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. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)
This policy seeks to ensure that our courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default. It provides students with the opportunity to develop the skills they need to conceptualize, outline, draft, revise, and edit their work by forbidding the use of AI for these purposes in connection with work submitted for credit. It also forbids using AI to translate work for credit, thus providing students with the opportunity to develop and exercise their own fluency with legal English. […] The use of AI is prohibited for aid in conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit. AI use is prohibited for any use for any purpose in any exam situation. Students may not upload course materials—including assignments, readings, slides, class recordings, or other class content—into generative AI systems.
Scott Alexander has told many stories about why he is pseudonymous. In 2013, when he was applying for medical residency, he told a simple story which begins with an interviewer saying he would have to take his LiveJournal down if he were accepted:
I originally deliberately linked this blog and some of my other writings to my real name in order to bury Google evidence of certain stuff I did online when I was a dumb teenager, but that mission is pretty thorougly (sic) accomplished and now I agree with my interviewer that even if I don’t get hired (cue serious of elaborate ritual hand gestures to ward off unthinkable misfortune) it is to my benefit to switch back to my normal totally un-Google-able pseudonym of Scott Alexander (well, actually just my first and middle name).
FYI, this is why its a red flag that someone has public profiles on dozens of sites. Its a standard technique to bury negative posts in Google results, PR firms will write the profiles and get you a few press releases and talks to help. I hope this is the last thing I have to say about this particular creep.
What did he do, leave written evidence of white supremacist leanings?
if you held a gun to my head I would guess it would be his racism (he thinks that different groups have natural places in society driven by their inborn hereditary differences), but I don’t see any point in trying to track it down. He is clever but uses his brains for very common, very bad ideas and the things he has done since 2013 are much worse than the things he could have posted as a young man.
Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:
If any harm ever comes to me “mysteriously” - you know who it was.
I love my life.
https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529
She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".
As usual this sort of message actually makes me worried about what she might do to herself. :(
I’ve never heard of abuse allegations against Altman, so I looked them up and holy shit wow.
Came across this on the orange place: dontpastetheai.com
I was expecting like nohello.net but instead we get a decent intro explaining nuance as to why people ask other people questions followed by how to use AI and hide that you used it.
Is it me, or do attempts to make movies with AI tools
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/24RKHEkwgZ6Hm6ygY/can-an-llm-make-a-feature-length-movie-on-its-own
Remind me of SCPs
Quoth the blog post:
I have a YouTube channel where I mostly get LLMs to write albums and make them into music videos.
… the fuck did I just read?
If you wonder how you can look at any of this without viscerally realizing that it’s absolute dogshit, I found the
authorsperpetrators conclusion very insightful.Where we go from here
I expect these issues to all be fixed by the end of 2027.
I expect no-longer-obviously silly movies to be doable within two years, right now it’s going slower than I expected in January 2026 because the frontier labs are no longer competing over having the best video generator, like they were when we had Sora2 and Veo 3.1.
And WHY are they no longer competing over this? Tell me. Could it be that its incredibly expensive to make somthing that nobody wants except fraudsters, and that further improvement via the kind of ML we do just produces exponentially diminishing returns for ever increasing huge amounts of effort and they realized it’s not worth it?
Just like they will never understand that the openAI ‘pause’ for ‘security and alignment’ is a convenient excuse for the fact that they have no goddamned money and are on a treadmill to oblivion.
Oh boy, this is the most straightforwardly delulu lesswrong post I’ve ever seen.
If you see issues in the YouTube video, rest assured that those issues survived even more than two generation attempts.
lol
AI slop is very good at falling into the uncanny valley, whether that paragraphs of pure nothingness from a text extruder, or strange almost-human looking imagery that looks and feels inexplicably wrong. Its a great way to produce some accidental nightmare fuel, especially considering the AI bros glazing such shit are incapable of recognising its accidentally disturbing nature.
As a “fun” sidenote, there was an SCP article on the site which acted like a slop generator (SCP-1004, Factory Porn). Its writer, DrBright, was permabanned in 2022 after a lengthy history of sexual harassment was uncovered (and the article was deleted altogether in February of this year). Feels oddly fitting, in the worst way possible.
I’ve had the same thought about Factory Porn, it’s is basically what Image slop generators are, right down to the addictive nature, even when it isn’t porn being generated.
It still cant keep scenes consistent for more than 5 seconds amazing.
I got to 47 seconds and there’s a guy driving a tent stake with a mallet that isn’t quite there, only to have the mallet disappear.
“So you printed out a piece of the internet for us to throw away.”
My favourite error, and it appears repeatedly, is that instead of an object passing from one character to another, a copy of the object suddenly finds itself in the second person’s hands. It is shockingly bad at portraying any kind of action! It’s never going to get better!
