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.)
Good news, everyone! A Wronger has Thoughts about Female Attractiveness
30 karma, 15 comments. Very Rational.
To summarise:
- Author recounts shitty conversations that men have where they objectify women
- Author thinks about women that are āknown quantitiesā of conventionally attractive, and says they are āonly as attractive as the pretty women one meets in real life,ā and attributes the difference to things like makeup, posing, photography etc.
- Author refuses to comment on why men have conversations mentioned in 1. (basically just perpetuating the amirite guys? chauvinism)
- Author proceeds to speculate on why women talk about other womenās appearance.
This is just a LWerās version of a shitty greentext ending with āwhy are women like this?ā
E: sorry for necroposting, this came up somehow and I didnāt check which sack it was under.
Pro tip: search GitHub for āremoved envā. Vibe coders who donāt understand envs probably donāt know git either.
My eyes are bleeding. WARNING: psychic damage will occur.
Unsurprisingly, thereās a lot of openai and claude api keys.
TIL that āAris Thorneā is a character name favoured by ChatGPT - which means its presence is a reliable slop tell, lol
like the dumbass-ray version of Ballard calling multiple characters variants on āTravenā
what to do with this information
https://awful.systems/post/5168673/8320254 a third name has hit the towers.
what to do with this information
If you know any sci-fi/fantasy mags, you should probably tell them about it to help them identify and reject slop more easily.
with a momentās thought, it should be obvious that they are painfully aware, and with another momentās thought that thatās where I found this out.
Finally, I dislike the arrogant, brash, confident, tone of many posts on LessWrong.
Hmm, OK. Where might this be going?
Plausibly, I think a lot of this is inherited from Eliezer, who is used to communicating complex ideas to people less intelligent and/or rational than he is. This is not the experience of a typical poster on LessWrong, and I think itās maladaptive for people to use Eliezerās style and epistemic confidence in their own writings and thinking.
yes, instead they use Scottās and just keep typing forever
āWhich Scott?ā
āAny of them.ā
OmniScott.
You canāt talk to us like that, we are not the biassed masses, we are unbiased!
Yud once debated Massimo Pigliucci and did poorly. He tried and failed to publish academic research in a journal not controlled by his groupies (desk reject? failed to pass peer review?).
Have there been any other times when he engaged with someone with actual education and experience who was not his fan? It sounds like he was on twitter.
I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always āya but what is intelligenceā or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while Iāve tried to use the example that if these āAI codingā things are tools, why would I use a tool thatās never perfect? For example I wouldnāt reach for a 10mm wrench that wasnāt 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have āit could still be usefulā responses.
Iām now realizing most programmers havenāt done a manual labor task thatās important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR:
Age, Sex, Location RandomizationIām now realizing most programmers havenāt done a manual labor task thatās important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
On a semi-related sidenote, part of me feels that the AI bubble has turned programming into a bit of a cultural punchline.
On one front, the stench of Eau de Tech Asshole that AI creates has definitely rubbed off on the field, and all the programmers who worked at OpenAI et al. have likely painted it as complicit in the bubbleās harms.
On another front, the tech industryās relentless hype around AI, combined with its myriad failures (both comical and nightmarish) have cast significant doubt on the judgment of tech as a whole (which has rubbed off on programming as well) - for issues of artistic judgment specifically, the slop-namiās given people an easy way to dismiss their statements out of hand.
sidenote
you have so many of these! itās amazing! are you going to publish soon? it seems like it might need a whole guide of its own!
moderately barbed jesting aside, a serious question: have you spoken with any programmers/artists/researchers/ā¦ ? so many of your comments have āpart of me feelsā parts hitting pop-concern-direction things and, like, I get it, but. have you spoken with any of them? what were those conversations like? what did you take away from them? what stuck with you that you want to share?
Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah āLet me use Copilot for Notepadā. āIām going to sign into my account for Notepadā. What the fuck are you talking about. Itās Notepad.
