Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? 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 soo 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. The spooks are well underway.)
For people who use firefox:
browser.nova.enabled = false in your about config gets rid of the corners.
I thought they already got rid of the corners 🤔
SpaceX gives $1.5m in fascist slop tokens to DHH’s dotfiles. I don’t even know.
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/10/spacexai-joins-as-founding-corporate-patron/
Dont you know? Racist developers will solve the toxic ground on Mars.
Weiner Von Wrong, creator of the nouveau Hitler Limo, funding yet another fascist?
Musk and DHH are both incompetent fascists, they were made for each other
We’re closing in on 7,000 pull requests from more than 550 contributors, and every one of them deserves a proper look. That’s not a job for mere humans!
I’m lowkirkenuinely curious where this will lead.
Every one deserves a proper look! … but we’ll do slop reviews instead.
Glyph’s recently sneered his fellow programmers’ enthusiasitc acceptance of the slop machines - recommend checking it out.
For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop, but now it looks like the slop is winning. It is pretty depressing. I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.
Now it seems like a lot of meetups are all about AI, and if the topic is not AI, someone brings it up: Can AI do this, did you use AI, etc, etc.
@EFreethought @BlueMonday1984 not even just meetups, having dinner with programmer friends also mostly revolves around AI. Sure, some of it is talking negatively about it. But a few years ago we’d talk politics, hobbies, personal life etc. and now that’s overshadowed by AI talk. It’s just invading every space. Luckily still less so with my non-tech friends.
I’ve been squeezed out of physics academia after years of ordinary career pressure and obstacles that aren’t very interesting or pertinent to this thread. The fact that the insitutions and the community have no resistance to slop, that’s why I’m not even trying to go back.
What are you doing now? I feel like after I graduate I’m gonna have to find a new field.
Writing fiction and expository material to build emotional stability while looking for the next thing to do.
Not the most encouraging answer, I know, but so it goes.
Best of luck to both of you in your searches for cleaner pastures!
For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop, but now it looks like the slop is winning. It is pretty depressing. I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.
Honestly, can’t blame you - with how utterly tech’s surrendered to the slop machines, and how its actively sabotaged attempts to resist them, I’d be looking to leave as well.
Years ago I thought, I like writing hobby software but I don’t think I would enjoy it as a career. And so, I do not work (at least directly) in software development.
If only I knew the armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabot I was dodging there.
@rhamph @EFreethought I’m glad I retired from professional software development just before LLMs came on the scene. Now I program the old-fashioned way as a hobby.
However I recently was sent an ai-generated report of bugs and vulnerabilities in one of my projects and I have to admit that it is genuinely useful.the fuck was the point of this post
I have to admit that it is genuinely useful.
Cool testimonial bro.
If that was all GenAI was being (aggressively and incessantly) pushed as you probably wouldn’t be seeing terms like cognitive surrender and technofeudalism being thrown around as often, and this lemmy instance would still mainly be about dunking on SFBA quasireligious get-smart-quick scams.
@rhamph @EFreethought I don’t think I would enjoy much of anything done for work under capitalism.
Practically everything has to compromise for profitability and exploitation.
That is no way to live or build a society.
For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop
I don’t think I ever saw this. The only indication would have been a major dev org like the FSF, OSI, SFC or somebody hitting Microsoft with a really aggressive lawsuit over OpenAI. They would have had a slam dunk and it would have set the tone for the way the rest of the world reacted, I think.
Instead it was just ‘wow cool toy.’ That was when I realized the real politics of Foss wasn’t just a couple of bad actors like Eric Raymond but a full on rot.
I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.
I wish I had a plan B, but I’ve devoted my life to being a software engineer and have no idea what else I could do .
It is pretty depressing.
Yeah. I’ve sort of resigned to my world being ruined and everything I ever worked on stolen and sold back to my bosses for the rest of my career.
I just wish there were some way to inflict some fraction of this pain on the people responsible, the people who go to work every day to ruin mine.
Russia used an AI powered drone to kill civilians
It didn’t kill them because it attacked them, it killed them because it crashed into a wall and exploded.
Russian operators reportedly programmed the drone to fly toward a gas station, where its onboard system selected a target, most likely propane tanks. Before reaching them, however, the drone crashed into a wall and exploded, killing all three civilians.
Somehow this is worthy of a Terminator comment
Ah, it was an Anduril drone, then?
Terminator, but stupid
Nondeterminator
So wait, are they saying it mistargeted or that after selecting a “valid” target it failed at the guidance itself? Because the latter would be a legitimately impressive fuckup given that both sides in that war have been using automated terminal guidance systems for a while now to get around EW defenses.
