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.)
At the same time, some of that harm may be balanced on a statistical level by lives saved through AI tech.
[]The bad stuff happening now is worth it so that humanity can benefit in the future… Now where have I heard that before,
New (to me) lore from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline
This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses.
The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day.
lol pilgramage what. is he converting?
Buddism us quite popular amoung the tech crowd from what I always gathered. So no shock there, that or Orthodox Christianity. (The latter being the preferred adult convert religion of alt right types. because they think it is like how space is uncorrupted by capitalism, but instead of capitalism they fear the woke).
Because rationalists distrust mainstream normal science and skepticism, they are far more willing to dabble in mysticism and the supernatural than normal skeptics.
lol pilgramage what. is he converting?
The parts I skimmed mostly read like a travelogue so tax write-off vacations with the family in Europe, plus he has an audience of marks that will eat up fucking anything as long as it’s framed as independent research into the parts mainstream academia doesn’t want YOU to know about.
Still the cross-section between simulationists/transhumanists and mysticism enthusiasts was already huge before Yud mixed in adult Harry Potter fandom and an implicitly supernatural set of adages about human-to-computer soul transfer and living in the end of days waiting for the Artificial Godhead Intelligence to incarnate and judge humanity.
the kindergarten/elementary school / New Atheism view of religion is “believe in big sky father, ask him personally for good stuff, get good stuff”. Religions that manage to progress out of the cult stage do have something more going on, generally a system of ethics designed to help people cope with the vagaries of life (and maybe also control their thoughts so they don’t revolt).
I think this is why Buddhism (at least the Western kind) is so popular, as it relatively focussed on “how to live” rather than “what to believe”.
“Rationality” strives to be a secular Buddhism, you have rules and precepts for how to approach life and personal interactions. It’s interesting and maybe a comment on how human brains work that they seem to have invented a great sky father from first principles too.
there are some religions that put more emphasis on orthodoxy and there are religions that put more emphasis on orthopraxy. christianity would be more in the former category and buddhism, especially buddhism-as-mind-hacking-tool would be the latter. rationalists are just religious in a way that is less common in the west
tangent
the kindergarten/elementary school / New Atheism view of religion is “believe in big sky father, ask him personally for good stuff, get good stuff”.
there is some evidence that a couple of ancient polytheist religions worked this way, sort of https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
you might wonder if there’s some space for new atheist racism to happen, as religions that do more of orthopraxy are not western or ancient (therefore primitive)
The latest tech bro attack on public education is Alpha School for teenagers. One reporter thinks that if we take the accounts claiming to be students are real then:
…we have to take semi-seriously the question of whether Alpha School is a cult? A set of indoctrination camps for the airport-book class? What the hell is happening here?
A focus on judging people by biometrics, cult criticism, and assertion that LLMs can replace teachers. Someone on Bsky replies:
The cult of Alpha school is strong in Miami-where the Miami tech/finance/crypto bro set is just generally dumber (or less intellectual, less cultured, less educated) and far less ethical than in other parts of the country (not that silicon valley tech bros are awesome, but the worst ones move here)
Hereticon got started in Miami.
They’re tarnishing the Alpha course’s¹ hard-won cult branding.
¹ They might not seem too culty based on that Wikipedia page but if I remember correctly Private Eye printed some very critical stuff about the courses and people associated with them in recent years. Details not forthcoming until I flick through my big stack of old magazines…
A woman with the Bsky handle genna has them clocked:
a LOT of the techniques and ideologies (faith in unpaid, uncomfortable labour as a way to modify behaviour, impossible/humiliating tasks) seem inspired by the widespread and widely criticized American wilderness reform schools/for-profit troubled teen industry.
At least the sea will swallow Miami like unto Port Royal.
Another Anthropic employee has quit for reasons typical of an Anthropic employee
Apparently people on LinkedIn are theorising about if this guy’s even real due to his lack of social media posts for a Silicon Valley techie (his twitter was created this year and is empty aside from his quitting thread, Facebook created yesterday and no LinkedIn account)
Don’t suppose we could track down how the announcement got any publicity whatsoever…
lots of people will spend the aftermath of the AI bubble bursting and the “frontier labs” cratering by deleting embarrasing tweets
“I quit my job at the scary drawing company because the drawing I made was too scary for me but my bosses didn’t seem scared enough”
Pls don’t be clickbaity
Some alignment guy bailed out of fear anthropic will unfavorably immanentize the eschaton. It’s as cliche and pointless as the op makes it sound.
