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.)
I had short odds for that entire submission being nuked but apparently there’s enough non-bad stuff there for the mods to keep it up.
Matt Clifford, Snake oil salesman, founder of Entrepreneur First startup incubator and chair of the UK’s ARIA research committee (that hands out money to researchers) quietly doing a fascism* by joining anthropic whilst also continuing to be a civil servant. Other high profile anthropic
bribesalary receivers include Rishi Sunak the former Prime Minister and George Osbourne the former Chancellor.*from Wikipedia: Corporatism became a main tenets of Italian fascism, and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy advocated the total integration of divergent interests into the state for the common good
oh boy do i have notes on this fucker, going back to jan 2025
Tonight’s pivot article? 😊
the effort of rampant libertarians to jumpstart a social movement is going as well as expected
My first thought was maybe one of them isn’t focused enough on doomerism and is too concerned with practical shit, which in lesswrong and AI doomer spaces is a nono (practical concerns about GenAI and data centers are okay as a way to draw in normies, but they want to make sure you speak the shibboleths that indicate your real concern is Skynet). Thus whichever one is the less doomer one would get a smidgen of credit in my eyes.
I was disappointed to learn the real reason…
We endorse pointing out harmful actions. But we condemn attacks on people’s character.
…although it is probably a good thing that someone is willing to call Sam Altman a slimeball and Anthropic lying hypocrites? So I’ll give PauseAI-US a tiny bit of credit for that.
…or maybe not
When I read Holly’s Twitter feed, I get why someone would have a gut reaction like “this is an unhinged person who’s stooping to the level of personal attacks on people who seem nice and are just trying to do their best”.
Whatever credit this PauseAI-US person gets for willingness to call people out, they lose for doing so through twitter.
This is terrible, absolutely horrible, disendorsement is only a few short steps from defenestration. How could these people do this
Just in time for Irreplaceable to show up!
Not sure about the Libertarian connection, but the comments feature Eliezer Yudkowsky and at least one member of the MAPLE cult (Goldenberg).
A “no attacks on people’s characters” policy seems like a terrible idea in this space because so many people are grifters, liars, and apocalyptic cultists. At some point you have to say “you are a bad person who uses false words to do bad things.”
A “no attacks on people’s characters” policy seems like a terrible idea
Rationalists: “Its not our fault that we got deceived and manipulated by SBF, lots of people were fooled by him!
pay no attention to the fact we repeated the pattern of falling for it with OpenAI and Anthropic also”Also Rationalists: “You can’t jsut call people
in or adjacent to our in-groupbad people!”Also Eliezer: "There’s a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn’t matter that God doesn’t actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f’d-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it. "
Tag yourself I’m “(I suspect)”
I don’t think it’s a very novel insight to point out how this pattern is pretty typical of high control groups, though I guess most are much more explicit about the in-group/out-group distinction there. Our very good friends seem less inclined to treat everyone outside the circle like they’re part of a grand anti-tescreal conspiracy, at least.
I don’t think it’s a very novel insight
The slatestarcodex branch of lesswrongers have made “high-decoupling” and “steelmanning” and being “gray tribe” their entire identity so its extra funny (compared to normal cults in-group/out-group distinctions) seeing how hypocritical they are at it.
not Libertarian in the organized political sense, more like steeped in the dominant California ideology
that dyson toothbrush, huh
“everything is camera” is this decade’s “shove a bluetooth in there”
think of the monetisation opportunities!
but yeah it’s pretty weird, people are out of ideas for what to do I guess. endless growth mindset can’t have a thing just be done 🤷♂️
yeah, the only idea left is “insert as much financial friction that is tolerated between people and the things they use in their lives”.
new odium symposium episode. we look at the evolution of keyboard warrior and self described most censored man on the internet jk sheindlin
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/23-gobsmacking-168259713
my feeds are full of news of the death of Wendell Berry who I have absolutely no relationship to but this quote is relevant to our interests
Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.
When I was 17, I thought it would be great to live forever, even though my life at the time was not especially happy. But now that I’m over 50, I have trouble understanding how people can make it to my age or older without at least becoming somewhat comfortable with the prospect of death.
Dan Luu and tptacek are big mad at Ed Zitron, and claim to have slammed him with FACTS and LOGIC
If I have a billion trillion dollars but 20% of the population hates me, but I get to live in a giant solid gold mansion with an army of servants keeping the 20% away from me, have I really failed?
I don’t know, you tell me.
I’m not going near your solid gold mansion by the way, that’s a death trap!
@pikesley
the simpsons did jeff bezos(with too much hair and too few dollars)
@Amoeba_Girl @o7___o7
Part of the deal you took when you got the billion trillion dollars is that we get to make fun of you for being a sellout, why are they trying to renegotiate now?
I enjoyed one of the comments comparing Zitron to a fire and brimstone priest… like dude, Big Yud and Dario are right there
Zitron is a better writer though. Yud is bland personified.
Speaking of wrong predictions… the entire US military budget would have to be spent on OpenAI/Anthropic to keep the bubble from bursting.
well that really is rather a tell, isn’t it
Ed Zitron says water is wet but he didn’t properly quantity wetness or indeed how long it would take me to be soaked through if I touch water… Checkmate atheists!
