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.)
looks like this weekly thread refuses to die, I’m gonna keep posting here
Drew DeVault has put together a handy-dandy little list of people to avoid
Here’s a pretty thorough overview of why owning an LG television (or, more likely, any smart tv) is a bad deal https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&ra=m
I do appreciate the “microslop” t-shirt.
Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship (“e.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.”) Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the “Center for AI Safety” in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists don’t watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an “effective altruist organization” named the Nonlinear Fund (part 1) - (part 2). Nonlinear’s modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having “casual romantic relationships” with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.
It would only be moral to take the money then make videos about how ‘AI safety’ is an imaginary distraction from mundane matters of labour rights and finance capitalism.
From that post about Nonlinear:
I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference — someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didn’t want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.
I didn’t feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space — or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I don’t want to use such a system.
This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.
Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting people’s punctuation in the Hall of Shame.
Whisper networks are awful, but the way to prevent them is to not let creeps into your community in the first place. And if you trust someone enough to ask them for advice like this, you should probably listen to what they say, even if it is “vague and hard for me to concretely visualize.”
If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be “retaliated against”, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. I’ve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I haven’t always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.
Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.
Looking back, the pushback against Kathy Forth and Sarah Constantin suggesting that lying or sexual misconduct might be problems in the community would have been a red flag too. So was Yud’s demand that a random German blogger who criticized him post a retraction on every blog post. But I lived in comforting darkness until FTX went bankrupt!
Oh hey I also know Drew Spartz, but not from the Nonlinear Fund. He runs the Documenting AGI channel (which is mentioned in this email) highlights include this racist doomer meme, a post about how AI will be able to end the world in 3 months, and a video about an AI Black Death in 2 years posted in 2024 I’ve shared some other posts of his here but these are the ones I could grab the fastest
I believe he was posted about on Reddit SneerClub because of sharing pdoom scores, all I remember about that post was a biologist arguing AI would replace us because of the competitive exclusion principle even though a quick search will tell you CEP is not always true
Previously in Hossenfelder’s appearances on awful dot systems:
Her latest contribution to the discourse is supporting racist marshmallow Nathan Cofnas, because he’s “on the side of science”.
I mean, so too were the people making charts of how effective Zyklon B was.
Nonlinear Fund threatened to sue the person who said they were bad bosses with no boundaries who wasted funds! There was a bet on the Manifold prediction market about it. Narrator: Nonlinear did not sue.
Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this week’s stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and it’s just as cursed as you would imagine.
That’s it. That’s the post.
Oof, the brain poison is real.
Tap for spoiler
Mod: Nothing says revolutionary politics like voluntarily abandoning productive terrain to capital and then yelling at everyone who wants to contest it.
Organize workers? Fight over ownership? Build public and cooperative alternatives? Open source the tools? Democratize control?
No thanks. I have selected performative outrage and yelling at strangers online.
Rando: Not only that - they don’t even build art coops as pushback, instead celebrate petty-burgeoise of lone commission artist. And those types have that slimy “bootstrap” mentality.
I’ll do you a favor and not link it.
Capitalist: I’m gonna make a factory for feeding shit to the masses
Idiot: Comrades, we must contest the feeding-shit-to-the-masses industry by buying their shit and feeding it to ourselves.
that’s just db0 /s
i’m getting serious blockchain socialist flashbacks. how surprised would you be that he also pivoted to ai
Made me remember that I browsed r/cryptoleftists a few years ago, till I started trolling in the comments and got banned. Just checked, and the head honcho, Joshua Dávila, is still on his bullshit. Though he recently announced he is rebranding because TheBlockchainSocialist got too cringe.
PS: r/leftistsForAI isn’t him I don’t think. Though that would be 100% his niche.
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when you’re really good at convincing people to like ai
Embrace the AI because it’s like the thing everyone loves in movies: xenomorphs
“being around ai is like this” i… ok
We Should Improve Society Somewhat .jpg
That is a silly comparison, in the thing nor aliens nobody joins them willingly.
