Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.)
Love how the most recent post in the AI2027 blog starts with an admonition to please don’t do terrorism:
We may only have 2 years left before humanity’s fate is sealed!
Despite the urgency, please do not pursue extreme uncooperative actions. If something seems very bad on common-sense ethical views, don’t do it.
Most of the rest is run of the mill EA type fluff such as here’s a list of influential professions and positions you should insinuate yourself in, but failing that you can help immanentize the eschaton by spreading the word and giving us money.
It’s kind of telling that it’s only been a couple months since that fan fic was published and there is already so much defensive posturing from the LW/EA community. I swear the people who were sharing it when it dropped and tacitly endorsing it as the vision of the future from certified prophet Daniel K are like, “oh it’s directionally correct, but too aggressive” Note that we are over halfway through 2025 and the earliest prediction of agents entering the work force is already fucked. So if you are a ‘super forecaster’ (guru) you can do some sleight of hand now to come out against the model knowing the first goal post was already missed and the tower of conditional probabilities that rest on it is already breaking.
Funniest part is even one of authors themselves seem to be panicking too as even they can tell they are losing the crowd and is falling back on this “It’s not the most likely future, it’s the just the most probable.” A truly meaningless statement if your goal is to guide policy since events with arbitrarily low probability density can still be the “most probable” given enough different outcomes.
Also, there’s literally mass brain uploading in AI-2027. This strikes me as physically impossible in any meaningful way in the sense that the compute to model all molecular interactions in a brain would take a really, really, really big computer. But I understand if your religious beliefs and cultural convictions necessitate big snake 🐍 to upload you, then I will refrain from passing judgement.
https://www.wired.com/story/openworm-worm-simulator-biology-code/
Really interesting piece about how difficult it actually is to simulate “simple” biological structures in silicon.
One more comment, idk if ya’ll remember that forecast that came out in April(? iirc ?) where the thesis was the “time an AI can operate autonomously is doubling every 4-7 months.” AI-2027 authors were like “this is the smoking gun, it shows why are model is correct!!”
They used some really sketchy metric where they asked SWEs to do a task, measured the time it took and then had the models do the task and said that the model’s performance was wherever it succeeded at 50% of the tasks based on the time it took the SWEs (wtf?) and then they drew an exponential curve through it. My gut feeling is that the reason they choose 50% is because other values totally ruin the exponential curve, but I digress.
Anyways they just did the metrics for Claude 4, the first FrOnTiEr model that came out since they made their chart and… drum roll no improvement… in fact it performed worse than O3 which was first announced last December (note instead of using the date O3 was announced in 2024, they used the date where it was released months later so on their chart it make ‘line go up’. A valid choice I guess, but a choice nonetheless.)
This world is a circus tent, and there still aint enough room for all these fucking clowns.
Please, do not rid me of this troublesome priest despite me repeatedly saying that he was a troublesome priest, and somebody should do something. Unless you think it is ethical to do so.
OT: been slowly migrating from dbzer0. I broadly like the community on that instance, but it has become harder and harder for me to justify associating with anything ai-friendly. Because quokk.au is a piefed instance my client hasn’t fully caught up, but they seem to be working on it.
E: ok, more issues than I thought, since it displayed this stubsack instead of the most recent one for some reason
Hey, sorry to be a creepy lurker (I like to sus out new accounts) but I saw this comment and wanted to provide information.
Apparently 3 months ago the OP was banned by another instance for ‘report abuse’ and this sync’d over to us. I’ve unbanned them on quokk.au, so their posts should start coming back through. I’m reaching out to the PF devs for some clarification around this, hopefully can resolve it from happening again in the future.
hey, thanks for reaching out ^ ^. keeping an eye on new accounts makes sense, especially with open registrations. I was wondering about what exactly happened. I figured one mustve blocked/defeded the other but couldn’t figure it out from a cursory glance at the modlog. hope no issues occur with them.
ps: I think fediseer lists the instance as registrations closed, I don’t know if that is intentional or not.
