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. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)
Annie Altman, Sam Altmanās sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:
If any harm ever comes to me āmysteriouslyā - you know who it was.
I love my life.
https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529
She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".
Came across this on the orange place: dontpastetheai.com
I was expecting like nohello.net but instead we get a decent intro explaining nuance as to why people ask other people questions followed by how to use AI and hide that you used it.
Is it me, or do attempts to make movies with AI tools
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/24RKHEkwgZ6Hm6ygY/can-an-llm-make-a-feature-length-movie-on-its-own
Remind me of SCPs
If you wonder how you can look at any of this without viscerally realizing that itās absolute dogshit, I found the
authorsperpetrators conclusion very insightful.Where we go from here
I expect these issues to all be fixed by the end of 2027.
I expect no-longer-obviously silly movies to be doable within two years, right now itās going slower than I expected in January 2026 because the frontier labs are no longer competing over having the best video generator, like they were when we had Sora2 and Veo 3.1.
And WHY are they no longer competing over this? Tell me. Could it be that its incredibly expensive to make somthing that nobody wants except fraudsters, and that further improvement via the kind of ML we do just produces exponentially diminishing returns for ever increasing huge amounts of effort and they realized itās not worth it?
Just like they will never understand that the openAI āpauseā for āsecurity and alignmentā is a convenient excuse for the fact that they have no goddamned money and are on a treadmill to oblivion.
Oh boy, this is the most straightforwardly delulu lesswrong post Iāve ever seen.
If you see issues in the YouTube video, rest assured that those issues survived even more than two generation attempts.
lol
AI slop is very good at falling into the uncanny valley, whether that paragraphs of pure nothingness from a text extruder, or strange almost-human looking imagery that looks and feels inexplicably wrong. Its a great way to produce some accidental nightmare fuel, especially considering the AI bros glazing such shit are incapable of recognising its accidentally disturbing nature.
As a āfunā sidenote, there was an SCP article on the site which acted like a slop generator (SCP-1004, Factory Porn). Its writer, DrBright, was permabanned in 2022 after a lengthy history of sexual harassment was uncovered (and the article was deleted altogether in February of this year). Feels oddly fitting, in the worst way possible.
Iāve had the same thought about Factory Porn, itās is basically what Image slop generators are, right down to the addictive nature, even when it isnāt porn being generated.
It still cant keep scenes consistent for more than 5 seconds amazing.
I got to 47 seconds and thereās a guy driving a tent stake with a mallet that isnāt quite there, only to have the mallet disappear.
āSo you printed out a piece of the internet for us to throw away.ā
I am mildly fascinated by the types of issues that appear and the contrasts with other things that can locally in space and time look right.
An object doing nothing will have a consistent surface and show perspective relative to the viewpoint. The systems are able to have representations of surfaces of different types and how they can fit together within an object. I am of course talking about within a given generation, not between generations where its utterly unsurprising that consistency is very difficult or impossible.
But multiple objects in interaction with each other do very strange things. Their relative sizes change as if they are in different positions relative to the camera. They snap between individually plausible relationships, without going through intermediate states. Doors open on the hinge side when the other side is not visible. The relative size of and distance to the background can suddenly change, as the foreground suddenly interacts with something that should be far in the background.
Objects that change also do so in bizarre ways. Living things morph between different archetypes. Flames in particular change wildly between types and sizes and respond to the facial expressions of humans, smoke and water effects blend together. Sudden movements with no cause occur, sudden morphings of one object into another when the context around them changes and something else makes sense, especially when held in a hand. Time-reversed motions occur mixed in with time-forward motions, and slow-mo with regular time. Debris suddenly appears from an object but when the dust clears the original fails to have been eroded away into the fallen debris.