(And with the creeping corruption, environmental disasters, everything being made worse by sociopaths, but the lack of roaming monsters, the rifters book series would be a better fit).
And who do we have here conducting the interview: Stuart Ritchie, anti-trans activist & one of the more ‘deniable’ eugenics types of the late 2010s. What an incredibly tight ecosystem our good friends inhabit indeed lol.
Nvidia’s CEO is claiming that GPT Astra is AGI, in other words, CEOs saying more bullshit to keep valuation up
He also said that during a Lex Fridman interview 5 months ago (copy pasted from someone else’s comment on substack)
”he said in during a Lex Fridman interview March 26, 2026 - first time. I was just watching this today. ----- At about 1:56:29–1:56:35, Lex asks whether AGI is 5, 10, 15, or 20 years away. Jensen replies: “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI.”
We have, that’s the trick when people don’t define acronyms.
Artifical
GPU
Inflation
If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky1 (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.
transcript
it’s cool that you’re doing bednets or whatever but if your ideological project has decided that unilaterally declaring wars of aggression because yud said to is one of its charter missions i think your project is bad and should be burned
it is unfortunate that most of your opposition is andreessen horowitz and peter thiel. you guys don’t even seem to know they are your opposition, though, since you keep making deals with them; so i’m sort of inclined to just think that everyone sucks here and to curse both your houses
for the low low price of, what is this, like fifteen million dollars? you too can get pet obama officials to bless eliezer yudkowsky’s fever dreams
- They became the main character of bsky for a bit after commenting about imaginary data center vandalism being analogous to pogroms and is a weird AI “centrist” in general who keeps calling Zitron a grifter. You may also know him for being the one who made that very decent siskind email explainer that we probably had a thread about.
gyges went off the deep end quite some time ago, up to and including support for a crypto/ai grifter’s “dystopiabreaker” claims that not falling with the autoconfabulator crowd is basically being anti-vaccine.
there’s nothing centrist about him, along the lovely racist theophite, he’s one of the more aggressive confabulation machinery grift promoters.
I assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending he’s the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all he’s doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but I’m serious people so won’t engage with what he’s saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and he’s Always Posting.
No wonder he tripped on his dick the moment people pushed back and immediately trotted out the most laughable hackneyed persecution complex bullshit.
I don’t know who the lovely racist theophite is supposed to be, but to me the other notable gyges-style lowkey booster is quantian, who i knew as an occasional generally reasonable guest in the trashfuture pod. I wonder what caused him to turn into an LLM water-carrier and if it was at all more complicated than simply having AI adjacent investments.
theophite is known for this post which i think is most of how he got a following
to him being a rabid racist: there was a palestinian guy posting on bsky asking for donations at one of the worst points of the genocide and theophite took it upon himself to start acting as a one man misinfo shop about him, screenshotting his posts and coming up with unjustified theories about how he was ai generated, represented some sinister force, etc. eventually the guy was proven to be completely authentic, theophite kept going and idk what happened after that because i blocked him. the whole thing was obsessive and overtly about hostility to poor and brown people
What a POS
It always surprises me when someone starts with “AI safety is a sex cult inspired by bad science fiction” or “prompt engineering is ritual magic without the fun sacred names” and then wheels to “but chatbots and ‘Agentic AI’ are still the wave of the future!”
I guess maybe the sex cult and the ritual magic make the standard grifting seem credible by comparison? Like, E-Dub and company don’t pass the sniff test but Saltman and friends seem like reasonable adults who can’t all be wrong?
For real. Even if he was at all genuine about worrying that not pushing back against anti-AI sentiment was setting the stage for more problematic anti-science backlash he still got lost in the sauce almost immediately.
Ah yes SE Gyges, the most reasonable pro ai guy.
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The regular suspects seem to be very mad at NetBSD, don’t they?
Ooh, now I really want to install it.
Via tabte.cc, FF supports AI training on copyrighted materials.
i guess that’s why Cory Doctorow likes them so much.
edit: they are apparently professionally affiliated
Assumed that latter part was common knowledge.
