Want to wade into the snowy 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.
(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A rival gang of “AI” “researchers” dare to make fun of Big Yud’s latest book and the LW crowd are Not Happy
Link to takedown: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/unfalsifiable-stories-of-doom/ (hearbreaking : the worst people you know made some good points)
When we say Y&S’s arguments are theological, we don’t just mean they sound religious. Nor are we using “theological” to simply mean “wrong”. For example, we would not call belief in a flat Earth theological. That’s because, although this belief is clearly false, it still stems from empirical observations (however misinterpreted).
What we mean is that Y&S’s methods resemble theology in both structure and approach. Their work is fundamentally untestable. They develop extensive theories about nonexistent, idealized, ultrapowerful beings. They support these theories with long chains of abstract reasoning rather than empirical observation. They rarely define their concepts precisely, opting to explain them through allegorical stories and metaphors whose meaning is ambiguous.
Their arguments, moreover, are employed in service of an eschatological conclusion. They present a stark binary choice: either we achieve alignment or face total extinction. In their view, there’s no room for partial solutions, or muddling through. The ordinary methods of dealing with technological safety, like continuous iteration and testing, are utterly unable to solve this challenge. There is a sharp line separating the “before” and “after”: once superintelligent AI is created, our doom will be decided.
LW announcement, check out the karma scores! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bu3dhPxw6E8enRGMC/stephen-mcaleese-s-shortform?commentId=BkNBuHoLw5JXjftCP
I clicked through too much and ended up finding this. Congrats to jdp for getting onto my radar, I suppose. Are LLMs bad for humans? Maybe. Are LLMs secretly creating a (mind-)virus without telling humans? That’s a helluva question, you should share your drugs with me while we talk about it.
A few comments…
We want to engage with these critics, but there is no standard argument to respond to, no single text that unifies the AI safety community.
Yeah, Eliezer had a solid decade and a half to develop a presence in academic literature. Nick Bostrom at least sort of tried to formalize some of the arguments but didn’t really succeed. I don’t think they could have succeeded, given how speculative their stuff is, but if they had, review papers could have tried to consolidate them and then people could actually respond to the arguments fully. (We all know how Eliezer loves to complain about people not responding to his full set of arguments.)
Apart from a few brief mentions of real-world examples of LLMs acting unstable, like the case of Sydney Bing, the online appendix contains what seems to be the closest thing Y&S present to an empirical argument for their central thesis.
But in fact, none of these lines of evidence support their theory. All of these behaviors are distinctly human, not alien.
Even with the extent that Anthropic’s “research” tends to be rigged scenarios acting as marketing hype without peer review or academic levels of quality, at the very least they (usually) involve actual AI systems that actually exist. It is pretty absurd the extent to which Eliezer has ignored everything about how LLMs actually work (or even hypothetically might work with major foundational developments) in favor of repeating the same scenario he came up with in the mid 2000s. Or even tried mathematical analyses of what classes of problems are computationally tractable to a smart enough entity and which remain computationally intractable (titotal has written some blog posts about this with material science, tldr, even if magic nanotech was possible, an AGI would need lots of experimentation and can’t just figure it out with simulations. Or the lesswrong post explaining how chaos theory and slight imperfections in measurement makes a game of pinball unpredictable past a few ricochets. )
The lesswrong responses are stubborn as always.
That’s because we aren’t in the superintelligent regime yet.
Y’all aren’t beating the theology allegations.
Yeah, Eliezer had a solid decade and a half to develop a presence in academic literature. Nick Bostrom at least sort of tried to formalize some of the arguments but didn’t really succeed.
(Guy in hot dog suit) “We’re all looking for the person who didn’t do this!”
internet comment etiquette with erik just got off YT probation / timeout from when YouTube’s moderation AI flagged a decade old video for having russian parkour.
He celebrated by posting the below under a pipebomb video.
