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.)
At the same time, some of that harm may be balanced on a statistical level by lives saved through AI tech.
[]The bad stuff happening now is worth it so that humanity can benefit in the future… Now where have I heard that before,
Terry Tao talks about how he used to try to cooperate with the AI industry to achieve a positive outcome, but now he finally sees their true colors. Link
During this event, OpenAI requested an interview concerning my vision of the future of AI and mathematics. I accepted, and spoke with them for perhaps an hour. I had done similar interviews in various venues, and I assumed that, as with these other cases, they would eventually post the entire interview online, which talked about both the possibilities and risks of AI much as I have done in these other interviews. As it turned out, they only used a few snippets of that interview for that infamous advertisement instead. In retrospect, I should have pushed back harder on their decision; but I decided at the time that even a selective release of my commentary would help raise awareness of the potential for AI, and in particular on the possibility of the “best of both worlds”.
Since then, the situation has deterioriated markedly. Many of the people in the industry that shared my views have left or become sidelined, with most major tech companies now increasingly focused on the race to develop extremely powerful, autonomous AI technologies regardless of their actual value to society. The current drama surrounding the Navier-Stokes global regularity problem is the most dramatic and visible instance of this, but there have been multiple other such examples, and much of my commentary in the last few months has been aimed that the increasingly severe divergence between the current objectives of the AI industry, and of mathematics in general.
Much respect to artists for seeing all this coming from the very beginning, and holding the line.
Open Letter about the Mathathon
This open letter calling for the cancellation of the Caltech “Mathathon”, has received 471* signatures so far. [Only members of the Caltech community or mathematicians at PhD student level or beyond are eligible to sign.]
* Now 771 signatures.
“On October 30th, 2026, Caltech will begin hosting the Caltech Mathathon, a math hackathon in which participants are encouraged to solve open research problems by prompting LLMs. Two prominent AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, will supply participants with 2 million dollars in AI credits. This event is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.”
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6dBeDwjRP4UkchGSpLwLQjiG8qLX5_wW_3-xoC4dImTPp6g/viewform
Signed.
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.
Apparently they can also sick the police on you on a trust-me-bro basis:
Last month, The San Francisco Standard reported that Anthropic had reported a man to San Francisco police for telling Claude that he had bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.” When the Standard contacted the man in question, he told the newspaper he was “just fucking around.”
But while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.
image shamelessly stolen from https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv5puo47ns2z
Never wanna hear any bullshit about Anthropic being the “good guys” ever again
LITERALLY 1984
(I am morally obligated to make this joke)
without going into the merits of the specific case, I find it highly amusing that OpenAI fucked up their big Navier-Stokes announcement which is now more about how they stole research from honest mathematicians rather than how awesome their AI is
One detail that seems to have not spread around: the announcement was so rushed that when the 165 page output was released, it only included 16 citations, and those citations did not even include the work of Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, who introduced the overarching framework for attacking the problem (that Buckmaster-Alpöge and OpenAI used). After the announcement and after these redditors pointed it out, they threw in a few more citations to include them, but come on.
wtf is deal of that segyges person. now they’re convinced that openai will solve room temperature superconductors in silico real soon, because altman vagueposted about it
and this all based on lk-99 fraud case, nevermind that there’s no high temperature superconductivity theory, or how prohibitively computationally expensive computational chemistry is, and i guess it’s not accurate enough anyway, this all with people that do computational chemistry coming in their thread trying to explain this, then posts this
wtf is deal of that segyges person
He does worthless little-birthday-boy AI boosting while pretending to be the serious face of
bluesky AI bootlickingfair and balanced anti-anti-AI bluesky.Occasionally has decent sneer content, though it has a much more evident muh datacenters tint these days. Writer of the siskind email explainer.
Also the creator of the anti ai blocklist iirc. Think that is why I blocked him myself.
Anyway if we are going the ‘ai is making silly science fiction things real’, I want monopole magnets (yes the game also has room temp superconductors).
I keep free-associating this idiot with eigenrobot and maybe that’s unfair to them. They’re insufferable and smug and always confidently wrong, but maybe they’re not also a huge racist.
they also have a blog where they blog about how unfair are the anti-ai terrible people and. among other things, why the luddites were the terrible, no good, absolutely not worthy of interest reactionary bunch who got what they deserved.
