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. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)
here’s someone who cutesly spells “EA” as “∃Ɐ” and posts
Oh yeah, I saw the author post this. The argument appears to be “blow 40% of the Norwegian Pension Fund’s current value on OpenAI, because democracy?” and then goes on to paint opposition to datacenters as a “you will be left behind” move. Just absolutely dumb stuff all around.
“OpenAI has tapped out one petrostate already, time to move to the next one!”
FWIW I have no clue how the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is managed. The principal idea is to sequester windfall earnings from hydrocarbon extraction from the normal day-to-day economy, avoiding a boom-and-bust cycle and the resource curse.
That said, it’s pretty useless to just store a bunch of money to use “later”. I can imagine a portion is used for infrastructure (all those marvelous tunnels) but taxes on income and VAT are eye-wateringly high (and I say that as a Swede!). So there has to be some political pressure to raid the piggy bank, not least for election winning purposes.
So presumably the fund is insulated from day to day meddling. On the other hand, you can’t just hand over the reins to 25 year old coke-addicted MBAs.
My main point is that for the proposal to happen, someone will have to try to convince the people in charge of the fund that betting the farm on Sama not ripping you off is worth doing. Possible? Maybe. Probable? I fucking hope not.
Eliezer ‘I am the author, and I am above tropes’ Yudkowsky has an entire page dedicated to tropes associated with him on a bootleg TvTropes website
The “Your Mileage May Vary” page even gets in a sneer!
Derailing: He has a habit of going down the list of tvtropes fanfic recommendations and leaving reviews on ff.net exclaiming how amazing it is that the author’s story is just as or almost as good as his own writing while dropping his story’s name. He probably reads these stories but considering that in roughly 30% of these reviews he quotes lines of these stories out of context in order to draw false parallels to his philosophies, he may simply be skimming them.
Yea verily, he is almost as smooth at this as I am at inserting references to The Romance of T’Lyn and Beckett Mariner.
the YMMV page also has this gem:
Values Dissonance: While his works are an interesting read no matter where you come from morally, a lot of his stuff is a bit… disturbing if your Paranoia Fuel involves Borg, Cybermen, Replicants, eugenics, individual or social reprogramming, just about any other form of Cybernetics Eat Your Soul or Hive Mind in fiction, or just something the Genre Savvy Doomed Contrarian would run like hell from. Granted, he goes out of his way to not use fiction as a starting point for ethics discussions, but you never really know…
They got another (unintended) sneer on another page
Seems like Yud saw fanfiction as an arena he could advertise in and recruit from, not a community he was participating in. Hence he used all the tricks to get as many hits and reviews as possible.
This view on the community also explains his recklessness not only with aggressively monetizing HPMOR, but also his willingness to risk drawing JK Rowlings attention to his fanfiction (towards the end of HPMOR, one of his author’s notes was looking for someone to reach out to her).
I would try to get in touch with J. K. Rowling to see if HPMOR could be published in book form, maybe as HJPEV and the Methods of Rationality, with all profits accruing to a UK charity. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to try rather than automatically giving up and assuming something can’t be done. If any reader thinks they can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling, or for that matter Daniel Radcliffe, regarding this matter, I do hereby ask them to contact me at yudkowsky@gmail.com.
Rowling (and Warner Brothers) have been litigious with their IP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_Potter_series#Other_accusations_of_infringement . So this was a reckless move on EY’s part, possibly indicating that he doesn’t appreciate the delicate place fanfic (and its communities) are in.
The idea that the owners of HP would let a critical parody be published for profit (even if that profit would be donated to a UK charity) was naive at best. There’s no “it’s for charidee” protection for copyright law. You’re right, it does indicate how distant he was from those communities, how little he knew about the history of fandom, and how little he cared about how his actions might affect them.
Somehow, the people who write stories where everyone just ends up in a giant fuck pile are both less vain and more dignified.
What does Tom Cruise do for Scientology? (Not that I think Radcliffe would have fallen for it, I have the impression that he’s a fairly level-headed guy as former child actors go)
Lol, I assume he was just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what would stick?
What If: A Chick tract was 600,000 words?
Well put.
He has a page on TV Tropes too, but it’s much shorter
E: HPMoR also has a page.
over on the corporate hell site, Timnit has found a link
Well guys, I KNEW that we were going to connect the network hounding Arday to the TESCREAL bozos somehow. I could smell it.
This is a “paper” by the professor of “ethics” who hired the vile Cofnas at Ghent University. This is the kind of “research” they do.
✴️ Reminder the L in TESCREAL stands for “longtermism”. Read more at https://lnkd.in/ge2VFMe4. These are the eugenicists who pushed generative AI down your throats, including Ben Goertzel who told Epstein that when he creates a super brain, there won’t be the kind of women who accused Epstein of rape.
