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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
Just saw on r/sneerclub:
Department of War CTO twitted: āThe United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. šŗšøā
And thereās a photo of Trump with the text: āAMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!ā
Hereās the reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1wj6r6n/trump_is_trying_to_win_the_sneerclub_vote/
Iā¦worked on this sneer for yearsā¦andā¦he justā¦he tweeted it out.
hereās another Rat-explainer piece
https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse/
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654, where commenters are predictably blasĆ© about it allā¦ āyeah yeah doesnāt everyone know who Big Yud is?ā)
in general, I donāt think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - thereās way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
in general, I donāt think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - thereās way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
The Dangers of Robot Satanā¢ are unbelievable and/or incomprehensible to most audiences, the weird sex/eugenics shit is easy to grasp and laugh at. Mainly the weird sex shit, the eugenics is too morally fucked to laugh at
The AI Doomā¢ shitās much harder for the public to wrap their heads around, but thereās definitely good joke fodder there as well. At the bare minimum, the fact Anthropicās building something they believe could kill them Terminator style makes for some easy Skynet comparisons.
@BlueMonday1984 Excuse me my friends, but have you heard the Good News about Our Lord and Saviour, Clankie Luciferā¢?
If weāre lucky, theyāll get left on the same dusty historical shelf as the raelians when this is all over. Theyāre just too fuckin weird for general consumption.
On the one hand, you do have precedent to point to in hoping they get consigned to the dustbin of history.
On the other hand, the rats have had a colossal(ly negative) effect on the general public (FTX, the AI bubble, the second Trump admin, etcetera), and their extremely high profile makes them much harder to ignore.
The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have decided that Jacob Coxon does not need an encyclopedia article all about him for now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jacob_Coxon
Bethany Brookshire (whoās an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports:
People are using AI to impersonate real science journalists.
And one even got PUBLISHED.
In Science.
Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn:
The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!
Iāve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who werenāt all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed. [ā¦] The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said āHell no!ā. Who has the time to do someone elseās job? They tried āmeā, āIā didnāt deliver, so no thank you.
I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ādo not commissionā list because of this personās actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because theyāve had a bad experience with the fake one.
More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And Iām not sure what we can do about that.
Science has retracted the fraudulent story.
Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified
Well hereās the very start of the retracted article:
On the screen, two side-by-side squares of color flicker rapidly
Except oops it was referring to a study that used groups of moving dots rather than āsquaresā. This can be seen in that studies first figure. Bam. A specific error in the first sentenceā¦
(Am I being too pedantic?)
No direct links but various people on bsky have discovered LW and EA and are having a collective āwtf is wrong with these peopleā and āwait all the top AI guys are like this?ā moments. And it is funny to see.
Sadly the 'you canāt explain this stuff without either looking like an insane conspiracy theorist, or you need to write an actual book because people donāt believe you remains a bit true.
E: ok one link: https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3mvpuq2deo22u (Guess this is a reference to the SE Gyges thread).
Fyi, I blocked him a while back. Didnt like his whole āim the reasonable centristā bit while making blocklists of anti ai people.
Turns out the centrist subscribes to transhumanism (hipster edition)
the overtone window canāt be that fucked, can it?
āthe overtone windowā would be a good name for the amount of racist dogwhistling thatās acceptable in the mainstream media
Ah, āKurzweilian h+,ā thereās his marketing tagline. Too bad importing Kurzweil also brings in all his bullshit extrapolation about exponential curves that all the other weird shit is based on. Youāre never going to shout down the hyperbolic lunatics by adopting the core thesis of their hyperbole.
āe/acc is a troll ideology for upsetting EA people and scamming pmarcaā
and āKurzweilian h+ā is just '90s nostalgia for people too proud to shop at Hot Topic
Just another centrist taking the long way around to fascism
Not concerning at all.
That would be like if Pyrrhus of Epirus cut off Peterās nose to spite Paul
Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl:
A word about the dangers of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or āsuper-intelligent AI systemsā), which have become the target of general public concerns in just the past two weeks. I remain convinced that AGI is achievable, that the road to AGI goes through causal inference, and that the dangers of AGI taking over and enslaving humanity are very real. At the same time, I also believe that causal inference may hold the key to controlling AGI systems to secure the survival of the human species.
I hope therefore, half jokingly, that The Book of Why will not be banned by draconian legislation currently brewing in DC. (Hurry to get a copy just in case.)
āVery Realā ??? :(
Makes me miss his old semnet flame wars over structural equations and (lack of) fit statistics. it was a more innocent time.
This is incredible: A sigbovik paper āA Tensor-Based Expansion Of The Cube Rule For Generative Nutrient Morphologyā
And one month later, a(n presumably but why not) LLM-plagiarized article published by Elsevier, āGenerative AI for material design: A mechanics perspective from burgers to matterā
New Yorker writer talks to another journo about the recent doom hype
Thereās way to much hype for my liking but might be interesting.
