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.
Found a remarkable ad-hoc anti-LLM-product manifesto on the orange site. As is tradition, tag yourselves; I’m “believ[ing that] there’s a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks.”
How can we, as a community, talk about the existential risk of climate change or the benefits of adopting renewable energy or cheer the development of ever-more-efficient power consumption
Well I have a good/bad news thing about that one
my god, you found the good HN comment
It’s as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, “we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we’re cooked” to “oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!”
Definitely this one for me. I can only describe it as some fucked up denial psychology, the way people are pretending the environment isn’t collapsing, and the LLM boom on top of that is like a bad joke. Even in discussions critical of the tech sector this is treated as almost an afterthought—the very real, very violent damage done to all of us from poor countries by people in rich countries to prop up their toy fantasy schemes. Even if LLMs did everything they claim to do, it would still be a moral imperative to form insurgent guerillas to blow up these datacentres, on the environmental damage they do alone which is not a minor detail Karen it’s kind of a big deal
Ooh. I love these. I’m “I don’t think Sam Altman or most of his social circle are good people and I don’t want to give them more wealth and power.”
I’ll go one step wider. It is not just Sam Altman or his social circle, but all the people most enriched by capitalism (and thus most able to exploit and benefit from a technology that shifts power away from labor and to capital) that I don’t want to see further empowered.
I hate LLMs because I am under enormous pressure, from many different angles, to also use them. I’m being asked – required, in some cases – to ignore all of my concerns about them and use them anyway because everyone else does and “obviously” they are the future. Because, somehow, all of my positions against LLMs make me unreasonable and a less valuable member of society.
oof. yeah that’s me.
Their “Dev team of none” justification (one of many) is really solid and not something I’ve seen spotlighted before, here it is in full:
The development team of none
Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
and also crypto https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254 surviving cryptobros are nonplussed
there’s a new variant of the old crypto affinity grift around, too: banning crypto projects is transphobia.
ah yes famously non-far-right cryptobros and downright woke russian and iranian sanction evaders
The Guardian published a William McAskill editorial in the what-if-the-stateless-text-generators-had-moral-agency genre of fiction, and Emily Bender did a thread
From the article:
But the sheer pace of growth in AI means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enormous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.
Get fucked, Will.
But also, if we grant the untenable sci-fi premise, this would be like a star trek episode where the federation cedes unconditionally to the expansionist alien fascists of the week if they have a much greater population because that’s all it takes to outweigh the other side’s moral concerns.
Earth-Trisolaris Organisation-ass moral framework.
It’s pretty grim to be as immersed as I am in all the tech news bullshit (which I continue to do largely because I am the most techy person in most rooms I exist in, and the closest thing to an AI expert (it feels so weird to say that, but I do have a fair bit of experience coding machine learning from scratch in a scientific context, so I probably do need to get more comfortable with thinking myself as an expert — it’s a relative term, after all)
However, I really enjoy that in addition to there being names that make me grimace because I know they will have dogshit takes on things, there are also names that I really respect. It makes me feel more connected to people, because it makes me reflect on how meaningful knowledge production is based on trust. Emily Bender, for instance, is someone whose work I am familiar with, and thus I am far likely to spend the energy to read stuff like the thread you linked.
As grim as modern tech is, it makes me smile that there are so many people who are fighting the good fight.
via dumpsterfire
Robotaxi riders are falling asleep, sparking frantic emergency service calls
So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: “sleepers”. The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo’s first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.
Apparently it’s cheaper to foist the job of waking passengers up on 911 than to hire an employee to do it. Good ol’ privatize the gains / socialize the losses!
The relation of tech and emergency services is something I became acutely aware of, when my volunteer firefighter unit recently got 2 alarms in one week that turned out to be someone lost his IPhone driving through a curve. (Apparently they have a G-sensor/accident detector and can robocall emergency services.)
Okay, it’s not that common. IPhones do that for years and those 2 were our only cases of that. Still sucks to get the news via radio, when you’re already in full kit ready to roll.
