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.
who is this Dean Ball guy? new week, new guy, I guess.
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/19/pentagon-openai-dean-ball-trump-ai
Zoom in: āEvery industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. @deanwball is that for AI,ā Defense under secretary Emil Michael said Sunday on X.
āDean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points).ā Michael was arguing against Ballās point that various government agencies, including the Pentagon, have blocked employees from using Chinese AI, which has already sent a message to regulated companies.
Russ Wilcox felt compelled to weigh in also
Dean Ball, days into his new job as Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, posted his assessment of Kimi K3, the new model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI. Kimi is an open-weight model, which means its inner workings are published for anyone to download, run, and modify; the newest versionās weights ship later this month. It had just matched the best publicly available models of the first quarter. The post made three claims. Open-weight models are āinherently decelerationist.ā A probable outcome of an open-weight-dominant world is āfull AI communism,ā a future of AI as public good and digital public infrastructure that strikes him as a ādystopian hellscape.ā And the United States government will at some point realize that its best strategy is to create large amounts of āregulatory riskā around the use of open-weight Chinese models.
I have met Dean Ball. We have disagreed before. This time the disagreement is public, and so the response should be too.
oh no kimi3 got the neo marxist woke mind virus
Mathematicians donāt love the use of āAIā for math, not one bit, via Timnit Gebru
You know, given automated proof checkers, I was naively assuming mathematics was one field that gen-AI would have a hard time screwing up. Even programming is too difficult to write thorough testing for. But a proof (or counter example to a conjecture) seems like it would have to be solid if it passes lean or whatever system for validating it.
But the threats #3 and #5 the declaration lists make me consider the bigger picture. Academic fields without clear capitalist payouts are already underfunded and under respected. Pure mathematics could, at least up until now, draw on the respect STEM gets, but with math proofs getting used as fuel for the LLM hype machine, there are a variety of unpleasant ways things could twist.
Threat #1 makes me wonderā¦ if LLMs+formal verification systems manage to pluck lots of low hanging fruit, and we are left with harder stuff that not enough literature exists as training data for LLMs, it seems like the entire educational pipeline for producing mathematicians could end up screwed up.
new odium symposium episode. we look at the work of conservative philosopher, grifter and tobacco lobbyist Roger Scruton.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/21-mr-rogers-164372632
Am seeking suggestions on audiobooks to listen to! I think Iād like to start with the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, tho I donāt know what order to go with, or if that matters.
If the queer experience on the 90s island of Harris intrigues you, weāre halfway through Douglas Stuartās John of John and really enjoy it. Narrator has a Scots accent though, if you find that hard to deal with.
For the Hainish Cycle books the order doesnāt matter too much, theyāre not direct sequels.
I started with (and would recommend starting with) The Left Hand of Darkness. The first 3 Hainish novels are also her first novels and she was still developing her style, in my opinion. I think The Dispossessed is her finest work, although I still havenāt read all of her novels.
thanks, noted!
The Earthsea novels are not to be missed either. Maybe pass on the fifth.
Tales from Earthsea is also good.
I didnāt mind The Other Windā¦ it isnāt as good as the others, but thatās a tough act to follow. It does draw together a bunch of plot threads from the previous books and provides a kind of closure, which I appreciated. There was more to say of Earthsea, but le Guin wasnāt going to have the time or energy for that.
Barbara Rosenblatās recordings of the Amelia Peabody novels are fun.
thanks!
presented without comment: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist (via https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist)
there are two things that are obvious in his blog: first, michaÅ is an incredibly privileged dude (who doesnāt notice his privilege because, coming from poland, he sees himself as underprivileged), and second, the moment people finally leave the vicinity of the formalized skeptic movement is strictly dependent on how much misogyny and racism they tolerate.
2017, three years post gamergate, is quite much.
2017, three years post gamergate
You know, I was wondering if the author elided the gap between early 2000s and 2017 because of the cringey and sometimes outright awful stuff that came out of the rationalistsā¦ but youāve reminded me the skeptic movement also had some nasty bits both within it and as offshoots.
I donāt think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.
The overlap between rationalists and the skeptic community was indeed tiny. I say this as someone heavily involved in Usenet skeptic communities since the late eighties. In fact the Bay Area doesnāt even register as a locus of the skeptic community at the times heās talking about.
Iām not trying to excuse what much of the skeptic/atheist community later became in the 2010s. Itās definitely turned into something nearly unrecognizable since its earlier days. But that had nothing to do with any sort of imagined rationalist adjacency.
That was kind of a nothing post? I think the author is misrepresenting the growth (or at least failing to connect the most important dots) of the lesswrong rationalist by portraying them as a natural evolution of the skeptics movement and not the deliberate cultivation of an audience by Eliezer looking for people to spread his ideology to and by Thiel looking to influence farm and create a cult incubator. And then the post is titled āmy falling out with the rationalistā, and they write they "wanted to offer a more personal perspective " but they donāt actually discuss that much of the personal angle eitherā¦
The author tends to cull his own social media posts pretty aggressively if they get too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention, and itās possible thereās more he wanted to say in the blog post but he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it.
But yeah, it felt like half a post.
he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it
You know, on net, the internet would be a better place if more people did this, but I wonder why the author even bothered posting anything at all?
yeah, subculturally theyāre unrelated strains
like, just factually in terms of history, theyāre unrelated strains. LW rats come in a straight line from the Extropians in the '90s. The previous-millennium skeptics have crossover with those guys, but theyāre not the same as a group at all.
