Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 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.)
Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):
I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.
So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:
But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.
As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.
A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.
a coworker set up an argument, almost a syllogism, I can’t quite fill it in, maybe yall can
- enshitification
- shit rolls down hill
- therefore: ?
spoiler
- PROFIT
-
Shit piles up at the bottom of the hill
-
Bottom of the hill elevates until it reaches the enshittifiers
-
Dinosaur eats man
-
Woman inherits the earth
-
Whitehouse gives anthropic “just draw the rest of the fucking owl” energy over Fable:
Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the model’s guardrails can’t be circumvented. Security experts say that can’t be done.
With this and the OpenAI stories over the last few days I’ve been enjoying some top shelf schadenfreude
The AI safety company when they actually have to make their AIs safe instead of just making vague suggestions
SpaceX is reportedly buying Cursor for 60 billion
not even sure what to even say to this tbh
edit: at first i thought the headline was a parody, or at least they meant to write million. but no, 60 BILLION. numbers don’t mean anything anymore.
As I recall the impetus for this was that the team working on grok’s code generation ability was preferring to use cursor. Imagine making a model so shitty that even the kind of ai-brained buffoons who want to work on fucking grok don’t want to use it. Now consider that apparently that model is grok itself.
Disgraced artist, TTRPG writer, and porn star Zak Sabbath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zak_Smith tweeted about Brent Dill. Do all the awful Internet celebrities from fifteen years ago know each other? (No links because I delete my xcancel history).
Edit / https://xcancel.com/Alex_A_Guerrero/status/2067067064750047321#m (reply by x dot com/@ZakSmithSabbath)
AGI’s ETA: Delayed (again) due to technical difficulties
came across this one when doomscrolling, pretty good article with healthy doses of skepticism. out of three commenters, one appears to be a rationalist (based off the “empirical evidence” and “instrumental convergence” they mention) who tries to argue that we don’t actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing, even though every single AI doom argument is about smart-as-a-human and better AIs. Just comes off as goalpost moving
The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn’t really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won’t shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.
The header image is gold.
IS NOTHING SACRED?!
I checked Wikipedia’s history, its been fucked since last year
I checked the image which says December last year.
I haven’t bothered to examine the page history to see when the fucked content was actually introduced. I’m hoping that by posting about it, I can catch the attention of a particularly pedantic sex nerd who will be willing to fix it, for humanity’s sake. Let us not let the Adult Bookstore of Alexandria burn; rather, let us chronicle our times with our free hands
Doodle, the site where you make polls to schedule stuff with friends, that Doodle, wants me to PAY THEM to have a poll with more than 10 dates xDDDDD
I’m wheezing, I’m sorry, what xD DOODLE? A PRO PLAN for DOODLE? xDDD
While we’re suggesting stuff, you can just make a nuudel instead!
(It’s a free german Framadate instance.)
i’ve had a good experience with rallly, in case you’re looking for alternatives.
I used strawpoll.com which, well, works
Congrats to lesswrong, another one of their big ideas has reached the mainstream. (And it is eugenics).
Skeet from motherjones "Some of the same billionaires who bankrolled AI now admit the technology could one day kill us all.
And they’re funding a new plan to stop it—genetically engineered genius babies."
When I emailed Denecke, he told me Bootstrap Bio had ceased operations due to lack of funding. (The company’s former chief science officer, Qichen Yuan, was indicted for attempted sex trafficking of a child in September 2025. His case is ongoing.) But before the company unraveled, its early investors included Malcolm and Simone Collins, whom you may have heard of.
Has it been 2 months already? I was wondering when they would turn up in the news again.
E: I’m not serious, I came across this video on yt which fulfilled my ‘every 2 months’ thing already. It was actually a bit interesting, as it turns out both of them have a long mostly unscrubbed online history which they tracked down and analyzed, turns out she has a history of being a weird quirky person, and they both have an air of ‘want to become internet famous/create an internet scam’ sort of thing.
The comments on that vid are great as well (wait for it) check this one out:
It is rich for you to skewer anything Simone and Malcolm miss with their podcast when they post 5 days a week (you neglected to mention) and you can’t even maintain your schedule or throw up a post on bluesky when you are off schedule. Also, because you two are genetic dead ends you don’t know that a mother of 5 cannot be a night person, she was up with a baby when she emailed. Malcolm and Simone talk in different rooms because she always is looking after a baby, and babies can randomly make noise so Simone can mute and Malcolm can take over. Maybe you can meet a baby one day and learn how they work. But I will say this episode is better researched than the usual “read article titles and giggle” podcasts you put out.