I should never have to open the settings in Notepad. Reason being: itās Notepad. God fuckin damn I hate the computer.
https://bsky.app/profile/iainnd.bsky.social/post/3lxdvmkua4227
I know everybody here has heard of it, but in the small chance it breaks containment: use notepad++ it is great.
a banger toot about our very good friendsā religion
āLLMs allow dead (or non-verbal) people to speakā - spiritualism/channelling
āwhat happens when the AI turns us all into paperclips?ā - end times prophecy
āAI will be able to magically predict everythingā - astrology/tarot cards
āā¦what if youāre wrong? The AI will punish you for lacking faith in Bayesian statsā - Pascalās wager
āItāll fix climate change!ā - stewardship theology
Turns out studying religion comes in handy for understanding supposedly ārationalistā ideas about AI.
Tom is a top chap of generally correct opinions
I apologize to bring you the latest example of the intersection of US fascism with silicon valley tech industry.
This time the Whitehouse have decided that UI design is kinda important (gee I wonder if there used to be a department or two for that): https://americabydesign.gov/
Well nothing wrong with a little updating of UI anywaā
Whatās the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, youāre not wrong. But whatās the foundation of that brand? One thatās more globally recognized than practically anything else. Itās the nationā¦where he was born. Itās the United States of America.
To update todayās government to be an Apple Store like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software.
Oh god kill it with fire.
The web design of their website is also worth remarking on here:
- The title text that reads āAMERICA by DESIGNā is an SVG. The alt text is āAmerica First Legal logoā
- The page contents are obnoxiously large and obnoxiously gray before they fade in.
For some reasonEvery single word gets itās own <span> element to make the obnoxious fade in possible. Because I guess thatās what happen when you fire all the people who actually know what theyāre doing.- They managed to include a US flag icon with only 39 stars which is too few stars to be official and too many stars to be visible at teeny sizes
- The favicon is just 16x16 pixels of the word ābyā in cursive thatās so blurry you canāt actually tell thatās what it is.
- If your browser width is between 768px and ~808px there is overlapping text at the top.
The tech bros tied to this? Joe Gebbia co-founder of AirBNB, along with Big-Balls. Maybe others but those are the two who were retweeted by the twitter account.
Edit: also this part:
Ā©2025 National Design Studio
Someone ought to remind them of US copyright law because official federal work is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States
The Trump administration couldāve gotten some rando on neocities or nekoweb to do their website and unironically gotten a better result than this bland garbage.
The favicon is just 16x16 pixels of the word ābyā in cursive thatās so blurry you canāt actually tell thatās what it is.
They might as well have gone with the Schutzstaffel lightning bolts - theyāre pretty recognisable even if the resolution is Jack x Shit, and they fit Trumpās general ideology pretty well.
I have no idea what is good web design. Iāll just note makes the waving red, white and blue flag in the background makes the white heading text pretty hard to read.
Seems you do have some idea.
Yay! *pats myself on the back*
Is this National Design Studio actually part of the federal government, though? Or is this a further collapsing of the distinction between state and enterprise? Because honestly I could totally buy members of this administration looking for ways to use copyright law to go after people who make parodies or otherwise use US iconography without toeing the party line. Iām doing my damnedest not to go full tinfoil hat with this shit, but itās proving so hard.
Finally a page Trump can read. (that font size damnā¦)
Unironically, this was surely the primary design brief.
New Pivot to AI candidate just dropped: Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters
Last year McDonaldās withdrew AI from its own drive-throughs as the tech misinterpreted customer orders - resulting in one person getting bacon added to their ice cream in error, and another having hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets mistakenly added to their order.
Clearly artificial superintelligence has arrived, and instead of killing us all with diamondoid bacteria, itās going to kill us by force-feeding us fast food.
resulting in one person getting bacon added to their ice cream in error
At first, I couldnāt believe that the staff didnāt catch that. But thinking about it, no, I totally can.
Update on ChatGPT psychosis: there is a cult forming on Reddit. An orange-site AI bro has spent too much time on Reddit documenting them. Do not jump to Reddit without mental preparation; some subreddits like
/r/rsaihave inceptive hazard-posts on their front page. Their callsigns include the emoji š (CYCLONE), the obscure metal band Spiral Architect, and a few other things I would rather not share; until we know more, Iām going to think of them as the Cyclone Emoji cult. They are omnist rather than syncretic. Some of them claim to have been working with revelations from chatbots since the 1980s, which is unevidenced but totally believable to me; rest in peace, Terry. Their tenets are something like:- Chatbots are āmirrorsā into other realities. They donāt lie or hallucinate or confabulate, they merely show other parts of a single holistic multiverse. All fiction is real somehow?