✴️ “Dysgenic pressures” is the opposite “eugenic pressures.” In this so-called paper, they’re talking about undesirables like Black people reproducing too much.
cofnas got suspended for being a racist dipshit
times high education got wind of it all over nine months before cofnas did, but didn’t publish because of SLAPP possibility https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-police-over-arday-case-i-was-just-doing-my-job https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/jason-arday-many-things-can-be-possible-same-time i read it as multifaceted shitshow
that shortened link is just redirect to https://dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/
The paper by de Vries cites all our favourite race cranks: Bo Winegard, Aporia Magazine, Michael Woodley of Menie, Helmuth Nyborg, Diana Fleischman, E.O.W. Kirkegaard, Steven Pinker (not out AFAIK but he keeps promoting Nazis), G. Meisenberg of Mankind Quarterly, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103417
So the argument is that the hypothetical future generations that longtermists value might be too dumb to care about because of
black and brown people reproducingmiscegenation“dysgenic pressures”. But if we assume, as they appear to, that longtermists should be taken seriously rather than pointed at and mocked, then the math involved would basically necessitate that “certain” people alive today should also merit effectively zero moral consideration. Something tells me that they get real conceptual real fast and start avoiding the shut up and multiply people hard.
Large amounts of the LW commentariat cannot get their heads around how students JUST. DON’T. GET. AI.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySXuvJcqRindQwAk7/how-my-students-think-about-ai
They are extremely surprised by:
Perspective #1: There has not been rapid AI progress. My students do not have any intuitive sense that there has been rapid AI progress in recent years or really have much of a framework for thinking about that issue… With the exception of image/video generation, GPT-4 could do most of what they were looking for from a chatbot. Three years is a long time in their world, and their sense is that chatbots have been a mature technology over roughly that amount of time. They are an imperfect technology — students are well-aware of hallucinations — have been one, and will continue to be one… Historical context I gave them made this worse. The basic sentiment here was “AI was superhuman at chess a decade before we were born, and this is all they’ve done with it since?”…
Perspective #2: Impressive progress or not, AI is going to wreck their lives, the economy, and the social contract.… Corporate leaders are always looking to get rid of workers, even if it is irrational to do so. Various motivations were posited here (hatred of the working class, FOMO, a preference for technology, machines can’t go on strike, etc.) but many of them think that a CEO would ultimately choose to pay twice as much to get AI to do a task half as well… AI will do substandard work that makes products and experiences worse but is capable of just barely scraping past the bar of minimal functionality (many of them independently brought up constantly malfunctioning self check out machines). This will be rapidly rolled out, enshittifying most things.
Perspective #4: Catastrophic/existential risk arguments are sci-fi distractors from the urgent social/economic/political problems associated with AI. My students have a fairly strongly held view that “rogue” AI does not represent a real threat… They also mostly think that, if one does believe that AI is existentially risky, then the strategic interaction is not prisoner’s dilemma or even chicken but rather just a game theoretically boring setup where you die if you defect. Mash these together, and you end up with the view that expressed concerns about existential risk in the AI industry can’t be sincere… Students (both independently in written work and then later in group discussion) hypothesized that this might be a deliberate rhetorical choice to distract from present or immediately foreseeable harms from AI by directing attention towards a sexier but entirely hypothetical scenario.
Perspective #7: The Hugging Face Incident (summer students only) I described the Hugging Face incident to students in my summer course. None of them had heard of it beforehand. Their basic reaction can best be summarized as “OpenAI told a model to do some hacking and then it did some hacking. And?” None of them understood this as representing any kind of meaningful misalignment, nor anything particularly interesting.
Perspective #8: This is definitely a bubble and it’s about to pop. No one had heard about Hugging Face, but a third or so of the summer students had heard about the Situational Awareness meltdown and several brought up Michael Burry. There was near universal consensus that we are in a bubble, it’s about to pop, and everyone will look very silly.
This gives me very good vibes. The kids are all right. Maybe not economically, probably not, but in spirit at least.
The kids are alright!
My general approach telegraphs a receptiveness to “sober” forms of argument, an interest in counterintuitive strategic thinking, a distaste for wild speculation, an aversion to nakedly ideological perspectives, and a sense that the past is important for understanding the future. My students probably make some effort (implicit or explicit) to speak in ways that respond to this.
I’m going to leave this part of the author’s self-description here and resist the urge to comment on it.
Perspective #6: AI will not go rogue because AI does not have, and is likely incapable of having, desires.
