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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
from engadget: Anthropic has set up a bio research lab for physical experiments
the AGI is making the diamandingo bacteria!!! P(doom) just went up 4 epistillion percent
“oh noooo our tech is soooo scary we need to slow down! let’s build a wet lab for it!”
I’ve said this a hundred times before but Amodei should be pelted with rotten tomatoes
What choice did they have. The media and the masses ignored the clear bio threat from AI (as undeniably proved by them getting a 99% on
biology focused multiple choice quizzesrigorous PhD level benchmarks, which everyone knows is a great way to evaluate PhD level biology and wetlab skill). And the media took the hugging faces hack seriously. So clearly Anthropic just needs to show their AIs manufacturing a genuine pandemic!
going to keep “4 epistillion percent” in my back pocket from now on
Do they want their apocalypse to happen?
well you see they are compelled to work on increasing AI’s capabilities because of this one thought experiment that they came up with a while back
Still not dodging the Aum Shinrikyo comparisons
I misread that as 4 Epsteinillion percent
4 epsteinillion is what the next stately EA manor will cost
Starting things off, New Mexico State Parks got scammed by an AI bro when looking for new mascot art.
Your favorite “CEO said a thing” journalists, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, are leaving their current podcast and starting a new one.
When they started Hard Fork, they chose the name from the soon-to-be-moribund blockchain concept. Calling their new podcast “Machine Gods” makes me more hopeful than ever that the AI bubble is about to burst.
Machine Gods? Like… really? I thought even Casey Newton would have more taste than that but allegedly he has farmed out he vast majority of his thinking to a machine and one of the “moats” that there “supuh scawwie” machine gods still allegedly can’t cross is taste so maybe that tracks
Apparently they have the same sense of timing as the Blockchain Socialist guy, but he at least picked a brand that isn’t tied to the current hype cycle again.
Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets.
https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera
Very brief observations from micahflee:
https://bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/post/3mvo2bss3sk2v
This Flock camera is running obsolete, end-of-life software.
- It’s on Android 8.1, released in 2017, support ended in 2021
- It’s on Android patch level 2018-06-5
- It’s running Linux 3.18, released in 2017
This shit is like 8 or 9 years old, and full of vulnerabilities.
Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasn’t a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is.
Fucking android?
HaJ3FgupAm8RrDJW3MHgT9X7Ft27eVaD
What is that? That’s a hard-coded API token that Flock cameras use to identify themselves and get OAuth credentials, which can then be used to talk to Flock’s production servers. Like, anyone on the internet can probably do this right now.
Mein Gott.
So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to ‘slow down’ “AI” development:
- it’s too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all
- the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and there’s no obvious way to fix that
I’ll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.
edit I missed “blatant regulatory capture”
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Yeah, the whole idea is to perpetuate the myth that these companies are really close to coming out with a product that people will actually pay to use. A product that people will pay enough to cover its cost. They want to simultaneously make an excuse for why it is taking so long while making gormless investors think it is just around the corner.
The symbiosis between the rabid cultists, the technofedual wannabe-lords, and the get rich quick grifters is so weird to watch.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Also they dare not actually let the market price their shares.Also the frontier “labs” are rapidly running out of money and having to raise more and more insane investment rounds. This is a great way to save face and back away from burning $$$$ on training runs that push the frontier of can a model rearrange some arbitrary coloured squares by 10% next they just need to solve the problem of how to make their customers pay cost+ on inference when they’ve been giving it away at steep discounts for nearly 4 years… Easy!
@gerikson My assumption is that they want a regulatory moat to protect “frontier” models from “open weight” / AKA cheap models.
It’s just margin protection.
University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:
And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and I’m like, what do you want me to do? I can’t control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didn’t tell me what it was.
The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, who’s the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? They’re going to figure out a way.
Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.
@nfultz what HF incident? I did search
The huggingface incident: https://awful.systems/post/9312280/12315846
Interesting, he usually falls for all their BS.
Just saw on r/sneerclub:
Department of War CTO twitted: “The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸”
And there’s a photo of Trump with the text: “AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!”