Still the link OP shared is like 80% about Terrence Tao worrying about LLMs ruining mathematics, it’s a kind of reverse bury the lead situation, which is a bit unnecessary.
tried to make the link automatically skip to the part about the Anthropic employee but I guess substack doesnt work like that
Status of my evening:
Post a link to my personal website, find out a minute later that it’s “down for maintenance”, try to log into my web hosting dashboard (Siteground) to figure out what’s going on, it rejects the 2FA code it sends me, then the 2FA code suddenly works, then the dashboard is full of hard-selling slop features that I will gouge out my left eye with a spork and skull-fuck the hole with the blunt end before I will use… My blog seems to be back now, though?
Fuck, I need to migrate my blog. If there is even anywhere to migrate it to.
I’m very happy with a Hetzner auction server. Though I’ve lots of different things running on it, might he overkill for “just” WordPress. They offer cheapish VPSs though. And they’re in Europe and have excellent technical support.
Not an ad, I just like them
Damn, the guy doing Greg Brockman (looks like Cooper Hoffman if I read the IMDb cast list right) has gotten the stance and the face so spot on. Even just from the screenshots, I could tell that was supposed to be him.
Sounds promising. For something like this to be good, it has to thread the needle in terms of highlighting the blatant disregard for humanity from the tech CEOs without falling victim to the skynet boogeyman. So based on the little I’ve heard, they might do ok at that. But I never get my hopes up anymore tbh, just in general
Speaking of movies about high-profile silicon valley grifters, what the fuck is this??
At this point given the absurdity of this combination of people I feel like the reality will likely be disappointing.
If all it took to bring these guys down was to show that they were weird and unsettling, the CIA would have infiltrated and shut down awful systems by now
Men Who Stare At Goats would have shut down the CIA first
Tesla’s new self-driving taxi seems to be entirely made of red flags and those horror movie moments where you can’t understand why anyone would go in there, because they’re clearly going to die.
Highlights:
- No door handles. Good luck getting out instead of burning to death and/or drowning!
- Doors might not unlock if there are power issues, eg. Bad things happened in a crash.
- No manual controls! First responders will have to push it out of the way.
- Unless there’s a power issue, because the parking brake will engage if there’s no power, so it’ll need to be barged by another vehicle, I guess?
- Or you push it faster than 5mph, because the brake will engage for safety reasons.
- Or if it is in the wrong gear or mode, because back-driving the motor can cause electrical safety issues or overheating, which will presumably increase the risk of people trapped inside being burned to death.
- The vehicle is silent and may move without warning. You can’t tell if it is unpowered. First responders are instructed to “cage” the vehicle before trying to interact with it. Otherwise I guess it might just main or kill them by surprise.
- Not all high voltage components are labelled. Exposed bits in a crash might just kill you if you don’t have suitable ppe, and you can’t tell which bits those are, lol.
The guide advises first responders to contact the company via the car’s communications system or phone for most emergencies, and says that the Tesla can assist emergency personnel by moving the car remotely, helping provide access to on-board controls or putting the car in neutral so that it can be pushed.
If Tesla cannot be reached by phone, the manual advises first responders to use an email address to learn more about how to move the Tesla, though it warns, “This email is not monitored for emergency requests.”
🤡
Welcome to the future, where first responders might just opt to watch you die because they’re not certified to rescue you from your autonomous death trap, because there’s no point in you all dying.
H/t to violet blue. https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/117237691936474802
Tesla has not gotten clearance from safety regulators to deploy vehicles without features such as brake pedals, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it had opened an investigation into whether the Cybercab meets vehicle safety standards.
The fuck do you mean opened an investigation. I don’t care that the US are a fake made-up country, there is no conceivable world in which you can legally put random shit on public roads without some kind of permit.
Quick search and from somewhere else
the company relied on self-certification, the standard method automakers use to affirm compliance with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards without pre-approval from regulators. NHTSA can audit that self-certification at any time, and it has now requested the engineering data and testing records Tesla used to reach its conclusion
you can’t be fucking serious
That’s horrifying.
oh wow, it’s that bad huh. i guess it make sense, there’s a reason why the cybertruck is not legal in europe yet still on the streets in the us.
Literally “just push it over there with the rest of the fire and send an email.”
The door handles don’t sound so bad from a firefighter perspective. More excuses to break out the slicy claw. ಠᴗಠ
Having to account for the stupid thing to start driving on its own for no reason seems more irritating. Maybe we can invest in some big jaws attached to the front of the truck to crunch down on and immobilize struggling robo-taxis. This seems like a very reasonable direction to develop car technology.
There was a photo from a cybertruck crash not so long ago where you could see that the doors and windows had been attacked with crowbars to try and get the damn things open before the people trapped inside burned to death. It didn’t work.
