Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. The spooks are well underway.)
Moldbug showing that the other neonazi tweet wasnt an accident. “What if AI solves the jewish question”
You know how AI proofs are supposed to be credible because of formalization with Lean? The AI generates a natural language proof and then supposedly generates a Lean program corresponding to the proof to verify that it’s true. There is now some troubling news about that: there are frequent examples where the statement given in natural language is different from the meaning of the Lean formalization.
The paper even points out several obvious mismatches in OpenAI’s famous Navier-Stokes solution between the English proof and the Lean formalization. There is even a spot where a 4 in the English proof turns into a 5 in the Lean proof (which causes further problems down the line). This is mostly a cosmetic error, and it doesn’t mean that the Navier-Stokes solution is wrong, but there could very well be deeper problems, especially with the English proof. At minimum, this solution absolutely requires careful review by experts. OpenAI’s behavior towards said experts has been appalling.
My viewpoint has been that the only successes that AI has had are in domains where failure is not costly (at least for someone with deep pockets), and especially when there is a formal system such as Lean that can reliably catch errors. So AI can be endlessly trained to write compiling Lean programs corresponding to formal proofs, but as soon as it runs into tasks that are not 100% bolted down, like writing the proof in English, the hallucination problem rears its ugly head. This reinforces my belief that AI is a chess engine but for Lean.
If I was treating this as a technical problem, I would say, why not just have an AI that generates the Lean proof, and at most have an optional assisting tool that translates it into English without perfect reliability? But this is not a technical problem. By outputting English proofs in the format of a research paper, OpenAI can more easily market that their AI is intended to fully replace mathematicians, and that this is only the herald of their general superintelligence (and not that math is the only thing working out for them).
just a peeve
here’s a personal blogpost on LW entitled “Three types of AI risk: why (some) leftists are against (some) AI regulations” (by “sudo-nym” which I admit is a great nick)
First sentence
You may have seen factions of the left being opposed to current attempts to regulate the AI industry, despite the fact that they clearly also want to stop AI.
OK Mr Sudo-Nym, if that is your real name, imma gonna stop you right there
Which “factions”?
Are these factions actually in existence, or are they just Xhitter/Bluesky handles? If you’re provide like, I dunno, sources, we could maybe evaluate this ourselves. It would also clarify whether these are US leftists as opposed to leftists in other countries which are in my experience a bit more attuned to both political realities and have a more theoretical foundation.
As it is it feels as if you’re fighting windmills in your imagination.
Commenters point out that the “frontier labs” are actually raging capitalists so there’s that.
The factions exist and those are the hardcore anarchists.
A real electoral powerhouse.
(Aka a few guys on bsky with 10k followers max total).
And I say that as somebody who feels anarchist aligned.
Most of rationalism seems to be “Making up a guy and getting mad at him” doesn’t it?
but but but don’t call it strawmanning!!!
My real opponent lives in Canada. And no, you can’t meet him.
I’m not sure if this was highlighted already but from the OpenAI report on the Hugging Face incident:
The internal-only research model is comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol and was trained to advance persistence and multiagent collaboration, among other capabilities. The model was not intended for public use, and was only used by a small number of OpenAI personnel for internal research.
Absolutely typical, the “unexpected communication” is hardly an emergent phenomenon, (I remember them trying to claim unexpected high success at translation tasks without specific training, which was also complete BS), like you can’t act surprised that agents communicate and hack stuff if that what’s you’re instructing them to do.
Just had a shower conversation with myself, and for some reason the crystal meth metaphor (methaphor?) is really coming together in my head.
“Have you even tried some frontier meth?”
“Sure, you can also get energy with exercising, eating well, and structure. But we don’t have to live like amish people, now that we can have meth!”
Nationalized Open Weight Models -> State-funded AI dispensory
There’s surely a rich bounty of comparisons left to mine.
Knowledge workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your teeth.
Also works for cocaine, I’m noticing.
Might be best as a comeback, if someone compares AI to a pharmaceutical breakthrough like antibiotics.
Everything written by AI boosters tracks much more clearly if you simply replace “AI” with “cocaine”. I shall demonstrate! (Not linking to OP, because it’s trash.)