I am mildly fascinated by the types of issues that appear and the contrasts with other things that can locally in space and time look right.
An object doing nothing will have a consistent surface and show perspective relative to the viewpoint. The systems are able to have representations of surfaces of different types and how they can fit together within an object. I am of course talking about within a given generation, not between generations where its utterly unsurprising that consistency is very difficult or impossible.
But multiple objects in interaction with each other do very strange things. Their relative sizes change as if they are in different positions relative to the camera. They snap between individually plausible relationships, without going through intermediate states. Doors open on the hinge side when the other side is not visible. The relative size of and distance to the background can suddenly change, as the foreground suddenly interacts with something that should be far in the background.
Objects that change also do so in bizarre ways. Living things morph between different archetypes. Flames in particular change wildly between types and sizes and respond to the facial expressions of humans, smoke and water effects blend together. Sudden movements with no cause occur, sudden morphings of one object into another when the context around them changes and something else makes sense, especially when held in a hand. Time-reversed motions occur mixed in with time-forward motions, and slow-mo with regular time. Debris suddenly appears from an object but when the dust clears the original fails to have been eroded away into the fallen debris.
On multiple occasions, a carried candle keeps moving with a characcter rising and falling with their footsteps hovering in front of them when both hands become occupied with other tasks. This is fascinating and indicates that the relationship between the two objects motion is represented separately from the idea of something being ‘carried’. (This is positively Lovecraftian.) Candles also indicate something else, with flowing wax changing wildly in timescales that do not make sense, with the system apparently understanding that there are different patterns but having no idea how they come about or change. There is no generality here, just an endlessly compounding list of rules of thumb.
Excessive correlations between objects across the frame are rampant. Footsteps preferentially synchronized. People in the background lipsyncing with foreground characters, faces changing expression in unison. Textures changing across multiple objects at once.
I have said it before, and I will say it again, the relationship between the outputs of these systems and what they mimic are precisely the relationship between a stick insect and a stick, or a social-parasite-beetle and a baby ant. Not just in form, but because that is also precisely the same forces that drove both things into existence - superficial resemblance to something else with a very different internal set of causes, that can fool to a first inspection by the inspection applied but just isnt doing the same thing. And again, SCP-2030 feels the same.
Wow, I watched 15 minutes from 45:00 and it’s just like… wtf. The guy is old, younger, mustache, no mustache, sets a gun down and then pulls another gun out of thin air, sometimes the gun it’s a double barrel side x side, sometimes it’s an over-under, sometimes a muzzle loader… The candles, wtf is up with the candles? The dog is remarkably consistent but the mouth doesn’t move right and it’s just a horror show. The cave setting changes…
Yeah, it’s just so fucked up.
In the same cut, the guy then materializes a hat in his hand and puts it on, replacing the hat he was already wearing.
I picked a bit randomly where a walking stick changes shape, disappears, appears, the guys hair changes color etc.
45 minutes is even better
SlateScott first floated his bright idea about “medical ethics are for foreigners not a good-hearted genius like me” in 2010.
Here’s what happens. In some far off corner of the world, some psycho doctor does something horrible like deliberately inject a patient with flesh-eating bacteria. The media hears about it and panics the public, who become suitably enraged and make demands of their politicians. Their politicians go to leading medical administrators and demand that doctors be more ethical. The leading medical administrators obviously don’t control the actions of every single psycho doctor, so they think quick and say “Okay, we’ll make all medical students take a class on Ethics and Professionalism,” hand the implementation off to professors, and then raise their own salaries for thinking of such a brilliant idea.
I guess California and Alberta and Sweden and Japan were far off from Cork, Ireland. How did he pass that class?
Hippocratic oath is government-imposed oppression apparently
There is no way that the class did not cover how MDs and nurses have been central to state atrocities for 150 years, from Bush’s torture program to MK-ULTRA to Unit 731 to the original eugenicists (who kept committing wild sterilizations into the 1970s). There is no way that it did not cover how authorities often hint at what they want done without being so vulgar as to say it where it could come up at their trial.
But didn’t he get that authoritarian followers are deterred if an authority figure like a professor says “the following acts are unacceptable?”
OpenAI is slowing development because of uh safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/open-ai-pause-hack
Definitely not because improvement is stagnating and they’re running out of money
It just occurred to me that this makes Anthropic look bad, actually
if OpenAI is slowing down because they concerned about
moneyAI safety, then it makes Anthropic look like fools for publishing that blog where they waffle on about keeping up the race because of “bad actors”If OpenAI is slowing down, an Anthropic that actually is concerned about safety would slow down too. But they won’t, because
moneyChina“bad actors”Well I’d like it if they actually stuck to this, since it would finally lessen the flow of AI slop. Wouldn’t be surprised if this gets quietly ignored because OpenAI
Greta D. says she met Yudkowsky at the wedding of his ex and Duncan S. (cw: rationalists propositioning each other) “Mawwage, is a dweam within a dweam …”
otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aella’s twitter polls and resulting studies. it’s fun. I’ll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link
this blog post is so badass
the woman herself shows up in the substack comments with the most pitiful display of “I’m just a smol self-taught bean why are you being so mean to me?”