Daft ai project of the week: “lore”, a version control system that should not be confused with another vcs of the same name open-sourced by epic games a few weeks ago.
lore does not track your code. it tracks the prompts, notes and decisions that produced it. you commit intent. when you want code, you run lore materialize: it replays the accumulated intent into a brief, and an agent reconciles the working tree to match it.
the code is build output. the intent is the source.
…which would be great, if the output of llms were deterministic, and generally it is not. This means rolling back a change to undo or fix something is just another spin of the roulette wheel, with the analogy being reinforced by the number of tokens you’ll have to buy and burn to do a rebuild. It looks like it still needs a real vcs behind the scenes, given that it isn’t entirely self-hosting, but maybe I misunderstood something.
You might wonder if this is some kind of satirical work, or perhaps piece of performance art, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t… the creator and sole human author (naturally, claude is the only other “contributor”) is a big fan of something called “open audio protocol” and a project called “audius” which came about by someone asking what if spotify and soundcloud, but on the blockchain? With ai agentic integration?
I know we’re all familiar with the metaphor of LLMs as roulette wheel, but I think there’s some real craft to turning that into Russian roulette.
I’ve always thought that the ability for a VCS to show me exactly what my codebase looked like at any point in the past wasn’t as dementia-simulating as I’d like
Considering this is the logical endpoint of the “LLM’s are just like compilers bro” line of thought, I’m not surprised at all.
Nah, this isn’t the endpoint… you want something like prompt2exe, which is a performance art piece. Gets an llm to output machine code, and bundles it into an executable.
no package dependencies and invokes no assembler, compiler, or system linker.
Hardcore mode. No handholding for puny human devs by their tool chains. 🦾
Probably impractical for normal people to run, unless they have an employer who wants their minions to be burning all the tokens and pays up for the expensive kind of accounts.
Jesus, you’re right. This is so much worse.
I think there’s something to the compilers analogy, in the sense that if you used a C compiler through a chat interface with one liners to insert snippets into assembly without keeping the source code in source files as such, it would probably be slower than just writing in assembly yourself.
That LLMs have a number of extremely undesirable properties as “compilers” (from nondeterminism to plagiarism) does not make the dumb ass chat interface any less fundamentally shit. It just makes them shit in other ways too.
There is one narrow case in which I’ve found the compiler analogy useful: explaining my frustrations with LLM-assisted design/architecture doc generation. Here, it’s useful because handing someone a design document that was output by an LLM is a lot like handing someone a binary and asking them for a code review.
I’d much rather work with whatever disorganized soup of thoughts someone fed into the machine, because those at least contain intent, rather than a document that actively obscures what the designer wanted in a barrage of detail.
Yeah… I think the core point is, LLM’s shit is generated artifacts, which need to be kept separate from sources. That you can’t actually re-generate the same artifacts, is just a dingleberry on top of the shit pile.
kayfabe vcs
Wait, did I get that right and it reruns the prompts every time you want to look at the code? Holy token costs batman.
Perfect for when your workplace will fire you if you dont use enough tokens, I’m sure.
Finally a VCS that simulates the horrific results of
cvs mergegone wrong, 20 years since the last time I used cvs.
presented without comment: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist (via https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist)
how did it not click that lcamtuf was an ex-rat
That was kind of a nothing post? I think the author is misrepresenting the growth (or at least failing to connect the most important dots) of the lesswrong rationalist by portraying them as a natural evolution of the skeptics movement and not the deliberate cultivation of an audience by Eliezer looking for people to spread his ideology to and by Thiel looking to influence farm and create a cult incubator. And then the post is titled “my falling out with the rationalist”, and they write they "wanted to offer a more personal perspective " but they don’t actually discuss that much of the personal angle either…
The author tends to cull his own social media posts pretty aggressively if they get too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention, and it’s possible there’s more he wanted to say in the blog post but he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it.
But yeah, it felt like half a post.
he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it
You know, on net, the internet would be a better place if more people did this, but I wonder why the author even bothered posting anything at all?