It’s impressive how these very rational millionaire tech lords get so bent out of shape by anyone outside of their club getting any attention whatsoever. Just peak pettiness.
They can all go choke on a pelican.
Nvidia’s CEO is claiming that GPT Astra is AGI, in other words, CEOs saying more bullshit to keep valuation up
He also said that during a Lex Fridman interview 5 months ago (copy pasted from someone else’s comment on substack)
”he said in during a Lex Fridman interview March 26, 2026 - first time. I was just watching this today. ----- At about 1:56:29–1:56:35, Lex asks whether AGI is 5, 10, 15, or 20 years away. Jensen replies: “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI.”
We have, that’s the trick when people don’t define acronyms.
Artifical
GPU
Inflation
Via Baldur Bjarnason Protonmail funding French far right
What would people recommend as an alternative email provider that funds fewer (ideally zero) fascists?
Haven’t heard bad stuff about mailbox.org (Heinlein Group) yet.
Have been using Tutanota for years. They took an anti-AI stance pretty early on as well.
I remember this showing up here a while back
Ah fuck, they’re also funding {ungeskripted}. He’s a way too big german “free speech” type podcaster. I’ve got him on my shitlist recently, after wonky BSW-type supposed leftists were sharing his clips in a political group chat.
in which le gwern and sword guy neal sponsor a writing contest
Premise
Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM.
What happens in this ‘business as usual’ future?
I may as well through my name in the hat, I could use the cash. but, who the hell gave them $100k for this? I guess BTC is back up.
but, who the hell gave them $100k for this?
the third name is a vc-type, and I bet it won’t take much scratching to find that linked to our good friends and the ongoing public image adjustment campaign that’s seeing funding from a few corners
I dug into the link at the bottom of the rfp, it’s definitely a lot more crypto / ethereum leaning than ai, none of the names rang any bells to me as I’m less acquainted with that group. https://www.paradigm.xyz/frontiers-2026 and https://www.paradigm.xyz/writing but they do have shocking amounts of js on their pages, hung the tab, probably trying to mine something.
What the hell kind of prompt is this oh my god. I’m getting bored just contemplating the idea of trying to think up a story.
No.
Turns out the only cause of inequality in the world is that there’s just too much progress. Once the Best GPU has finally been designed, it’ll just keep rolling off the production line, and those charitable manufacturers will gladly distribute them at bargain prices to all the impoverished masses. Who all have a reliable source of energy to devote to churning out slop.
s/gpu/Butt-Face Chester Cheeks/g and you got yourself a deal.
“The year is 2040. Everybody has access to a Butt-Face Chester Cheeks. What happens in this butt-business as usual future?”
Keep in mind that Butt-Face Chester Cheeks is simply a special case of Tickle Me Elmo, and strategize accordingly
AI Use: LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group—unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
Lol. Lmao.
So I love Neal’s books, I think he’s a fun story-teller and anathems orbital mechanics scene has loads more tension than any slop in something like interstellar.
But whenever he gets involved in social-technological commentary I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.
Anyway, scour the submissions for little Lytton contest entrants
I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.
The advent of the AI bubble has made this distinction much more trenchant for me. I was already somewhat aware before, but I am now much more likely to judge someone’s character on whether they believe science fiction, broadly, is a roadmap to the future or a reflection and exploration of current conditions and historical contingencies.
When they are using science fiction as a venue to be weirdly horny, what are they weirdly horny for, and in how many star systems do they know the age-of-consent laws?
I’m convinced Stephenson is personally very right wing but also smart enough not to advertise it publicly.
@gerikson I know Neal (we’ve gone drinking together) and I think he *is* right wing/conservative by disposition, but also thoughtful enough to understand nuance and shades of grey: he’s not a reflexive knee-jerk type, or willing to follow someone else’s flag.
Damn, imagine living in this world and being like “You know, those people who’d keep women chained to the house, kill the gays, force a state religion on people, and segregated society have some good points”
Did you ever ask him about his day job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Outside_of_writing is pretty colorful and the sword kickstarter especially was not a good look.
@nfultz @techtakes Neal is a great big history nerd. I do not take him for a big-time business brain.
The main thing I have noticed, thinking back, is that his books often require an Interesting Billionaire to move the plot forward – Dodge, T.R. Schmidt, Eliza, the sultan of Kinakuta, whatever – and my suspension of disbelief can no longer always rise to the occasion on that count, even in an SF setting. Which is also I think why Anathem remains my favorite.
It has been ages since I’ve read them but anathem is definitely his best work. I did really enjoy zodiac, snowcrash, and the cryptonomicon when I read them ~15 years ago though.
His books are always a bit libertarian (usa meaning, derogatory) although snowcrash is a very funny send up of what that might actually look like if adopted wholeheartedly so idk how much they can be said to endorse it wholeheartedly.
Some of it reminds me of the incoherence of Pratchett’s politics. A sort of “Just let smart people with good values do what they want and things will be ok” without establishing how you determine who that applies to or really sitting with how fragile that is.