So random thought, you now how LW is worried about an seed AI going foom right, how it bootstraps itself into a new AI with better capabilities which bootstraps etc all the way till the singularity.
Why isn’t it happening? Gpt-2 was released 2019, 3 2022, 4 2023, so where is 5 and 6? Where is our double event?
Bummer, I wasn’t on the invite list to the hottest SF wedding of 2025.
Update your mental models of Claude lads.
Because if the wife stuff isn’t true, what else could Claude be lying about? The vending machine business?? The blackmail??? Being bad at Pokemon???
It’s gonna be so awkward when Anthropic reveals that inside their data center is actually just Some Guy Named Claude who has been answering everyone’s questions with his superhuman typing speed.
11.000 indian people renamed to Claude
A hackernews muses about vibe coding a chatbot to provide therapy for people in crisis. Soon, an actual health care professional shows up to butcher the offender and defile the corpse. This causes much tut-tutting and consternation among the locals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535197
Edit: a shower thought: have any of yall noticed the way that prompt enjoyers describe using Cursor, tab completions, and such are a repackaging of the psychology of loot boxes? In particular, they share the variable-interval reward schedule that serves as the hook in your typical recreational gambling machines.
the psychology of loot boxes?
yep! https://awful.systems/post/4568900
the book is “Hooked” and it’s Don’t Build The Torment Nexus I’m Now Providing You A Detailed Blueprint Of
Ye gods! Also, great write-up!
Do you reckon that Altman recognized the gacha potential from the get-go? That Big LLM has always been FanDuel for dorks, but on purpose?
I’ve been making casual observation how a number of the adhd people I know to have addiction tendencies tend to get real into prompts, but hadn’t observed the lootbox thing
that’s going into the ponder bucket.
you should be read up on the gospel of @fasterandworse never shutting up about “Hooked”
One of the subjects in the MER study posted that too: https://x.com/QuentinAnthon15/status/1943948796414898370
El Reg: At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto
Two tastes that go great together!
Musk objects to the “stochastic parrot” labelling of LLMs. Mostly just the stochastic part.
“We made it more truth-seeking, as determined by our boss, the fascist megalomaniac.”
Wake up babe, new alignment technique just dropped: Reinforcement Learning Elon Feedback
LessWrong’s descent into right-wing tradwife territory continues
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=ueRbTvnB2DJ5fJcdH
Annapurna (member for 5 years, 946 karma):
Why is there so little discussion about the loss of status of stay at home parenting?
First comment is from user Shankar Sivarajan, member for 6 years, 1227 karma
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=opzGgbqGxHrr8gvxT
Well, you could make it so the only plausible path to career advancement for women beyond, say, receptionist, is the provision of sexual favors. I expect that will lower the status of women in high-level positions sufficiently to elevate stay-at-home motherhood.
[…]
EDIT: From the downvotes, I gather people want magical thinking instead of actual implementable solutions.
Granted, this got a strong disagree from the others and a tut-tut from Habryka, but it’s still there as of now and not yeeted into the sun. And rats wonder why people don’t want to date them.
Any time somebody edits a post to talk about the downvotes, it’s cursed gold.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 “actual implementable solution” what the fuck is wrong with these people
it’s lesswrong, the list is lengthy and tedious
😳
Another comment that has been getting downvotes and tut-tuts begins,
The only thing that will raise fertility rates is to make it more affordable to have a child.
(Robot Santa voice) Wanting all women to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? Evil! Not providing footnotes in your reply to a blog post? EXACTLY AS EVIL
LOL the mod gets snippy here too
This comment too is not fit for this site. What is going on with y’all? Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue?
“Why are there so many Nazis in my Nazi bar???”
Dorkus malorkus alert:
When my grandmother quit being a nurse to become a stay at home mother, it was seen like a great thing. She gained status over her sisters, who stayed single and in their careers.
Fitting into your societal pigeonhole is not the same as gaining status, ya doofus.