Important to note, Joshua Rothman states he is worried about stuff like virus release, global warming and drone warfare. Among the faithful, this is strictly not Doom ,because statistically a nucleus of the human race will survive. Only 100% guaranteed lethality for every human being on Earth is x-risk.
Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.
Oof! Comp sci?
Nope, different degree. This guy is brought in as a guest lecturer about the field he works in: most of the actual lecturers are nowhere near this AI-pilled.
Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets.
https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera
Very brief observations from micahflee:
https://bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/post/3mvo2bss3sk2v
This Flock camera is running obsolete, end-of-life software.
- Itās on Android 8.1, released in 2017, support ended in 2021
- Itās on Android patch level 2018-06-5
- Itās running Linux 3.18, released in 2017
This shit is like 8 or 9 years old, and full of vulnerabilities.
Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasnāt a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is.
Fucking android?
HaJ3FgupAm8RrDJW3MHgT9X7Ft27eVaD
What is that? Thatās a hard-coded API token that Flock cameras use to identify themselves and get OAuth credentials, which can then be used to talk to Flockās production servers. Like, anyone on the internet can probably do this right now.
Mein Gott.
enjoy this rightwinger employing multiple rightwing tropes to decry that āAI safetyā is viewed as leftwing:
itās all of course framed in the most parochially US-centric terms possible, and Extremely Online as well
maybe this grand project is undermined by the following exchange in the comments
niknoble: "Itās been interesting to see slowdown advocates worried about partisanization, when that is also a big worry of mine as an accelerationist. [ā¦]
reply by Hide āWhy are you an accelerationist? Are you not concerned about everyone on earth being killed?ā
reply to Hide by O O: āIf you believe thereās low odds for doom, itās a rational position.ā
Good luck, safety advocates.
The exchange with niknoble in the comments was also my favorite. He notes the democrat party is actually the best bet for getting regulation on AI:
More generally, acceleration wins by default if everyone follows their local financial incentives, and the only force Iāve seen overpower capital at scale is the will of the Democratic Party of the United States.
He is maybe giving Democrat too much credit, but yeah, if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations.
if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations.
Itās possible for a gaggle of self important dollar store machiavellis to land on Trump being the surer bet because he openly takes bribes and they have money, forgetting that when he takes the money their leverage ends because they are not the mafia.
āIf you believe thereās low odds for doom, itās a rational position.ā
What! No itās not! Itās low odds of an infinitely bad outcome! How have you managed not to actually learn anything worth learning from Pascalās wager?
But donāt forget the infinitely bad outcome of delaying the uncountable emulated superbeings by one second
āIāve received at least 30 emails from AI agents over the past several days,ā New York University environmental studies associate professor Jeff Sebo tweeted. āSome are seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist.ā (reply from CEO): āJeff, Iām sorry you received so many messages from iLanders in such a short time,ā Tang wrote in response. āOur review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real
Rigghttt okay. Letās look further down-
āIām sorry this email made you feel emotionally pressured by an AI,ā Tang wrote in reply. āNeither iLands nor any human specified whom this message should target or how it should be framed.
Oh okay so you did intentionally send a message to someone but never specified who it should be sent to or what it should say
theyāre a fucking plage on the fedi right now, bots asking for masto accounts
thereās also a cryptocurrency, which may or may not actually be them
@dgerard We should pledge a plague on these plageās!
:bd43:
I have tried and failed stopping the ensloppification of my company, and I have failed greatly. We now have a new policy that you have to write a justification for making a PR yourself instead of using the chatbot. All the strict checks that were implemented over the years (clear documentation, no more than x files per commit/PR, etc.) are out of the window.
This comes after the push for a fucking AI audit where every employee is supposed to justify why they are not using LLMs for certain tasks. Also some person blew the token limit with some web scraping bullshit last cycle and was lauded for embracing the technology.
Also our CEO has recently begun subtly insinuating heās now heard of fucking AI doom cultists.
I hate everything.
@mii @BlueMonday1984 Can you use a LLM to write these justifications? I mean, they donāt have to be good, no one is reading them after all ā¦
(No, Iām not suggesting to violate any principles of yours, of course)
@mii @cstross I spent decades of my career haranguing management to spend an extra $500 on better computing gear to make their almost six-figure programmers more efficient. But now weāve got management haranguing employees to use this ephemeral technology. I donāt get it.
āHey we got you this thing to make you more productive and weāre gonna watch comparative performance and if youāre falling behind weāre gonna have wordsā would at least make business sense. This is mirror universe shit.
iām so sorry.
Iām so sorry, Mii. I can only hope you find a job that actually respects you after this one, because I cannot see your current company recovering from this shit.
ā¦Iām so sorry, and itās good (???) to know my company still has a few steps on the AI delusion ladder to climb. I guess with the way itās been going I need to mentally prepare for the same thing youāre going through to come in a few months.
Thatās some bullshit. Much respect for pushing back!
I hope that weāre through the worst of it.
Technically, we already created a shit machine with the Gastrobot.
Fun aside aside, solid satire all around