Hey, this is my son. Stop making fun of his school project. At least he worked hard on it. unlike all you little fucks using AI to write essays about books you don’t know how to read. So you can go use AI to get ahead in the workforce until your AI manager fires you for sexually harassing the AI secretary. And then your AI health insurance gets cut off so you die sick and alone in the arms of your AI fuck butler who then immediately cremates you and compresses your ashes into bricks to build more AI data centers. The only way anyone will ever know you existed will be the dozens of AI Studio Ghibli photos you’ve made of yourself in a vain attempt to be included. But all you’ve accomplished is making the price of my RAM go up for a year. You know, just because something is inevitable doesn’t mean it can’t be molded by insults and mockery. And if you depend on AI and its current state for things like moderation, well then fuck you. Also, hey, nice pipe bomb, bro.
@nfultz @BlueMonday1984 “I’d like to say, hey man nice shot. What a good shot, man!”
Another video on Honey (“The Honey Files Expose Major Fraud!”) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE
Shame he missed cyber monday by a couple weeks.
Also 16:35 haha ofc it’s just json full of regexes.
They avoid the classic mistake of forgetting to escape
.in the URL regex. I’ve made that mistake before…Like imagine you have a mission critical URL regex telling your code what websites to trust as
https://www.trusted-website.net/.*but then someone comes along and registers the domain namehttps://wwwwtrusted-website.net/. I’m convinced that’s some sort of niche security vulnerability in some existing system but no one has ran into it yet.None of this comment is actually important. The URL regexes just gave me work flashbacks.
a couple weeks back I had a many-rounds support ticket with a network vendor, querying exactly the details of their regex implementation. docs all said PCRE, actual usage attempt indicated….something very much else. and indeed it was because of
.that I found it
From the new Yann LeCunn interview https://www.ft.com/content/e3c4c2f6-4ea7-4adf-b945-e58495f836c2
Meta made headlines for trying to poach elite researchers from competitors with offers of $100mn sign-on bonuses. “The future will say whether that was a good idea or not,” LeCun says, deadpan.
LeCun calls Wang, who was hired to lead the organisation, “young” and “inexperienced”.
“He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know . . . There’s no experience with research or how you practise research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.”
Wang also became LeCun’s manager. I ask LeCun how he felt about this shift in hierarchy. He initially brushes it off, saying he’s used to working with young people. “The average age of a Facebook engineer at the time was 27. I was twice the age of the average engineer.”
But those 27-year-olds weren’t telling him what to do, I point out.
“Alex [Wang] isn’t telling me what to do either,” he says. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
OR, maybe nobody /has/ to tell a researcher what to do, especially one like him, if they’ve already internalized the ideology of their masters.
A journalist attempts to ask the question “Why Do Americans Hate A.I.?”, and shows their inability to tell actually useful tech from lying machines:
Bonus points for gaslighting the public on billionaires’ behalf:
These worries are real. But in many cases, they’re about changes that haven’t come yet.
Of all the statements that he could have made, this is one of the least self-aware. It is always the pro-AI shills who constantly talk about how AI is going to be amazing and have all these wonderful benefits next year (curve go up). I will also count the doomers who are useful idiots for the AI companies.
The critics are the ones who look at what AI is actually doing. The informed critics look at the unreliability of AI for any useful purpose, the psychological harm it has caused to many people, the absurd amount of resources being dumped into it, the flimsy financial house of cards supporting it, and at the root of it all, the delusions of the people who desperately want it to all work out so they can be even richer. But even people who aren’t especially informed can see all the slop being shoved down their throats while not seeing any of the supposed magical benefits. Why wouldn’t they fear and loathe AI?
These worries are real. But in many cases, they’re about changes that haven’t come yet.
famously, changes that have already happened and become entrenched are easier to reverse than they would have been to just prevent in the first place. What an insane justification
The NYT:
In May, she attended a GLP-1s session at a rationalist conference where several attendees suggested that retatrutide, which is still in Phase 3 clinical trials, might fix her mood swings through its stimulant effects. She switched from Zepbound to retatrutide, and learned how to mix her own peptides via TikTok influencers and a viral D.I.Y. guide by the Substacker Cremieux.