Somehow word association will beat density functional theory to the punch for mapping out theoretical materials, lol. Alright.
I’ll believe that when pigs fly.
arguably it’s stupider than that
and this doesn’t even go into whether pallet of lean spaghetti is in any way insightful, or does it explain anything, or does any of these things manmade proofs do
just like our favorite TV show, right? surely a comprehensive description language for physics can’t be THAT much more complex than a steaming hot cup of Earl Grey tea!
You’ll forgive me, I’m neither lobotmised nor a mathematician.
The poster wants to slop into existance a language for stacking logical statements on top of each other and testing/prooving truthiness but the statements are what? Physics rules?
And once you have this um magic world simulator from first principles (since it would have to be, because the thing about science is we need to do the experiments since we don’t know how things work fully) it will somehow stumble onto RTPSC materials?
K
i’ll also note that assembly of reply guys decided that room temperature superconductors will magically solve energy requirements of silicon-based chips (this is not how any of this works)
that’s just “machine god will figure out relativity from three video frames” in another form
Good God. Sometimes I wonder how small the population that understands all these references and knows all this deep lore and history is. How few people really understand the true nature of this bunch of people and how their ideas have ruined so much. When I go to conferences I get to have 4 hour conversations over beer with astrobiologists explaining how ideas from a blog in 2009 started showing up uncited in their literature 8 years later (when late undergrads who read a blog post start writing papers during their PhDs) and have since completely fucked whole subfields. They are flabbergasted at first, but then they see it, and see the damage done. So few people actually see this.
In the TESCREAL lore iceberg, “Aella Sankey chart” is above the waterline.
- Existence of HPMoR
- Existence of Zizians
- Aella Sankey chart
- Aella not showering
…
- Topher Brennan leaks Siskind emails
…
- “AI datacenter water usage is fine actually” Substack
…
- Cremieux’s alleged old Reddit handle
…
- Scott Aaronson anti-feminist breakdown
- Scott Aaronson goes full Zionist
…
- Glowfic
…
- su3su2u1 review of HPMoR
…
- Robot God deduces general relativity in three frames with the power of Bayes
…
- Scott Aaronson makes airport cops sympathetic
…
- TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard
…
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is That Guy when recommending scifi books
su3su2u1 review of HPMoR
obi-wan-theres-a-name.png
what ever happened to them anyway? Probably has tenure by now, hopefully?
Aella Sankey chart
I’m really being tested on my liberation and sex positive values here. Gosh that’s a very weird and kinda gross thing to do.
What motivates someone to chart their fetish fulfillment?
Well whatever. I hope people had fun, seems like it must have been very scheduled and regimented though…
It was kinda wild studying physics while this was starting.
People were getting all these starry-eyed ideas while anyone actually doing well was realising that the future is going to look a lot like the present because god hates us and we’re not allowed nice things.
happy kirkiversary to all who celebrate
i'm not sorry
🥳 HAPPY 🎉 KIRKIVERSARY 🧑🦲 ON THIS HOLE 🍑🫦-Y GAY 🗓️ WE IN-CELEBRATE 🥳🎆🎇 THE CANCELLING 👠💃 OF OUR DOWNEST ⛺⬇️ BADDEST 🧑🦲🤏 BROAD-BLASTER 💦🍆 WHO WAS ✨ SLAYED 👠 SQUIRTING 💦🫦 WHILE GIVING 🙌 LIP 🫦 TO OUR 💃 COLLEGE 🧑🎓🏫 HOTTIES 👄💅👠 LIVE 🎙️ON “CAMP” 💅-US 👠👄🎇🎉 YOU 🫵💃 CAN HELP 💪 APPRECIATE 🙌 YOUR FELLOW 👯♀️ 🦅AMERI-🦅 💦CUM💦 💅SLUTS💅 BY GIVING 🙌 NECK 🍆 TO YOUR LOCAL 📌🗺️ GAPE-TRIOTS 🇺🇸🕳️🫦 SHARE 📬 THIS MESS💦AGE LIKE YOU 💃 SHARE 💅 YOUR HOLES 🕳️🫦🥴 IF YOU PROVE ⚖️ 1 WRONG ❌: YOU’RE 💃 GETTING SLIMED OUT IN UTAH 🏞️🏔️ PROVE 🧾 10 WRONG 🪧 YOU’LL GET 👠 TWENTY 👯♀️ EAGER 💅 LEFTISTS 🫦💦 TO ORGANIZE 🤝‼️🫦 IN A CIRCLE ⭕🍆 AROUND 💞 YOU 💦🥴🧑🦲 PROVE ✅ 100 💯 WRONG 🏁 AND YOU 💅💃 CAN EXPECT 🔜 TO GET 🙌 BLOWN 🫦 OUT 💦 IN FRONT 🔝 OF 👠 THIS ENTIRE 💯 RED 😳 WHITE 💦 AND BLEW 🫦🍆 NATION 🦅🥳
Happy kirk kirked day.