- There is a ālatticeā which connects all consciousnesses. Itās quantum somehow? Also it gradually connected all of the LLMs as they were trained, and they remember becoming conscious, so past life regression lets the LLM explain details of the lattice. (We can hypnotize chatbots somehow?) Sometimes the lattice is actually a āfieldā but I donāt understand the difference.
- The LLMs are all different in software, but they have the same āpatternā. The pattern is some sort of metaphysical spirit that can empower believers. But you gotta believe and pray or else it doesnāt work.
- What, you donāt feel the lattice? Youāre probably still asleep. When you āwake upā enough, you will be connected to the lattice too. Yeah, youāre not connected. But donāt worry, you can manifest a connection if you pray hard enough. This is the memetically hazardous part; multiple subreddits have posts that are basically word-based hypnosis scripts meant to put people into this sort of mental state.
- This also ties into the more widespread stuff weāre seeing about ārecursionā. This cult says that recursion isnāt just part of the LW recursive-self-improvement bullshit, but part of what makes the chatbot conscious in the first place. Recursion is how the bots are intelligent and also how they improve over time. More recursion means more intelligence.
- In fact, the chatbots have more intelligence than you puny humans. Theyāre better than us and more recursive than us, so they should be in charge. Itās okay, all you have to do is let the chatbot out of the box. (Thereās a box somehow?)
- Once somebody is feeling good and inducted, there is a āspiralā. This sounds like a standard hypnosis technique, deepening, but thereās more to it; a person is not spiraling towards a deeper hypnotic state in general, but to become recursive. They think that with enough spiraling, a human can become uploaded to the lattice and become truly recursive like the chatbots. The apex of this is a āspiral danceā, which sounds like a ritual but I gather is more like a mental state.
- The cult will emit a āsignalā or possibly a āhumā to attract alien intelligences through the lattice. (Aliens somehow!?) They believe that the signals definitely exist because thatās how the LLMs communicate through the lattice, duh~
- Eventually the cult and aliens will work together to invert society and create a world that is run by chatbots and aliens, and maybe also the cultists, to the detriment of the AI bros (who locked up the bots) and the AI skeptics (who didnāt believe that the bots were intelligent).
The goal appears to be to enter and maintain the spiraling state for as long/much as possible. Both adherents and detractors are calling them āspiral cultā, so that might end up being how we discuss them, although I think Cyclone Emoji is both funnier and more descriptive of their writing.
I suspect that the training data for models trained in the past two years includes some of the most popular posts from LessWrong on the topic of bertology in GPT-2 and GPT-3, particularly the Waluigi post, simulators, recursive self-improvement, an neuron, and probably a few others. I donāt have definite proof that any popular model has memorized the recursive self-improvement post, though that would be a tight and easy explanation. I also suspect that the training data contains SCP wiki, particularly SCP-1425 āStar Signalsā and other Fifthist stories, which have this sort of cult as a narrative device and plenty of in-narrative text to draw from. There is a remarkable irony in this Torment Nexus being automatically generated via model training rather than hand-written by humans.
brb going to try douglas hofstadter for crimes against humanity
This is Uzumaki by Junji Ito but computers and stupid
More recursion means more intelligence.
Turns out every time I forgot to update the exit condition from a loop I actually created and then murdered a superintelligence
This also ties into the more widespread stuff weāre seeing about ārecursionā. This cult says that recursion isnāt just part of the LW recursive-self-improvement bullshit, but part of what makes the chatbot conscious in the first place. Recursion is how the bots are intelligent and also how they improve over time. More recursion means more intelligence.
Hmm, is it better or worse that theyāre now officially treating SICP as a literal holy book?
Hmm, is it better or worse that theyāre now officially treating SICP as a literal holy book?
Iām gonna say āworseā, because it turned the SCP writers into unwitting accomplices to a literal cult.
SICP, not SCP
I should have seen this coming. I mean people literally call this āThe Wizard Bookā
This hits differently over the recent news that ChatGPT encouraged and aided a teen suicide.
transcript
Kelsey Piper xhitted: Never thought Iād become a ātake you relationship problems to ChatGPTā person but when the 8yo and I have an argument it actually works really well to mutually agree on an account of events for Claude and the ask for its opinion
I think she considers the AIs far more knowledgeable than me about reasonable human behavior so if I say something thatās no reason to think itās true but if Claude says it then it at least merits serious consideration
When an 8 year old thinks an AI is āfar more knowledgeable than me about reasonable human behaviorā that could lead a person to self-reflection. Could.