On multiple occasions, a carried candle keeps moving with a characcter rising and falling with their footsteps hovering in front of them when both hands become occupied with other tasks. This is fascinating and indicates that the relationship between the two objects motion is represented separately from the idea of something being ācarriedā. (This is positively Lovecraftian.) Candles also indicate something else, with flowing wax changing wildly in timescales that do not make sense, with the system apparently understanding that there are different patterns but having no idea how they come about or change. There is no generality here, just an endlessly compounding list of rules of thumb.
Excessive correlations between objects across the frame are rampant. Footsteps preferentially synchronized. People in the background lipsyncing with foreground characters, faces changing expression in unison. Textures changing across multiple objects at once.
I have said it before, and I will say it again, the relationship between the outputs of these systems and what they mimic are precisely the relationship between a stick insect and a stick, or a social-parasite-beetle and a baby ant. Not just in form, but because that is also precisely the same forces that drove both things into existence - superficial resemblance to something else with a very different internal set of causes, that can fool to a first inspection by the inspection applied but just isnt doing the same thing. And again, SCP-2030 feels the same.
In the same cut, the guy then materializes a hat in his hand and puts it on, replacing the hat he was already wearing.
I picked a bit randomly where a walking stick changes shape, disappears, appears, the guys hair changes color etc.
45 minutes is even better
SlateScott first floated his bright idea about āmedical ethics are for foreigners not a good-hearted genius like meā in 2010.
Hereās what happens. In some far off corner of the world, some psycho doctor does something horrible like deliberately inject a patient with flesh-eating bacteria. The media hears about it and panics the public, who become suitably enraged and make demands of their politicians. Their politicians go to leading medical administrators and demand that doctors be more ethical. The leading medical administrators obviously donāt control the actions of every single psycho doctor, so they think quick and say āOkay, weāll make all medical students take a class on Ethics and Professionalism,ā hand the implementation off to professors, and then raise their own salaries for thinking of such a brilliant idea.
I guess California and Alberta and Sweden and Japan were far off from Cork, Ireland. How did he pass that class?
Hippocratic oath is government-imposed oppression apparently
There is no way that the class did not cover how MDs and nurses have been central to state atrocities for 150 years, from Bushās torture program to MK-ULTRA to Unit 731 to the original eugenicists (who kept committing wild sterilizations into the 1970s). There is no way that it did not cover how authorities often hint at what they want done without being so vulgar as to say it where it could come up at their trial.
But didnāt he get that authoritarian followers are deterred if an authority figure like a professor says āthe following acts are unacceptable?ā
Greta D. says she met Yudkowsky at the wedding of his ex and Duncan S. (cw: rationalists propositioning each other) āMawwage, is a dweam within a dweam ā¦ā
OpenAI is slowing development because of uh safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/open-ai-pause-hack
Definitely not because improvement is stagnating and theyāre running out of money
It just occurred to me that this makes Anthropic look bad, actually
if OpenAI is slowing down because they concerned about
moneyAI safety, then it makes Anthropic look like fools for publishing that blog where they waffle on about keeping up the race because of ābad actorsāIf OpenAI is slowing down, an Anthropic that actually is concerned about safety would slow down too. But they wonāt, because
moneyChinaābad actorsāWell Iād like it if they actually stuck to this, since it would finally lessen the flow of AI slop. Wouldnāt be surprised if this gets quietly ignored because OpenAI
otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aellaās twitter polls and resulting studies. itās fun. Iāll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link
the woman herself shows up in the substack comments with the most pitiful display of āIām just a smol self-taught bean why are you being so mean to me?ā
Erika rightly responds by calling out Aellaās own attitude towards the people who know how to apply the level of rigor to the data that she (apparently admittedly?) doesnāt. Like, you canāt simultaneously be this dismissive of the norms and processes of the scientific establishment and also claim ignorance and inability when your inability or refusal to follow those norms leads you to crap conclusions.
I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, itās like a whole new cognitive bias I hadnāt thought applied to rationalists.
I also still believe academia is a deeply broken culture. I believe this in large part because most academics have told me this.
