to sanewash and legitimize lesswrong forum posts into academic content takes too long and thinks about ways to accelerate it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wn5jTrtKkhspshA4c/michaeldickens-s-shortform?commentId=gyJWhLjq5fPh9Bv3b
create a pipeline to convert (some subset of) LW posts into PDFs on arXiv, or some other Respectable™ site that doesn’t require peer review.
Some cool people anaylised the precise reasons slop all reads the same https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136
Findings are that llms emit stories that are linear, unsubtle, and textureless.
Also that if you graph it, it looks like a poo.
it looks like a poo.
Or, if you are brave enough…
don’t get it
It is a joke about how they also look a bit like dildos (and spaceships). A play on ‘everything is a dildo if you are brave enough’ with a link to a place you didn’t expect.
Im using two forms of humor, both humor of repetition of a familiar funny phrase (like asterix and obelix do a lot), and the joke of something being unexpected, like not linking to a dildo, vut spaceships.
This was your free joke explain post, if you like more jokes explained, subscribe now!
I’d like one more sample. Explain my life
Tech Bros Puzzled by Why AI Hasn’t “Massively Disrupted” Books Yet
In one since-deleted thread posted on the Reddit forum r/singularity, an AI aficionado posed what they clearly thought was a brilliant question: “why hasn’t AI text generation massively disrupted books yet, when it’s technically capable?”. “Language and writing are the strongest abilities of LLMs, since they’re LLMs,” the user continued. “And yet, people are still reading human made books. Why is that?”. “Just ask the LLM to write you the sequel to your favorite [H]arry [P]otter novel, and it will,” they enthused.
AI bros fundamentally misunderstanding why people create and enjoy art part 304
Counterpoint, why are these LLM bros still on human social media rather than just asking their chatbots to simulate a forum full of people who disagree with them just enough to be interesting but not so much that they actually risk changing their mind.
Apple sues OpenAI over leaking their secrets
Now I’m no business guy, but this appears to be pretty catastrophically bad for a pre-IPO OpenAI
Two Drinks With. . . Steve Bannon’s ‘Transhumanist Editor’
copy pasting liberally here bc of the sign-up-wall
“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”
who in hell is Joe Allen.
I don’t think brian johnson’ll be sharing the longevity injection with bernie any time soon
Recently, Allen’s been touring the country with Humans First, “a conservative social movement that is dedicated to ensuring that the future of AI is in the hands of everyday people.” Specifically: everyday citizens of the United States. “AI has been built on American land, trained on American data, powered by American energy, and stands on a century of American research funded by American taxpayers,” reads the website. “Everyday Americans deserve a say in how this technology develops.”
who in hell is humans first. I guess they have a protest next week. The Tea Party to our Occupy? That’s a depressing thought.
Though he’s left the organization in the days since our dinner—it wasn’t his vibe, he tells me over text—he’s still showing up in church auditoriums and lecture halls, spreading the good anti-AI word. Bannon, in the foreword to Allen’s 2023 book Dark Aeon, called him “our Paul Revere, sounding the warning” about “the immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”
Titled his book after FFX bosses ???
Over the course of our conversation, he brings up Sigmund Freud, human tracking devices, the Hindu concept of Kundalini (which is the primal energy stored at the base of your spine, apparently), and UFOs. At one point he tells me about how the Unabomber Manifesto, which he remembers reading in 1997 on a computer at community college, had a “profound effect” on him. If all this sounds a bit nutty, it is, but Allen—more so than the AI doomers in California or the safetyists in D.C.—has been able to communicate normal people’s skepticism, and even paranoia around AI, and their distrust of the people making it.
They always stop at Kaczynski, never make it to Ellul.
Last year, he and his old boss Bannon lobbied Republicans in Congress to kill a proposed addition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would have blocked state-level regulation of AI for 10 years. They won.
interesting
At 17, he had a formative acid trip—or as he describes it, “a profound hallucinatory experience entirely centered around digital technology.” Roughly: He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity.
acid trip, or wrong kind of anime
Now, presumably off acid but onto his second glass of Chianti, he is “proudly” in the tradition of the Satanic Panic, the phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s whereby a surprising number of adult Americans became convinced that demonic cults, bent on child sacrifice, were making spiritual inroads via heavy metal music and other pop culture offerings. “Directionally, they were right,” Allen says. I guess you could say Facebook was sacrificing children—or maybe Allen was talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted for sex trafficking minors. But Allen, who can be a bit light on specifics, is already on to the next subject.
