Want to wade into the sandy 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
guys
Iām sorry, I think I need to believe that this is taking the piss in order to be able to function. It canāt be real (Itā's definitely real).
Oh God I read their FAQ and it looks like the whole concept is to gamify smoking weed because if thereās one problem with weed itās that itās not addictive enough on its own. I mean the actual concept is to try and smash enough hip tech buzzwords together to extract some amount of the dwindling venture capital continuing to slosh around the valley, but if it actually happens the thing itās going to do is take all the addictionware tactics that app developers have developed and bring them to bear on promoting drug use.
This is a serious blow to coolness, from which not even drugs will easily recover.
If itās āagentic,ā doesnāt that imply it smokes weed for you
Wake me up when thereās an agentic butt plug
You made me look and now you all have to know thereās a library for butt plugs (written in Rust) that has LLM generated code in it:
https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug#inclusion-of-llm-generated-code
I have mixed feelings about speaking things into existence
This is how I learn that buttplug.io has fallen
I hurt myself todayā¦ to see if I still feelā¦
Considering the amount of weird hentai on the internet that cannot end well.
Agentic Ripz is my new jam band.
Emile Torres and me, rationalist enemies list #3 and #1. a photo to strike fear into the utility functions of rationalists everywhere
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/116456408676175449
pic by my kid and from the premiere of Ghost in the Machine, an awesome documentary. Iām in it. tl;dr AI was always olde timey race science all the way down
What a rogueās gallery. Truly a chilling portrait of the sworn enemies of trillions of unborn human beings.
some of us just nail the existential risk
ātop aiā. so it is a sex thing after all.
Just looking at that picture makes me hear googles of unsimulated people scream in terror.
Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of bankrupt AI company iLearningEngines charged with fraud - Reuters, 17 April 2026
Prosecutors said iLearning marketed itself as an artificial intelligence-driven digital education ācompany with an āout-of-the-box AI platform,ā and claimed to earn revenue mainly by selling ālicenses for its educational and training platforms to customers, including healthcare companies and schools.
According to the āindictment, ā the defendants used forged sham contracts to make it seem that iLearningās customers were real, and used āround tripā transfers of investor and lender funds ā meaning they sent money to purported customers, who then returned it to iLearning ā to manufacture revenue.
At least ā90% of iLearningās $421 million āof reported revenue ā in 2023 was fabricated, the indictment said.
I think they called this wash trading in cryptoland.
Friend of Ziz and cofounder of the ārationalist fleetā pops up out of the woodwork trying to clear Zizās name
I find myself noticing things rather detached from the typical Ziz funnybusiness more strongly than I notice the stuff about that whole situation.
āIām Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death (and bring people back if I could) and that I would become a dragon and help generally facilitate a fantastical transhumanist future.ā
āI dream of non-Euclidean geometries, of countless worlds visible and accessible in the daytime sky, of competent infrastructure, of soul forges continually working to bring back the deadā¦ I dream of reaching through warps in the spacetime fabric to save the dying across timeā
āSigned, the dragon of creation Creatrei (cree-AH-trey) also known as Gwen Danielson or as Char and Astria (when referring to my hemis as distinct individuals)ā
The reactions are fun. āThis post is not actually doing a good job of making me trust you and think this conversation is safe to have[1], and I notice that as I am saying this that I am afraid that this will now somehow result in someone trying to murder me in my sleepā
Ziz has always had a tendency to express her ideas through metaphors in fiction that are familiar to her. We spoke at length about Contessa and Doctor Mother from Worm; the Wardens from World of Warcraft; Frisk, Sans, and especially Undyne from Undertale; Tassadar from Starcraft; Harry and Dumbledore from HPMOR; Iji.
Does āread a second bookā apply here, or is this a āread a first bookā situation?
Tassadarās probably the most telling. For those not in the know, the Protoss are noble savages modeled after samurai, templar, and Native Americans. Tassadar in particular is modeled after the stories of legendary Hiawatha and real person Geronimo, first uniting the Protoss under a single banner and then sacrificing himself in a cutscene at the end of a big battle before repeatedly re-appearing as a ghost in later titles. On one hand, Tassadarās the most influential Protoss in the entire setting; after his death, everybody switches in-game from a greeting revering ancient hero Adun (āin taro Adunā) to a greeting mentioning new hero Tassadar (āin taro Tassadarā). But on the other hand, heās a general and warrior deeply enmeshed in a military tradition which demands his unwavering total sacrifice in order to achieve any progress. Tassadar is a racist stereotype embodying the idea of stoic acceptance; when Protoss say āit is a good day to dieā they are echoing tropes about Native American beliefs.