Things (and skills) for busting open locked doors and laminated glass aren’t (yet?) commonplace, and I wouldn’t trust tesla engineering to keep me alive long enough for the professionals to turn up with the right tools 🫤
Here is a roundup of the “october tech movie” superfecta
is there a kalshi market for which one tanks the hardest? Or will we get crossover sequels for musk vs altman a la MCU?
Crosspost, hat-tip to @pnwpixel@programming.dev for finding this. Omarchy announces another patron: DigitalOcean. I will wait for DO to explicitly confirm/deny this, but if this is true then I’m going to be moving my entire small-business footprint.
There’s this: “Built for agents: Omarchy’s pipeline moves to DigitalOcean” https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/digitalocean-joins-omacom-foundation
Alongside the infrastructure move, DigitalOcean is joining the Omacom Foundation, the nonprofit that funds Omarchy’s infrastructure and the open source projects it depends on, as a Founding Corporate Patron, and will serve as Omarchy’s agentic compute provider.
So fascism and slop. Name a more iconic couple.
back at ya
Oh, gods damn it. I’m only going to have a couple of servers to move, but it’s going to be a huge pain in the ass. What VM provider is recommended these days for USAian customers?
Check out https://upcloud.com/. EU based, but have servers in the EU, US, and Asia-Pacific: https://upcloud.com/docs/getting-started/locations/
If you got questions, hit them up on mastodon: https://glitchy.upcloud.world/@upcloud
I’m probably going to increase my presence on DreamHost in California, who I’ve hosted with for over a decade. They historically are First Amendment proponents known for being quietly friendly towards adult content; also, in 2017 DH pushed back on the Department of Justice’s subpoena for 1.3 million IP addresses visiting an anti-Trump protest-organizing website. That said, I’m 100% prepared for yet another Milkshake Duck Moment.
Looking forward to being able to send email, which DigitalOcean still blocks in order to funnel customers towards hosted email-delivery services.
happy kirkiversary to all who celebrate
Happy kirk kirked day.
And people said rightwing minds couldn’t be changed during debates.
I thought it was his neck that got changed?
Change comes from within.
Lack of blood in this case
wtf is deal of that segyges person. now they’re convinced that openai will solve room temperature superconductors in silico real soon, because altman vagueposted about it
and this all based on lk-99 fraud case, nevermind that there’s no high temperature superconductivity theory, or how prohibitively computationally expensive computational chemistry is, and i guess it’s not accurate enough anyway, this all with people that do computational chemistry coming in their thread trying to explain this, then posts this
Somehow word association will beat density functional theory to the punch for mapping out theoretical materials, lol. Alright.
I’ll believe that when pigs fly.
arguably it’s stupider than that
and this doesn’t even go into whether pallet of lean spaghetti is in any way insightful, or does it explain anything, or does any of these things manmade proofs do
You’ll forgive me, I’m neither lobotmised nor a mathematician.
The poster wants to slop into existance a language for stacking logical statements on top of each other and testing/prooving truthiness but the statements are what? Physics rules?
And once you have this um magic world simulator from first principles (since it would have to be, because the thing about science is we need to do the experiments since we don’t know how things work fully) it will somehow stumble onto RTPSC materials?
K
i’ll also note that assembly of reply guys decided that room temperature superconductors will magically solve energy requirements of silicon-based chips (this is not how any of this works)
Once we have superconductors, all computation will immediately switch to relay-based logic
cmos logic still beats it, because main source of heat are switching losses (all these gate + parasitic capacitances being charged and discharged, and some related phenomena). relays store more energy, and that makes situation worse, even if you make them as MEMS
Also consider how much more noise pollution you would get by adding billions of little click-clacks to the operation.
that’s just “machine god will figure out relativity from three video frames” in another form
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
I dunno, but AI machine god will figure it out from first principles in a nanosecond once we turn it on!
incidentally, this is also their current best shot at turning rube goldberg cash burn pit into something that’s not one
Good God. Sometimes I wonder how small the population that understands all these references and knows all this deep lore and history is. How few people really understand the true nature of this bunch of people and how their ideas have ruined so much. When I go to conferences I get to have 4 hour conversations over beer with astrobiologists explaining how ideas from a blog in 2009 started showing up uncited in their literature 8 years later (when late undergrads who read a blog post start writing papers during their PhDs) and have since completely fucked whole subfields. They are flabbergasted at first, but then they see it, and see the damage done. So few people actually see this.
In the TESCREAL lore iceberg, “Aella Sankey chart” is above the waterline.