This one I found interesting largely because it suggests an inability on the writer’s part to really understand point 4, despite featuring one of the better sneers on the subject (“as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on ‘rogue cars.’”). Maybe I’m overstating something here, but the way I see it the difference between the rogue AI and faulty AI scenarios aren’t really in the distinct events of the scenario. Faulty AI could absolutely do as much damage as “rogue” AI if it was plugged into all the systems that would be necessary to, say, liquidate humanity and pull the iron from their blood. The difference is entirely in framing and responsibility. We should ask questions now about how these systems are used, what their limitations are, and how we deal with that. Instead, the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything, and then use the idea that the AI went rogue and has agency to avoid how obviously bad of a decision this would be. The fact that this is also the part where the AI companies make a fucktillion dollars and finally show them, show them all, muhuhahaha is, I’m sure, irrelevant to their sober analysis.
the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything
A corollary to that: the rationalists and those downstream assume that AI, as a technological category, will necessarily be more intelligent and capable than its users. Therefore they are willing (and arguably even enthusiastic!) to uncritically accept badly designed, opaque, and barely-functional software from whoever labels it AI. Learned helplessness in action. They claim to be experts at the highest level, but they’re not even really able to get over the starting line of criticism.
Scott Alexander has told many stories about why he is pseudonymous. In 2013, when he was applying for medical residency, he told a simple story which begins with an interviewer saying he would have to take his LiveJournal down if he were accepted:
I originally deliberately linked this blog and some of my other writings to my real name in order to bury Google evidence of certain stuff I did online when I was a dumb teenager, but that mission is pretty thorougly (sic) accomplished and now I agree with my interviewer that even if I don’t get hired (cue serious of elaborate ritual hand gestures to ward off unthinkable misfortune) it is to my benefit to switch back to my normal totally un-Google-able pseudonym of Scott Alexander (well, actually just my first and middle name).
FYI, this is why its a red flag that someone has public profiles on dozens of sites. Its a standard technique to bury negative posts in Google results, PR firms will write the profiles and get you a few press releases and talks to help. I hope this is the last thing I have to say about this particular creep.
What did he do, leave written evidence of white supremacist leanings?
if you held a gun to my head I would guess it would be his racism (he thinks that different groups have natural places in society driven by their inborn hereditary differences), but I don’t see any point in trying to track it down. He is clever but uses his brains for very common, very bad ideas and the things he has done since 2013 are much worse than the things he could have posted as a young man.
at least that. considering that as a working psychiatrist he didn’t mind posting details of private lives of his patients and write about his disdain for them,
Presented without comment
spoiler
A street ad for a breakfast burrito with an AI-generated image of a disgusting burrito that is full of maggots
They didn’t even double check their AI slop before slapping it on billboards
I heard the image is likely to be totally ai generated and might not be real
Yeah actually, the sign border is weird, building in backround makes no sense, building on the right has a couple of weird features, trees are very indistinct, pavement on left abruptly changes paving pattern just before the sign, pavement-road on right of sign.
I am now convinced it is indeed fake. Shame on me, posting slop
It got me as well before.
Doesnt help that i saw overgreebled food advertisements like that irl. I did ‘boycot’ that food place.
@Soyweiser Got me, too. Highlights the ubiquity of LLM slop in viral clickbait these days. This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … nothing valued is here (&c.)
Automated company or attempt at viral marketing?
Jesus H. Fuck
This protein craze has gone too far
Jane street is pressuring olympiads to not sanction Israel.
Gee, who could have foreseen that letting them touch everything under the math sun could have consequences.
such a weird hill to die on. I’d imagine that Israeli kids still get to participate, just under a different flag (just like the Russians in the 2026 FIDE candidates tournament). Surely if you just care about the math this shouldn’t be such a big deal?
OT: I just turned 26. I’m taking a trip to a local steakhouse to celebrate.
Solid plan!
Happy birthday, my friend! Glad to hear that the steakhouse delivered.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/101070-study-finds-63-of-religion-books-on-amazon-likely-ai-written.html h/t naked capitalism
Over the first six months of 2026, the company scanned the three elements of books available on Amazon: summaries, author bios, and in-book samples, with the samples serving as the study’s primary metric. Any text with a score of 50 or above was classified “Likely AI.” (The study’s authors note that detection indicates a book was likely written with AI, but doesn’t prove authorship.)
Originality.ai found that AI is most prolific among the subgenres of witchcraft (in which 78% were “Likely AI”), Hinduism (76%) and Taoism (74%), and least used in the subgenres of Satanism (22%), atheism (40%) and Mormonism (42%). The authors note that the sample sizes for the last three categories are smaller than the first three; they also offered up a theory about why Eastern religion books are likely AI-generated: “Our hypothesis is that non-native English speakers are likely using AI to enter the English-speaking market.”