I think its the latter? it says that it selected the target but crashed before it could actually strike said target
Hasn’t most of that automated terminal guidance been directed at people and tanks in open fields, away from buildings?
“We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models,” Anthropic’s update reads.
If they want to moderate the user generated content posted to their internet platform, that’s fine with me, but then they should forfeit the DMCA safe harbor for their plagiarism machine as well.
It’s now titled “Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes,”
Well what the fuck do they think their whole leadership team has been doing in Washington these last eight months?
Oh my god is it in response to that AI torture chamber?
gotta be right?
Just got this recommended to me haven’t watched it yet but already let out a sigh
Edit: just watched a little bit of it-its about the HuggingFace hack. sighhhhh
Spotted this the day it came out. It’s largely reporting Dwarkesh Patel’s blog post about the different “civilisations” of agents as if it were fact.
Very disappointed in Kurzgesagt who previously seemed pretty “with it”. But then, as someone with a formal background in compsci, stats, NLP and machine learning, perhaps this is Gell-Mann Amnesia/Knoll’s Law of Media literacy at work…
They had a couple of videos openly sponsored by effective altruists a while ago. Could be they are still downstream of EA money, or they got audience captured because pretending the inevitable scifi future is just around the corner comes with a built in audience.
They also were a mouthpiece for self driving car hype for a while.
it’s in the trees, it’s coming…
half of the open positions in my company’s division are for “Software Engineer - AI Native”…
Is that code for please use the tokens we are paying out the ass for either way or for we have no intention of paying you like regular swengs?
That is a new way to discriminate against older people.
on slubstack: MIT publishes a paper that proves LLM scaling has a hard ceiling contains a 7 minute video
Ever since the beginning of the current AI bubble, there has always been a certain type of dipshit who takes some art posted on social media by an artist, feeds it to AI, and then comments with the slop image saying that they made it “better”. Well, now I am on the receiving end of that. In one of my papers, I (foolishly) wrote down a few comments on future directions, and now some motherfucker decides to send me an obviously ChatGPT generated manuscript with a solution to one of my problems.
Unfortunately, I think their AI generated proof is itself correct, so I have to deal with it. But the manuscript is written in a way that obviously indicates that he hasn’t even read it. There’s even a section describing experiments for this mathematical question (???), complete with a “verification guide” that references an “archive” full of python scripts and test cases that he did not send me. I suspect he doesn’t even know they exist.
Unfortunately, I think their AI generated proof is itself correct, so I have to deal with it.
Well you can just ignore it, or even steal it. No copyright on it anyway ;).
Or cite it, but in the most passive aggressive way you can get away with.
…You should check the literature really carefully to make sure that whatever proof the AI “generated” doesn’t actually already exist somewhere and it regurgitated it without proper accreditation.
The spammer in question had previously posted a bigger result, but the writeup was so badly written that some people in the field wrote a new, readable paper with the same result. In their abstract, they specifically cited him and said that the proof was so unreadable that they were unable to follow the details, and they had no choice but to write their own proof. (The spammer’s proof also used math that was advanced enough to be far beyond his knowledge.)
My pet theory is that after this embarrassment, the spammer saw that nobody was able to verify his argument. Now the real problem is that his paper was written so badly that nobody could understand it (in math, you can’t verify what you can’t understand), but somehow he thought that the problem was that he didn’t add an experiments section!
Moldbug showing that the other neonazi tweet wasnt an accident. “What if AI solves the jewish question”
Thanks I was afk so only could do a quick share.
I think this is one of the clearest indications in a long time that he doesn’t actually take his own bullshit seriously. Why does he imagine that he would be exempt from a new Holocaust? He is just one among many scheming viziers/wannabe Rasputins, he’s made it clear over the years that’s the kind of position he’s most comfortable with. He’s as vulnerable as anybody in the sort of power struggle that would accompany mass pogroms in the US; perhaps moreso than many.
For a long time, clever young men have been taught the parable of Plato and Dionysius of Syracuse. Some intellectuals will always convince themselves that they will be the one to guide the stupid little tyrant and not the many who end up in a slave market just outside his domain (in the legend someone bought Plato and freed him).
He wants to be Julius Streicher not the Wicked Vizier.
doesn’t work that way. also, useful idiots (sensu largo) can survive very long (and either reach the top or, one day, their usefulness ends.)
You know how AI proofs are supposed to be credible because of formalization with Lean? The AI generates a natural language proof and then supposedly generates a Lean program corresponding to the proof to verify that it’s true. There is now some troubling news about that: there are frequent examples where the statement given in natural language is different from the meaning of the Lean formalization.