Erika rightly responds by calling out Aella’s own attitude towards the people who know how to apply the level of rigor to the data that she (apparently admittedly?) doesn’t. Like, you can’t simultaneously be this dismissive of the norms and processes of the scientific establishment and also claim ignorance and inability when your inability or refusal to follow those norms leads you to crap conclusions.
I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, it’s like a whole new cognitive bias I hadn’t thought applied to rationalists.
I also still believe academia is a deeply broken culture. I believe this in large part because most academics have told me this.
You seem to believe uncritically what they tell you here. The truth is, everyone LOVES to complain but if you tell them “THEN LEAVE??” they’d rather keep their position. And it’s very normal, actually. most systems (idk, liek law, healthcare, environmental protection) are “deeply broken.”
Maybe you think that only systems worth engaging with are those with self-perpetuating optimism loops? where everyone is so happy and satisfied with the community and activities? If so, it matches really well the intellectual environment I think you are in.
Update on the slop dentist situation: second opinion says that loved one has zero cavities. I suspect that her only problem was having a non-median mouth that wasn’t well-represented in Pearl AI’s training data.
It was called fucking Pearl AI? god these people suck so fucking bad
ugh, right?
Witnessed an “AI-Powered political sandbox” called President Simulator crop up after seeing someone stream it on Discord.
I felt tempted to try and fuck with it, but its asking me to sign up for some fucking reason
Well it took longer than I expected, but the AI 2027 guys finally posted a second update
This table is essentially the TLDR
They also finally explained the “2025 was 75% of AI 2027’s progress” thing and it seems like that number was mostly skewed by revenue (edit: valuation) numbers (Edit 2: apparently this is wrong?? the 75% figure is supposed to represent 2026 progress. So 2025 was still 65%, I think. These people are confusing)
For some reason their website lists the date of ASI as 12/2028 even though their actual graph only had a 32% chance tops of ASI happening on that date
<edited> Didnt I hear them say a while back that its not even revenue numbers? That its valuation of the companies being taken as proxy of value produced.
I find myself caring so little what these people think about anything
That is even worse than using the ARRs, which Ed Zitron has extensively explained are wildly distorted numbers done by shuffling sales and costs around to get really good 30-day to 1-month stretches.
I believe that was mentioned here
Here’s that side-by-side comparison
Bioman has already pointed out the “Economic Value” numbers they are using for these tables are probably bullshit (based on self reported run-rate extrapolations that are deliberate distortions at best, based on VC valuation at worst). To add to this… the compute values are also probably bullshit. They are likely based on data center announcements and not confirmed totally complete data centers (Ed Zitron has ripped into how much bs there is in data center announcements). “Coding Time Horizon” is probably METR, which, while some of the best numbers for estimating actual AI improvement for practical purposes, are still really bad in several key ways. (They don’t have enough human task performers for the longer duration tasks even if everything else was right, because they aren’t, and there are several ways systematic bias could have leaked in and compelted distorted the constructed measure of task duration.)
“AI Software R&D Uplift” is the single most important category to their scenario of recursive self improvement… and they have it at a small fraction of what they estimated.
I took a quick look over the article again, this spreadsheet contains how they measure their metrics. “Compute” seems to be based off number of chips, which is probably in part based off data centres anyways
And apparently they have ditched METR and are now using “coding uplift (i.e., how much of a speedup AIs are providing to software engineers at AGI companies) and revenue.”
Ed Zitron has also explained his suspicion that lots of GPUs are sitting around in warehouses waiting to be installed, in some cases sold (to juice NVIDIA’s revenue) but not even shipped yet.
And I’m really skeptical speedup from AIs claimed by the LLM companies is in anyway related to reality.
According to one of the writers apparently 17% is supposed to be ‘progress is 17% slower than expected’, so the 34% figure here implies progress is 34% slower than expected, so that’s actually worse
That wouldn’t make sense, because 1.07 would mean progress is negative. I think they meant it as a multiplier? So 1.07 is almost exactly what the predicted, .17 is only 17% of what they expected.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because so much of the input numbers to these calcs are garbage.
Yeah that’s what tripped me up, because if that was true then it’d make no sense why the percent of progress went up while the uplfit number went down.
