Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
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.)
Good blog post ‘“Who Owns ROM Hacking?” And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With’ on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.
I want to point out that SMW Central doesn’t ban people for being pro-GenAi, nor are they barred from anything just for being pro-GenAi. They simply can’t upload content to the site that was created with GenAi. Despite this, GenAi users believe that, because SMW Central has rules against GenAi content, SMW Central must feel the need to “control or dictate” what they do.
This context transforms the statement substantially. When this group of individuals says “nobody owns ROM hacking,” what they mean is that they should be allowed to publish their work wherever they want without consequence.
Kind of reminds me of the people who, around the time the (UK) smoking ban was introduced, made “It’s my right to smoke anywhere I want” their whole personality.
Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Don’t Vibe Code
(slightly dated (Mar 2026) but first time I heard of this guy)
The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.
In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors
According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article’s summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn’t even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn’t happening.
Excellent usage of the chart comic
r/BetterOffline post about the article
Brief comment snippet:
A convertible note is a loan from an investor, but instead of paying them back with cash you give them stock options. It’s still a loss, you’re taking cash from an investor because you can’t break even with revenue.
Imagine if you do that as a baker. ‘Hey flour/sugar/yeast supplier, I can’t pay your for your products, but I will pay you in stocks to our bakery, I’m planning to sell our bakery soon, and as we don’t have to pay you for the supplies, we can sell our product at below the going rate making sure we look good for the sale of the company’.
Found a cluster of negative reviews for Yud’s book Scott Alexander’s review managed to land on the list somehow
To single out a specific review
For example, they describe trees as “self-replicating factories that spin air into wood” and conclude that “any intelligence capable of comprehending biochemistry at the deepest level is capable of building its own self-replicating factories to serve its own purposes.”
So an AI could self replicate…because a tree can?? not all trees even self-replicate so the metaphor isn’t even right
It is amazing in a way, there are computer scientists who work at the highest level of their field, so they understand computers better than most, but they have more trouble than you or me installing linux.
Understanding something doesnt mean you can build it.
(I know this will be met with ‘well then you dont understand it deep enough’ and that just reminds me that there always will be place for god in the gaps of science).
Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.
The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.
The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.
So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto…
Stumbled upon this book today the author is apparently fake as per this article (I did my own search and didn’t find anything)
There’s a youtube video on it that I’ll watch later
The website you linked is down and that article appears to be written in the exact same tone with certain machine text tells as the book itself
https://www.scribd.com/document/1019266552/12-Last-Steps-Dr-Selwyn-Raithe-2025
Classic weird conspiracist funnybusiness with a side of ARG
I definitely reeks of conspiracy theory, per this description
Two ‘its not x, its y’ statements in close proximity also raise my ‘ai generated’ suspicions
It gets worse
Edit basically if you took 90s black helicopter conspiracists, and early 2000s infowars, plopped them down in the current day with Google and a Claude subscription
I first learned of it through a comment under a Yudkowsky interview, comparing his messages to the book’s, which is not exactly confidence inspiring
It’s actually about perpendicular to him. Only similarity is that it posits that AI systems are dangerous. Take all the New World Order conspiracy theories and infowars the elite wants to kill you off and take your stuff and become transhuman, with depopulation and you will eat the bugs and stay in your minute city pod, and replace the ruling elites with AIs.
“A type III super-civilization can harness the energy output of an entire galaxy, and all the inhabitants stare at you like sleep paralysis demons, except for Bob, and we don’t want to get into what Bob’s deal is”
So is the steering wheel attached to the entire device so he steers by rotating the half circle or is the half cricle just to attach it to Bob and there is a deeper mechanism?
“Oh bother, I’ve fallen onto another one of these fart-propelled flight platforms and I can’t get up”
The cult at the heart of the rot of the world is built on such unserious foundations
The Russian Cosmists have so much to answer for.
My parents got super into the spinoff of For All Mankind that takes place in the Soviet Union, “Star City”. The central conceit of that alternate history spate of shows is that Sergei Korolev didn’t die and kept being as awesome as he was at running the Soviet space program. In the spinoff the writers actually knew a bit about what they were doing, and have him more or less directly quoting cosmists at other characters… I got to tell my parents that its people like him that are the reason their new laptop was expensive and that the oligarchs think they’re going to live forever as feudal lords of the solar system.
Every Korolev needs a crew of Glushkos to figure out shit he was actually hired for
Heh. Read the actual full paper.