I have definitely done this. Written half an essay in the awful.systems comment box, realized I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying anymore, and deleted it. I like to tell myself that forcing myself to realize I was being incoherent is enough to justify the costs. I guess if I acknowledge that I don’t rely on my online footprint to put food on the table the way the proper blogonauts (we’re still doing blogs, right?) do I can understand the incentives against doing that though.
yeah, subculturally they’re unrelated strains
like, just factually in terms of history, they’re unrelated strains. LW rats come in a straight line from the Extropians in the '90s. The previous-millennium skeptics have crossover with those guys, but they’re not the same as a group at all.
And the Movement Skeptics of the aughts looked at Kurzweil’s singulatarianism and asked what he was smoking, while basically ignoring that the Holy Sequences existed. I should know, I was there.
The biggest crossover between skeptics and rationalists I can think of is Julia Galef, and she podcasted with a philosopher who debated Yud once then decided it was infra dignitatem. She also dropped out of CFAR when it became more open that the rationality workshops were for finding Sarah Connor.
yeah, they mostly thought the lesswrongers were annoying weirdoes when they perceived them at all, e.g. rationalwiki
Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.
I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of “leaving rationalism” is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone (James Damore the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women don’t belong in tech).
I don’t know the author so I don’t know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.
Gene Ray actually came to MIT in person. I knew the people who invited him. They had a history of… performance-art kind of stunts on the boundary of good taste? Like calling attention to an obscure discretionary fund by running for student government on a promise that they would use it to bribe everyone who voted for them. One of them taught me to pick locks during rush week.
I don’t think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.
Looking at the people who believe IQ is magic, billionaires are gods, and that you should freeze your head. These people are skeptics.
Yes, skeptics classed Alcor and cryonics with homeopathy and Bigfoot. American skeptics had a Libertariam wing but I have not heard of Michael Shermer visiting Lighthaven.
The overlap between rationalists and the skeptic community was indeed tiny. I say this as someone heavily involved in Usenet skeptic communities since the late eighties. In fact the Bay Area doesn’t even register as a locus of the skeptic community at the times he’s talking about.
I’m not trying to excuse what much of the skeptic/atheist community later became in the 2010s. It’s definitely turned into something nearly unrecognizable since its earlier days. But that had nothing to do with any sort of imagined rationalist adjacency.
there are two things that are obvious in his blog: first, michał is an incredibly privileged dude (who doesn’t notice his privilege because, coming from poland, he sees himself as underprivileged), and second, the moment people finally leave the vicinity of the formalized skeptic movement is strictly dependent on how much misogyny and racism they tolerate.
2017, three years post gamergate is quite much.
2017, three years post gamergate
You know, I was wondering if the author elided the gap between early 2000s and 2017 because of the cringey and sometimes outright awful stuff that came out of the rationalists… but you’ve reminded me the skeptic movement also had some nasty bits both within it and as offshoots.
Am seeking suggestions on audiobooks to listen to! I think I’d like to start with the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, tho I don’t know what order to go with, or if that matters.
For the Hainish Cycle books the order doesn’t matter too much, they’re not direct sequels.
I started with (and would recommend starting with) The Left Hand of Darkness. The first 3 Hainish novels are also her first novels and she was still developing her style, in my opinion. I think The Dispossessed is her finest work, although I still haven’t read all of her novels.
thanks, noted!
The Earthsea novels are not to be missed either. Maybe pass on the fifth.
Also noted!
Tales from Earthsea is also good.
I didn’t mind The Other Wind… it isn’t as good as the others, but that’s a tough act to follow. It does draw together a bunch of plot threads from the previous books and provides a kind of closure, which I appreciated. There was more to say of Earthsea, but le Guin wasn’t going to have the time or energy for that.
Le Guin deserves credit for responding to her earlier work without denigrating it.
If I may add to these excellent suggestions:
The Night Circus and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Go in cold, do not spoil! Enjoybwith a a warm beverage. The readers are phenomenal.
The Laundry Files series by local hero Charles Stross, in which it turns out that P=NP, the Great Old Ones can be summoned in polynomial time, Cthulhu ate America via regulatory capture, and the world is suffering from the magical equivalent of global warming. Our protagonists have to mitgate all of this on a British civil servant’s salary.
The Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi, in which Our Regular Subjects have become a problem.