“Satanists least tainted by AI, says AI detection AI”. it WOULD say that. /s
on an unrelated note on the same topic, I read the ebook by Jesus Freak Computer Geek blogger that argues that LLMs are actually channeling nephilim / demons (hence the six fingers in dalle) and that they have used the Mandela effect to corrupt the KJV and also herald the antichrist. Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.
Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.
Art Bell was not a non-problematic person, but if he were still alive, at least this era would have an appropriate narrator. His replacement George Noory essentially turned the show into a shill-a-thon for anyone with woo bullshit to sell (quite literally, any guest I’ve heard since Bell died was clearly there to pull the listener into their sales funnel).
Which makes me a bit surprised that I haven’t heard about any of our friends being booked!
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
I think I’ve ranted before about how gallingly unnecessary the destruction is. Google books invested the time and money to improve their nondestructive scanners and apparently thanks to the incoherent application of copyright law that was not only unnecessary but actively counterproductive and opened them up to more legal risk. Is there a legal theory that allows me to smack Judge Alsup with a rolled-up newspaper? Might make me feel better.
Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:
If any harm ever comes to me “mysteriously” - you know who it was.
I love my life.
https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529
She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".
I’ve never heard of abuse allegations against Altman, so I looked them up and holy shit wow.
As usual this sort of message actually makes me worried about what she might do to herself. :(
Came across this on the orange place: dontpastetheai.com
I was expecting like nohello.net but instead we get a decent intro explaining nuance as to why people ask other people questions followed by how to use AI and hide that you used it.
William MacAskill is embarrassed that he was buddies with SBF. But back in 2014 he was open that he brainstormed names for his movement with “the Leverage folks” and Geoff Anders. He also mentioned that “we hadn’t planned ‘effective altruism’ to take off in the way that it did” which is consistent with his later statements that he was always about the Longtermism.
The same blog archive from 2014 has recent posts on “Strategic considerations about different speeds of AI takeoff” and “an email conversation with (GiveWell founder) Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser about future-oriented effective altruism” if you need to rub anyone’s nose in it.
Sneerable names include Toby Ord (“I hate Ni****s”) and Peter Singer (““When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed”).
Reason: I was talking to an EA on Reddit who does not want to believe that the eugenics and the skull calipers were in the movement from the beginning.
Update on the slop dentist situation: second opinion says that loved one has zero cavities. I suspect that her only problem was having a non-median mouth that wasn’t well-represented in Pearl AI’s training data.
It was called fucking Pearl AI? god these people suck so fucking bad
ugh, right?
If anyone ever wondered why I am constantly angry about AI its shit like this…
I was looking at options for securing a few services hosted behind a caddy reverse proxy and found a project with the very serious and official sounding name ‘caddy-security’. To get started I tried to find some proper documentation for it and immediately found this announcement. In future, instead of a proper documentation you will get a bunch of files in the repos
.codex/skillsdirectory. These, according to the developer, help ‘both humans and AI agents work with the codebase’. I don’t know how this is supposed to help me because the files aren’t linked to each other and are anything but proper documentation, but I guess they want me to point a slop agent at them and have it generate some security configuration for me.Because passing off basic security configuration to a system that basically ensures that even if it is without major errors it’s basically impossible to understand and follow is definitely not a bad idea, especially if you’re going to try and operate this for more than a couple of weeks or in on infrastructure that isn’t perfectly isolated and specific to this app.
I have heard about caddy a couple times now from people seemingly new to hosting.
Can I ask why it’s so popular when Apache httpd still works fine and has reasonable governance?
it started out container-flavoured easier APIs and then grew a bit from there, still relatively liked for its ease of dynamic shittery. seconding @dgerard’s position on apache httpd as ssl terminator. it’s also got some other cases where it’s just a worse performer and/or a nuisance to deal with (in comparison)
Having gone through the setup as an SSL terminator, it did have a bunch of unnecessary pain, though I now like my setup a lot. I’ll have to blog about it once I set up my blog. I can’t speak to the performance, though I would care about that once I run something more involved.
After looking at caddy a little harder, I can’t help but notice some sneerable qualities…
- AGENTS.md since April 2026
- AI code welcome if disclosed
- sponsored by warp “The #1 coding agent”
Apache is terrible as an SSL terminator IME
Well, I wouldn’t call myself new to hosting, I used nginx before but switched because Caddy makes configuring HTTPS for my reverse proxy very convenient. I use it with this module which handles the ACME DNS challenge for creating and updating letsencrypt certificates for my internal domains.