You seem to believe uncritically what they tell you here. The truth is, everyone LOVES to complain but if you tell them āTHEN LEAVE??ā theyād rather keep their position. And itās very normal, actually. most systems (idk, liek law, healthcare, environmental protection) are ādeeply broken.ā
Maybe you think that only systems worth engaging with are those with self-perpetuating optimism loops? where everyone is so happy and satisfied with the community and activities? If so, it matches really well the intellectual environment I think you are in.
Witnessed an āAI-Powered political sandboxā called President Simulator crop up after seeing someone stream it on Discord.
I felt tempted to try and fuck with it, but its asking me to sign up for some fucking reason
Well it took longer than I expected, but the AI 2027 guys finally posted a second update
This table is essentially the TLDR
They also finally explained the ā2025 was 75% of AI 2027ās progressā thing and it seems like that number was mostly skewed by revenue (edit: valuation) numbers
For some reason their website lists the date of ASI as 12/2028 even though their actual graph only had a 32% chance tops of ASI happening on that date
<edited> Didnt I hear them say a while back that its not even revenue numbers? That its valuation of the companies being taken as proxy of value produced.
I find myself caring so little what these people think about anything
That is even worse than using the ARRs, which Ed Zitron has extensively explained are wildly distorted numbers done by shuffling sales and costs around to get really good 30-day to 1-month stretches.
I believe that was mentioned here
Hereās that side-by-side comparison
Bioman has already pointed out the āEconomic Valueā numbers they are using for these tables are probably bullshit (based on self reported run-rate extrapolations that are deliberate distortions at best, based on VC valuation at worst). To add to thisā¦ the compute values are also probably bullshit. They are likely based on data center announcements and not confirmed totally complete data centers (Ed Zitron has ripped into how much bs there is in data center announcements). āCoding Time Horizonā is probably METR, which, while some of the best numbers for estimating actual AI improvement for practical purposes, are still really bad in several key ways. (They donāt have enough human task performers for the longer duration tasks even if everything else was right, because they arenāt, and there are several ways systematic bias could have leaked in and compelted distorted the constructed measure of task duration.)
āAI Software R&D Upliftā is the single most important category to their scenario of recursive self improvementā¦ and they have it at a small fraction of what they estimated.
According to one of the writers apparently 17% is supposed to be āprogress is 17% slower than expectedā, so the 34% figure here implies progress is 34% slower than expected, so thatās actually worse
That wouldnāt make sense, because 1.07 would mean progress is negative. I think they meant it as a multiplier? So 1.07 is almost exactly what the predicted, .17 is only 17% of what they expected.
Anyway, it doesnāt really matter, because so much of the input numbers to these calcs are garbage.
Yeah thatās what tripped me up, because if that was true then itād make no sense why the percent of progress went up while the uplfit number went down.
Update on the slop dentist situation: second opinion says that loved one has zero cavities. I suspect that her only problem was having a non-median mouth that wasnāt well-represented in Pearl AIās training data.
It was called fucking Pearl AI? god these people suck so fucking bad
ugh, right?
hereās someone who cutesly spells āEAā as āāā±Æā and posts
Oh yeah, I saw the author post this. The argument appears to be āblow 40% of the Norwegian Pension Fundās current value on OpenAI, because democracy?ā and then goes on to paint opposition to datacenters as a āyou will be left behindā move. Just absolutely dumb stuff all around.
āOpenAI has tapped out one petrostate already, time to move to the next one!ā
FWIW I have no clue how the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is managed. The principal idea is to sequester windfall earnings from hydrocarbon extraction from the normal day-to-day economy, avoiding a boom-and-bust cycle and the resource curse.
That said, itās pretty useless to just store a bunch of money to use ālaterā. I can imagine a portion is used for infrastructure (all those marvelous tunnels) but taxes on income and VAT are eye-wateringly high (and I say that as a Swede!). So there has to be some political pressure to raid the piggy bank, not least for election winning purposes.