The percentage isn’t total progress to some key point of AI 2027, it is progress relative to their timeline. A constant 1.0 would be staying on track with their predictions, numbers less than that would be falling behind. So they are admitting the real numbers are falling behind their predictions more and more (while still not acknowledging their entire timelines was bs in the first place).
I read their spreadsheet and their % progress numbers in terms of AI capabilities is MASSIVELY skewed by Claude Mythos. The rest of it is below the mark if you exclude that
here’s someone who cutesly spells “EA” as “∃Ɐ” and posts
Oh yeah, I saw the author post this. The argument appears to be “blow 40% of the Norwegian Pension Fund’s current value on OpenAI, because democracy?” and then goes on to paint opposition to datacenters as a “you will be left behind” move. Just absolutely dumb stuff all around.
“OpenAI has tapped out one petrostate already, time to move to the next one!”
FWIW I have no clue how the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is managed. The principal idea is to sequester windfall earnings from hydrocarbon extraction from the normal day-to-day economy, avoiding a boom-and-bust cycle and the resource curse.
That said, it’s pretty useless to just store a bunch of money to use “later”. I can imagine a portion is used for infrastructure (all those marvelous tunnels) but taxes on income and VAT are eye-wateringly high (and I say that as a Swede!). So there has to be some political pressure to raid the piggy bank, not least for election winning purposes.
So presumably the fund is insulated from day to day meddling. On the other hand, you can’t just hand over the reins to 25 year old coke-addicted MBAs.
My main point is that for the proposal to happen, someone will have to try to convince the people in charge of the fund that betting the farm on Sama not ripping you off is worth doing. Possible? Maybe. Probable? I fucking hope not.
Does anyone get why CJ the X (they/he pronouns) and our friends are playing footsie? The best I can find is https://sojo.net/articles/culture/cj-x-nonbinary-philosopher-shaping-gen-zs-spiritual-imagination Do they have any actual connection to PUA outside Aella? Any video essays on the philosophy of gender? I think their look is a TikTok thing and a queer camp thing although some PUA like peacocking too.
I suppose my kneejerk objection to their appearance reminding me of PUAs from Strauss’ “The Game” is rooted in a fear that it’s another manifestation of the rationalist pathology of reinventing everything from first principles. Rainbow eyeliner and random feathers aren’t inherently terrible on their own. But using over-the-top fashion as a tactic to cultivate more sexual attention was a central part of Strauss’ cohort 20 years ago, it was widely publicized (and often mocked) all over the internet, and that subculture was ultimately harmful to a lot of people! We can learn from the past! And most of the people Strauss hung around with and documented were specifically and obsessively pursuing heterosexual sex and norms, so I don’t trust whatever remains of that culture to automatically be cool with trans and nonbinary people, especially if it gets cross-pollinated with whatever the hell Aella is doing.
There’s also something to be said of the inherent narcissism of the influencer economy? Like, I prefer my video essayists to have more of a burned-out academic vibe so CJ has been adjacent to but not on my radar. That being said, having a very distinct aesthetic is pretty common in the space because having a hook is what brings in eyeballs and thus patreon subs or superchats or whatever else turns that into an actual career. I would sooner assume he’s using a similar strategy to manipulate viewers into clicking his face rather than that he’s actively following the PUA playbook.
CJ has an essay complaining about how corporate social media is toxic, but they still built their career around it, Twitter users who hated the site but could not leave reminded me of the fable of the monkey and the jar of rice. https://cjthex.com/what-is-to-be-done/
Aella’s orientation seems very straight and patriarchal (she wants a strong, wealthy, dominant man, and she frames her polls around men and women not around figuring out what the people you have the hots for are in to). Queer, trans, and nonbinary rationalists seem to end up on the sidelines (eg. Duncan Sabien, Ozy).
Fans say that CJ is a music-school dropout and that its not clear how they funded themself before becoming a successful vlogger. Toronto is not cheap. “Autododact” and “parents with some money” fits the pattern.
they pronouns
he
his
?
Oops! All I know about them is their presence at Bay Area rationalist events. Fixed the OP.
I’m also interested in answers to this; I don’t really follow youtube types in general (and even less other of the pop names) so I didn’t even know this name until it showed up here this week
I cut YouTube out of my life a year ago, briefly returned for idle entertainment like cooking shows, and then gave it up again. Even before all that, I was generally ignorant of who YouTube-famous people were.
I ruthlessly cull any helpful “suggestions” from my YT recommendations and try to do some due diligence on the people I do follow.
Jane street is pressuring olympiads to not sanction Israel.
Gee, who could have foreseen that letting them touch everything under the math sun could have consequences.
such a weird hill to die on. I’d imagine that Israeli kids still get to participate, just under a different flag (just like the Russians in the 2026 FIDE candidates tournament). Surely if you just care about the math this shouldn’t be such a big deal?