“Let’s pretend you’re the only person at your company using cocaine. You decide you’re going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison. […] In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting cocaine.”
You could also compare it to the lobotomy, with how much it ruins people’s intellect
though the lobotomized themselves weren’t among the loudest advocates of the procedure afaik
unlike trepanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning#Voluntary_trepanation
Unhappy thought: For whatever future we’ve got, the history of mathematics will be scarred by fashtech cocaine. The people with all the money have every incentive to make mathematics intractable as a profession. No time or resources to do anything but clean up after their DDOS attacks. No way to check the correctness of AI-generated proofs except by using more AI to formalize them.
First up: thanks for your hard work here in the sneer mines during these ridiculous times!
I saw this being ignored on HN and I thought that you might appreciate it:
Navier-Stokes Lost in Translation – Why Lean Verification of AI Autoformalisation Does not Guarantee Correct Natural Language Proofs
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144
The authors point out that automatic translation of natural language mathematics into Lean is very hard, actually. They also highlight some examples of such translation errors in the Navier-Stokes “paper” published by OpenAI. They tread lightly and don’t take a position on the correctness of the proof, but they do bring a large stack of receipts.
I also thought the reference to the Solvability Complexity Index (which is new to me) was interesting, and there’s an appendix with an explainer on how the SCI hierarchy is constructed. According to this scheme, autoformalisation of natural language proofs is strictly harder than the Halting Problem.
I haven’t had a chance to check on the bona fides of the authors.
This is all beyond my level, but I’d love to see what our local experts think of it in light of the recent gish galop.
Happy cake day!
There’s apparently an “Association for Human Mathematics” that has released the following statement:
Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI – which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution – released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.
Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest.
Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI’s assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism.
Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.
One of the proofs that OpenAI announced yesterday is for a major open problem in the field I’m working in. I tried to read it but it was a completely incomprehensible 100+ page output. I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding. (I had known about the results weeks in advance before their official announcement. There is a bunch of more drama there that I won’t get into.) Putting aside the serious possibility of Lean bugs, a lot of people don’t realize that there is ultimately no point in having a machine just generate Lean blobs endlessly. The reality is that mathematicians have always done math for the sake of enjoyment or understanding, and math contributes to society by improving understanding. Still, I am worried about the convenient social arrangement that allowed many mathematicians to do this for a modest living.
Anyway, I’m sure it was a good idea to apply the full might of capital for pure math problems, instead of less important social issues like climate change. We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).
Edit: Here is an article by Quanta which I think accurately describes the situation that mathematicians are going through right now: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-end-of-math-as-we-know-it-20261005/
so what i’m getting from this is the only kind of progress openai and friends are capable of is progressing from slop grenades to slop airstrikes, and so far it only works because they have good marketing, augmented by their own bot farms, and because money is all you need, and so far they haven’t ran out of money
I’m not at all a mathematician and mostly bad at understanding things, but, is an unwieldy proof that’s barely comprehensible and might be relying on multiple layers of bugs and traps and whatever undefined edges of formal proof systems even a proof at all? Does it actually merit consideration outside of pure spite (understandable)?
personally I feel like all this shit is a continuation/outgrowth from the crypto “whitepaper” phenomenon: ~zero substantive engagement with the actual discipline in question, and “work product” (quotes intentional) equal to some claims with a “proof” thrown out as its defense
(it also continues to be part of a cultural and knowledge DDoS, which others have written better on)
Like, in other words, I don’t think most mathematicians are particularly interested in building huge datacenters to brute-force compute quintillions of decimals of pi under current algorithms? Because the point is understanding, not mere knowledge? I dunno!
If it’s actually exploiting a bug in a formal system, no. If it’s a natural-language (unformalized) document which no one can understand, no. On the other hand a formal proof not using bugs which can’t be understood, is still considered a proof, though its value is lower than an understandable proof (because as you said in another comment, the real value is in understanding rather than theorems). The prototypical example before LLMs was the proof of the four-color theorem which relied on computer-checked casework.