List appended! Thanks!
the night circus is one of my favourite books of all time ever, very much recommend. If you like that the magicians by Lev Grossman feels very similar in a way I cannot put my finger on, though it does not really fit into this list.
Ursula is great! I love The Dispossessed. You can kinda read them in any order based on what catches your attention, except stuff like Earthsea that is best consumed in order.
if you like this kind of stuff I would recommend also:
- Margaret Killjoy (A Country of Ghosts is basically The Dispossessed spiritual successor; The Sapling Cage is fresh queer fantasy; also the Danielle Cain series has been published as podcasts, it’s like, anarchopunk post-collapse Scooby-Doo)
- The Serpent Gates series (this starts exactly like the Tombs of Atuan, except Tenar is a lesbian orc and the equivalent of Ged is using her for his own purposes and the rest of the story goes very different but the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it)
- The Wayfarers series (slice-of-life sci-fi, kind of like Star Trek at its best, exploring diversity imaginatively)
- The two Robot and Monk books by the same author (feel-good hopepunk about how society could be good after collapse)
- Octavia Butler is the other undisputed giant. Lilith’s Brood series for some genuinely creative sci-fi, or the two Parable books for collapse fiction that is so prescient it’s downright uncomfortable.
- A Memory Called Empire and it sequel (sci-fi about colonialism and the Empire; sophisticated handling of these themes that I appreciated as a Global South migrant)
- This Gilded Abyss. Fundamentally a CaitVi fixfic. If the previous sentence made any sense to you you must try this one. Otherwise: Picture the Titanic, but it’s a luxury submarine in a magical-steampunk type setting. Now add zombies. Now add toxic yuri.
- The Locked Tomb series (lesbian Warhammer 40k. my favourite book series in the world. spectacular audiobook narration.)
- This Is How you Lose the Time War—absolute hoot of a book, just a delight from start to end. Picture the Spy × Spy comics from MAD. Now make one spy a time-traveling agent from future biopunk ecogarden utopia, the other spy an agent from future mind-upload cyperutopia. Their mission is to shift the timelines to their respective visions. Alas, they’re both lesbian… (Sorry, I have a bit of a pattern in my interests)
the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it
If you don’t mind reading comics online you could check Fairmeadow.
First impressions on this because I don’t have anyone else to talk about it and you pointed me to it,
spoilers for uh the first 20 or so pages of Fairmeadow ig, click to open:
- Who would win: 1 presumably lesbian orc, or a non-evil, not particularly terrifying cow
- I like what the artist did with visual storytelling here: Goma confused Sanctuary with the cow because of his horns, and afterwards she still threatened Sanctuary, for the same reason she threatened the cow: she’s treating him as meat. Alas, Sanctuary utterly defeats her, in the same way that the cow did: by caring about her state and not responding to her violence at all.
- What Sanctuary did by force-kidnessing her with the basket of squash is actually a very effective deescalation technique you can use yourself, too. It’s something salespeople do to manipulate others. Due to some quirk of human psychology, we almost reflexively feel more friendly towards someone we helped. Not someone who helps us, somebody we do a favour for. Subconscious probably goes “if I decided to do a favour for this guy he must be an ally; otherwise I wouldn’t be helping him, now would I”, which bypasses the guards of “he’s only helping me because he wants something”. Thus if you want to defuse someone’s hostility, ask them a favour—something genuinely helpful and that they are able to do, and in a way where it’s awkward for them to refuse.
FWIW my bookshelf contains very few works along these lines except for the works of Nagata Kabi, specifically 「My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness」, which you might like to check out, if you haven’t already. But uh, yeah all I can say in relation is that it has “Lesbian” in the title.
a bit of a pattern in my interests
It’s books, right?? /s
(In this case the /s stands for sapphic)
If the queer experience on the 90s island of Harris intrigues you, we’re halfway through Douglas Stuart’s John of John and really enjoy it. Narrator has a Scots accent though, if you find that hard to deal with.
I guess I will learn what my tolerances for Scots is!
Barbara Rosenblat’s recordings of the Amelia Peabody novels are fun.
thanks!