Both are also quite popular in my exp among the wider vaguely leftwing programmer crowd. Which is also good that we keep being critical of both as well here.
i agree that this is, minimally, a ludicrous time to come out swinging in fucking reason mag for this lol
but i’d love to read something fleshing out the pro-copyright? anti-anti-copyright? argument. is transformative use the hinge here? like, since an LLM can produce copyright infringing material, etc.? is it marketing and using these products as replacements for creators? both of those are prob compelling to me but i’ve been wondering about this all for a while
I feel like if a you want to train something off of my software or my other intellectual property, we can come up with a commercial licensing agreement for that. Or you can obey the terms of the publicly posted software license. Instead they are arguing that I am not allowed to negotiate and that big companies get to do whatever they want with code from small companies.
They already have an army of lawyers, so why do they need a get out of jail free card too? I wrote the thing, so what do I get? Fucked over is what I get.
A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to “chat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?”
Anyone know when and why polyamory became a Rationalist shibboleth?
“Polyamory” is the excuse that abusive men use now the way they used “free love” in the 1960s. I know people who make the poly thing work; they’re honest and communicative, traits that I do not associate with lesswrongs.
I reckon it goes way back to the movements that produced them. My first thought is ayn rand:
In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair. They informed both their spouses, who briefly objected, until Rand “sp[u]n out a deductive chain from which you just couldn’t escape”, in Barbara Branden’s words, resulting in her and O’Connor’s assent.
You can see how “The most rational thing is that I fuck your spouse” would appeal to the less wrong folk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Atlas_Shrugged_and_Objectivism
Muhammad also discovered that God wanted him to marry as many women as he liked, but did not want them to remarry after he died. Joseph Smith ‘married’ a lot of younger women too. So I think if you let people rewrite social rules, many of them will decide that the new rule is “I fuck whoever I want, but they only fuck me.”
Interesting question because I bet it’s bound to coincide with when the cult dynamics really began to take hold.
Like this isn’t your grandpa’s swingers group, it is vertical workplace polyamory1 with an implicit understanding that if members in good standing don’t get sufficient amounts of ass they might get distracted and become inefficient, costing the universe untold billions in unrealized far future lives.
It’s very easy to imagine a scenario where they just slapped the polyamory brand on an already established culture of culty sex shenanigans.
- I swear the claudism was unintentional
There are a lot of attempts to push polyamory on white-collar and chattering-class culture, but many men in the USA seem to push it so they can tell their primary partner “I sleep with my groupies because I am polyamorous” and tell their groupies “who cares that you have a boyfriend, how about polyamory?” It also lets insecure men show off that they have not just one hot babe but several, and we know many rationalists are desperate for the rest of the world to recognize their genius. The problem, to be clear, is not necessarily with polyamory, just with people who use it as a way to get a gang of domestic servants.
I still have scars from events like the ones documented at https://allegedlythewebsite.org/ So many men in the skeptic and adjacent blogosphere used “sex-positivity” to mean “I can hit on you and encourage you to bottom at kink events, and you can’'t say I am creeping you out or you are looking fro a job not a playmate.” Similar dynamics are common in academia, polyamory was just one trendy excuse in the 2000s and 2010s. Scott Alexander experimented with polyamory and was living with a sex blogger in 2013 and I think Yud had connections in the NYC poly and kink scene.
I don’t exactly why, but based off the dates of various classic lesswrong posts I know it has existed since before 2010 in rationalist culture.
As to inexact reasons why… some key big name starting rationalist (i.e. Yudkowsky for sure, but probably a few others) were into polyamory. (Probably for the obvious reasons of getting to sleep with more people.)
I always assumed it was a package deal with the California Ideology.
I don’t know the answer, but I’ve always assumed it’s because it’s just something Yud is really into.
Michael Vassar called sleeping with his staff at MetaMed polyamory. Polyamory is common, and bosses and teachers sleeping with employees and students is common, but the combination stands out.