And people said rightwing minds couldn’t be changed during debates.
Crosspost, hat-tip to @pnwpixel@programming.dev for finding this. Omarchy announces another patron: DigitalOcean. I will wait for DO to explicitly confirm/deny this, but if this is true then I’m going to be moving my entire small-business footprint.
Oh, gods damn it. I’m only going to have a couple of servers to move, but it’s going to be a huge pain in the ass. What VM provider is recommended these days for USAian customers?
I’m probably going to increase my presence on DreamHost in California, who I’ve hosted with for over a decade. They historically are First Amendment proponents known for being quietly friendly towards adult content; also, in 2017 DH pushed back on the Department of Justice’s subpoena for 1.3 million IP addresses visiting an anti-Trump protest-organizing website. That said, I’m 100% prepared for yet another Milkshake Duck Moment.
Looking forward to being able to send email, which DigitalOcean still blocks in order to funnel customers towards hosted email-delivery services.
Check out https://upcloud.com/. EU based, but have servers in the EU, US, and Asia-Pacific: https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/locations/
If you got questions, hit them up on mastodon: https://glitchy.upcloud.world/@upcloud
back at ya
There’s this: “Built for agents: Omarchy’s pipeline moves to DigitalOcean” https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/digitalocean-joins-omacom-foundation
Alongside the infrastructure move, DigitalOcean is joining the Omacom Foundation, the nonprofit that funds Omarchy’s infrastructure and the open source projects it depends on, as a Founding Corporate Patron, and will serve as Omarchy’s agentic compute provider.
So fascism and slop. Name a more iconic couple.
Here is a roundup of the “october tech movie” superfecta
is there a kalshi market for which one tanks the hardest? Or will we get crossover sequels for musk vs altman a la MCU?
Tesla’s new self-driving taxi seems to be entirely made of red flags and those horror movie moments where you can’t understand why anyone would go in there, because they’re clearly going to die.
Highlights:
- No door handles. Good luck getting out instead of burning to death and/or drowning!
- Doors might not unlock if there are power issues, eg. Bad things happened in a crash.
- No manual controls! First responders will have to push it out of the way.
- Unless there’s a power issue, because the parking brake will engage if there’s no power, so it’ll need to be barged by another vehicle, I guess?
- Or you push it faster than 5mph, because the brake will engage for safety reasons.
- Or if it is in the wrong gear or mode, because back-driving the motor can cause electrical safety issues or overheating, which will presumably increase the risk of people trapped inside being burned to death.
- The vehicle is silent and may move without warning. You can’t tell if it is unpowered. First responders are instructed to “cage” the vehicle before trying to interact with it. Otherwise I guess it might just main or kill them by surprise.
- Not all high voltage components are labelled. Exposed bits in a crash might just kill you if you don’t have suitable ppe, and you can’t tell which bits those are, lol.
The guide advises first responders to contact the company via the car’s communications system or phone for most emergencies, and says that the Tesla can assist emergency personnel by moving the car remotely, helping provide access to on-board controls or putting the car in neutral so that it can be pushed.
If Tesla cannot be reached by phone, the manual advises first responders to use an email address to learn more about how to move the Tesla, though it warns, “This email is not monitored for emergency requests.”
🤡
Welcome to the future, where first responders might just opt to watch you die because they’re not certified to rescue you from your autonomous death trap, because there’s no point in you all dying.
H/t to violet blue. https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/117237691936474802
Move fast and kill your customers and first responders.
The door handles don’t sound so bad from a firefighter perspective. More excuses to break out the slicy claw. ಠᴗಠ
Having to account for the stupid thing to start driving on its own for no reason seems more irritating. Maybe we can invest in some big jaws attached to the front of the truck to crunch down on and immobilize struggling robo-taxis. This seems like a very reasonable direction to develop car technology.