This comment was left by none other than “Diana Fleischman” Yes, that one, the evolutionary psychologist, and partner of Primal “I’m no longer allowed near students” Poly (For those who remember sneerclub from reddit, he was a regular subject. For example).
Amazing how small this nazi nerd world is. And how bad they are at defending their own. Feel free to leave ‘ad hominem’ reactions to that. (I will not as my yt profile links back to my real life).
How is it that whenever I learn something new about this family it’s always a new way for them to be awful to each other or their kids?
Geoffrey Miller could do with a RationalWiki entry https://www.primalpoly.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)
Person bets big on polymarket to profit from the continuation of the Iran war, gets screwed out of his blood money by site-wide oracle scam, complains on reddit.
Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol (used to be a thing with smart contracts), which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes, and currently like 9 people hold over half the voting power, so yeah.
The future of finance and the future of information aggregation keep overlapping in the funniest ways.
which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes,
Wait that’s even fucking dumber than I thought it was, good grief
Everything I’ve learnt about prediction casinos is against my will and all of it is somehow the dumbest shit imaginable. I went through crypto, NFTs, the metaverse, and 3 years of AI bullshit, and nothing reached this level of psychic damage before.
Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol
Amazing that on first glance it looks like a smart contract ‘all done by code’ thing, but then the reveals comes and it is just a few rich people again.
Well yeah. Just because they call their crypto scheme an Oracle doesn’t mean they’ve actually solved the oracle problem.
LB: Enormous fan of that chud griping in /r/CryptoCurrency of all places, and getting laughed at for falling victim to a scam.
i’ll just quote it straight because i can’t make it any funnier:
maia arson crimew 🏴 > @crimew.gay SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel’s private society that doesn’t have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.
Wired has a story about Peter Thiel’s Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, “sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).”
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.
…
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”
So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.
I’m sorry are you telling me that there people’s social circle includes the same like 50 oligarchs and apparatchiks and they’re making a dating site for themselves? I know they lost Epstein but this is just pathetic.
Of course Ezra Klein is hanging out with the worst people in the world. He’s always on the hunt for a new gutter to pick up some fetid idea and tart it up for liberals.
We are good on opsec
According to a later post from them there’s a chance this is more of a list of attendees at a past or upcoming event, but tbh I don’t think there’s much of a difference between “member of the nu-money illuminati” and “accepted an invite to hang out with the nu-money illuminati at their clubhouse.” I can only assume it has the same statue of a hand clutching a globe as the Deus Ex opening cinematic.
Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will be…
Qiaochu Yuan (no relationship to the man accused of soliciting a child) left his PhD program to become an “emotional coach.” If his old tweets are any guide then Doctor, heal thyself. G. Duleba and Ozy picked similar careers rather than coaching a soccer team or teaching freshman English like most people who want to be teachers and mentors.
Edit / Ozy also does not like the PUA advice of Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max. I think this is less sneering at a stranger than sneering at someone Ozy’s friends know and admire (Miller and Fleischman attend TESCREAL events).
This sort of stuff makes me feel bad for Ozy. After a decade pushing back against this shit the community still likes it.
Yeah. I’m not gonna spring for the paid subscription to read the whole thing, but if we’re gonna be angry at reasonable general-purpose life advice being melded to a toxic and hateful ideology and then put forward as a revolution in human thought and relationships, then I have bad news about the whole rationalist community.
It makes a twisted sort of sense that so many of them go into life coaching. In their hermetically sealed subculture of highly paid, socially inept nerds, it probably pays the bills to set yourself up as an authority on reading social cues.
Did you see the Brent Dill stuff today?
Did you see the Brent Dill stuff today?
No, it seems to be on the Nazi bar? So Brent Dill now has a YouTube channel and gave a talk about sasquatch.
Some Vibecamp organizer tweeted that he organized a weekend event with young women and Brent Dill. He agrees with Scott Alexander that figures like Curtis Yarvin are sexy and attract women to your events!
(ProTip: if you aren’t getting enough feminine energy at your events, advertising it as an opportunity to meet a reputedly DANGEROUS man is a fantastic way to fix that … Like wait…this guy who’s rumored to be <every_bad_male_coded_thing> is the same guy holding space generously and openly with no ‘grabby’ or fearful / aversive energy towards anyone? When was the last time a rationalist guy showed aptitude at THAT?! (For those who don’t know, rat-adjacent women tolerate --or, darkly, cultivate-- bizarre behavior from men as a matter of course, so it was startling that the supposed exemplar of rat-man badness was so far from that energy).