EY has recapitulated a ton of bullshit he learned as a teenager hanging out on the Extropians listserv with older shitty libertarian dudes. The archives are like a proto-LW, with conversations about race and intelligence, sex and kinks, gender differences, armchair geopolitics, etc, mixed in with fantasizing about the glorious transhuman future. I don’t know that anyone was using poly as a term at that point, but everything I’ve read about the Extropians suggests they were eager early adopters of bullshit Evo-psych ideas about men having “evolved” to fuck lots of women.
Oof, if he was raised by Internet Libertarians, I understand why he became such a shitty person.
Sex at Dawn came out in 2010 and was heavily hyped online. It does not seem to have got positive attention in academia. The 2009 edition of The Ethical Slut has polyamory in the title.
Whereas the successful polyamorists know that humans evolved in order to use calendar software.
This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can’t imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.
Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle
It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas’ current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he’s been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it’s get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: they’re quite the opposite), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort “the AI app says this is plagiarized” attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race “science” is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between “impartial” academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.
Part of the accusations were also that he faked running a lot of marathons in a short period. Which he actually did. I even heard that some news outlets who accused him of faking it actually had reported themselves on him running the marathons.
It is a kiwifarms style witch hunt but started by a racist academic, and perpetuated with help from the media.
Here in Belgium some investigative journalists have been reporting on Cofnas since his appointment in March. They recently translated one of their pieces to English and made it available for non-subscribers (click on ‘Lees alleen dit artikel gratis’ to close the pop-up):
https://apache.be/2026/03/05/self-declared-race-realist-nathan-cofnas-receives-appointment-ugent
The UGent philosophy department is also not without controversy. Maarten Boudry, a former employee there, is one of the main people in this country pushing ‘climate realism’, ‘concerns about Islam’ and ‘cultural marxism was a Nazi conspiracy theory but right now we itnis actually happening in our institutions’. He’s very buddy buddy with Steven Pinker and likely trying to get more international reach.
Apart from that, plagiarism issues never make news headlines because they happen very often at universities. The only cases I’m aware of are Arday and Claudine Gay. Probably because they have a political skin color.
Without having read that specific article
From what I heard Cofnas research is quite bad (it has cases of him seemingly not having read the sources he cites as those say the opposite of what he claims they do, and that is above the normal badness of race science shit. Some of his tweets (I think it was tweets, could also have been facebook posts or something) certainly read as ‘intended for internal racist fights’ and not intended for academics). And the guy who appointed him is also being looked at with suspicion. So hope they also take a good look at the guy who hired him (without using the normal process for it apparently).
Also a German Minister of Defense. My impression is that Arday was a fabulist, but so are many academics at wealthy research institutions, and the global campaign against him was clearly motivated by racism. Not sure about the plagiarism because I am not on Cambridge’s academic integrity committee.
even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated
The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing.
It’s insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying he’s a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didn’t do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t murder.
I was pretty disgusted by that. It seems like the guy’s crimes were some poor citation (he did cite the academic he alledgedly plagiarised so obviously it’s not plagiarism lol) and maybe exaggerating some of his life?
Seeing the media go from uncritically regurgitating a racist’s allegation, to reporting about the allegation controversy, to uncritically reporting what people claim to have or have not remembered about his life from 30 years ago, to digging through his entire life. For, I’ll reiterate, maybe citing something badly and doing some sloppy scholarship.
You know, the thing that gets someone a disciplinary chat and maybe a bump down if anything.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle
It should be said here again that these people don’t even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.
The thing that bothers me the most is that while this happens in Cambridge but over at Data Colada, Ariely is just like “whoopsie” and gets to keep his job. https://datacolada.org/138 - personally I consider fabricating your entire study to be worse than sloppy quotes, but it is insane how these two people are treated so differently.
I also think it’s really lazy that BBC couldn’t even mention Claudine Gay (AND Martin Luther King) since it was the exact same thing. Different country I guess.