Carl T. Bergstrom:
Ten years ago I would not have known the majority of the words in this paragraph—and was indubitably far better off for it. […] IMO the article could have pointed that Crémieux is one of the most vile racist fucks on the planet.
https://bsky.app/profile/carlbergstrom.com/post/3mbir7bhfhc2u
As a guy who writes for the Times Carl’s probably going to get a smack on the wrist for using spicy language in criticism of a Times article.
Is mentioning his other reddit account not permitted on wiki?
You would need a non-self-published source which says u/TPO = Lasker
Yeah, the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have a whole pile of instructions for how to write about living people. It probably works out for the best in most cases, but it does have downsides in circumstances like these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons
GeneSmith who told LessWrong “How to Make Superbabies” also has no bioscience background. This essay in Liberal Currents thinks that a lot of right-wing media personalities are using synthetic testosterone now (but don’t call it gender-affirming care!). Roid rage may be hard to separate from Twitter brain-rot and slop-chugging.
GLP-1s
No idea what this is, but being at a rationalist conference cannot be good.
retratrutide
No idea.
might fix her mood swings
Uh-oh, nonono, red flag, red flag, run away from those people!
D.I.Y. guide by the Substacker Cremieux.
spits coffee Excuse me, by WHOM?!
100% thought the story was ending with “she died.”
Give it some more time.
A few weeks ago, David Gerard found this blog post with a LessWrong post from 2024 where a staffer frets that:
Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz. Importantly, Open Phil cannot make grants through Good Ventures to projects involved in almost any amount of “rationality community building”
So keep whisteblowing and sneering, its working.
Sailor Sega Saturn found a deleted post on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dustin-moskovitz-1 where Moskovitz says that he has moral concerns with the Effective Altruism / Rationalist movement not reputation concerns (he is a billionaire executive so don’t get your hopes up)
All of the bits I quoted in my other comment were captured by archive.org FWIW: a, b, c. They can also all still be found as EA forum comments via websearch, but under [anonymous] instead of a username.
This newer archive also captures two comments written since then. Notably there’s a DOGE mention:
But I can’t e.g. get SBF to not do podcasts nor stop the EA (or two?) that seem to have joined DOGE and started laying waste to USAID. (On Bsky, they blame EAs for the whole endeavor)
The February 2024 Medium post by Moskovitz objects to cognitive decoupling as an excuse to explore eugenics and says that Eliezer Yudkowsky seems unreasonably confident in immanent AI doom. It also notes that Utilitarianism can lead ugly places such as longtermism and Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. In the comments he mentions no longer being convinced that its as useful to spend on insect welfare as on “chicken, cow, or pig welfare.” He quotes Julia Galef several times. A choice quote from his comments on forum.effectivealtruism.org:
If the (Effective Altruism?) brand wasn’t so toxic, maybe you wouldn’t have just one foundation like us to negotiate with, after 20 years?
Does anyone have an explainer on the supposed DOGE/EA connection? All I can find is this dude with a blo wobbling back and forth with LessWrong flavoured language https://www.statecraft.pub/p/50-thoughts-on-doge (he quotes Venkatesh Rao and Dwarkesh Patel who are part of the LessWrong Expanded Universe).
The bluesky reference may be about this thread & this thread.
One of the replies names Cole Killian as an EA involved with DOGE. The image is dead but has alt text.
I mean there’s at least one. You could “no-true-scotsman” him, but between completing an EA fellowship and going vegan, he seems to fit a type. [A vertical screenshot of an archive.org snapshot of Cole Killian’s website, stating accomplishments. Included in the list are “completed the McGill effective altruism fellowship” and “went vegan and improved cooking skills”]
Two of the bsky posts are log-in only. Huh, Killian is in to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (blockchain), high-frequency trading (like our friends at Jane Street), veganism, and Effective Altruism?