So presumably the fund is insulated from day to day meddling. On the other hand, you canāt just hand over the reins to 25 year old coke-addicted MBAs.
My main point is that for the proposal to happen, someone will have to try to convince the people in charge of the fund that betting the farm on Sama not ripping you off is worth doing. Possible? Maybe. Probable? I fucking hope not.
Does anyone get why CJ the X (they/he pronouns) and our friends are playing footsie? The best I can find is https://sojo.net/articles/culture/cj-x-nonbinary-philosopher-shaping-gen-zs-spiritual-imagination Do they have any actual connection to PUA outside Aella? Any video essays on the philosophy of gender? I think their look is a TikTok thing and a queer camp thing although some PUA like peacocking too.
I suppose my kneejerk objection to their appearance reminding me of PUAs from Straussā āThe Gameā is rooted in a fear that itās another manifestation of the rationalist pathology of reinventing everything from first principles. Rainbow eyeliner and random feathers arenāt inherently terrible on their own. But using over-the-top fashion as a tactic to cultivate more sexual attention was a central part of Straussā cohort 20 years ago, it was widely publicized (and often mocked) all over the internet, and that subculture was ultimately harmful to a lot of people! We can learn from the past! And most of the people Strauss hung around with and documented were specifically and obsessively pursuing heterosexual sex and norms, so I donāt trust whatever remains of that culture to automatically be cool with trans and nonbinary people, especially if it gets cross-pollinated with whatever the hell Aella is doing.
Thereās also something to be said of the inherent narcissism of the influencer economy? Like, I prefer my video essayists to have more of a burned-out academic vibe so CJ has been adjacent to but not on my radar. That being said, having a very distinct aesthetic is pretty common in the space because having a hook is what brings in eyeballs and thus patreon subs or superchats or whatever else turns that into an actual career. I would sooner assume heās using a similar strategy to manipulate viewers into clicking his face rather than that heās actively following the PUA playbook.
CJ has an essay complaining about how corporate social media is toxic, but they still built their career around it, Twitter users who hated the site but could not leave reminded me of the fable of the monkey and the jar of rice. https://cjthex.com/what-is-to-be-done/
Aellaās orientation seems very straight and patriarchal (she wants a strong, wealthy, dominant man, and she frames her polls around men and women not around figuring out what the people you have the hots for are in to). Queer, trans, and nonbinary rationalists seem to end up on the sidelines (eg. Duncan Sabien, Ozy).
Fans say that CJ is a music-school dropout and that its not clear how they funded themself before becoming a successful vlogger. Toronto is not cheap. āAutododactā and āparents with some moneyā fits the pattern.
they pronouns
he
his
?
Oops! All I know about them is their presence at Bay Area rationalist events. Fixed the OP.
Iām also interested in answers to this; I donāt really follow youtube types in general (and even less other of the pop names) so I didnāt even know this name until it showed up here this week
I cut YouTube out of my life a year ago, briefly returned for idle entertainment like cooking shows, and then gave it up again. Even before all that, I was generally ignorant of who YouTube-famous people were.
I ruthlessly cull any helpful āsuggestionsā from my YT recommendations and try to do some due diligence on the people I do follow.
Jane street is pressuring olympiads to not sanction Israel.
Gee, who could have foreseen that letting them touch everything under the math sun could have consequences.
such a weird hill to die on. Iād imagine that Israeli kids still get to participate, just under a different flag (just like the Russians in the 2026 FIDE candidates tournament). Surely if you just care about the math this shouldnāt be such a big deal?