And the Movement Skeptics of the aughts looked at Kurzweilās singulatarianism and asked what he was smoking, while basically ignoring that the Holy Sequences existed. I should know, I was there.
yeah, they mostly thought the lesswrongers were annoying weirdoes when they perceived them at all, e.g. rationalwiki
The biggest crossover between skeptics and rationalists I can think of is Julia Galef, and she podcasted with a philosopher who debated Yud once then decided it was infra dignitatem. She also dropped out of CFAR when it became more open that the rationality workshops were for finding Sarah Connor.
Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.
I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of āleaving rationalismā is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone, specifically James Damore, the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women donāt belong in tech.
I donāt know the author so I donāt know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.
Gene Ray actually came to MIT in person. I knew the people who invited him. They had a history ofā¦ performance-art kind of stunts on the boundary of good taste? Like calling attention to an obscure discretionary fund by running for student government on a promise that they would use it to bribe everyone who voted for them. One of them taught me to pick locks during rush week.
how did it not click that lcamtuf was an ex-rat
via dumpsterfire
Robotaxi riders are falling asleep, sparking frantic emergency service calls
So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: āsleepersā. The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymoās first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.
Apparently itās cheaper to foist the job of waking passengers up on 911 than to hire an employee to do it. Good olā privatize the gains / socialize the losses!
The relation of tech and emergency services is something I became acutely aware of, when my volunteer firefighter unit recently got 2 alarms in one week that turned out to be someone lost his IPhone driving through a curve. (Apparently they have a G-sensor/accident detector and can robocall emergency services.)
Okay, itās not that common. IPhones do that for years and those 2 were our only cases of that. Still sucks to get the news via radio, when youāre already in full kit ready to roll.
The Guardian published a William McAskill editorial in the what-if-the-stateless-text-generators-had-moral-agency genre of fiction, and Emily Bender did a thread
From the article:
But the sheer pace of growth in AI means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enormous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.
Get fucked, Will.
But also, if we grant the untenable sci-fi premise, this would be like a star trek episode where the federation cedes unconditionally to the expansionist alien fascists of the week if they have a much greater population because thatās all it takes to outweigh the other sideās moral concerns.
Earth-Trisolaris Organisation-ass moral framework.
Itās pretty grim to be as immersed as I am in all the tech news bullshit (which I continue to do largely because I am the most techy person in most rooms I exist in, and the closest thing to an AI expert (it feels so weird to say that, but I do have a fair bit of experience coding machine learning from scratch in a scientific context, so I probably do need to get more comfortable with thinking myself as an expert ā itās a relative term, after all)
However, I really enjoy that in addition to there being names that make me grimace because I know they will have dogshit takes on things, there are also names that I really respect. It makes me feel more connected to people, because it makes me reflect on how meaningful knowledge production is based on trust. Emily Bender, for instance, is someone whose work I am familiar with, and thus I am far likely to spend the energy to read stuff like the thread you linked.
As grim as modern tech is, it makes me smile that there are so many people who are fighting the good fight.
Daft ai project of the week: āloreā, a version control system that should not be confused with another vcs of the same name open-sourced by epic games a few weeks ago.
lore does not track your code. it tracks the prompts, notes and decisions that produced it. you commit intent. when you want code, you run lore materialize: it replays the accumulated intent into a brief, and an agent reconciles the working tree to match it.
the code is build output. the intent is the source.
ā¦which would be great, if the output of llms were deterministic, and generally it is not. This means rolling back a change to undo or fix something is just another spin of the roulette wheel, with the analogy being reinforced by the number of tokens youāll have to buy and burn to do a rebuild. It looks like it still needs a real vcs behind the scenes, given that it isnāt entirely self-hosting, but maybe I misunderstood something.
You might wonder if this is some kind of satirical work, or perhaps piece of performance art, but Iām fairly certain it isnātā¦ the creator and sole human author (naturally, claude is the only other ācontributorā) is a big fan of something called āopen audio protocolā and a project called āaudiusā which came about by someone asking what if spotify and soundcloud, but on the blockchain? With ai agentic integration?
Finally a VCS that simulates the horrific results of
cvs mergegone wrong, 20 years since the last time I used cvs.kayfabe vcs
Considering this is the logical endpoint of the āLLMās are just like compilers broā line of thought, Iām not surprised at all.
I think thereās something to the compilers analogy, in the sense that if you used a C compiler through a chat interface with one liners to insert snippets into assembly without keeping the source code in source files as such, it would probably be slower than just writing in assembly yourself.
That LLMs have a number of extremely undesirable properties as ācompilersā (from nondeterminism to plagiarism) does not make the dumb ass chat interface any less fundamentally shit. It just makes them shit in other ways too.
There is one narrow case in which Iāve found the compiler analogy useful: explaining my frustrations with LLM-assisted design/architecture doc generation. Here, itās useful because handing someone a design document that was output by an LLM is a lot like handing someone a binary and asking them for a code review.
Iād much rather work with whatever disorganized soup of thoughts someone fed into the machine, because those at least contain intent, rather than a document that actively obscures what the designer wanted in a barrage of detail.
Yeahā¦ I think the core point is, LLMās shit is generated artifacts, which need to be kept separate from sources. That you canāt actually re-generate the same artifacts, is just a dingleberry on top of the shit pile.
Nah, this isnāt the endpointā¦ you want something like prompt2exe, which is a performance art piece. Gets an llm to output machine code, and bundles it into an executable.
no package dependencies and invokes no assembler, compiler, or system linker.
Hardcore mode. No handholding for puny human devs by their tool chains. š¦¾
Probably impractical for normal people to run, unless they have an employer who wants their minions to be burning all the tokens and pays up for the expensive kind of accounts.
Wait, did I get that right and it reruns the prompts every time you want to look at the code? Holy token costs batman.
Perfect for when your workplace will fire you if you dont use enough tokens, Iām sure.
Iāve always thought that the ability for a VCS to show me exactly what my codebase looked like at any point in the past wasnāt as dementia-simulating as Iād like