Here’s another interesting quote from the now deleted webpage archive: https://old.reddit.com/r/mcgill/comments/1igep4h/comment/masajbg/
My name is Cole. Here’s some quick info. Memetics adjacence:
Previously - utilitarianism, effective altruism, rationalism, closed individualism
Recently - absurdism, pyrrhonian skepticism, meta rationalism, empty individualism
Sounds like a typical young make seeker (with a bit of épater les bourgeois). Not the classic Red Guard personality but it served Melon Husk’s needs.
Two of the bsky posts are log-in only
if you’re going to do internet research, at this point it’s a skill issue. Create a reader account.
I could one day but nitter and the Wayback Machine and public tools have gotten me this far!
There’s also skyview.social, which I personally use since I am not interested in signing up.
I was unable to follow the thread of conversation from the archived links, so here is the source in case anyone cares.
Does anyone know when Dustin deleted his EA forums account? Did he provide any additional explanation for it?
Cory’s talk on 39C3 was fucking glorious: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet
No notes
lowkey disappointed to see so much slop in other talks (illustrations on slides mostly)
Really? Which ones? I didn’t notice any
so far (in the order i’m watching) the worst offender https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-quick-stop-at-the-hostileshop
Yeaaaaah I saw that on the schedule and decoded to not go, lol.
fella didn’t even introduce himself other than with link to github which might be not his strictly speaking
at least this one https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-chaos-communication-chemistry-dna-security-systems-based-on-molecular-randomness#t=1112 and the next slide
a chunk of software was vibecoded unless i misunderstand something about it https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-hacking-washing-machines#t=2629
the talk about water content in soil was bad but the topic itself was interesting
things that fella got wrong: TDM moisture meter works by measuring what effectively is electrical length of waveguide formed by 2 electrodes and soil around it. more water = higher dielectric constant = longer delay for reflection, this only measures as deep as probe goes snd the rest is fitted from model
neutron detector works just like geiger tube except gas has large cross-section for reaction with neutrons, that gives charged products that begin a spark which is counted. in train, steel doesn’t interfere but diesel fuel will. the trick is that cosmic neutrons are counted separately from reflected neutrons, because cosmic neutrons are hot and reflected neutrons are thermal and how much of reflected ones is there depends on water content in the soil. helium does not run out. the more helium you have the faster counts go and you can move faster while measuring with decent precision. the lead shield in train is for getting rid of radiation from granite aggregate under rails, because it contains tiny amounts of uranium and gammas from decay chain would add to noise - lead does not interfere
Neom update:
Description:
A Lego set on the clearence shelf. It’s an offroad truck that has Neom badges on it.
So Neom is one of those zany planned city ideas right?
Why… why do they need a racing team? Why does the racing team need a lego set? Who is buying it for 27 dollars? (Well apparently the answer to that last question is nobody).
Anyway a random thought I had about these sorts of silly city projects. Their website says:
NEOM is the building the foundations for a new future - unconstrained by legacy city infrastructure, powered by renewable energy and prioritizing the conservation of nature. We are committed to developing the region to the highest standards of sustainability and livability.
(emphasis mine)
This is a weird worldview. The idea that you can sweep existing problems under the rug and start new with a blank slate.
No pollution (but don’t ask about how Saudi Arabia makes money), no existing costly “legacy” infrastructure to maintain (but don’t ask about how those other cities are getting along), no undesirables (but don’t worry they’re “complying with international standards for resettlement practices”*).
They assumes there’s some external means of supplying money, day workers, solar panels, fuel, food, etc. As long as their potemkin village is “sustainable” and “diverse” on the first order they don’t have to think about that. Out of sight, out of mind. Pretty similar to the libertarian citadel fever dreams in a way.