Not gonna touch the Undertale reference today.
God knows I love me a good dose of genre fiction, but I believe that if youāre gonna base your entire worldview on fiction you should use something thatās not second or third hand.
I feel a bit regretful sometimes that none of my copious fanfic output has inspired anyone to draw fanart. But at least no one has gotten weird about it, either.
I feel like you may be judging Tassadar too harshly. What you said is true but his defining feature is openness and empathy towards other cultures. The Conclave, the ruling body of the protoss, consider humans basically animals and blast them from orbit without a care, and they dismiss the āDark Templarā as heretics. This even though the Dark Templar are the only ones who have the magitech to kill the invading aliens. His whole arc is about rejecting prejudice and teaming up with people your culture considers inferior, not just heroic sacrifice.
I can understand what theyāre saying, though. Like, his defining moment is the finale of SC1 where he does sacrifice himself and become this major culture hero. There is definitely room to question that warrior ethos and what it says about the Protoss and what that in turn says about how we think about the real-world cultures and ideas that inspired them, and Iām pretty open to those constructs not being particularly respectful. But within those background structures and the culture they describe the immediate storyline is about how the conclave and even the Khala itself is ultimately destructive and makes the Protoss more vulnerable even as it is their source of strength and identity, which feels actually pretty timely if you read it that way.
Iāll have you know thereās lots of important WoW lore in the novels!!!
Given the Star Wars discussion alluded to in the next paragraph, I think weāre looking at ātry rereading your first book while being less of a self-important dumbass.ā Like, I get it, Revan is one of the best characters in that canon, and where Vader fell for very human if selfish reasons Revan pushes even farther and was using the dark side to conquer the galaxy in order to try and save it fromā¦ being conquered by a sith empire that drew great and terrible power from the dark side of the force. What happened to Vader again? Oh yeah, he sought the dark side for the power to save his wife and became a great and terrible warlord by calling on his rage and despair overā¦ killing his wife. Like, the fact that trying to gain power through the dark side is at best a self-destructive shortcut that will undermine your actual goals is pretty goddamn consistent, and this is Star Wars Legends, a canon not exactly known for being internally consistent. Iām not saying you need to āagreeā with that premise, and I think the franchise as a whole is usually too conservative, with the passivity of the light sife being a big part of that. Itās just deeply absurd to me for that to be the takeaway from that story. Like all the people whoās main takeaway from Jurassic Park was āman, wouldnāt it be cool if we had real dinosaurs?ā who then went on to be the victims and villains of Jurassic World.
Habrykaās all, āDammit, why do you have to come here and remind everyone where the Zizians came from?ā
EDIT: This person also seems to have no concept of the finality of death, which might explain why the Zizians were so murdery.
This person also seems to have no concept of the finality of death
The god ai can perfectly simulate people, and a sa copy is you, death isnt permanent. And when you start to think this is inevitable and close, murder becomes just another way to signal how strongly you feel about a thing.
murder as virtue signaling
The link to the guide to setting up a retrofitted boxtruck to continue AI alignment research in with local copies of the internet archive after civilization collapses in 2025 is fun
SCENE: a wind-blasted desert landscape. In the foreground, a weathered truck rests on the side of a ruined highway. The windscreen is dusty and cracked, and the tyres have long since rotted away.
A PAIR OF SCAVENGERS, clad in bulky rags, approach the truck with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.
Using a CROWBAR, they force open the back doors of the truck, and exclaim
āFuck it, Ted, itās one of those dumb AI trucks!ā
These are the kind of people who I could picture working away at a laptop in a box truck and they tell you theyāre close to a breakthrough and then you get closer and the laptop isnāt on, and hasnāt been powered up for years.
while itās technically plausible that Ziz was involved in a minor oopsy whoopsy fucky wucky deady weady or two or six, sheās always been lovely to me, much of the time,
The back-and-forth between Gwen and LessWrong commenters is getting spicy. This definitely deserves a top-level post on SneerClub.
Not really part of the back and forth but I find this illuminating of their recent travails, regarding it not being a step to far to prevent them from posting:
āThis isnāt super relevant since itās not like the standards are super high but ever since the enormous onslaught of LLM psychosis posters, the default of people who try to post to LW is to get rejected from posting hereā
Sounds like the mods have had to deal with a lot of unbalanced people lately, and are not having it.