…
I love my friends, of course. But many live in this bubble, have never meaningfully connected outside the bubble, and don’t know how: highly unskilled at basic normie relational skills. In a way that reads as very rude if you’re not accustomed to the norms (rather, the lack thereof) in the ffgk bubble. And they have better visibility into the OUTRAGEOUS behavior of the truly danger characters in the scene --the sexual violence, the fraud, the lying, more lying…so much lying.
…
AND TO BE ABUNDANTLY CLEAR: sometimes Brent still says he needs outrageous amounts of power and control that no sane person should ever give a person so wounded. To which I say…DON’T DO THAT. THAT WAS REALLY STUPID WHEN BLACK LOTUS DID IT, AND IT WOULD BE BEYOND PROFOUNDLY STUPID TO REPEAT.
A vibecamp peson replied with screenshots of a chat with with Dill where he claimed that during 2014-2018 he was living in a rationalist group home and had his expenses paid in exchange for serving as an “emotional support dom” for a barely-legal person who had had sex with housemates while under 18, and that drama inside the house lead to the accusations against him (reminder, Dill confessed to doing some very disturbing things to much younger partners on his blog).
Yuan tweeted in response:
i was heavily involved with brent dill for a substantial chunk of 2018, when he was embedded in the bay area rationality community. based on those experiences i never want to get involved with him ever again and i highly recommend none of you ever do so either. please note that this is the strongest condemnation i have ever written publicly about anybody
…
when this is happening to you, from the inside it feels like finally you’ve found someone who’s saying things that make sense, that matter, who’s bravely pointing out the elephants in the room nobody else is willing to, who is being unfairly persecuted by the popular monkeys, who’s showing you all the social rot and promising in so many words that maybe, just maybe, you and him can fix it together, because you get it, right? you’re not like the others. you see the truth. you’re so special. or whatever. he will tailor different versions of this pitch to different people based on what he’s figured out about you. the pitch includes, among other things, a sophisticated defense against any attempts to warn you about him, which look like confirmation of his persecution thesis
There is a 2 hour 39 minute YouTube video called “The Legend of Brent Dill: An Outsider’s Perspective on the Human Sacrifice Rituals of the Rationalist Cult.” I ain’t watching that.
Can we just take off and drop a small asteroid on Oakland?
this is just PUA bullshit right? Oh akshually women are ATTRACTED to “dominant” men, dangerous men, bad boyz, anyone who challenges this is just too woke to admit the truth
I’m extraordinarily reluctant to take the guy’s description at face value. It seems ripe for that thing guys do where a crowd that’s 1/3 women becomes “mostly women” in their perception. But even taking it at face value, what the Hell, you know? He’s holding an event that self-selects for women who are vulnerable to predation and puts them in harm’s way. “Protip: to get more feminine energy at your events, advertise it to alcoholic women and hold it at a brewery!”
When I read rationalist descriptions of other people’s psychology I sense a certain amount of contempt for them (because they are not Rational and of course cannot understand themselves as well as the rationalists can understand them). In this case, the silly woman who doesn’t understand why her expectations are being defied. Maybe it isn’t meant to be contemptuous, but that’s how it comes across to me.
I dunno, it does read like fiction. Like one of those billionaire romance novels, actually.
Scott Alexander literally says this before his story about ‘Henry’ the patient who beat his fifth wife because she objected to him cheating with the ex who had left him after he beat her:
I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more)
/s And male rationalists would never, ever hang out with an edgy scary person like Yarvin, Sailer, or Vassar for the thrill and bragging rights! Only teh fe-males would do such a thing. /s
<every_bad_male_coded_thing>
“Come to our event where men cut their toenails in public”
a precise ukrainian drone might be a safer option
A lot of people want to know if the Law of Armed Conflict has a “wicked advisors” or “misogynist influencers” clause.
zitron got a scoop on openai: 8.8B loss in 2024, 60.3B loss in 2025, 1.17B from ms + softbank, promises more detailed analysis later https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
So when sama suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!
tbf i expected that ed got openai’s s1 at that point. anything more detailed would be nice to see. that also suggests that saltman knows that leak occurred, and maybe who leaker is