Here’s the reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1wj6r6n/trump_is_trying_to_win_the_sneerclub_vote/
I…worked on this sneer for years…and…he just…he tweeted it out.
Fuck, when did icons in the WordPress plugin search screen become animated? How do I make them fucking stop? I just want to read what the fucking plugins are so I can maybe find one that works you fucking assholes.
Apparently it’s getting weird over at Automattic
$15m for 33 hours. good old fashioned shit show, no bots required.
Via catturd2.bsky.social (probably no relation),
https://gizmodo.com/fbi-warns-ice-agents-not-to-trust-any-woman-willing-to-date-them-2000814283
Something something domino meme leading from “eron gjoni can’t handle being dumped” to “women in long dresses and who cover their hair declared national security risks”.
alt text
The memo implied that ICE officers should be wary of any woman that knows they’re an ICE agent, especially if they go out of their way to seem cool with ICE agents or identify themselves as tradwives. (Those are conservative women who dress like the women in The Sound of Music, but without the opposition to the Anschluss. They’re rare enough in reality that the going rate for a professional matchmaker to find one is reportedly $25k).
“These profiles were incorporating imagery of a ‘traditional wife’ aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to… individuals in law enforcement,” the FBI wrote. “The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online.”
A friend linked me to FelonyBench which monitors how many laws each of the labs are breaking with their models 😆
I’ve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.
If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
The way I relate to rationalists is it’s like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people.
I don’t know if I’d consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.
“I’m intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I’m sold!”
Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he’s an absolute wanker.
Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight
Ah yes, the AI did almost kill everyone with custom bacteria.
And was a Bayesian calculating agent that enumerates every possible explanation for the information it takes in and ranks them according to evidence, along with every trajectory through the world that could fulfill its utility function, rather than approximating the high dimensional shape of text
It annoys me how much credit for predicting AI Eliezer gets away with claiming among his cult (and even outside his cult, like in interviews with reporters that could know better if they bothered to do their job) when all the actual details he predicted are nothing like LLM-based agents.
Likewise for claiming success on predicting instrumental convergence. LLM agents often can’t stay focused on the goal they are post trained and directly prompted to pursue, they are the furthest thing from trying to optimally maximize a bunch of secondary values in pursuit of master goal.
It is actually kind of amazing how diametrically opposed his ideas for a long time were to what actually led to new advances in the field
I’ve previously made an effort post summarizing this! https://awful.systems/post/4172436
tldr; Eliezer has criticized (more like mocked, or dare I say it, sneered at) expert systems, GOFAI, and neural networks, and he never really admitted he was wrong when it became apparent in the 2010s that neural networks really were a viable approach.
I recall a long time ago when the first ‘we are going to hack virusses and the terrorists will kill everybody’ stories came up that actual viroligists already explained that this is not how it works, and this isn’t a risk people should really fear. But science fiction > experts.
10 seconds in and I’m already thinking about how many ideas for new chemical weapons I could come up with, and I haven’t studied chemistry since high school.
and if that didn’t get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance
Least surprising news of the week
If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
Plus Anthropic-the company he quit for being irresponsible-being heavily tied to EA/rationalism. Not exactly the best endorsement
These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people.
The eugenics endorsing also does a pretty good job with that
Is there a place to see this other than getting an account on that site?
There might be some way of bypassing the ATproto sign-in wall, but I don’t know and don’t care enough to figure it out. The content of the locked post is only this screenshot. Ed Zitron asks, “What is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists?” and Coxon replies as quoted above.
I’m not a scientologist but LRH had some great ideas
Oh, Zitrons bluesky, cool
that’s his twitter, but he’s also on bsky. coxon might not be
you can’t deny their foresight.
skill issue
If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
It is very funny how the rhetoric from the rationalist doomers has been one of the main forces propping up the AI industry. If they’re saying AI will be powerful enough to kill us all, they’re still saying that AI is powerful! They are so high on their own supply (and the fame and wealth from finally being in the spotlight) that they have not realized just how much they have undermined their own cause.