Uh oh
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/gwen-danielson-zizians-interview-1235552043/
Going on a media tour now
The foursome had been on the lot for a few months when the pandemic struck in March 2020. That same month, the price of Bitcoin ā in which most of Borhanianās life savings was invested, money that was covering much of the groupās expenses at that time ā cratered. Soon after, the four of them stopped paying rent to Lind altogether.
Aella also lost much of her early earnings on crypto.
Curtis Lind reminds me of the businessman who supported Elron early on and lost most of his money.
The end where Gwen Danielson decides that Yudkowsky is
hertheir savior is tragic.edit/ The article describes Danielson as transfemme but refers to them as them so I will do the same
soul forges continually working to bring back the dead
Even in death, duty does not end.
Iām Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death
thiel jumpscare
Is the crappy dragon fursona related to Peter Thiel being an anagram for āthe reptileā?
theyāre all cosplaying medieval alchemy so at least it fits a theme
Ah yup, that is definitely the type of person whoās deeply attracted to cults.
Saw a remarkable take on the pro-AI parts of bsky, that since DeepSeek420.69 can offer the model at like 15% of Claudeās pricing, that must mean that Anthropic is operating at an at least 80% positive margin on inference, so things will work out.
In the same thread they complained about Zitronās math being dodgy.
Two tech-related links for today, both relating to fascism.
First, tante has a new blogpost about AI being overtly fascist in nature, which heās also posted to LinkedIn, seemingly for kicks. (Found on red site, too)
Second, the Nazi laptop company has sent a second pre-release laptop to DHH, showing they have not changed at all since they went full fash six months ago:
Tante nails it again. No notes.
That he has a LinkedIn finally explains how I first heard of him. A liberal but very startup/hustle culture brained colleague shared an anti-blockchain thing on the Slack. Always wondered how she stumbled on a comm(o|u)nist tech critic, but it mustāve been LI.
https://theintercept.com/2026/04/23/chatgpt-ai-false-confession-interrogation-crime/
āIf ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isnāt vulnerable?ā
I donāt have words for how stupid this is.
Their heart seems to be in the right place, police interrogation will be exploitative and brainwashy with no real consequences for the interrogators, but they sure chose the dumbest possible way to make their point:
Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots arenāt people and havenāt achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heatonās ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.
āChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess ā like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,ā said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote the book on false confessions. āIf ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isnāt vulnerable?ā
Detective: āSo Magic Eight Ball. Iām just gonna ask you outright. Were you the killer?ā
Magic Eight Ball: āIt is decidedly so.ā
Some Guy: āOh my god.ā
Only the magic eight ball has been rigged with sides reading:
-
Signs point to yes
-
It is decidedly so
-
Absolutely. Youāre so smart
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Maybe. Good question!
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There are strong reasons to think so
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Lots of people are saying it
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I can see why youād ask that
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There isnāt a strong consensus either way
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If itās this easy to coerce the Magic Eight Ball, what chance do the rest of us have against DOOM?!?
deleted by creator
Looks like Mythos didnāt catch this one:
Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop
Whoopsie!
Itās fine, spyware is only a risk when itās bad peopleās spyware. Itās totally fine when itās Anthropicā¢-approved spyware!
As for Mythos catching things, maybe they should have used Mythos on their very own Claude Code considering that it has hilariously obvious security exploits, such as this one which inserts an arbitrary string into a shell command. Actually, never mind I donāt see anything wrong here, maybe we should burn another $20k in electricity running Mythos on it again to find out.
anthropic is the most moral ai company in the universe
Well it does have the secret āAny attempt to arrest a senior officer of OCP results in shutdownā derective.
This week in unsettling AI ads.
The algorithms feed me variants on this one pretty frequently, always with some fantasy woman offering to be your best friend and definitely not maybe give you dirty pictures. āNormal human woman tied up in a basementā is new, though, and even skeezier than usual. I donāt know what the workflow is for these or whether thereās an actual person writing the prompts for this, and I donāt think thereās any answer that would make me less uncomfortable about it.
Wtf is up with the face in the top left circle.
I canāt imagine the Mouse being happy about this cameo.
damn i wish i had confidence of a mediocre techbro. twitter thread suggests that thereās four copyright infringements just in these two images
e: still canāt get fingers right, lol
looks up, shrugs Everybody involved here kind of sucks, best of luck to all of them. looks back down
When weāre all too tired for ālet them fightā.
For the uninformed (like myself), the odd fox out is a character from Zootopia (pic related), which is a Disney movie.
Bold move to steal from The Mouse in broad daylight, isnāt it?
You can see also his rabbit counterpart from Zootopia in a princess dress in the background of the first picture!
I assume thatās more because they used AI to lift zootopiaās art style wholesale and so thatās just how rabbits are now.