The paper even points out several obvious mismatches in OpenAI’s famous Navier-Stokes solution between the English proof and the Lean formalization. There is even a spot where a 4 in the English proof turns into a 5 in the Lean proof (which causes further problems down the line). This is mostly a cosmetic error, and it doesn’t mean that the Navier-Stokes solution is wrong, but there could very well be deeper problems, especially with the English proof. At minimum, this solution absolutely requires careful review by experts. OpenAI’s behavior towards said experts has been appalling.
My viewpoint has been that the only successes that AI has had are in domains where failure is not costly (at least for someone with deep pockets), and especially when there is a formal system such as Lean that can reliably catch errors. So AI can be endlessly trained to write compiling Lean programs corresponding to formal proofs, but as soon as it runs into tasks that are not 100% bolted down, like writing the proof in English, the hallucination problem rears its ugly head. This reinforces my belief that AI is a chess engine but for Lean.
If I was treating this as a technical problem, I would say, why not just have an AI that generates the Lean proof, and at most have an optional assisting tool that translates it into English without perfect reliability? But this is not a technical problem. By outputting English proofs in the format of a research paper, OpenAI can more easily market that their AI is intended to fully replace mathematicians, and that this is only the herald of their general superintelligence (and not that math is the only thing working out for them).
You know how AI proofs are supposed to be credible because of formalization with Lean?
There is another problem… apparently Lean4 hasn’t actually been fully formally verified. And in fact could have more bugs lurking in it, maybe even some foundational problems… Lesswrong post explaining the problems.
OpenAI can more easily market that their AI is intended to fully replace mathematicians, and that this is only the herald of their general superintelligence (and not that math is the only thing working out for them).
Yeah, this has been driving me crazy… reading places like hackernews or r/singularity, I keep seeing people assuming mathematicians and just bitter or engaging in sour grapes and that is why they are complaining about the “proofs” OpenAI dumped out. Like it is just some small niggling detail that the proofs can’t be read by humans and that Lean may have bugs and that some of OpenAI’s proofs have already been shown to have critical mistakes.
Scott Aaronson is teaching a Yudkowsky class: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10125
we’ll read and debate many of the conceptual and mathematical works that have been most influential in the AI alignment field, from both before and during the current LLM revolution.
Can’t wait until an ‘after’ sneaks in there 🤞
Its kind of notorious that scientists are bad at dealing with con artists and sales funnels because they assume good faith and that nobody has serious material interests in convincing you of something false. That was James Randi’s whole thesis. A good professor would contextualize ‘AI alignment’ and The Singularity in '80s and '90s pop culture, apocalyptic religion, and a rape-enabling SoCal subculture and not just have his students read the papers straight.
I forgot he was in Austin. Has he been on Rogan? Great(ly stupid) things could happen.
Joe Rogan should ask Scott Aaronson about Zionism. It will be glorious (adjective over-enunciated with wild Gowron eyes).
Wonder how Rogan would react to the ‘I stole money from the tip jar’ story
Alessandro Strumia in the comments. Only the best hang out in the online home of Computers Scott.
I vividly remember encountering Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Sequences 20 years ago. I remember thinking: even if these people talk and act like crazy cultists, still, let me bend over backwards to be epistemically virtuous, and entertain their ideas on their merits, as very few academics would.
Scott Aaronson is an experiment to discover how many timeshares one man can afford on a professor’s salary. He has never in his life not bought the extended warranty.
Im reminded of how he talked about sneerclub. The epistemically virtuosity only bends one way.
Straw for thee, steel for me.
Just had a shower conversation with myself, and for some reason the crystal meth metaphor (methaphor?) is really coming together in my head.
“Have you even tried some frontier meth?”
“Sure, you can also get energy with exercising, eating well, and structure. But we don’t have to live like amish people, now that we can have meth!”
Nationalized Open Weight Models -> State-funded AI dispensory
There’s surely a rich bounty of comparisons left to mine.
Also works for cocaine, I’m noticing.
Might be best as a comeback, if someone compares AI to a pharmaceutical breakthrough like antibiotics.
You could also compare it to the lobotomy, with how much it ruins people’s intellect
though the lobotomized themselves weren’t among the loudest advocates of the procedure afaik
unlike trepanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning#Voluntary_trepanation
Everything written by AI boosters tracks much more clearly if you simply replace “AI” with “cocaine”. I shall demonstrate! (Not linking to OP, because it’s trash.)
“Let’s pretend you’re the only person at your company using cocaine. You decide you’re going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison. […] In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting cocaine.”
Knowledge workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your teeth.