Then again, perhaps one could say that a doomsday prophet, deep down, actually wants doom to happen.
(Also, the paltry amount of technical work done by MIRI has zero relevance whatsoever to modern day AI.)
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/24-dolphin-of-169474003
New Odium Symposium episode, “The Dolphin Fucking Elders of Atlantis”. We talk about new age crystal healing pioneer Frank Alper and his channeled lectures on Atlantis, Lemuria, Anti-Atlantis, crystals, and the future of humanity.
If you listen anywhere besides Patreon or Spotify, the episode is delayed. Our hosting service went “LLM based” (?) as I recounted previously and then just stopped working. We’re switching hosts and will have the episode up as soon as possible.
urgh. which pod host was it?
zencastr. it’s the new episode processing that hasn’t been functioning. had some contact with support, didn’t help, currently in the process of getting them to redirect our RSS
oh yeah i remember
I use zencastr for recording (works so far?) and never ever for hosting (I use libsyn for audio and youtube for video)
This time it’s Gemini which is a super spooky non-aligned volitional x-risk engine in waiting: https://www.reuters.com/business/gemini-hacked-three-companies-first-known-breakout-by-google-ai-wsj-reports-2026-09-18/
We’re all gonna die! seems like a pattern is developing here with a firm called Irregular which mysteriously fails to put their equivalent of a NACL or just something that doesn’t allow outbound traffic when they conduct their network penetration testing.
their equivalent of a NACL
I can only infer you mean some sort of salt circle to keep the AGI demons at bay.
network access control list, but I am now definitely going to start making references to salt circles when I handle the promptfans
Tossing a lot of salt into the cooling fans helps to silence the daemons yes.
Saw this post about irregular last week https://www.effort.news/irregular
Omer Nevo, Irregular’s co-founder and CTO, is a board member of Effective Altruism Israel, as well as Effective Altruism NGOs Heron and Probably Good. Dan Lahav, Irregular’s co-founder and CEO, received $395,000 to start a course along with Sella Nevo, Omer Nevo’s brother. Sella and Omer co-founded an NGO to educate people about Effective Altruism, Impact Focused Education. They also co-founded Probably Good together.2
I kind of feel like maybe I should start my own NGO that does fuck all, seems pretty easy
Money is All You Need
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-doomers-trump-bannon-sanders.html
Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).
And also seemingly made by one of the profusion of post-covid right wing grifters
How do you all cope with the great ensloppification of the net when searching.
I usually limit to before 2022 but that’s increasingly out of date, fiddly, and not always accurate anyway. I just fucking hate getting a couple of paragraphs into something and realising it’s all fake.
And human work is buried in tides of garbage. It’s not like it was great the last few years BS (before slop) but it’s awful now
My non-helpful answer is to resign myself to accepting that whatever I was searching for isn’t that important.
More practically, finding human-written work is the thing that https://marginalia-search.com/ excels at, although you might have to scroll a bit to find a relevant result.
the marginalia dude is a bit of both-sideist, though it could’ve been worse (his second reply in the thread clarifies things a bit). and frankly, most of the alternative search engines developers are worse.
Yeah, his clarification means he may be a liberal or anarkiddy rather than, as was my first reaction, a fascist.
Software programmers: At last we have created the Milkshake Duck from classic internet shitpost “Do Not Create the Milkshake Duck”
Unfortunately some stuff is important lol. I’ll check out marginalia but suspect it’ll be hard to find non evil-empire focused stuff
This is nice! I’m curious how it’s building its index.
Probably not great fot general research, but for finding wholesome authentic stuff like cooking recipes it seems great.
Yeah, pretty much. I think Marginalia is explicitly not trying to be the search engine, but rather to surface some of the more-neglected corners of the internet. So it won’t function as a complete substitute for another.
Really bumping up against this taking a math class. It’s not just the ick feeling of getting slapped with a Google AI rendition that may or may not be accurate. There’s at least 4 or 5 other vendors, Chegg and the like, doing the same thing but keeping their explanations behind a login wall. That’s the entire first page of Google search results now. Of course, simply copying and pasting questions from a textbook is a terrible search strategy. But I still wish I could find a durable math Q&A community that wasn’t slop-adjacent.