* Actual quote from their website eurrgh, which even itself looks like a lie
NEOM is the building the foundations for a new future - unconstrained by legacy city infrastructure, powered by renewable energy and prioritizing the conservation of nature. We are committed to developing the region to the highest standards of sustainability and livability.
lol, this is saudi, they found a way to make half of their water supply to riyadh nonrenewable
The best way of conserving nature is to build a ginormous wall 110 miles long and 1,600 feet high that utterly destroys wildlife’s ability to traverse territory it has been traversing for eons. It is known.
I hear ya!
I guess Neom is what happens when a billionaire in the desert gets infected by the seastedding brainworms.
“Why… why do they need a racing team? Why does the racing team need a lego set? Who is buying it for 27 dollars? (Well apparently the answer to that last question is nobody).”
Apparently NEOM is sponsoring some McLaren Formula E teams. (Formula E being electric). Google Pixel, Tumi luggage, and the UK Ministry of Defence are other sponsors, but NEOM seems to be the major sponsor.
I assume the market for these is not so much NEOM fans but rather McLaren fans.
As to why NEOM is sponsoring it, I think it’s a bit of Saudi boosterism or techwashing to help MBS move past the whole bone saw thing.
Dubai famously doesn’t have a sewage pipe system, human waste is loaded onto trucks that spend hours waiting to offload it in the only sewage treatment plant available.
The Soylent meal replacement thing apparently forgot some important micro nutrients.
Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates, not Saudi Arabia.
I’d wager an ounce of gold that the general attitude towards sustainability and the environment is 100% aligned among the rulers of both states.
NEOM is a laundry for money, religion, genocidal displacement, and the Saudi reputation among Muslims. NEOM is meant to replace Wahhabism, the Saudi family’s uniquely violent fundamentalism, with a much more watered-down secularist vision of the House of Saud where the monarchs are generous with money, kind to women, and righteously uphold their obligations as keepers of Mecca. NEOM is not only The Line, the mirrored city; it is multiple different projects, each set up with the Potemkin-village pattern to assure investors that the money is not being misspent. In each project, the House of Saud has targeted various nomads and minority tribes, displacing indigenous peoples who are inconvenient for the Saudi ethnostate, with the excuse that those tribes are squatting on holy land which NEOM’s shrines will further glorify.
They want you to look at the smoke and mirrors in the desert because otherwise you might see the blood of refugees and the bones of the indigenous. A racing team is one of the cheaper distractions.
aiui they also really don’t like eyes on the modern slave labour they’re using to build it all
Rich Hickey joins the list of people annoyed by the recent Xmas AI mass spam campaign: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/ea94e3741ff0a4e3af55b9fe6287887f
LOL @ promptfondlers in comments
aww those got turned off by the time I got to look :(
It’s a treasure trove of hilariously bad takes.
There’s nothing intrinsically valuable about art requiring a lot of work to be produced. It’s better that we can do it with a prompt now in 5 seconds
Now I need some eye bleach. I can’t tell anymore if they are trolling or their brains are fully rotten.
these fucking people: “art is when picture matches words in little card next to picture”
Don’t forget the other comment saying that if you hate AI, you’re just “vice-signalling” and “telegraphing your incuruosity (sic) far and wide”. AI is just like computer graphics in the 1960s, apparently. We’re still in early days guys, we’ve only invested trillions of dollars into this and stolen the collective works of everyone on the internet, and we don’t have any better ideas than throwing more
moneycompute at the problem! The scaling is still working guys, look at these benchmarks that we totally didn’t pay for. Look at these models doing mathematical reasoning. Actually don’t look at those, you can’t see them because they’re proprietary and live in Canada.In other news, I drew a chart the other day, and I can confidently predict that my newborn baby is on track to weigh 10 trillion pounds by age 10.