So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (āezra klein is a disgusting worm,ā https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/1-ezra-klein-is-166891080 ), and i went to upload it to our rss host, zencastr. friends. zencastr is so fucked now. the only interface, as far as i can tell, is an llm, and it tormented me. im just gonna dump the screenshots. this is a fragment of an exhausting hour of back and forth.
note that i apparently have 10k credits, which i assume are temporary and there as a welcome to the new service. a single credit is a few bucks and in total the bill just for the conversation came out to about 6-7 dollars
it also tried to get me to use this absolutely horrible episode description
i asked it to schedule the episode for 9 am Tuesday, aug 18th, same as the patreon, and it said it did. turns out it went out this morning. cool! if you listen by rss itās out now i guess.
i posted on reddit asking how to switch hosts. the ceo found that post today and offered his hand, which i bit
i keep thinking about that bit in a philip k dick novel where the protagonistās door tries to chisel tips out of him before opening, and threatens to sue him when he bypasses the lock. i hate the future/present so much
holy fuck thatās infuriating
imagine the worst possible CLI and then make it even worse and then make it an asshole
real rich of their CEO (presumably? it looks like a burner account which still checks out if itās their CEO or someone who works for him doing damage control and trying to take this shit to DMs) to both anthropomorphize their chatbot and assert that the problem is you need uhh training on the system that doesnāt do what you want it to do and keeps trying to charge you for shit that makes your workflow worse
honestly the thing that makes me think it is actually their CEO is Iāve watched these fuckers use āletās take this to DMs/emailā as an attempted power move. they seriously think we want to talk to them privately about, like, anything at all. no fucker Iām here to call you out in public because your product is shit and youāre shit too.
Iām using Zencastr cos the free tier is the right price and Iāve found my way to evade most of the AI crap thankfully. āNew recordingā on the front page or in existing sessions seems to take you to the bit that actually does shit.
I just record with it, I grab the MOV and WAV files and I put it together from that and (after much faff) upload to YouTube and Libsyn. I shudder at the thought of Libsyn going AI, cos otherwise they just do a good job of hosting the mp3 files and running the RSS and I can get onto Apple without having to interact with Apple.
adrian still hasnāt responded
I havenāt been listening to your podcast (no shade, itās just not my thing) but Iāll have to listen to this because my God that man frustrates me.
He basically exists to funnel run the:
intellectually curious libs -> smug superiority complex with status quo bias -> reactionary
pipeline.
hell yeah, get his ass! o7
What were they thinking?!
PS:
So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (āezra klein is a disgusting worm,)ā¦
A+ hook
The episode dropped and Iām like 2/3 in and have already passed my previous record for the number of times Iāve had to pause an episode of OS to make a little angry noise.
Alternative title: Adam No! Bonk
Word is that both Adam Conover and Carol Queen have backed out.
Run away, Nina, run away!
so maybe this is a bit too obvious to state at this point but: conoverās very obviously tied up in aellaās plzdontkillus EA influencer scheme, his apparent anti-AI stance is purely performative, and the apology he did for doing marketing for worldcoin on his channel isnāt accepted. he knew what he was doing.
also, I really donāt need the Adam Ruins Everything guy in the same part of my brain as sex, thanks
countdown to Comedian Sex Pest Scandal in
can we kick aella and her friends out of perversion
Perverts (shower-positive)
cj noooā¦ someone come get my favorite parasocial essay-they out of there
Every time a new person learns who Aella is, an angel loses its wings.
Nina Hartley coshing a Nazi with a dildo was not on my 2026 Bingo card but I can hope
Edit / Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything seems like a mainstream āMythbustersā type TV presenter, if he likes older women and she needs a dildo caddy this has potential. We talked about CJ the X here.
Some things are classics for a reason.
Regarding Grettaās job title āorgy organizerā:
besides the point but orgynizer was right there
https://bsky.app/profile/mecha-lenin-3000.bsky.social/post/3mtcx7bixkc2u
Whoever CJ TheX is, they look like they strolled straight out of Neil Straussā book. Is it valid to call somebody an āunreconstructed pickup artistā if there was never any attempt at (or even possibility of) reconstruction?
edit: they/them pronouns