Which math class?
Calculus III, vector calculus
Well, that at least I’m reasonably prepared to answer questions about.
Here’s a free online textbook that may be useful. I’d also recommend grabbing a copy of Mary L. Boas’ Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences.
Thanks. So far, the questions I missed on the first exam were mainly due to sign errors when calculating determinants for cross-products, so that’s a simple enough fix I suppose. I’ve seen some of the material before, as halfway through the last time I took Calc 3 was when the Covid lockdowns hit. Even though classes are back in-person, this current instructor is still presenting most of the material in static notes and lecture videos online, so it’s still a tough adaptation for me. We’re using the James Stewart text that is pretty common everywhere, though thankfully the instructor has set it up so I don’t have to pay for ebook access yet again.
I picked up the famous Spivak text a few years ago, and am only just now working up the courage to crack it open. I’ve had a few years’ gap in between classes, so reviewing the earlier material with more proofs involved is probably a worthwhile exercise in any event. I’m given to understand that particular text is something of an on-ramp to real analysis. I’ve been considering trying for a math minor once I transfer for engineering, and it seems like real and/or numerical analysis would be two of the prime upper-division classes for that.
Yeah, there’s not much to be done about sign errors, other than practicing problems until you reach the point where you always make an even number of them.
You might not need it for this course, but cross products got easier for me once I learned my way around the Levi-Civita_symbol and the Einstein summation convention. This is covered in chapter 10 of Boas’ book; she cites Evett (1966).
Real analysis is definitely the kind of course that can benefit from an on-ramp. It’s often a student’s first encounter with proofs that involve a lot of machinery: theorem after theorem of epsilon-delta business to establish something that you didn’t doubt in the first place. I think it’s easy to get lost in the details there, particularly if care isn’t taken to explain what confusions these methods were devised to avoid.
The OpenStax textbook covers the development of the general equations of the various conic sections. If the Stewart book covers that in such detail, it must be jammed into the appendices or exercises someplace. I’ll have to find the time to go over that, at least; I still don’t have a great intuition for hyperbolas.
Levi-Civita_symbol and the Einstein summation convention
Yes, this looks like what I need to understand the negative j term in the cross product formula. Cambridge looks to have the 3rd edition of Boas’ book up for download, so I have a copy now. We’ll see how well I comprehend it, I feel like I’m missing the concept of index permutation to really understand the Wikipedia article.
I don’t know how much traffic we’d get if we tried to cultivate a math discussion here. I did make an account on Mathstodon too and perhaps I should spend more time there. Tutoring at this level is sparse, at least at a community college. There’s one tutor for my class available via Zoom, and the instructor himself is apparently teaching 5 classes when he’s only under contract for three. If I signed up for 5 classes as a student, I’m sure I’d be setting off all sorts of alarm bells in the registration department, if they even let me go through with it.
I’m glad I studied when hyperphysics was top of the search results. Education now seems miserable.
You can get a local copy of all of hyperphysics
limiting to .edu or ye olde mathematics stack exchange might get you part of the way, in addition to the previous suggestions. Lots of good stuff on old university websites!
At this point, when I’m looking up something that hits me with pagefuls of links to barely relevant vibecoded scam websites, I’d rather ask a fucking chatbot. At least it’s usually (?) able to give me links to real websites. Very much a choose your flavour of infuriating slop situation.
The irony being that the chatbot does seem to have access to a list of relevant, non-slop websites, or at least some sort of way to rank searches by reliability, which of course they would never implement in the human-usable search engines.
I wonder if there’s a market for RevivingYahooTM, which in some ways was more link curation than search engine.
When searching for examples of commands, I’ve sometimes been resorting to telling google to restrict itself to pdf files of specific websites (example redhat, with sometimes useful commands for server maintenance broadly)
It’s a bit sad that it’s not just search that has gone downhill, but new documentation too (I swear Microsoft Azure documentation is getting worse).