ā¦thatās just how rabbits are now.
This really captures the mood of the present moment, doesnt it?
New random positivity thread:
You thought software quality was poor before LLMs? You aināt seen nothing yet.
Typical mentality on the orange site:
I donāt think Iāve read a single line of code Iāve shipped in over 6 months.
The poster goes on to whine about how it sucks itās not the same as solving puzzles and theyāre just QAing all day now and calls the LLM a slot machine, so at least theyāre not boosting.
Still, they donāt go so far as to say they were forced to work this way, so their not even looking at the code either means theyāre a lazy bum or that itās too far past incoherent to be worth it.
Habryka @ LW takes a break from reinventing Western civilization from first Rat principles to advocate a RETVRN to incandescent lighting:
Eventually, in most of the western world outside of the US, incandescent lightbulbs were literally banned to promote energy saving policies.
This was the greatest uglification in history. Within two decades, much of the world that was previously filled with beautiful natural-feeling light started feeling alien, slightly off, and uncomfortable, and societal stigma around energy-saving policies prevented people from really doing anything about it.
Who TF was using LED lights for indoor lighting in the 1990s? Compact flourescents were the lightbulb replacement in the oughties.
And how TF do you write that post without using the phrase āsensory sensitivityā and citing some women who know they have autism? Once you know you are more sensitive to your environment than allistics, you can start to experiment with interventions.
Dramatic fascistic āRETVRNā language and focus on aesthetics aside, my wife and I actually dug into some of this lighting quality stuff a while ago and while our very good friend here does a poor job explaining it there is a definite difference in normal LEDs vs incandescent or natural light. The LED spectra is fascinating - big spikes at a couple wavelengths and nothing in between. In my experience with switching to the fancier high-CRI LEDs the difference is pretty minimal. Feels like a possible case where you donāt notice it, but your brain does. For my wife it seems to have helped reduce the incidence and severity of her crippling migraines, which is obviously more impactful. I donāt think Iād say it beautified the space or brought us back to the halcyon days of our glorious past, but thatās been huge for us all the same. The plural of anecdote is not cliche, but thereās not nothing here.
What these people do is they take something thatās vaguely true or at least has a kernel of truth in it and they give it the most sensationalistic and negative spin possible. So it canāt be āthere were upsides and downsides to the switchover from incandescent bulbsā, it has to be āthe greatest uglification in historyā, and anyone who points out the energy saving advantages of LEDs and fluorescent lightbulbs is just trying to Silence You and smear you. Itās so wretched.
jesus fucking christ this is insufferable, these guys have been masking off for so long now that theyāre scraping the bottom of the barrel to find new things to do fascist signalling about
This was the greatest uglification in history.Seems like a market opportunity for some special lights/glass that recreates the natural feeling light they want. (I have some lower light leds in older style lamps and Iām having, for me, nice and cosy lighting. Only issue seems to be me getting older and my eyes getting worse with age.
Another lament about the tech industry has come to my attention, as Ky Decker asks themselves āDo I belong in tech anymore?ā
Pretty solid piece all around, recommend checking it out
[lament about ill effect of AI, hereās why itās terrible]
I use AI sparingly for
this is critihype
āI use AI sparingly forā is the new āI only do meth before my hookups for unprotected sex with strangersā.
I use AI sparingly to make sure the company-paid subscription is a net loss for the AI vendor.
Hey, it could happen.
Overall, I think it was a bit cookie cutter for an article of this type, but maybe Itās just the preaching to the choir effect. Even the fact that he ostensibly quit his job over this stuff doesnāt hit as hard as it should, it comes off as if he could have done so at any time but this way he gets to grandstand about it.
Also stuff like this:
It wasnāt a bad job, not by most metrics. It ticked the boxes a job is supposed to tick: good pay. Health insurance. Remote work. Time off. Nice coworkers.
sounds like it should be in a how do you do, fellow workers copypasta.
I canāt tell if this is serious.
If thatās really how we react to someone who admits AI use although they know why AI is bad, we need to listen to Dr. Fatima some more.
I find it hard to get mad at someone who uses AI sometimes on account of all the bozos who went full Gas Town.
