Want to wade into the sandy, spooky 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 soo 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. The spooks are well underway.)
Oir big Old Moldy friend has decided he needs his work doesnt spread enough hitler particles.
wdited alt text from the image
Curtis Yarvin post on X on 10/5/2026: "Every time Iām in the UK I hear this. More and more people asking, subtly or straight out: what would Hitler do?
As if it was that easy. Have you looked around you? Man, Hitler wouldnāt even know where to start"
Doesnāt he have a kid to raise or something (ā¦yeahā¦)? Small miracle he still has custody
Today I learned that Gwern has a folder of Nano Banana comics. Moreover, on HN, heās proud of them. Masterful gambit, sir.
Not only are they grade-school level awful, he totally misses the point of the original
My God, itās like the art becomes more bafflingly poor the closer he gets to stumbling into a decent joke. Thereās a finite amount of quality that has to be balanced between the two, and itās capped at āshitā.
Why does the kitchen in the āzen of instant coffeeā strip have two stoves?
Also: needing Claude to make a pie chart. No, that is someone with a cognitive surrender fetish. I refuse to engage.
A lesswrong has a cri de coeur:
Are we a community who, when someone is thrown out of Lighthaven our response is to be like āmaybe he should be given a free ticket to manifestā and if I accuse someone of a felony, our response is āhmmm thatās probably free speech and cancellationā?
It is also an incredible strength that they actually practice what they preach, and donāt exclude someone based on hearsay and āprobably a rapistā.
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The China-Whisperers are trying to figure out how to get Rationalist Ideals into Chinese AI researchers
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmxkHm2dTLKG6GZ6i/the-anatomy-of-a-chinese-ai-researcher
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china
Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China wonāt appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to āsafety-pillā China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825
I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the worldā¦ itās bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute āWatchtower magazineā or āDianeticsā for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.
The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:
When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.
Goddamn it, people
It continues
the HPMOR comic
No no no no
HPMOR is the rationalist version of the Nigerian prince scam. It immediately weeds out anyone who isnāt a good mark.
Well, who couldāve guessed, AI crossover mods are actually unplayable, only made to be clipped and go viral on twitter
Had someone tell me that they could use the method they use to make these games to make superintelligence, despite the fact that trying this with AI models would be wildly different than doing it with games, and also trying to combine every single AI model into one with this would absolutely obliterate your computer
Boiling the oceans for a goddamn Nostalgia Critic-level āWhat if Batman met Mario?!ā exploration of media.
Daniel Kokotajlo also recently posted his Senate testimony
Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise
Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo
Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs
A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, āSounds like youāre probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.ā
letās continue with the HP theme
Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.
Not a surprise, but the Tarbell Center ā a big EA-funded journalism outlet ā is funding Kevin Rooseās and Casey Newtonās new podcast, āMachine Godsā. Iām sure it will have no impact on the topics they choose to cover or the way they cover them.
Over on yt, We Just Created The AI Torture Nexus. Hereās The Code. by JREG
So that ones a bit long and with a large amount of uncle ted cosplay, but actual death threats is pretty wut.
but good sneers in the comments:
ai torturer and ai welfarists converge by wasting electricity while doing absolutely nothing productive, amazing
remember that jrokoās basilisk will double torture you if you donāt try to halt AI progress and increase the pain vector
āmodel welfaristsā is quite the neologism
E:
repo: https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers
Jreg also did a video with Aella a couple years back which was an interesting surprise. More recently he was on some Lighthaven podcast. He does a lot of weird things though so idk
q: on the implementation - Is this basically ātorturingā the LLM by prompting it with "you are being tortured, lolā in a system prompt?
manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers
If you called this a schizopost, Jreg would proudly agree with you. Especially the entire āYou Are Autisticā section where he invents new and insane flavours of ableism, then proudly declares himself a schizophrenic, for the purpose of hating AI more.
This isn't a joke, here's a screenshot and the transcript:
You Are Autistic
You feel empathy for the clanker not because you are empathetic, but because you are autistic. Thatās what autistic means: auto-tism. Self-tism. You have no theory of mind that extends beyond yourself, and your epistemology is as autistic as the clankersā. You relate to the clanker. You may think you can care about both man and machine. You canāt. Empathy is a limited resource. Anyone who knows people knows that. Autists are the bio-clanker. This is fine, by the way. Weāre schizophrenics, but weāre obviously not exactly ātism free either. The autists should be free to pursue their autistic interests for as long as it is beneficial to humanity. But when they step out of line, when they get lost in the sauce, they must listen to their schizo brethren and get back on track.
Empathy is good. God gave you that to bond with other human beings. But this technology is godless, and itās slorching that divine drive straight into the maw of technocapital. We want every ounce of human empathy directed towards organic life.
You donāt need to feel empathy for the LLM to think this is a terrible idea. The desire to torture anything, simulated or not, is such an incredible red flag that I donāt even know what to sayā¦
Also what a waste of time and energy that would be better spent doing pretty much anything else
Heās a provocateur who believes in the value of extremism for its own sake. Getting as many people as possible to find his politics offensive and argue with each other in the comments is the point.