Recycling previous joke: https://awful.systems/post/6373632/9569779
@picklefactory The point of the “interesting billionaire to move the plot forward” is that for science fiction to engage the reader it plausibly needs a character with *agency*, i.e. the ability to drive a change in the status quo.
Having a Magic Billionaire on call allows the author to neatly sidestep the humongous amount of maneuvering it takes to put an Ordinary Joe in a position to start the plot moving. (Neal did it in Cryptonomicon and it was painful to behold: ate a third of the book.)
I suppose my only-half-joking grant proposal I talk about with linguist friends in which you run an entire large text through a base-model LLM, extract the residual stream, and score every token according to perplexity compared to the ground truth reality in order to ask and answer super interesting questions about information theory in human communication doesn’t count?
writing a story that looks like it’s about everyone having their own LLMs but it’s actually about the predicted state of clime catastrophe by 2040 and the consequences of the fascist turn in world politics, and the GPUs don’t make the slightest difference to anything and don’t really matter for the plot
The regular suspects seem to be very mad at NetBSD, don’t they?
Saw this on Lobsters. Hilarious.
nice of the rationalists to remind me that no matter how ugly the ai situation gets they will never ever be capable of making a good point
Dwarkesh Patel seems to be one of their media operations like Vox Future Perfect and the Collinses.
ohhh this is what that gary marcus post was about god its worse than i thought. ‘AI civilisations’ gimme a break
Yeah OpenAI, this is what happens when you think you can trust Gandhi.
In the addendum to his essay he defends his use of anthropomorphizing language because it makes it easier to understand…
“quantum physics is hard so here’s a fairy tale about the mysterious proton and his three children: the quark triplets”
See also: electric fields and currents are so complicated, so let’s talk about fluid dynamics
Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship (“e.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.”) Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the “Center for AI Safety” in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists don’t watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an “effective altruist organization” named the Nonlinear Fund (part 1) - (part 2). Nonlinear’s modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having “casual romantic relationships” with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.
Oh hey I also know Drew Spartz, but not from the Nonlinear Fund. He runs the Documenting AGI channel (which is mentioned in this email) highlights include this racist doomer meme, a post about how AI will be able to end the world in 3 months, and a video about an AI Black Death in 2 years posted in 2024 I’ve shared some other posts of his here but these are the ones I could grab the fastest
I believe he was posted about on Reddit SneerClub because of sharing pdoom scores, all I remember about that post was a biologist arguing AI would replace us because of the competitive exclusion principle even though a quick search will tell you CEP is not always true
Nonlinear Fund threatened to sue the person who said they were bad bosses with no boundaries who wasted funds! There was a bet on the Manifold prediction market about it. Narrator: Nonlinear did not sue.
Previously in Hossenfelder’s appearances on awful dot systems:
Her latest contribution to the discourse is supporting racist marshmallow Nathan Cofnas, because he’s “on the side of science”.
I mean, so too were the people making charts of how effective Zyklon B was.
From that post about Nonlinear:
I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference — someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didn’t want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.
I didn’t feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space — or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I don’t want to use such a system.
This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.
Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting people’s punctuation in the Hall of Shame.
Whisper networks are awful, but the way to prevent them is to not let creeps into your community in the first place. And if you trust someone enough to ask them for advice like this, you should probably listen to what they say, even if it is “vague and hard for me to concretely visualize.”
If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be “retaliated against”, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. I’ve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I haven’t always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.
Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.
Looking back, the pushback against Kathy Forth and Sarah Constantin suggesting that lying or sexual misconduct might be problems in the community would have been a red flag too. So was Yud’s demand that a random German blogger who criticized him post a retraction on every blog post. But I lived in comforting darkness until FTX went bankrupt!
It would only be moral to take the money then make videos about how ‘AI safety’ is an imaginary distraction from mundane matters of labour rights and finance capitalism.
Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says “brain damage” and “increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits”). I have to admit I did not know this.
…is the only reason EAs were ever into “malaria nets” because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?
In my brief foray into it, actually I met singer once lol at a lunch about it, no. Really just that it’s a cheap way to save people that were otherwise ignored because of racism.
You still encounter disgusting narratives about overpopulation and people living in Africa, despite most of these people’s resource consumption and thus strain on the world being completely negligible compared to the sort of people that love making those arguments.
Malaria is suuuuper upsetting and preventable.
There were always racists in the movement and its ideological foundations are shakey but they didn’t have hegemony at the start.
Thank you, that’s very interesting. To be clear I am not pro-malaria, but sometimes groups are against bad things for weird reasons. Like Scientologists campaigning against abusive psychiatric practices because L. Ron Hubbard was mad at psychologists for not taking him seriously.
The defensiveness that people have learned to write online with is truly a tragic marker of our times. It didn’t even cross my mind you would be pro-malaria.
I’m sure there’s someone out there!
I will admit I was imagining a grumbling LessWronger reading this and going “oh, so it’s wrong to care about malaria?!?!” I probably need to take some time off social media.