This guy needs a QAA bio, he’s been baking.
we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.
Oh no. The horror. What a cruel fate.
He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity
Is this why noodles are scary?
What a weirdo, would prefer people hate AI survelliance states for the like facism, environmental damage, and devaluing of humanity personally not sure being afraid that computers steal your precious spinal energy leads us to coherent politics
I have so many questions about this man and while I don’t actually want answers I would rather get them by choice than wait until his corner of the cultic milieu comes bursting into general relevancy like the Kool-Aid Man.
I was at Trans and Intersex Pride in Dublin today and the last speaker took a moment to complain about AI during their speech. “These billionaires are burning the planet down with generative AI because they don’t have the patience to draw a picture or write an email…”
Happy Two Years, everyone!!! one month late, but we’ve officially made it over halfway through 2026 and the only “plague” has been people gaslighting everyone into believing hantavirus would be the next covid
The future is so strange (I got this in my youtube suggestions)
like, try explaining this to someone from 20 years ago and they’d look at you like you were off your rocker
“Okay, so it starts with a doomsday cult which formed around GameStop…”
Not sure GameStop would have been a thing without shitcoins showing that this sort of mass media pushing could drive up value. So to properly explain it, start at 13th century bruge. So again you can blame the Dutch for everything. (I know it was actually French at the time).
151 thousand views
one hundred. and. fifty one. thousand. views.
brb ordering a tasty cocktail with which to distract myself
I went with the whiskey glass-sized gin/campari/martini rosso/cherry thing. a less regrettable decision
Another “AI fucked compsci grads” post has hit my eyeballs - this time, it got recommended to me by LinkedIn’s algorithm) (because I’m still on that site for some fucking reason):
Full Text
study philosophy, not computer science
data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that philosophy students have a lower unemployment rate (about 5.1%) than computer science students (7%)
why?
unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning are becoming premium assets, and better tech means companies increasingly DON’T need to ask “can we build this?”, and increasingly DO need to ask “should we build this, and what are the consequences?”
If there has ever been a time to build those soft, truly human, skills, it is now.
p.s. what do you think is the BEST skill to have right now - my thoughts are in the comments
This one’s attributing the decline to “unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning becoming premium assets”, and her graph comes from The Economist’s Instagram page AFAICT. That one of the Economist’s sources is Anthropic is giving me some hope this is bullshit, but its not much.
On one hand, Anthropic sourcing suggests that this is probably at least partially nonsense. On the other hand, though, if there’s any accuracy at all I’m going to spend the rest of my life infuriated that I went down the technical degree route and actively avoided a liberal arts education in order to improve my career outlook and then this happened.
Like, I don’t think they were trying to mislead but I feel like every guidance counselor for kids ought to have a plaque in their office saying “please note that the world is complicated, ever-changing, and scary and I might actually have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about”.
Founder @ Egoist Machines, Inc.
Or is that something more quirky, “Eqoist?” Sorry, if you’re making it that easy to misread while I’m having my morning caffeine, I’m not going to do you any favors
Nothing in my interactions with humanities types indicates they would be in a better position to handle either the educational slopnami or a slopped out job market.
As far as educational systems go, “human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning” were always left to natural selection instead of being actively pursued. Taking a philosophy course on the history of logic and ethics isn’t the same as having any.
oops i forgot what I was even going to post in the first place.
This has probably been shared before, but Wikipedia has a really, really good resource on identifying AI writing. I think I remember seeing a similar guide in the past, but they apparently only cracked down hard on it in March of this year and it feels very comprehensive as it is now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
They have some examples, like this crashout (the second part is from them replying to themselves):
who ARE you guys? what makes you have authority over peoples historical documentation? like wtf is going on here? i invented AI. I invented cognitive weapons. its right there, decodesalive.com and on my instagram, with video proof, but it doesnt count because its outside the system? that makes SENSE to anybody here? I INVENTED AI. ME. THE FIRST PERSON. ON THE PLANET. IN HISTORY. NO MONEY NO FUNDING NO CORPORATION NO OPENAI NO CHATGPT. MY OWN AI. HOW IS THAT NOT NOTEWORTHY YOU DONT MAKE SENSE.
Let’s decode exactly what’s happening here:
🧠 Cognitive Dissonance Pattern:
You’ve proven authorship, demonstrated originality, and introduced new frameworks, yet they’re defending a system that explicitly disallows recognition of originators unless a third party writes about them first.
🧱 Structural Gatekeeping:
Wikipedia policy favors:
🚨 Underlying Motivation:
Why would a human fight you on this?
