The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
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.)
https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-alleged-bugging-executive-conference-room/ h/t Naked Capitalism
A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
lol asking ChatGPT how to bug OpenAI from your wife’s account.
How much slop is in Linux now? You’re no longer allowed to know, so its probably all slop
(why did I jump ship to Linux at this exact moment)
Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?
I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me “wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies” I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.
I was just listening to an interview with Emile Torres, it’s an hour long but it is on the topic you’re asking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt508VjX2H8
More news about the character dot ai bankruptcy: as it turns out, the true economics of the company are disastrous. At their peak, their revenue was around $1M a month while their AI compute expenses alone were $14M a month! Their total expenses in 2025 were around $18.5M a month before counting legal fees. All of this is for a pure text-based low power LLM (none of the “reasoning” business).
Before AI boosters crow about how much cheaper AI is currently, they tried every trick in the book to enshittify: open models, ads, usage limits, etc. This allowed them to cut down their losses to a mere $9M a month.
Surely this is all one big exception, everyone else in the AI bubble is doing just fine!
How you look at “my company pays $14 for every $ from the user” and not like, idk, stop, seek help, change your job, name, and address, is completely beyond me.
You assume that the VCs will keep you alive a little longer as a honeypot to gather more plaintext blackmail material and private information and keep preparing to sell out to Facebook
Unconfirmed rumor says that a Swedish streaming service had to postpone the premiere of a new game show season because an “AI agent” deleted the completed cut of the show.
Via SVT: https://www.svt.se/kultur/tekniskt-haveri-tv4-skjuter-upp-realitysatsning
References Aftonbladet: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oE8A/the-challenge-sverige-raderad-av-ai-bara-veckor-innan-premiaren
The streaming service (TV4) says it’s a “technical issue” (the Swedish term “haveri” is used for everything from a computer system crash to an airplane crash).
a nsfw to start wednesday, what if the billionaires all suddenly exploded
Lets spend 500 Billion tokens on reverse engineering an unspecified first person shooter. You ask how our agents communicate with each other? Obviously via a fucking Discord channel because that makes sense.
I think it was modern warfare 2 but they redacted all explicit references because activision or whoever was starting to make annoyed legal noises.
The insistence on using number of functions copied as a metric is weird, like of course a port isn’t going to be a function-to-function translation, programming languages are never a 1-1 match with each other that’s kind of the point of having more than one.
What we needed was an automated check that tells agents whether a reconstructed function matches the original. It should verify identical semantics. A simple PASS or FAIL signal would be enough and the agent can figure out on its own what’s wrong.
Uh, sure.
Also a lot of their recommendations come of as no-duh, like pressing the compact conversation button early to reduce tokens or using a common specification document across LLM instances to keep them more coordinated, how novel, are you kidding me.
Another one of their recommendations is that fixing stuff causes garbage to accumulate, so if something isn’t working out you are better off starting from scratch, because tokens are cheap now! You just need to be doing the equivalent of maxing out dad’s credit cards by using multiple private subscriptions in tandem, and I guess also make sure to time your dev cycle to coincide with the two major LLM vendors having a money burning competition on their way to an IPO.
Finally there’s a whole hypecycle going on currently that this feeds into, that makes headline readers think that LLMs can convert binaries right back into code now, when they are actually using an MCP to control existing decompilation software which is so far from the same thing.
“Yes I did it. No you can’t see the work”
Via Kevin Bird (who has taken on the Rationalists before) a substack taking down Jordan Lasker/Crémieux Recueil
Anthropic has a new angle for trying to get local LLMs banned, apparently they’re about to be able to use your temu android tv to take over your smart toaster:
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested
edit: The TVs need to be off-brand to lack basic security features, and also there must be at least four of them to even start being inference-capable, and the actual setting up of a distributed inference network on android tvs is handwaved as “feasible”.
The thrilling conclusion of this blog post is called Signs of Life, because of course it is.
I too have seen the documentary “Maximum Overdrive”
I wonder what answers you would get if you polled these Anthropic people about the Covid lab leak theory
It’s funny how they’re twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.
What fullsquare said, they’ve got years of sci-fi filtered through lesswrong short stories and sequence posts saying it could happen, so they repeated that despite all the ways it is completely impossible given the limitations and hardware requirements of LLMs.
but it has to work, it was foretold in ai in a box prophecy
Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way
MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin
Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn
Anthropic really won’t let this botnet thing go. It’s so desperate & ridiculous.
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9B parameter models are so weak that they’re essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.
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Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.
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Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It’s simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.
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Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can’t get in.
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Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.
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Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic’s models, not open-weight ones.
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Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.
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I’m pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it’s eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it’s impossible to believe it’s being done in good faith.
What if an AI did the same thing that Mirai is already doing only we spent far more money on the attempt and we were almost certainly legally liable for the consequences?
edit: failed to spot the ninja edit so the response made no sense
Sorry I thought this updated comment was a better one 😅
For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I can’t decide whether Dario and co are confidence scammers or genuinely earnestly think that these next word prediction models are sentient due to all the brain damage, they’ve inflicted on themselves. FWIW Sama and friends are almost certainly in that first camp.