There is enough of this shit that appeasement has no reason except making well meaning moderate centrists more comfortable, and they were never the audience. (despite their unshakable conviction they are the only audience.) dr. fatimaās video is good advice on comforting the comforted and nothing else.
i commend to you my masto post with the more detailed version, and the responses thereto, e.g.
the world we live in where the golang stdlib cryptography maintainer doesnāt know how to use ffmpeg and canāt be fucked to learn and so instead relies on slop
I donāt have much sympathy for the āletās wait and seeā moderates, but I do think thereās a coherent difference between people who have tried AI tools and found some use for them in some limited context and people who go full Howard Hughes with it like John McGasTown or whatever that idiotās name is. To me it feels like an extension of the argument that these so-called AI systems are a normal trchnology. They arenāt a harbinger of the end times, whether you interpret that as the singularity or the biblical Armageddon. Itās a normal technology that is breaking in normal ways and is breaking society and the economy in the ways we would expect late capitalism to break. If it wasnāt this it would probably be something else. Hell, thereās still a chance that the wheel turns to āQuantumā or something else after this and we stretch another few years out of that before the music stops.
AI is a bad tool for any given job, and is fundamentally not worth the price that we as a society are paying to let it exist at this scale. If it wasnāt being subsidized by capitalists chasing ridiculous returns and bouyed by an economic system structured entirely around giving it to them then thereās no way in hell it would have hit this point. But thatās not incompatible with people being able to find utility in it in some cases, and I think we lose credibility by treating any admission that someone has found any value in AI products as a confession of unseriousness. That doesnāt mean their use isnāt still part of the problem, but Iād we frame the critique in terms of āhow much would you actually be willing to pay for you āoccasionalā use?ā It would redirect the discussion away from the subjective āwell I found it useful for Xā to the more objective question of just how expensive and destructive these things are to operate and how much of those costs are going to have to be subsidized forever if these things are going to stick around.
Welp, thanks for clarifying.
i generally like Dr. Fatima, so i was curious about this video, but it was pretty disappointing. I have several more thoughts but i wanted to keep this reasonably short.
The first section about āback end harmsā is the best part. Unfortunately, section 2, the āFront End Harmsā section names valid problems but falls flat when it comes to solutions. She rolls out a lot of lib tropes about āeducationā and gestures at companies self-regulating the sycophancy of their own models despite evidence (a massive amount of it if we consider corporate āself-regulationā more broadly) to the contrary. Remember āmedia literacyā discourse about social media misinformation? it went nowhere, because itās not a problem that can be solved with education, itās imperative to actually learn lessons from history and bring this technology under political control. You cannot do this effectively when your government is 3 monopolistic corporations in a trenchcoat.
She says that anthropic are ābetter than the competitionā which is trivially true but extremely credulous. If faced with the choice, I would prefer that Claude beats out Grok and chatGPT but this is ultimately a marginal difference due to the nature of the industry and ultimately of capitalism itself.
Section 3 is fine for what it is, but itās really about the psychology of persuasion and not AI as such. Some of the discourse on this site would benefit from the reminder that moral absolutism isnāt very persuasive, but this section is way too long, we can just dispense with the moralizing and āharm reductionā anyways, because just like plastic recycling, personal reduction in AI use for harm reduction reasons is a fake solution to a systemic problem.
The harms of AI are intimately linked with the nature of monopoly & platform capital. You cannot defeat this enemy if you cannot actually describe it properly, and no amount of leveraging NIMBYism to defeat your local datacenter project will fix it.
Maybe Dr. Fatima isnāt the right person to be delivering that message, or simply doesnāt view the problem through a materialist lens. Itās not enough to be against AI, you need to be for something. This is the disease of liberal technocratic managerialism and it manifests in myriad ways including AI critique. We need to move beyond it.
presented without further comment, this remarkable piece of political advice
Okay, todayās Rat fixation that I want to rant about is āconstructing hypothetical examples to justify my idiosyncratic position.ā Like, Iām not even interested in arguing about whether their conclusion makes sense in their hypothetical world, Iām more curious about what kind of chain of thought leads you to speculate about that in 2026. Like, maybe Iām reading way too much into this but in practical terms it feels like āhow do I justify voting for the Republicans no matter how far-right they might go, if my local Democrats try to move the tiniest bit left?ā which feels like the rat/tech ethos in a nutshell.
Or maybe itās the more traditional past time of trying to construct arguments in favor of controversial-sounding positions so that you can feel smarter and more open-minded than everyone else.
Unfortunately, our problem right now is not Donna the below-average Democrat but Donald the fascist. And when it comes to fascists I do not ask if they are above or below average.
I think that, while many LessWrong readers do believe that one party is way better than the other, such that the inter-party quality variation is far larger than the intra-party quality variation, this is not true of all readers.
ā¦ Wait is this about race and iq again?
Anyway the math aināt mathing, as there never can be a republican above average enough to counterbalance out that they are an republican.