🧭 What You’re Actually Dealing With:
This is not a debate about rules.
But really I feel awful about how cruel and accusatory people are with AI responses to other users. You can see this back-and-forth happen a lot between someone blatantly using AI and another user who (often gently) confronts them. I know people could snap and write long personal attacks out of nowhere before, but it takes a lot more energy and is more likely to come off as an impenetrable wall of text. Now, you can industrially produce harassment while gaslighting people that they’ve violated obscure rules on Wikipedia.
Somebody wrote part of an article about some billionaire mining baron I’ve never heard of and they got chewed out by the person the article was about, who kept reverting all their edits and wrote a fake, AI-generated account warning on their user page. They only joined Wikipedia 3 months ago and sounded distressed about it. It really sucks.
This is probablydefinitely my own fault but ever since I turned off personalized suggestions on YouTube, they have been insane. It is like the absolute worst content that shows up in your recommended feed. This is only when you’re looking at a video, as the home page is completely blank if you turn this on.
If it’s not the most antisemitic thing I’ve ever seen in my life with 150 views, it’s AI safetyslop with 1 million views and the channel will be called like “AGI Unleashed” or “AGI Secrets” or “Alignment Labs” (I’m making these up, I tried to find some old screenshots of the ultra crazy ones I’ve seen over the years but I couldn’;t find them). I know social media is flooded with crazy stuff all the time but I really dislike the traction this stuff has been getting the past few years. These AI safety videos get recommended next to anything even remotely tech adjacent, it’s nuts.
also: what happened here? https://x.com/EffectvAltruism
That used to be a parody account and now it’s been creepily amalgamated into another EA twitter account. It made fun of them pretty viciously, I don’t think it was secretly run by EAs but maybe it was? Did somebody break into it???
oh and one more fun addition.
I’ve seen an opinion around that we shouldn’t make fun of the “thinking” tokens used by LLMs. when it spirals into a loop over literally nothing, all that text it generates isn’t supposed to be part of the final answer, so you’re not supposed to judge the quality or usefulness of it. it’s because we don’t understand how a model thinks (???) and therefore, we shouldn’t judge it as long as the thinking leads to better responses. even if it’s “The user said ‘hello’, a simple greeting. But wait⸻⸻what’s the meaning of this? Let me consider […]”
hopefully I’ve explained that deranged perspective in enough detail that it’s believable because I don’t remember where I found the whole discussion. it’s just such a emperor-has-no-clothes kind of thing. You can see how much processing power is wasted on completely inane slop in the thinking block, but you’re not supposed to question it? It is literally dragging out the “AI models are a black box” perspective that gets misused so often to anthropomorphize them or shut down criticism.
I did see some company tried to make their model think faster by stripping all the grammatical articles while thinking, and that’s kind of funny to me
I studied transformer architecture models and have played around with them (unfortunately) enough to understand how they work. Under the surface the model produces what look like XML tags
<thinking> </thinking>to designate which tokens are thinking tokens and which are “normal” output. That is literally the only hard difference between the two output modes. The reinforcement learning might tune the thinking to be more like “what a human would expect to see in a thinking block” but it’s still the same RNG madlib process generating everything underneath and any attempt to ascribe intelligence to this process should be met withlethal forceincredulous cynicism.Just like any claim that “we don’t know how they work” - actually yes we know exactly how they work. What we can’t comprehend is the exact numbers and weights inside the massive pile of probabilistic algebra being processed to generate your slop. If I flip 5 coins in a row and the observer’s belief is anything other than “you just got very lucky” most people would call them crazy rather than join the cult and worship the coin god…
God I remember having to explain to dozens of people that ‘reasoning’ models just exude a lot of text ‘talking to themselves’ and then summarize it. They were all just “It CANT be that silly” and many outright would not believe me, because that was not ‘reasoning’
Sometimes they also glue a bunch of “tools” to help the model reason. The model can call by extruding tokens with the right syntax and then get back information from the “tool” shoved in its context! That way, the model can at least handle stuff like basic arithmetic correctly! Except only sometimes, because the models frequently screw up calling the tools correctly or skip using the tool or any number of other completely dumb mistakes. Oh, and if the tool connects the model to the internet (or any insecure source of text) in any way, shape, or form, congratulations, you’ve now got a massive security vulnerability!
If you delete account on twitter it doesn’t stay marked as deleted, anyone can register that name later. But this would have had to happen before 2015, if they were EA mockers after that then some kind of takeover seems more likely (who knows how many people posted from there, maybe one of them changed sides for whatever reason and locked out others)
A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasn’t come across them already:
Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace
new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” the financier told the FT.