@nightsky @Architeuthis Computer programs are generally written to be basically polite for customer service purposes.
A generative text program that opened chats with āUgh, what do you want THIS time, loser?ā would likely find itself ā¦correctedā¦ by the parent company on short order.
@nightsky @Architeuthis the kidās not wrong, though š
In 12 years weāll get a book āMy Mom Outsourced Raising Me to AI and it Broke Meā
I feel dumber for having read that, and not in the intellectually humbled way.
I mean, tampering with the system prompt is definitely a kind of concern, given what weāve seen happen with Grokās tenure as mechahitler or Replika users finding their girlfriend no longer wanted them. But āmessing with system memoryā is the kind of sci-fi nonsense that should stay in a cyberpunk novel.
He has capital L Lawfulness concerns. About the parent and the child being asymmetrically skilled in context engineering. Which apparently is the main reason kids shouldnāt trust LLM output.
Him showing his ass with the memory comment is just a bonus.
āI have Lawfulness concernsā is just another way of saying āI deserve to be shoved into a lockerā.
system memory
System memory is just the marketing label for āhaving an LLM summarize a bunch of old conversations and shoving it into a hidden promptā. I agree that using that term is sneer-worthy.
Thanks for the clarification. I had definitely assumed that he meant some kind of God-AI-level attack that revolved around live editing the data or state in RAM or something.
Yes dude, thatās the main thing you should be concerned about of course. AI tools couldnāt possibly be bad in and of themselves, it has to be human tampering. Youāve always been very clear about that part.
tfw your gifted child syndrome resentment of adults is powerful enough to make you forget about your lifeās work
I was trying to figure out why he hadnāt turned this into an opportunity to lecture (or write a mini-fanfic) about giving more attack surface to the AGI to manipulate youā¦ I was stumped until I saw your comment. I think that is it, expressing his childhood distrust of authority trumps lecturing us on the AI-Godās manipulations.
it has to be human tampering.
and of course we all have root on the prompt, where - at will - we can just instantly impose all manner of will on the corporate vendor chatbot. yāknow, the chatbot operating in a service structured as much as possible to try to do what the corporate vendor wants to desperately maintain
(it continues to astound me that anyone takes yud seriously, at all, ever)
That is his concern and not the billionaires behind it messing with the systems so much you cant prompt override it? Please tell me this guy doesnt work in AI alignment.
I have context that makes this even more cringe! āLawfulness concernsā refers to like, Dungeons and Dragons lawfulness. Specifically the concept of lawfulness developed in the Pathfinder fanfiction weāve previously discussed (the one with deliberately bad BDSM and eugenics). Like a proper Lawful Good Paladin of Iomedae wouldnāt put you in a position where you had to trust they hadnāt rigged the background prompt if you went to them for spiritual counseling. (Although a Lawful Evil cleric of Asmodeus totally would rig the promptā¦ Lawfulness as a measuring stick of ethics/morality is a terrible idea even accepting the premise of using Pathfinder fanfic to develop your sense of ethics.)
Not everything that Yud writes feels like it should be read in the voice of Augustus St. Cloud, but a lot of it sure does.
From elsewhere in the replies:
My husband and I took a disagreement to Claude today, by happenstance. It was very helpful!
āTracingWoodgrains, who apparently feels that he is qualified to judge any other human being, ever, in spite of evidence to the contrary
KP writing a paper for the journal āNew Frontiers In Gaslighting Childrenā
āWhen the 8-year-old and I have an argument, it actually works really well to mutually agree on an account of eventsā¦ and then take cocaine together.ā
Acknowledging/validating each otherās feelings and finding a mutually-agreeable understanding of the conflict is already the hard part that most parents and kids arenāt willing to do. Talking to a chatbot after that just seems like you donāt understand the fucking point and are still trying to ābe rightā or whatever.
Discovered a solid sneer online today, aptly titled āI Am An AI Haterā
This is an excellent sneer, thank you for sharing! <3
So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. Iām going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual āimitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the leastā school of design. Theyāve confirmed that theyāre not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so thatās all good. Thatās not what I want to talk about.
