Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.)
Elon makes Grok developers install intrusive surveillance software on their laptops. Theyāre being told to enable screen captures and URL tracking.
In conjunction with his comments about making it antiwoke by modifying the input data rather then relying on a system prompt after filling it with everything, itās hard not to view this as part of an attempt to ideologically monitor these tutors to make sure theyāre not going to select against versions of the model that arenāt in the desired range of ācloseted Nazi scumbag.ā
prompt injection phish by email
so glad these things have a solid security model and this totally wonāt result in a scrambled half-assed fix
A prompt-injection attack on Googleās Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozillaās bug bounty program
Whenever I think Mozilla canāt get any worseā¦
So now they do āAgentic Securityā and āReal-time GenAI intelligence on emerging threatsā.
mozilla has for years had a habit of tailchasing some utterly fucking weird shit instead of focusing on their core business, and this feels very much like part of that. but fucking still
So random thought, you now how LW is worried about an seed AI going foom right, how it bootstraps itself into a new AI with better capabilities which bootstraps etc all the way till the singularity.
Why isnāt it happening? Gpt-2 was released 2019, 3 2022, 4 2023, so where is 5 and 6? Where is our double event?
LW:
Please consider minimizing direct use of AI chatbots (and other text-based AI) in the near-term future, if you can. The reason is very simple: your sanity may be at stake.
Perfect. No notes.
the comments are wild āyes good post having my brain taken over by a superintelligent autocomplete is a reasonable concernā
The top comment begins thusly:
I think you make a reasonably compelling case, but when I think about the practicality of this in my own life itās pretty hard to imagine not spending any time talking to chatbots. ChatGPT, Claude and others are extremely useful.
I didnāt think it was possible, but the perfection continues! Still, no notes!
Theyāre LWers, they already baked their psyche long ago
LWāer: āsorry can you excuse me for a moment? Iām having a bad day, somebody gave me a stack of papers with a paperclip in itā
(I do now worry if there are actual LWers who for real gave themselves ptsd like reactions from seeing paperclips. Like the woman who mistook āfree parkingā for āfree palestineā a couple of years back).
wonder if thatās why they tried and failed to change it to āsquiggle maximizingā
Remember Devin, the AI coding bot that turned out to be a complete scam?
Well, looks like Goldman Sachs decided to let it loose on its code base. In YOLO mode too, it seems.
It would be really funny if Devin caused a financial crash this way
Total fucking Devin move if you ask me.
Devin will be supervised by human employees and will handle jobs that engineers often consider drudgery, like updating internal code to newer programing languages, he said.
Good luck to the workers having to debug that shit.
Goldman is the first major bank to use Devin, according to Cognition, which was founded in late 2023 by a trio of engineers and whose staff is reportedly stocked with champion coders.
Being good at Codeforces contests surely translates to any other domain. I expect the Cognition guys to fully deliver on their promises.
This isnāt an original thought, but a better matrix for comparing the ideology (such as it is) of the current USG is not Nazi Germany but pre-war US right wing obsessions - anti-FDR and anti-New Deal.
This appears in weird ways, like this throwaway comment regarding the Niihau incident, where two ethnic Japanese inhabitants of Niihau helped a downed Japanese airman immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Imagine if you will, one of the 9/11 hijackers parachuting from the plane before it crashed, asking a random muslim for help, then having that muslim be willing to immediately get himself into a shootouts, commit arson, kidnappings, and misc mayhem.
Then imagine that it was covered in a media environment where the executive branch had been advocating for war for over a decade, and voices which spoke against it were systematically silenced.
(src)
Dude also credits LessOnline with saving his life due to unidentified <<<ethnics>>> shooting up his 'hood when he was there. Charming.
Edit nah heās a neo-Nazi (or at least very concerned about the fate of German PoWs after WW2):
This is, sadly, pretty unsurprising, as carrying forward the anti-FDR/anti-New Deal movement was a foundational pillar of the libertarianism that Trump co-opted. Heavily promoted by the LewRockwell.com/Mises.org crowd.
A hackernews muses about vibe coding a chatbot to provide therapy for people in crisis. Soon, an actual health care professional shows up to butcher the offender and defile the corpse. This causes much tut-tutting and consternation among the locals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535197
Edit: a shower thought: have any of yall noticed the way that prompt enjoyers describe using Cursor, tab completions, and such are a repackaging of the psychology of loot boxes? In particular, they share the variable-interval reward schedule that serves as the hook in your typical recreational gambling machines.
Iāve been making casual observation how a number of the adhd people I know to have addiction tendencies tend to get real into prompts, but hadnāt observed the lootbox thing
thatās going into the ponder bucket.
you should be read up on the gospel of @fasterandworse never shutting up about āHookedā
One of the subjects in the MER study posted that too: https://x.com/QuentinAnthon15/status/1943948796414898370
the psychology of loot boxes?
yep! https://awful.systems/post/4568900
the book is āHookedā and itās Donāt Build The Torment Nexus Iām Now Providing You A Detailed Blueprint Of
Ye gods! Also, great write-up!
Do you reckon that Altman recognized the gacha potential from the get-go? That Big LLM has always been FanDuel for dorks, but on purpose?
Musk objects to the āstochastic parrotā labelling of LLMs. Mostly just the stochastic part.