We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).
rational investors enabling marginal utility… thasss capitalism in action baybeeeee
I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding.
Hooray for the Denial of Service attack from the industry that wants to put a meter on thinking itself.
It isnt going to just be math, programming, various sites filled with usefull information that are now being closed because they keep being hammered by bots (or ddos attacks if they manage to actively block the bots) etc. What a waste.
If it makes you feel better, the applied / empirical side is just as fucked as pure math. My unhappy thought is we spent 30 years as a discipline trying to decontaminate after The Bell Curve dropped and now, AI Murray will haunt me from beyond the grave.
We know that many AI projects are powered or monitored by a Guy in India. It turns out the mass shooter in northern Canada who looked to ChatGPT for advice also had a Discord buddy in the USA who knew about her plans. Police allege that after trying to talk her out of her plans he streamed for her and helped her start her car to get to the site of the murders. I hope he and Sam Altman spent 30 years as roommates. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/tumbler-ridge-mass-shooting-arrest-9.7371316
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons, because simply stealing the collective works of humanity isn’t enough
New Baldur Bjarnason: Software developers are not okay
It has felt like this is where it would end up since ChatGPT launched in late 2022 to be honest.
The bubble will pop. It’s much too big to be sustainable.
But that won’t fix software industry employment because the Large Language Models don’t really need to work that well for this process. They only need to sort of work.
Get ready for the era of digitally sovereign on-premise open weight perpetual software sweatshops.
Think you slightly messed up the link
Should be working now, forgot the https:// prefix
Oir big Old Moldy friend has decided he needs his work doesnt spread enough hitler particles.
edited alt text from the image
Curtis Yarvin post on X on 10/5/2026: "Every time I’m in the UK I hear this. More and more people asking, subtly or straight out: what would Hitler do?
As if it was that easy. Have you looked around you? Man, Hitler wouldn’t even know where to start"
Doesn’t he have a kid to raise or something (…yeah…)? Small miracle he still has custody
The China-Whisperers are trying to figure out how to get Rationalist Ideals into Chinese AI researchers
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmxkHm2dTLKG6GZ6i/the-anatomy-of-a-chinese-ai-researcher
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china
Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China won’t appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to “safety-pill” China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825
The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:
When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.
Goddamn it, people
It continues
the HPMOR comic
No no no no
HPMOR is the rationalist version of the Nigerian prince scam. It immediately weeds out anyone who isn’t a good mark.
I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the world… it’s bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute “Watchtower magazine” or “Dianetics” for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.
checkin’ into my motel room in Santa Clara, nearly falling flat on my face as I walk in the door. because instead of a Gideon Bible in the nightstand, this place has a printed copy of HPMoR as a doorstop
The things I printed at print shops while infiltrating a HPMOR reading group under cover in 2014…
Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise
Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo
Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs
A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, “Sounds like you’re probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.”
more in the comments
I already disliked the original [Harry Potter] for its lack of rationality as a child (how can they have magic and poverty at the same time?) so I loved the flip.
OK so does HPMOR solve poverty? (Q is rhetorical don’t answer)
If you didn’t like HP check out Grossman’s The Magicians. A lot of graduating magicians there join non-profits or hedge funds.
I unironically wish there were a faithful prose adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist I could point people to.
not that it makes any real difference but I have been seeing “Galfoy”. Knowing that “foid” has increased in usage is a bummer tho
I’ve genuinely never seen anything as cringe as ‘Malfoid’. it’s basically just riding the coattails of the much better Petra Parker trend except with incel language
Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.
let’s continue with the HP theme
Today I learned that Gwern has a folder of Nano Banana comics. Moreover, on HN, he’s proud of them. Masterful gambit, sir.
My God, it’s like the art becomes more bafflingly poor the closer he gets to stumbling into a decent joke. There’s a finite amount of quality that has to be balanced between the two, and it’s capped at “shit”.
Why does the kitchen in the “zen of instant coffee” strip have two stoves?
Also: needing Claude to make a pie chart. No, that is someone with a cognitive surrender fetish. I refuse to engage.
Not only are they grade-school level awful, he totally misses the point of the original