Mathematicians don’t love the use of “AI” for math, not one bit, via Timnit Gebru
You know, given automated proof checkers, I was naively assuming mathematics was one field that gen-AI would have a hard time screwing up. Even programming is too difficult to write thorough testing for. But a proof (or counter example to a conjecture) seems like it would have to be solid if it passes lean or whatever system for validating it.
But the threats #3 and #5 the declaration lists make me consider the bigger picture. Academic fields without clear capitalist payouts are already underfunded and under respected. Pure mathematics could, at least up until now, draw on the respect STEM gets, but with math proofs getting used as fuel for the LLM hype machine, there are a variety of unpleasant ways things could twist.
Threat #1 makes me wonder… if LLMs+formal verification systems manage to pluck lots of low hanging fruit, and we are left with harder stuff that not enough literature exists as training data for LLMs, it seems like the entire educational pipeline for producing mathematicians could end up screwed up.
new odium symposium episode. we look at the work of conservative philosopher, grifter and tobacco lobbyist Roger Scruton.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/21-mr-rogers-164372632
Extremely mature of both of you to make a crouton joke and not once include a scrotum joke
This was a fun one. It feels like there’s a shared affinity between Rats and traditional conservatives for confusing length and volume of output with actual depth or quantity of thoughts, and I deeply appreciate your willingness to wade through it all. Now that I think about it it would be difficult to write 500 pages saying basically nothing and not repeatedly blatantly contradict myself.
Also, release the Foucault tangent, you cowards!
who is this Dean Ball guy? new week, new guy, I guess.
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/19/pentagon-openai-dean-ball-trump-ai
Zoom in: “Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. @deanwball is that for AI,” Defense under secretary Emil Michael said Sunday on X.
“Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points).” Michael was arguing against Ball’s point that various government agencies, including the Pentagon, have blocked employees from using Chinese AI, which has already sent a message to regulated companies.
Russ Wilcox felt compelled to weigh in also
Dean Ball, days into his new job as Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, posted his assessment of Kimi K3, the new model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI. Kimi is an open-weight model, which means its inner workings are published for anyone to download, run, and modify; the newest version’s weights ship later this month. It had just matched the best publicly available models of the first quarter. The post made three claims. Open-weight models are “inherently decelerationist.” A probable outcome of an open-weight-dominant world is “full AI communism,” a future of AI as public good and digital public infrastructure that strikes him as a “dystopian hellscape.” And the United States government will at some point realize that its best strategy is to create large amounts of “regulatory risk” around the use of open-weight Chinese models.
I have met Dean Ball. We have disagreed before. This time the disagreement is public, and so the response should be too.
oh no kimi3 got the neo marxist woke mind virus
Dean Ball’s name rings a bell to me. Emile Torres wrote an article on him its pretty standard OpenAI exec stuff (that is being a wacko high off his own tech)
Breaking News: Mr. Ball Gets Testy
For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they’re handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who’s ever scammed $5 in venture capital
Humanoid robots providing stiff competition to quantum as to where the
smartdesparate money will be going once everyone realises the wheels have fallen off ai.https://thepit.social/@peter/116962244994361810
(the video is too big to upload here)
I particularly like the way they had body bag operatives within lunging distance, because they clearly expected the thing to just fucking die at a moment’s notice.
Or maybe they do that for all their speakers.
big tech robot had literally the same task as a karakuri doll from 300 years ago and still lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_czILDdOBc8
(more on karakuri for people who want to wach some actual technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU-kqpkZWjc )
comedy gold
OpenAI: “Sorry about accidentally hacking you teehee. It was because of how good we are at computer security :3”
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
Maybe they should start applying some of that superhuman box-escaping AI to their own sandbox designs because if your sandbox escape is a bug in a “package registry cache proxy” you might be doing it wrong.
I’m deeply suspicious of this whole thing, because it looks a lot like a marketing exercise showing off how dangerous and powerful and autonomous their product is.
Also, “sandbox” is one of those words that the llm companies have ruined, because they use it to mean a strongly-worded sentence telling an llm not to do something.
A recent two hour interview with Kokotajlo I do not have the time to go through all this but if anyone does feel free to go ahead.