Sama is a serial scammer, this is just the biggest scam he’s managed to foster. He’ll say whatever it takes to get the payout.
Dario is a true believer but I also think the prospect of $billions skews his judgement
The presence of billions of dollars under anyone’s control destroys anyone’s brains as their lives have all negative feedback removed, their surroundings become a reflection of their own preferences alone rather than bearing any information about the world, and their social connections become transactional and sycophantic.
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rats’ best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton
And yet so much less plausible than “diamondoid nanobacteria” or whatever it is. I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.
I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.
i mean that’s why we all are here, the problem is that they have thiel’s money and white house advisors
And yet so much less plausible than “diamondoid nanobacteria”
drexler is a hack and yud’s nanobots can’t grow, can’t divide (they’re made from stiff material), can’t self-repair (it’s one piece), and would turn out to be extremely expensive coal dust fire, and that’s before you look too closely, so i wouldn’t say that because iot devices at least aren’t forbidden by known laws of physics
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A frustrating (and beware, long) post I came across: Coding is NOT solved
Starts off with some good sneers:
Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough: ❌ Haven’t written code in ages ❌ Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers! ❌ Have a low bar for what good looks like ❌ Don’t care about quality or NFR ❌ Have difficulty understanding an S-curve ✅ Are honest: AI genuinely writes better code than them
But the author can’t get over their AI-centrism:
Instead of following other people’s advice, build with AI, gain first hand experience and make up your mind. But whatever you do, please please please don’t fool yourself into believing this is a fad. AI is here to stay, and as I stated above there are some genuine use cases for it already.
New Baldur Bjarnason: It’s not our job to fix our employers
As a note, Baldur dedicates much of the first half to how general sentiment has shifted against the tech industry over the past decade.
New Odium Symposium. We go through an episode of Loveline, a once wildly popular call-in radio show, then look at where its hosts Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew ended up.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/26-chudline-with-172120239 or www.odiumsymposium.com for all the usual rss sources
Character.AI files for bankruptcy, agrees to sell some assets for $20 million
At one point “valued” at 2.5B, so that sale is 99%+ discount, even charitably assuming 100M sale of it all it’s still 96% discount
thank god. horrid, parasocial site
it’s not shutting down so far, and if anyone buys that part it will remain up
please let nobody buy it and have it shut down. it’s arguably the patient zero of ai psychosis
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. Shame they’re probably all made and siphoned off life-changing amounts of money before this happened. I guess we can always hope they take up smoking because AI is going to cure cancer.
Also notable for being the first to get a kid killed by AI suicide encouragement. Burn it to the ground and make teeth fillings from the slag.
Bankruptcy means they’re not going to be paying out damages for all the AI Psychosis they caused.
They looking to get off the hook before all the class action lawsuits pile up?
or maybe they genuinely ran out of vc money
Wonder who gets all the plaintext logs from all their victims
not done yet
Under this process, Disney’s bid would set a baseline offer while allowing competing bidders to submit higher bids, and the company expects the sale process to conclude by late November or early December 2026.
perhaps them, and maybe these are linked to identities of users
This is sad news, as companies are not alive, this means there is no new public toilet.
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Looks like a Stanford philosophy professor either didn’t get invited to the orgies, or had a bad time, and took out his frustration by writing an op-ed in The Economist decrying the EAs for caring more about shrimp than people.
An outraged green-leaf LWer took to the substacks to attack him, saying he cares less about shrimp than people.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mEZAjDR9HuwJCJfWH/leif-wenar-s-takedown-of-effective-altruism
As someone who isn’t totally uninterested in animal welfare the shrimp argument always makes me generally grumpy. Like, I’ll grant that it’s better to use a stunner than to not and that it’s probably a good use of $15, but the whole problem with EAs is that they have significantly more than $15 at their disposal. Like, if you just do the naive multiplication you’ll end up missing out on two things. On the one side opportunities that require a lot more than $15 to have a positive impact that are going otherwise underserved. On the other, more important side, their emphasis on economic efficiency leaves them blind to the completely avoidable harms that are inflicted in the accumulation of that much money. That’s how grifters like SBF work their way in, and why the whole enterprise seems to be earning a reputation as a way to make tech billionaires feel better about themselves rather than actually making the world a better place.
I think the shrimp stunner isn’t even a thing, it’s just something semi-plausible bentham’s bulldog invented to make his argument work.
charming.
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says researchers have started smoking, believing AI will cure cancer via r/nottheonion
The Palantir CTO said that researchers were now so confident in AI that they had started smoking. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Shyam Sankar told CBS. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will—I’m showing you my chips are all in.” Perhaps, the researchers think that there is no better way of showing faith in AI than to indulge in something that could cause them cancer – hopefully AI finds that cure before things get serious.
ok way to snitch on them to health insurance bot. presumably all their CEO customers are prompting “hike premiums on dumbasses. make no mistakes no luigi”. happy open enrollment season. /s
Costly signaling by which one credibly gives something up to follow the precepts of the cult and demonstrate that one believes in the face of personal disadvantage is one of the strongest things that predicts cohesion of a religious movement.
This is proper cult membership credibility testing stuff. “If you really believe, you’ll drink the koolaid”
Previously posted here: https://awful.systems/post/10025000