- Existence of HPMoR
- Existence of Zizians
- Aella Sankey chart
- Aella not showering
…
- Topher Brennan leaks Siskind emails
…
- “AI datacenter water usage is fine actually” Substack
…
- Cremieux’s alleged old Reddit handle
…
- Scott Aaronson anti-feminist breakdown
- Scott Aaronson goes full Zionist
…
- Glowfic
…
- su3su2u1 review of HPMoR
…
- Robot God deduces general relativity in three frames with the power of Bayes
…
- Scott Aaronson makes airport cops sympathetic
…
- TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard
…
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is That Guy when recommending scifi books
TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard
Out in the wild, I’ve actually seen somebody cite that piece earnestly… as an example of how Wikipedia still has problems even if it’s generally a useful source of information.
It’s like praising with faint damnation.
where does thiel/paypal mafia funding situation, urbit, other fashware and broader reactionary connection (yarvin etc) fit into that
also, that one oral bacteria startup
su3su2u1 review of HPMoR
obi-wan-theres-a-name.png
what ever happened to them anyway? Probably has tenure by now, hopefully?
Aella Sankey chart
I’m really being tested on my liberation and sex positive values here. Gosh that’s a very weird and kinda gross thing to do.
What motivates someone to chart their fetish fulfillment?
Well whatever. I hope people had fun, seems like it must have been very scheduled and regimented though…
right? and even then you have to go slow with explanation, otherwise you just sound like a crank
It helped that the first person I explained this to at a conference was explicitly working on deconstructing models of the origin of complex life that imply that it’s slow and unlikely that have been uncritically accepted in a lot of circles without actual evidence, and he was already confused about why following the chain of citations bottomed out at weird economist named Robin Hanson and why his naive model was ever taken seriously… oh MAN we had a fun evening.
Amusingly enough, something much like this has happened to me twice two years apart. The scientists deconstructing this stuff are always the most interesting people too.
It was kinda wild studying physics while this was starting.
People were getting all these starry-eyed ideas while anyone actually doing well was realising that the future is going to look a lot like the present because god hates us and we’re not allowed nice things.
wtf is deal of that segyges person
He does worthless little-birthday-boy AI boosting while pretending to be the serious face of
bluesky AI bootlickingfair and balanced anti-anti-AI bluesky.Occasionally has decent sneer content, though it has a much more evident muh datacenters tint these days. Writer of the siskind email explainer.
I keep free-associating this idiot with eigenrobot and maybe that’s unfair to them. They’re insufferable and smug and always confidently wrong, but maybe they’re not also a huge racist.
they also have a blog where they blog about how unfair are the anti-ai terrible people and. among other things, why the luddites were the terrible, no good, absolutely not worthy of interest reactionary bunch who got what they deserved.
without going into the merits of the specific case, I find it highly amusing that OpenAI fucked up their big Navier-Stokes announcement which is now more about how they stole research from honest mathematicians rather than how awesome their AI is
One detail that seems to have not spread around: the announcement was so rushed that when the 165 page output was released, it only included 16 citations, and those citations did not even include the work of Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, who introduced the overarching framework for attacking the problem (that Buckmaster-Alpöge and OpenAI used). After the announcement and after these redditors pointed it out, they threw in a few more citations to include them, but come on.
Dario’s back at it again-agent swarms could shut down the whole internet in 6 months
He also wanted AI research to slow down over a month ago. Surprise surprise Anthropic didn’t do jack to slow down
“Could rogue agent swarms take over the entire internet in the next six months?”
Nobody tell these three stooges about dead Internet theory
They can’t even swarm their own corporate content writing.
In this role, a given day might include drafting, editing, brainstorming, on-site event support, and coordinating executive response to breaking news, all in close collaboration with the External Communications team and other leaders.
- Executive Communications Writer Job Posting at Anthropic (Annual Salary: $295,000 - $345,000 USD)A swarm of large language models is capable of shutting down the entire internet in 6 months, but for some reason they need to pay a single human over a quarter of a million dollars to draft and edit language.
My line break produced some good comedy:
Posting at Anthropic (Annual Salary: $295,000 - $345,000 USD)
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.
Apparently they can also sick the police on you on a trust-me-bro basis:
Last month, The San Francisco Standard reported that Anthropic had reported a man to San Francisco police for telling Claude that he had bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.” When the Standard contacted the man in question, he told the newspaper he was “just fucking around.”
But while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.
image shamelessly stolen from https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv5puo47ns2z
LITERALLY 1984
(I am morally obligated to make this joke)
Never wanna hear any bullshit about Anthropic being the “good guys” ever again