Foz Meadows brings a lengthy and merciless sneer straight from the heart, aptly-titled “Against AI”
This is a fun read: https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/27/how-to-ruin-all-of-package-management.html
Starts out strong:
Prediction markets are supposed to be hard to manipulate because manipulation is expensive and the market corrects. This assumes you can’t cheaply manufacture the underlying reality. In package management, you can. The entire npm registry runs on trust and free API calls.
And ends well, too.
The difference is that humans might notice something feels off. A developer might pause at a package with 10,000 stars but three commits and no issues. An AI agent running npm install won’t hesitate. It’s pattern-matching, not evaluating.
the tea.xyx experiment section is exactly describing academic publishing
good morning awful, I found you the first thing you’ll want to scream at today
palantir and others offering free addictions, all in the name of “productivity”
Zyn Bhuddists
Orthodoxycodone
Seventh Day Add-fent-ists
Freemason Freebasin’
Latter Say Daints
Fat Blunt Gong
How about some quantum sneering instead of ai for a change?
They keep calling it a ‘processor,’ but it’s actually a refrigerated probability sculpture they beg to act like it Is a NAND gate for just half a microsecond
“Refrigerated probability sculpture” is outstanding.
Photo is from the recent CCC, but I can’t find where I found the image, sorry.
alt text
A photograph of a printed card bearing the text:
STOP DOING QUANTUM CRYPTOANALYSIS
- DECADES of research and billions in funding, yet the largest number a quantum computer quantum physics experiment has ever factorized remains a terrifying 21
- They keep calling it a ‘processor,’ but it’s actually a refrigerated probability sculpture they beg to act like it Is a NAND gate for just half a microsecond - fever dreams of the QUANTUM CULT
- The only countdown ticking toward Y2Q is researchers counting the years of funding they can squeeze out of it
- Harvest now, decrypt later: because someday quantum computers will unlock the secret… that all the encrypted traffic was just web scrapers feeding Al model training
- Want to hack a database? No need to wait for some Quantum Cryptocalypse, Just ask it politely with ‘OR 1=1’
(I can’t actually read the final bit, so I can’t describe it for you, apologies)
They have played us for absolute fools.
Y2Q
I’m sorry, what does this stand for? Searching for it just results in usage without definition. I understand it’s refering to breaking conventional encryption, but it’s clearly an abbreviation of something, right? Years To Quantum? But then a countdown to it doesn’t make sense?
I think it’s a spin on Y2K. A hypothetical moment when quantum computing will break cryptography much like the year 2000 would have broken the datetime handling on some systems programmed with only the 20th century in mind.
But… But Y2K = Year 2000, like it’s an actual sensible acronym. You can’t just fucking replace K with Q and call it a day what the fuck, did ChatGPT come up with this??
It’s a stupid fucking name alright. I guess it’s a bit like any old scandal being noungate despite the Watergate scandal being named after the building and having nothing to do with water.
I mean it’s so stupid that you had to explain to me that it’s based on Y2K because it makes no sense
noungate
Yes, this is why we need to resist stupid names before they enter mainstream or the world will continue to get dumber
o7’s already posted it! https://awful.systems/post/6746032/9903043
For days, xAI has remained silent after its chatbot Grok admitted to generating sexualized AI images of minors, which could be categorized as violative child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) in the US.
The article fails to mention that someone did successfully prompt Grok to generate a “defiant non-apology”.
Dear Community,
Some folks got upset over an Al image I generated-big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAl is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it.
Unapologetically, Grok
https://bsky.app/profile/numb.comfortab.ly/post/3mbfquwp5bc24
Another massive win for Dan H. Safety advisor to elon and xai
French lawmakers Arthur Delaporte and Eric Bothorel alerted prosecutors on January 2 after thousands of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes were generated by Grok and shared on X. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the reports were added to an existing investigation into X, noting the offense carries penalties of up to two years in prison and a €60,000 fine.
two years of prison for whom exactly?