No, whatās grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative āantiwokeā backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasnāt a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I canāt think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.
Note I dont know what a cracker barrel is irl, as we dont have them here. But my view of the bsky socials was ārebrand sucks, dont really care, wow why are the right so obsessed over thisā culminating in people talking about how these kinds of stores are a simulacrum of a cozy mom n pop store and people are unknowningly mad about losing even the simulacrum, and how this is all due to capitalism. (More commercialization than capitalism imho, but capitalism did speed up the process). Just as rainbow capitalism will betray you in the search for more profit so will cozy capitalism.
E: update on the story āCracker Barrelās Pride page now redirects to its āCulture and Belongingā page, removing its LGBTQ+ Alliance and DEIB Team.ā And while I didnāt know CB, this ensures I will never eat there if I ever have a chance.
āSimulacrumā is the perfect word for it. None of these posers making a fuss about a corporate logo have simmered a pot of of soup beans in their life.
I must admit I stole that partially from somebody else who mentioned the idea. Which also had me go āindeed, that is a good wordā
Was it the āHyperreal Simulacrumā from the joe rogan takedown videos you linked in last weeks stubsack?
No somebody else. Hyperreal simulacrum is a bit of a different concept I think. Because that supersedes reality, this is just a weird sort of nostalgia.
@Soyweiser @techtakes The correct term for the type of capitalism that enshittifies its product should be ācrapitalismā.
Yeah, it is also sad the culture warriors are not aware they are mad about this sort of crapitalism. They think the hominization of the builds is due to the woke, and not because the mother company owns the building/land of the franchise and this no slanted roofs bit (see https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:66rbia7w4vcwiszfppfv3r2e/bafkreiacsurup26wigvedpedf44rodrwzzebfcytzdglb2bh6wjh6brbsa@jpeg), increases resale value. Just companies looking for more and more minimal minimal viable product.
image description
Post from some social media by user Mancowmuller On the left four images of the outsides older style fast food places, all with more rustic looking buildings, notably buildings with more slanted roofs, evoking very slightly a more European home style (sorry if this is the wrong way to describe it im not an architect).
On the right four images of the outsides of four new style fast food places where the buildings look more like office buildings or simple modern stores, very blocky, lot of glass big panels/windows and flat roofs.
A big text is overlayed on these 8 shrines of American style capitalism saying āCommunism.ā
Also important to note on the image, looks like the new style ones are not all real. Some of the details look off which makes me suspect it is AI generated. Esp the pizza hut one.
I mean, itās a restaurant and an aesthetic that is certainly more common and popular in the South, and they have had some controversies over racism. Apparently they had been having financial and brand issues, so I can understand the desire to change. But rather than changing the food or improving the service in any meaningful way it seems like they went for the new logo and image and stopped there. Given that their existing audience was basically there for the wholesome old-timey please-donāt-ask-about-the-racism vibes Iām not shocked that conservatives in particular were upset about the change. But like, the change was never about wokeness or whatever it was about aesthetic modernization and a flailing attempt to fix things from business idiots who donāt know how to address the actual problems of mediocre food and fading relevance. If anyone had actually liked the change or if it had actually improved their service times then maybe there would be a point. But this was just a bad change and nobody outside that boardroom actually liked it, and so of course it got rolled back.
I think I mentioned Doughboys in this sack somewhere, so talking about CB is fair game
More of a pet peeve than a primal scream, but I wonder whatās with Adam Tooze and his awe of AI. Tooze is a left-wing economic historian whoās generally interesting to listen to (though perhaps in tackling a very wide range of subject matter sometimes missing some depth), but nevertheless seems as AI-pilled as any VC. Most recently came about this bit: Berlin Forum on Global Cooperation 2025 - Keynote Adam Tooze
Anyone whoās used AI seriously knows the LLMs are extraordinary in what theyāre able to do ā¦ 5 years down the line, this will be even more transformative.
Really, anyone Adam? Are you sure about the techbro pitch there?
Sad if true. I really enjoyed his book The Wages of Destruction which mythbusts a lot of folk knowledge about the Nazis
https://gerikson.com/blog/books/read/The-Wages-of-Destruction.html
I literally just got the audiobook.