āWe made it more truth-seeking, as determined by our boss, the fascist megalomaniac.ā
Wake up babe, new alignment technique just dropped: Reinforcement Learning Elon Feedback
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issuesāa significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
womp, hold on let me finish, womp
had a quick scan over the blogposts earlier, keen to read the paper
would be nice to see some more studies with more numbers under study, but with the cohort they picked the self-reported vs actual numbers are already quite spicy
and n=16 handily beats the usual promptfondler n=1
Also the attempt to actually measure productivity instead of just saying āthey felt like it helpedā - of course it did!
I have become aware that there is a very right wing Catholic podcaster who has a Catholicism AI chatbot app. Itās called Truthly.
Your Trusted Catholic AI Conversation Companion Deepen your understanding, explore ideas, and engage in meaningful dialogueāanytime, anywhere.
If someone could call up Pope Leo and get him to excommunicate the guys who invented this, that would be great.
Nah, we just need to make sure they properly baptise whatever servers itās running on.
really, really thoroughly baptise. not just drops but fistfuls of water. the more water the more holy. the servers will love being really holy!
Just throw the whole unit into the font, just to be safe. Or better yet, a river!
Canāt find the angle to spin this out into a grown-up buttcoin post, but if I did, the title would be āHorse_ebuttsā.
Anyway: recently Iāve been burdened with the knowledge that thereās a bunch of horse racing related crypto companies. Theyāre all obviously terrible.
- Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to āZed Championsā, which isā¦ pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
- EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people donāt trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
- BTX Racing: a blockchain platform for buying stake in horses. Not sure if you get to choose which cut of the horse you own. Also, not sure if when you liquidate your equine tranche you get cash or a bucket of glue.
Also, insert obligatory stablecoin reference here.
Wait wtf I once built a blockchain called equestreum *as a joke* https://github.com/hat-festival/equestreum I need to step away from the lathe
think of all the rug you could have pulledā¦
Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to āZed Championsā, which isā¦ pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
Theyāre also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know whoās winning this particular fight for peopleās cash.
EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people donāt trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
Itād arguably be helpful if the caregivers are helping themselves to the stash, but I doubt thereās anything stopping then from BSing the blockchain, too.
Yeah that āthey can just input bsā has always been the whole issue with those whole logging bit on the blockchain stuff. Esp considering the costs and risk of implementing a thing like this and the low costs of normal existing logging I dont see how this could ever become mainstream viable. (And that is ignoring the ease of use).
Theyāre also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know whoās winning this particular fight for peopleās cash.
Itās almost as if people donāt want to spend money on bland low-poly 3D models of horses and would instead prefer waifu art with surprisingly intricate character design that I definitely do not know anything about*
*I actually do not, but for the bit, pretend that I do and am being defensive
I can honestly say that I have never played Umamusume Pretty Derby because on my PC the sound keeps cutting out and the cutscenes donāt play which greatly disappointed me.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JspxcjkvBmye4cW4v/asking-for-a-friend-ai-research-protocols
Multiple people are quietly wondering if their AI systems might be conscious. Whatās the standard advice to give them?
Touch grass. Touch all the grass.
Username called āThe Dao of Bayesā. Bayesās theorem is when you pull the probabilities out of your posterior.
ē„č äøčØļ¼čØč äøē„ć He who knows (the Dao) does not (care to) speak (about it); he who is (ever ready to) speak about it does not know it.
Whatās the standard advice to give them?
Itās unfortunately illegal for me to answer this question earnestly
HN commenters are slobbering all over the new Grok. Virtually every commenter bringing up Grokās recent full-tilt Nazism gets flagged into oblivion.
this particular abyss just fucking hurts to gaze into
LessWrongās descent into right-wing tradwife territory continues
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=ueRbTvnB2DJ5fJcdH
Annapurna (member for 5 years, 946 karma):
Why is there so little discussion about the loss of status of stay at home parenting?
First comment is from user Shankar Sivarajan, member for 6 years, 1227 karma
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=opzGgbqGxHrr8gvxT
Well, you could make it so the only plausible path to career advancement for women beyond, say, receptionist, is the provision of sexual favors. I expect that will lower the status of women in high-level positions sufficiently to elevate stay-at-home motherhood.
[ā¦]
EDIT: From the downvotes, I gather people want magical thinking instead of actual implementable solutions.
Granted, this got a strong disagree from the others and a tut-tut from Habryka, but itās still there as of now and not yeeted into the sun. And rats wonder why people donāt want to date them.
Dorkus malorkus alert:
When my grandmother quit being a nurse to become a stay at home mother, it was seen like a great thing. She gained status over her sisters, who stayed single and in their careers.
Fitting into your societal pigeonhole is not the same as gaining status, ya doofus.
Another comment that has been getting downvotes and tut-tuts begins,
The only thing that will raise fertility rates is to make it more affordable to have a child.
(Robot Santa voice) Wanting all women to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? Evil! Not providing footnotes in your reply to a blog post? EXACTLY AS EVIL
LOL the mod gets snippy here too
This comment too is not fit for this site. What is going on with yāall? Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue?
āWhy are there so many Nazis in my Nazi bar???ā
Any time somebody edits a post to talk about the downvotes, itās cursed gold.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 āactual implementable solutionā what the fuck is wrong with these people
itās lesswrong, the list is lengthy and tedious
š³
deleted by creator
El Reg: At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto
Two tastes that go great together!