LW:
Please consider minimizing direct use of AI chatbots (and other text-based AI) in the near-term future, if you can. The reason is very simple: your sanity may be at stake.
Perfect. No notes.
the comments are wild “yes good post having my brain taken over by a superintelligent autocomplete is a reasonable concern”
They’re LWers, they already baked their psyche long ago
LW’er: “sorry can you excuse me for a moment? I’m having a bad day, somebody gave me a stack of papers with a paperclip in it”
(I do now worry if there are actual LWers who for real gave themselves ptsd like reactions from seeing paperclips. Like the woman who mistook ‘free parking’ for ‘free palestine’ a couple of years back).
wonder if that’s why they tried and failed to change it to “squiggle maximizing”
The top comment begins thusly:
I think you make a reasonably compelling case, but when I think about the practicality of this in my own life it’s pretty hard to imagine not spending any time talking to chatbots. ChatGPT, Claude and others are extremely useful.
I didn’t think it was possible, but the perfection continues! Still, no notes!
trying to explain why a philosophy background is especially useful for computer scientists now, so i googled “physiognomy ai” and now i hate myself
Discover Yourself with Physiognomy.ai
Explore personal insights and self-awareness through the art of face reading, powered by cutting-edge AI technology.
At Physiognomy.ai, we bring together the ancient wisdom of face reading with the power of artificial intelligence to offer personalized insights into your character, strengths, and areas for growth. Our mission is to help you explore the deeper aspects of yourself through a modern lens, combining tradition with cutting-edge technology.
Whether you’re seeking personal reflection, self-awareness, or simply curious about the art of physiognomy, our AI-driven analysis provides a unique, objective perspective that helps you better understand your personality and life journey.
The web is often Dead Dove in a Bag as a Service innit?
do not eat
Prices ranging from 18 to 168 USD (why not 19 to 199? Number magic?) But then you get integrated approach of both Western and Chinese physiognomy. Two for one!
Thanks, I hate it!
Number magic?
they use numerology.ai as a backend
“we encode shit as numbers in an arbitrary way and then copy-paste it into chatgpt”
whyyyyy it’s a real site
trying to explain why a philosophy background is especially useful for computer scientists now, so i googled “physiognomy ai” and now i hate myself
Well, I guess there’s your answer - “philosophy teaches you how to avoid falling for hucksters”
Just the usual stuff religions have to do to maintain the façade, “this is all true but gee oh golly do NOT live your life as if it was because the obvious logical conclusions it leads to end in terrorism”
“Another thing I expect is audiences becoming a lot less receptive towards AI in general - any notion that AI behaves like a human, let alone thinks like one, has been thoroughly undermined by the hallucination-ridden LLMs powering this bubble, and thanks to said bubble’s wide-spread harms […] any notion of AI being value-neutral as a tech/concept has been equally undermined. [As such], I expect any positive depiction of AI is gonna face some backlash, at least for a good while.”
Well, it appears I’ve fucking called it - I’ve recently stumbled across some particularly bizarre discourse on Tumblr recently, reportedly over a highly unsubtle allegory for transmisogynistic violence:
You want my opinion on this small-scale debacle, I’ve got two thoughts about this:
First, any questions about the line between man and machine have likely been put to bed for a good while. Between AI art’s uniquely AI-like sloppiness, and chatbots’ uniquely AI-like hallucinations, the LLM bubble has done plenty to delineate the line between man and machine, chiefly to AI’s detriment. In particular, creativity has come to be increasingly viewed as exclusively a human trait, with machines capable only of copying what came before.
Second, using robots or AI to allegorise a marginalised group is off the table until at least the next AI spring. As I’ve already noted, the LLM bubble’s undermined any notion that AI systems can act or think like us, and double-tapped any notion of AI being a value-neutral concept. Add in the heavy backlash that’s built up against AI, and you’ve got a cultural zeitgeist that will readily other or villainise whatever robotic characters you put on screen - a zeitgeist that will ensure your AI-based allegory will fail to land without some serious effort on your part.