Kardashev didn’t even think that colonizing whole galaxies was the likely end state! He thought that instead everything from billions of light years around would pile into individual huge artificial monolithic structures for efficiency!
Is anyone familiar with the website I Can Eat Glass? It was apparently created in the 90s by a Harvard student, who was concerned that people learning foreign languages only learn common phrases (e.g. “Where’s the loo?”) which makes them stand out as tourists when they speak. If one were to say a truly uncommon phrase, it stands to reason one would be instantly respected as a native. So he set up a website to collect as many translations of the phrase “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” as he could.
Surely you are riveted to your screens right now, desperate to learn what this very special brain genius has been up to since then. Ethan Mollick is a professor at a Pennsylvania business school and published “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” in 2024. Some say he is substacking about the exponential growth of AI capabilities, but critically this book was apparently read by some german teaching influencer.
He in turn published a self-help book for parents of school kids this year, that got put on display in my local library. And of course it has a chapter on AI, so I had to lend it and hate-read a little. And of course he references Mollick and his Co-Intelligence screed, which he apparently absorbed as a base expectation what the future of AI will look like, and so I got to learn about one very special brain genius from Harvard.
Very sad to learn that the “I can eat glass it does not hurt me” guy is AI-brained
New Odium Symposium premium episode. We talk about Julia Galef guest hosting the Ezra Klein show to shill superforecasting
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/ezra-klein-is-2-172872571
Quick Q, from where does the weird term “abliteration” come from? I’ve seen it used for “jailbroken” GenAI models.
Sounds like a marketing tagline for a failed “As Seen on TV” sort of gadget, tbh
With a bit of google searching by date it seems like this guy (https://huggingface.co/failspy/Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct-abliterated-v3.5) claims ownership of the coining, which I find plausible, based on the list of released weights and their timing.
As far as “abliteration”: it’s just a fun play-on-words using the original “ablation” term used in the original paper to refer to removing features, which I made up particularly to differentiate the model from “uncensored” fine-tunes. Ablate + obliterated = Abliterated.
The paper being referred to being: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction which seems to have somehow started out on the “AI alignement forum” of LessWrong https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refusal-in-llms-is-mediated-by-a-single-direction first posted 27th of April 2024. In general it’s a method of weight alteration so only really applicable to some opensource (or i guess leaked) models.
First model with abliterated in the name by “failspy” on 8th of May 2024.
Thanks!
wiktionary claims it is a blend of “ablate” and “obliterate”, it does not list an origin (at this point in time)
edit: looking a little more into this, knowing the etymology requires reading about AI discussions which I am not prepared for at this point in time but it is out there in the internet
New OpenBSD is out and the commemoratove artwork is definitely trying to say something about genAI.
On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out.
So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I’m thinking locksmithing.
If you’re interested in locksmithing I’ve got bad news. It got harder after WFH, waaaay more people home in rich neighbourhoods
OT: popping in for a second since I’m not drowning in homework for once (midterms start friday) to say carpal tunnel stripping is really good.
(so far I’m averaging in the high 80s last I checked).
Good luck with the midterms! I’m supposed to be studying for some myself…
Good luck with your exams.
going thru it myself, can report that non-graded “suggested exercises,” with exams being the only graded material, is not any better
So I just stumbled into Team Human, because a Youtuber I kind of like (Kraut) published a video for them. They seem to run a campaign targeted at creators, pushing to get videos released on the 10th or 17th. So they must be having a bit of a high point right now. (Idk if cash changed hands.)
Their manifesto tries to amp up societal harms, but the existential risk is snuck in at the end (AI programmed pandemics, etc.) and they want to regulate AI chips like nukes. CAIS (Center for AI Safety) is listed as the sponsor. Seems a little “AI centrist” to me, as in aligned with the less insane billionaires, but still a typical AI safety astroturfing shop. Shame if any of your favorite creators fell for it.
Glenn Beck is listed as one of the “leaders”. That guy is still around?
Iirc he has been trying a ‘im no longer a frothing weird rightwinger’ for a while now, but so far nobody really fell for it.
People who are entertaining in front of a camera are just regular people. If anything I’d expect the fame to make them on average worse than a random sample
Not to be confused with Team Human the Douglas Rushkoff podcast.
My first association was Alex Jones screaming “I’M TEAM HUMAN” while ranting about environmentalists. So the brand is getting a little crowded it seems.
I was gonna ask about that
They got one of my favourites, Medhi Sadaghdar (ElectroBoom), and yes in a video released on the 10th.