I have to take this story in small doses, it’s fuckin terrible.
nice of the rationalists to remind me that no matter how ugly the ai situation gets they will never ever be capable of making a good point
Dwarkesh Patel seems to be one of their media operations like Vox Future Perfect and the Collinses.
ohhh this is what that gary marcus post was about god its worse than i thought. ‘AI civilisations’ gimme a break
In the addendum to his essay he defends his use of anthropomorphizing language because it makes it easier to understand…
“quantum physics is hard so here’s a fairy tale about the mysterious proton and his three children: the quark triplets”
See also: electric fields and currents are so complicated, so let’s talk about fluid dynamics
Yeah OpenAI, this is what happens when you think you can trust Gandhi.
over on linked in
as a statistician, I’m so tired of hearing they’re “updating their priors.” No you didn’t. gwern at least posts his R code, but you are just an idiot regurgitating something you half heard, probably on Lex.
(00:39:39) Let me put it. Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux system. It’s an alternative operating system to macOS and Windows, and it’s freaking amazing.
No it isn’t. It’s your glorified dotfiles. too bad Lex can’t tell the difference. I feel bad that Lex is exposing literally a million people to your crap. /s
these guys.
How did Lex Fridman’s podcast become so popular? He has no affect, always seems like he is about to fall asleep, and most of his guests are horrible people. He is a less intense Joe Rogan.
I feel like his initial momentum came from picking interview subjects who were technical leaders but not well-known outside their niches and rarely were subjects of long-form interviews. Jim Keller and Chris Lattner were two who stood out for me early on, although I couldn’t finish their interviews because Lex himself was such a drag to listen to. He’s put some work into public speaking skills, but not nearly enough.
I refuse to knock him for his accent; a strong accent could even be an asset for standing out in the hugely overcrowded podcast industry. But the guy just doesn’t seem to cultivate any charisma or any real curiosity. The only time I’ve seen him show a smidge of passion was when I saw a clip of him ranting about “anti-woke” bullshit, which should tell you what his (and his backers’) real objective is.
Being on YT is a big driver here, and Lex is smart enough to work the algo. Have John Carmack on, get views when people search for Quake. Have Elon on, get subs when people search for Tesla. Have Mr Beast on and get some kids in the funnel. He’s very good at piercing through filter bubbles to get extra reach and pull numbers, unlike an Alex Jones. (EDIT: For this, the bland persona is a feature not a bug)
I’d ballpark that he made $20k off this DHH interview and picked up some rails devs along the way.
Whenever new coworkers bring up Lex, I always feel like it’s a test, like are they oblivious, or are they secret closet magas trying to test the water. Slate Star has a similar thing. And YT is bad enough but now I have to see it pop up on LinkedIn too.
Oh yeah, transfer my enthusiasm, mister high-stepping HH man. Update my priors till they’re so bleeding-edge that they’ve become subsequents. This is masterfully persuasive marketing rhetoric that will convince everyone and leave no holdouts. Scott Adams would be smearing his hands with Vaseline to prep for your appearance on his podcast, if he was still around.
Today’s cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as you’d think.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php
(paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools)
the novice climbers, from Roseville, said they’d entrusted Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip — from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them.
On a separate incident:
a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map he’d been following and explained that he’d prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.
“It was terrible — terrible — not even close to accurate,” Meyers said. “It had route lines and place names that were totally off — just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.”
The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people.
I’ve no doubt that they’d have fucked things up in the pre-llm days too… they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams 🫤
“GPS will stop people reading maps!” buddy you ain’t seen nothing yet. Technology is allowing people to get lost better, faster, and at scale.
Time for ‘if you planned this trip using a chatbot, turn back now’ signs at hiking trails.
@rook @BlueMonday1984 “Earlier this summer, rangers with Shasta-Trinity National Forest found a woman camping in an off-limits area on the south side of Shasta clearly marked with “no camping” signage, Meyers said. She told rangers she had asked ChatGPT where she could camp in the forest”
I mean, wild life (the one that eats you) is gonna be sooo happy with Ai chatgpt. 😁