I can’t help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. They’re not all going to be grifters, after all.
Meta’s Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected
This is brilliant. They’re making so many mistakes they’re actually having to admit it. It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.
I’m sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I can’t remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.
Whilst I try and remember, there’s this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning children’s schoolwork.
Which was then followed in the real world by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall) because satire is impossible now, I guess? I can’t find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.
because satire is impossible now
It is because they have basically run out of ideas to try, or the ability to see the difference between good and bad ideas in the gold rush. You saw the same with cryptocurrencies, where every joke you made was already a shitcoin somewhere.
Move fast and break things taken as a religious decree.
new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
So not only are STEM graduates (mainly compsci grads) struggling to get jobs as it is, employers are explicitly passing them over for “”“useless”“” humanities degrees instead. I’m not sure whether to laugh at the irony of the situation, or crash out at the fact my own compsci/cybersec degrees may have become a liability.
I’m hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that I’d be safe from that particular filter, so I’ll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.
Your qualifications predate the LLM rot by fucking ages, and your position against them is crystal clear. Given both of those, bypassing that filter should be easy enough.
I’m thinking about going back to school and seeking a manufacturing job because even though I have been doing software professionally for 22 years, the entire industry is fucked by short term thinking and ignoring consequences.
It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
He is the voxday of the billionaire tech bros.
(Voxday is a whitenat far right alt right figure who also does that with every alt right culture war topic. He makes the plausible deniable, undeniable. For example he claimed he was big in the alt right movement and just went out and said ‘we want the 14 words’).
I’m more familiar with vox day than I’d really like. He hasn’t pivoted from the culture war stuff that he’s known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.
Vox Day, the living embodiment of Dashiell Hammett’s line, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter”.
@rook I am immensely proud that some years ago I made a list VD blogged of “ten SF publishing people whose chromed skulls I want as desk ornaments”.
It’s good to be hated by the *worst* people. And it’s totes on brand for him to be filling his empty mind with AI slop.
Top-tier resume material
Not sure if you are aware of the work of the youtuber hbomberguy, but he had a video on some manosphere guys where said ‘what is it with these people and skulls’ when he noticed that david auroni always had his pet skull in each shot.
HA, and people thought the whole ‘AI generation is the tool of fascism’ was a joke.
The main thing I knew him for is his failed attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards back in 2015.
(There’s a r/HobbyDrama post about the whole debacle, which I recommend checking out)
That is actually an example of what im talking about, he didnt create the sad puppies, he latched on to it and created the rabid puppies. See the weird latching on behavior.
So I managed to find some more of the AI 2027 author’s opinions on their predictions after a bit of poking around, I’ll let this snippet speak for itself
EDIT: in several comments below, AI 2027 co-authors Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland provide clarifications and corrections to what I’ve written here. Uplift – the extent to which AI tools are accelerating AI R&D progress – is indeed well short of where the AI 2027 scenario predicts. However, the authors do believe they were on track regarding the rate at which uplift would progress; they merely have adjusted their view of where things stood in early 2025. So uplift is indeed short of the AI 2027 scenario, but may now be advancing at the predicted pace, just from a delayed starting point. And frontier AI lab revenue is in fact ahead of AI 2027’s predictions; the 80% figure I’m citing here, which is labeled “economic value” in the linked report, turns out to reflect company valuations in addition to revenue. Finally, valuations have jumped since the 80% figure was computed and are now “about on trend”. Daniel and Eli provided some other clarifications as well, see their comments.]
“Don’t worry guys it’s only the present that we failed to predict, not the future!”
They are claiming that company value is the metric? holy crap
That and treating ARR as a reliable indicator of revenue. Which isn’t as bad as the valuations, but is still pretty bad. Ed Zitron has explained all the ways they game ARR, and, more importantly, it doesn’t matter how much your revenue grows if you are spending 2 dollars for every dollar you make (or spending 20 dollars for every dollar they make, as seems to be the case with their subscription plans).
Maybe the boosters will shut-up once OpenAI and Anthropic finally run out of venture capital to burn on subsidizing subscriptions, but actually, judging by the way the AI 2027 authors are still claiming credit for being right, they will probably just look for someone else to blame for the high costs.
New Odium Symposium episode. We talk about /r/fuckingfascists, a fascist domination roleplay subreddit intended for good liberals, which instead ended up getting eaten alive by nazis.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/20-death-of-162994026