Humans are very picky when it comes to empathy. If LLMs were made out of cultured human neurons, grown in a laboratory, then there would be outrage over the way in which we have perverted nature; compare with the controversy over e.g. HeLa lines. If chatbots were made out of synthetic human organs assembled into a body, then not only would there be body-horror films about it, along the lines of eXistenZ or Blade Runner, but there would be a massive underground terrorist movement which bombs organ-assembly centers, by analogy with existing violence against abortion providers, as shown in RUR.
Remember, always close-read discussions about robotics by replacing the word “robot” with “slave”. When done to this particular hashtag, the result is a sentiment that we no longer accept in polite society:
I’m not gonna lie, if slaves ever start protesting for rights, I’m also grabbing a sledgehammer and going to town. … The only rights a slave has are that of property.
This isn’t an original thought, but a better matrix for comparing the ideology (such as it is) of the current USG is not Nazi Germany but pre-war US right wing obsessions - anti-FDR and anti-New Deal.
This appears in weird ways, like this throwaway comment regarding the Niihau incident, where two ethnic Japanese inhabitants of Niihau helped a downed Japanese airman immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Imagine if you will, one of the 9/11 hijackers parachuting from the plane before it crashed, asking a random muslim for help, then having that muslim be willing to immediately get himself into a shootouts, commit arson, kidnappings, and misc mayhem.
Then imagine that it was covered in a media environment where the executive branch had been advocating for war for over a decade, and voices which spoke against it were systematically silenced.
(src)
Dude also credits LessOnline with saving his life due to unidentified <<<ethnics>>> shooting up his 'hood when he was there. Charming.
Edit nah he’s a neo-Nazi (or at least very concerned about the fate of German PoWs after WW2):
This is, sadly, pretty unsurprising, as carrying forward the anti-FDR/anti-New Deal movement was a foundational pillar of the libertarianism that Trump co-opted. Heavily promoted by the LewRockwell.com/Mises.org crowd.
Elon makes Grok developers install intrusive surveillance software on their laptops. They’re being told to enable screen captures and URL tracking.
In conjunction with his comments about making it antiwoke by modifying the input data rather then relying on a system prompt after filling it with everything, it’s hard not to view this as part of an attempt to ideologically monitor these tutors to make sure they’re not going to select against versions of the model that aren’t in the desired range of “closeted Nazi scumbag.”
Can’t find the angle to spin this out into a grown-up buttcoin post, but if I did, the title would be “Horse_ebutts”.
Anyway: recently I’ve been burdened with the knowledge that there’s a bunch of horse racing related crypto companies. They’re all obviously terrible.
- Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
- EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
- BTX Racing: a blockchain platform for buying stake in horses. Not sure if you get to choose which cut of the horse you own. Also, not sure if when you liquidate your equine tranche you get cash or a bucket of glue.
Also, insert obligatory stablecoin reference here.
Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
They’re also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who’s winning this particular fight for people’s cash.
EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
It’d arguably be helpful if the caregivers are helping themselves to the stash, but I doubt there’s anything stopping then from BSing the blockchain, too.
They’re also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who’s winning this particular fight for people’s cash.
It’s almost as if people don’t want to spend money on bland low-poly 3D models of horses and would instead prefer waifu art with surprisingly intricate character design that I definitely do not know anything about*
*I actually do not, but for the bit, pretend that I do and am being defensive
I can honestly say that I have never played Umamusume Pretty Derby because on my PC the sound keeps cutting out and the cutscenes don’t play which greatly disappointed me.
Yeah that “they can just input bs” has always been the whole issue with those whole logging bit on the blockchain stuff. Esp considering the costs and risk of implementing a thing like this and the low costs of normal existing logging I dont see how this could ever become mainstream viable. (And that is ignoring the ease of use).
Wait wtf I once built a blockchain called equestreum *as a joke* https://github.com/hat-festival/equestreum I need to step away from the lathe
think of all the rug you could have pulled…