Steven Bartlett barely has 3 brain cells to rub together, so this seems like the perfect outlet for Kokotajlo’s message.
this Diary of a CEO channel has always struck me as the kind to fall for any kind of bs hook line and sinker
This is funny yet also awful: adversarial tokenmaxxing suggests that writing everything as l33t$p34k increases the cost to process a document with an llm because the initial tokenisation step produces far more tokens.
This seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to work around, if it became commonplace (which it won’t) but the prospect of any anti-llm places doing this in the meantime does not spark joy.
Adversarial tokenmaxxing could probably be done by using non-English character sets in lieu of English letters (e.g. faux Cryllic) - for two examples from the Greek alphabet, alpha and omicron alone can easily substitute for A and O, respectively.
As a bonus, this would likely make the text look like complete gibberish to LLMs, potentially leaving them unable to process the document altogether. This would probably shaft anyone using screen readers, though.
EDIT: Turns out the demonstration’s already caught on to this idea, didn’t notice beforehand:
I feel like there’s a version of this that has a slider for how aggressively you’re willing to sacrifice readability, and you could probably get pretty decent results on the scale of 2x to 2.5x just using different encodings of the same basic glyph.
I tested this with the Navy Seal Copypasta (well, the first 400 letters of it, the demo’s got a limit) - using just Cryllic characters got me a 3.01x increase, and turning on all four control types got a 4.53x increase.
Testing your own recent comment, Cryllic only got 3.38x, and all four controls got 5.11x.
Going from those two, the boost from homoglyphs alone is likely higher than you think - 3x to 3.5x, by my guess - pretty good for human readable text.
Tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes can easily sacrifice readability for token burn, so they can easily go higher.
I had heard the reverse of this a year or so back, that prompting in Chinese and answers in English was fewer tokens e2e than English/English somehow. Probably depends on the specific model build.
John Michael Greer writes:
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here, and have extended that ban to LLM-generated content of all kinds. https://ecosophia.net/july-2026-open-post/
Good for you, you peak-oil meme-magic druid, for keeping your corner of the net weird.
and covid vaccine denier
Yeah, I began losing interest in Greer as it became clear that he was perfectly happy squatting in the middle of the red-brown alliance during the Trump era. His critiques of industrialism and unquestioning belief in technological progress broadly align with what we discuss here, but he will always coddle MAHA types and tale a shrugging “well, what can ya do?” attitude towards people like Trump, as it fits his preference for cyclical theories of civilization.
I noticed a couple months ago that he actually managed to dig Nick Land out of whatever tweaker den that guy’s been hiding in for a podcast, which says a lot about what he’s willing to indulge these days.
That Greer/Land crossover podcast is one of the funnier things I’ve listened to in a while, thanks for the ref, I guess I had missed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-pcSez32-s if others are interested.
Land opens with a Greer/Land yin-yang and we’re off the to races. Greer definitely brings up Spengler. Then Land starts talking about “Father Chad the Colorado Exorcist” and Greer is just yes-and-ing about the Solomonic tradition of binding demons.
… Half way through, that’s enough for one sitting.
Relatedly, C2C had a guy on talking about the singularity plus the bible. https://kfiam640.iheart.com/featured/coast-to-coast-am/content/2026-07-22-1100-the-best-of-coast-to-coas-the-singularity-best-of-coast-to-coast-am-72/
Seems like America is definitely getting ready for this stuff to cross over to the Left Behind crowd, I predict more Tucker segments. I’ll post some of the other guys I’ve found, digging into the “AI is actually the demonic spiritual energy of surviving nephilim” theory rn.
I like to keep my analysis separate from my word-magic (making things happen by saying them). Greer is trying to remake the world and not just work up his courage which is a harmless and consensual form of word-magic.
I still respect the definition he gives for magic, which he probably pulled forward from one of the many past ritual magicians he’s studied. Magic is the change in consciousness in accordance with will… but we must always remember that that doesn’t say whose consciousness, nor whose will.
“Any Sufficiently Transparent Magic…” by Damien P. Williams talks about chatbots as sorcery https://pages.charlotte.edu/damien-p-williams/wp-content/uploads/sites/1342/2024/01/DPW_Any-Sufficiently-Transparent-Magic_Edits-PrePrint.pdf