CAIS seem like an “AI safety” laundromat, in the sense they try to put a reasonable face on the paperclip maximiser stuff. They were the ones who organised the “AI safety statement” in 2023, which features lots of signatories who I’m sure just thought “oh yes I don’t want anything bad to happen because of AI”, not “If we don’t give Yudkowsky the reins we’re doomed to become office supplies”.
Descent monday morning take from robert evans:
Schrodinger’s double-think.
transcription
Quote skeet:
This is a researcher at Anthropic. Some of these people have lost their minds! What is mainlining Claude all day doing to them?
there are basically two possible futures at this point. either we’re all going to die of[sic] the future is going to be Good beyond our wildest imagination. the trick is to hold this duality in your head and not be driven insane by one side.
Robert Evans (the only Robert Evans):
some of these people get so locked into a labyrinth of Rationalist thought experiments that they are no longer really capable of interacting with reality 1/2
you can in fact limit the horizons of possibility in your own mind so severely that you are no longer able to “think” in a useful way 2/2
Well, we are all going to die. So… musing over?
We all get that right, everyone is going to die. Everything living you lay eyes on is going to die. I am 100% certain that the future contains the death of everyone alive today.
Do they mean immanently? Why?
They’re referencing the meme that an uncontrolled AI will inevitably kill every last human being, for reasons.
They seemed to bring up a cartoon for 12 year old boys?
Not if you’re a Yudkowskian rationalist. He’d call us “deathists”.
I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are. Nor to know how much the physical world resists making tiny machines and measurements necessary to explore these frontiers, or the ethical dilemmas involved in exploring how consciousness works that vastly slow and perhaps outright prevent answering questions like “can we replace little bits of someone with some machine we can maintain easier in the interest of prolonging them?”
Also I do happen to know how the universe ends.
I have been forced to on multiple occasions explain to people that there is a difference between thinking that there’s anything at all intrinsically good about the fact that things like us that have come about the way we have come with expiration dates, and dealing with it.
I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are.
I think its the mid-wit meme, lesswrongers know just enough to imagine some grand solution like brain uploading or nanobots might cure death and not enough to appreciate all the reasons each of those solutions won’t work.
One of the funniest things I ever read was a result of a survey of laypeople, physics UGs, physics Grads, postgrads, and faculty on various “cool future” things.
predictions of the likelihood of things geeks constantly dream about craters once you get past the very basics. I can only assume that fields that aren’t mine, and are in general vastly more complex, are at least as full of evidence of god hating us and not allowing us nice things.
I remember reading some of yuddies writing about nanomagic and noticing that the word “sticktion” never showed up.
Judging by the way LLMs and generative AI has been used, even when we do get something vaguely like a realistic version of sci-fi fantasies, capitalism and people who can’t distinguish the limits of the real thing from the fantasy will manage to misuse it.
This doesnt apply to everything, like VR and 3d printers were a sci-fi fantasy and now they are mundane economically viable but not revolutionary products.
Biohacking and nanomachines otoh dont seem to be viable and you hear nothing about those anymore. Only a little bit in the uncreative (and going on the experts unrealistic) ‘ai will create bioweapons’ critihype. No ‘It will turn people into cyberzombies’ (quake 2 was pretty good (that was aliens not AI but still)).
Piles of screaming grey goo and people being like “Why are you running away? can’t you see it’s my grandmother?”
who in the hell would want programmable matter anymore, after they’ve seen what happened to plain ol’ computer programming as already practiced
What’s that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those “secrets they don’t want you to know” for incredible profits?
Ah yes ‘only these two things are possible, dont consider any other outcome’ truly rational thought
It’s just the fundamentalist version of our culture’s pathologies as a whole, which has a very hard time imagining anything other than endless progression or apocalypse, neither of which is real.
Also, ‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’ is just weak. ‘yeah bro AI is gonna make everything super good. How? uhhh i dont know it just will’
‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’
pumpkin spice season will be permanent
AI will make free ice cream for everyone
That ice cream? Also pumpkin spice
The pumpkin spice maximiser
We could unironically live in this world if only the powers that be would allow it. I’ve personally radicalized at least 3 basic bitches with this fact.
(To the tune of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme*): self-inflicted psychic debuff
*The correct theme, not the heretical one. If you have to ask, you’re wrong
It isnt Claude that did this to them, it is their desire to be lesswrong.
wat
They’re also incredibly horny about creating conscious digital slaves for some godforsaken reason