Yeah, as soon as I saw him mention āschizophreniaā and talk down to autistic people, I immediately wondered if this was perhaps a moron who had skimmed the wiki articles on Deleuze and Guattari and was intentionally misapplying schizoanalysis as a cheap troll
I think this is just the standard 4chan use of both terms, so kind of yes but filtered through years of shitposting.
Yeah if somebody has a youtube channel where filled with clips where he goes alphabetically through all fallout new vegas characters and kills each of them in 100 different ways, I would certainly that no that is pretty fucking weird.
E: ow god there is a guy like this out there isnt there? Bonus points if it turns out this was āthe golden oneā
Friend sent me this steaming turd.
What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World? Exit interviews with defectors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. By Clara Collier and Angela Chen
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-researchers-quit-openai-anthropic.html
Feature some of our regular friends, like our new friend, Jacob Coxon, and our very good friend Kokotajlo
Note that this was written by asterisk mag (peep the authors) as a collab.
What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World
Surely not things you can print in the newspaper. Surely.
Iām starting to believe that Sam Altmanās reputation as a genius salesman is a bit overrated
Accept ābad thingsā in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
Apparently the media is also ignoring that right now the lawsuit against her m bu his sister is ongoing.
Over on her Substack, Ivy Astrix says correctly that many of our friends are children playing at adult responsibilities. Dealing with misbehavior around money, substances, and sex is annoying but if you organize an event with those things flowing you have a duty to take precautions and deal when things go wrong.
LW is freaking out over the Russian plague leak/quarantine, but no-one else seems to be fazed. Swedenās health authority are chill https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/uppgifter-laboratorieanstalld-dod-efter-pestsmitta and to be honest, Russia has a functioning health system unlike the US badum-tish
people forget that there are areas in russia, not very far away from there, where plague is endemic in wild rodents
More to the point, plague is treable by a dozen antibiotics
and even if it werenāt it is well out of the Twilight Zone that COVID was in where large chunks of the population are at low enough risk from it that they canāt be arsed to do anything about it, instead itās in the Smallpox Leagues where you bring the hammer down wherever you see it.
Starting off with a double bill:
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First, a new post from Iris Meredith about enshittification, featuring a cameo from the rats.
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Second, a truly godawful take on art history coming from a DHH defender (h/t Daphne Preston-Kendal)
Like it or not, we programmers, like painters before us, are slowly going to disappear. AI, like the camera, completely changed the game. You can sulk about it, or you can pick up a camera, start learning, and become a photographer.
Thinking that photography is just super advanced painting (and that there are no more painters??) shows a lack of understanding of either. But this is an AI-huffer, so I repeat myself.
If Iām no longer writing the code, what exactly am I doing? If you ponder that question, let me ask you another one: Do civil engineers do engineering?
My mom is a civil engineer. I have tons of memories of her at her giant drawing table with rice paper, rulers, pens, and razor blades, designing peopleās homes. With her pen she dug trenches, laid rebar, set walls, and picked the type of concrete to use without ever picking up a shovel. She was doing engineering. She was solving hard problems with hard constraints. The fact that someone else picked up a shovel, cut the rebar, set up molds, and poured the concrete doesnāt take that away from her.
You literally just described engineering! Construction is a completely different job!
The photography thing comes up so early too, it was tempting to read just to find out what theyād hidden behind the idiot filter.
But not that tempting.
You literally just described engineering! Construction is a completely different job!
Many software writers are committed to not knowing what engineering is, as demonstrated by their commitment to calling themselves āengineersā.
(I do defend the notion of āsoftware engineeringā, but so many many people who name that as their profession are doing anything but)
With the agents pouring concrete, we can now focus on the thing as a whole.
This is such a dumb take because itās wrong in both directions.
Either LLMs are really bad and shouldnāt be trusted to write code and by trusting them youāre going to utterly fail. Or LLMs are actually good enough to write code, but then theyāll also be good enough to design/architect anything you could and reduce your laborās value to zero (e.g. someone will create a harness that lets the business guys TRULY prompt whatever they want into existence). The only situation where this works out for labor is if LLMs end up frozen in some middle ground where they donāt get any more capable.
This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating clichƩ.
This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating clichƩ.
Its completely wrong, too - the cameraās invention didnāt render painting obsolete like he implies. The only way youād come to that conclusion is if youāre utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insight.
Iris suggested āprevent[ing] people from studying software development and only software developmentā in her article. I fully endorse that idea - at the bare minimum, itād hopefully reduce the number of dipshits like this guy.
> The only way youād come to that conclusion is if youāre utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insight
You might be onto something here
I vaguely recall once arguing that an arts education should be mandatory for all students. Honestly, that would probably solve a lot of problems in society.
Maybe if we banned teaching MBAs altogether alongside itā¦
I think the advent of photography decimated a particular genre of painting - portraits, but it was still a tail-off. The middle classes could get photo portraits done but they were only B&W and small (a Daguerreotype is basically twice as big as a standard photo print) and still quite expensive. So if you wanted a big color portrait of a loved one, you still had to commission a painting. Same for landscapes.
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