There was a photo from a cybertruck crash not so long ago where you could see that the doors and windows had been attacked with crowbars to try and get the damn things open before the people trapped inside burned to death. It didn’t work.
Things (and skills) for busting open locked doors and laminated glass aren’t (yet?) commonplace, and I wouldn’t trust tesla engineering to keep me alive long enough for the professionals to turn up with the right tools 🫤
You’re right of course, stupid engineering like that will kill people and already has.
From an emergency responder perspective I’m mostly asking how can I keep my squad safe and how can I rescue survivors. Once we’re there we usually got all the tools you would ever need. And I’m 100% sure, if someone is in danger I’m breaking out the can opener before I would ever bother to call remote support.
Literally “just push it over there with the rest of the fire and send an email.”
Tesla has not gotten clearance from safety regulators to deploy vehicles without features such as brake pedals, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it had opened an investigation into whether the Cybercab meets vehicle safety standards.
The fuck do you mean opened an investigation. I don’t care that the US are a fake made-up country, there is no conceivable world in which you can legally put random shit on public roads without some kind of permit.
Quick search and from somewhere else
the company relied on self-certification, the standard method automakers use to affirm compliance with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards without pre-approval from regulators. NHTSA can audit that self-certification at any time, and it has now requested the engineering data and testing records Tesla used to reach its conclusion
you can’t be fucking serious
That’s horrifying.
oh wow, it’s that bad huh. i guess it make sense, there’s a reason why the cybertruck is not legal in europe yet still on the streets in the us.
Speaking of movies about high-profile silicon valley grifters, what the fuck is this??
At this point given the absurdity of this combination of people I feel like the reality will likely be disappointing.
If all it took to bring these guys down was to show that they were weird and unsettling, the CIA would have infiltrated and shut down awful systems by now
Men Who Stare At Goats would have shut down the CIA first
Damn, the guy doing Greg Brockman (looks like Cooper Hoffman if I read the IMDb cast list right) has gotten the stance and the face so spot on. Even just from the screenshots, I could tell that was supposed to be him.
Sounds promising. For something like this to be good, it has to thread the needle in terms of highlighting the blatant disregard for humanity from the tech CEOs without falling victim to the skynet boogeyman. So based on the little I’ve heard, they might do ok at that. But I never get my hopes up anymore tbh, just in general
Another Anthropic employee has quit for reasons typical of an Anthropic employee
Apparently people on LinkedIn are theorising about if this guy’s even real due to his lack of social media posts for a Silicon Valley techie (his twitter was created this year and is empty aside from his quitting thread, Facebook created yesterday and no LinkedIn account)
Don’t suppose we could track down how the announcement got any publicity whatsoever…
twitter loves doomerism but at the same time it is a bit odd how it managed to get so much attention so quickly
lots of people will spend the aftermath of the AI bubble bursting and the “frontier labs” cratering by deleting embarrasing tweets
“I quit my job at the scary drawing company because the drawing I made was too scary for me but my bosses didn’t seem scared enough”
Pls don’t be clickbaity
Some alignment guy bailed out of fear anthropic will unfavorably immanentize the eschaton. It’s as cliche and pointless as the op makes it sound.
Still the link OP shared is like 80% about Terrence Tao worrying about LLMs ruining mathematics, it’s a kind of reverse bury the lead situation, which is a bit unnecessary.
tried to make the link automatically skip to the part about the Anthropic employee but I guess substack doesnt work like that
Status of my evening:
Post a link to my personal website, find out a minute later that it’s “down for maintenance”, try to log into my web hosting dashboard (Siteground) to figure out what’s going on, it rejects the 2FA code it sends me, then the 2FA code suddenly works, then the dashboard is full of hard-selling slop features that I will gouge out my left eye with a spork and skull-fuck the hole with the blunt end before I will use… My blog seems to be back now, though?
Fuck, I need to migrate my blog. If there is even anywhere to migrate it to.
I’m very happy with a Hetzner auction server. Though I’ve lots of different things running on it, might he overkill for “just” WordPress. They offer cheapish VPSs though. And they’re in Europe and have excellent technical support.
Not an ad, I just like them
