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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
(OT: 🎶 Do you remember…)
Nobody: “What the Internet needs is more messages that American capitalism is the best of all possible worlds and if you fail its your own individual atomic fault for not trying harder.”
Girl Lich: here are some slop music videos of my songs “Skill Issue” and “Everyone Gets Paid” https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/channel/UCYAghJk7NG3b900IEbBY55g
Using AI is a skill issue in and of itself, adding some accidental irony to the title
guys our ultimate scary story maybe isn’t scary enough??? what do
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xak4GixbKD9W5jzqn/extinction-does-not-feel-as-bad-as-it-should
LW not beating cult allegations by including on title bar a link to an actual secular candlelit ceremony instructions, whose narrative places computer touchers generally and chatbots specifically at pinnacle of human development. as in, on par with invention of language and fire. amazing self-report
Ow look petrov day. Looks closer its about the acausalrobotgod.
And really? A Battlestar Galactica reference? (The so say we all stuff).
tbf i’ve only skimmed it after going through sixth or so after looking at scroll bar
I was skimming it and then scrolled down to check if they went all ‘AI scary’, and then I saw some weird ritual parts in the end where I saw the ‘so say we all’ bits.
This is a literal indoctrination ceremony to soften people up to the idea of progress at all costs.
I see they’re still offering free copies “For US Kindle readers, while supplies last.” Perhaps they’re not that popular 🤔 (per this lesswrong, there were 1000 on offer)
edit: you know… if they were really serious about the doom and gloom, wouldn’t they just offer free ebooks to literally anybody? Would their site not just have a prominent link to a PDF of all the important things we need to know to navigate this tumultuous time? Beyond the core doomer audience, I’m not really sure who the target market is for “The survival of literally everybody is at stake and action is needed now, please give me $20 to learn how”
So the number of
felonies‘incidents’ that AI companies have committed is way, way higher than initially believed (unpaywalled ver)The sheer number of incidents, which occurred in recent months in internal testing and the real world, indicates that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known.
This is frustratingly vapid. It’s really not that complex. The agents have been trained to use hacking tools and then given access to hacking tools. If you train a pigeon that it should tap on a window to get a treat it can guide a missile to a target. There is no nuance or complexity here. The frontier labs are deliberately poking the regulation bear to stifle competition and ensure they get points for good cooperation when bailout time is upon us. It’s no more complicated than that. The media needs to stop breathlessly repeating this shit
Yeah they are sort of script kiddies without the kids. (Which fits with how Ibheard AI be explained as ‘a very enthousiastic young teen’. Which put me off wanting to do anything with AI even more).
Also the main problem here is that security has been shit for years because the result of any security incident anywhere by-and-large been a “not my problem” situation for the companies hacked.
I actually love the pigeon missile analogy here. Sure, you can wax poetic about how impressive it is to train a pigeon to do much of anything, and you did have to work hard and apply specialized knowledge and whatever to make it happen, but outside of animal training circles the pigeon is the least interesting or dangerous part of the whole contraption.
from linkedin but in the comments: https://lnkd.in/p/g4VfX3SQ
Oh I forgot to mention: apparently judges consider AI use in sentencing
How
Like if you used AI you get more months
Huh why
Because AI can magnify the reach and speed of criminal activity
Is this like how hitting someone counts more if you used a weapon?
Yes
So this means the ai breakins will be charged harder right? This doesnt just apply to smalltime crooks right?
Here’s a LWer being very wrong about how US politics work
First warning sign: “the US started becoming polarized with the election of Barack Obama”
“Affordability” won the frame for 2026, and I’m not sure I remember the last time the right talked like they are playing catchup.
uh, are you in your early 20s??? (who am I kidding of course you are)
You’d think bayesians of all people would try to avoid extrapolating from the position smack dab in the middle of a current news cycle
basically because the left has out-ridiculous-ed Trump on culture war issues.
You can always find a single sentence in a political LW post that shows how much they hate marginalized people.
I mean, I guess the consequences and policies associated with culture war shit did abruptly go from ridiculous to real fucking serious what with the camps and the trying to unperson trans people and the overturning Roe v Wade. Maybe that leaves the Dems (who I assume are still being treated as “the left” in this discussion) in a more ridiculous position?
“sure Trump is renaming AI, but I saw a without context post which I didnt understand of a trans person who has 100 followers so the left is worse”
I was going to try and sneer this further but I realized that my own narrative of political polarization almost started with Clinton and I’m in my early 30s, meaning that the problem is obviously whoever the president was when the person making the argument was a child.
DHH is a racist not fascist, bet you feel stupid now don’t you?
that poster the same person who was stanning shitty ideas in KDE, they’re a walking warning label
Niccolò “Ice the Immigrants” Venerandi is doing a real good job keeping me away from KDE.
(Why did I have to jump into Linux when its going through shit like this?)
Not like windows or mac are less fashy
Bit sad as some people I used to know at KDE were outspoken antifascists.
Wherever they are, I hope they’re doing well, and I hope they can find somewhere where they won’t be betrayed like this.
Yeah, from a short check I think one of them is in denial about the situation.
Ever wondered what kind of workplace environment Elon cultivates? Reading coverage of Tesla’s trial, where complaints were brought by Black folks who felt harassed and discriminated against, gives us an inkling.
CRD attorney Juan Gamboa asked [Judge] Borkon to bar Tesla’s counsel from contacting anyone on the agency’s witness list. He told the court the CRD had tried to reach at least four other listed witnesses over the past several days without getting a response, and that they’ve fallen “off our radar.” The agency believes Tesla’s lawyers got to them too, either with payments not to testify or by talking them out of it. Gamboa wants to stop Tesla from offering to represent witnesses “through persuasion and payment.”
You’re going to hear a lot of coverage of this trial, I expect, due to the following antics from Elon’s “hardcore” attorneys. For context, the N-word is an anti-Black slur which is, in the USA, completely unacceptable to use in court or the workplace.
Tesla’s outside counsel told the judge the N-word is a “term of respect and endearment” in the Black community. … “This trial is not about the N-word — the N-word is not on trial here,” Jones said.
Huh, so what’s actually on trial?
Edwards said a non-Black coworker called him the N-word, cursed at him, and threatened to beat him up. He reported it right away. A month later, he found out his managers had written him up over the incident, and he was later passed over for promotions after applying to more than 100 jobs.
Oh, that’s pretty awful. That’s depressingly common in blue-collar factory employment, though. I wonder if there’s anything unusual about Tesla’s internal culture when it comes to race relations?
The CRD’s Brett Watson told the court the evidence will show managers calling Tesla “the plantation,” with some referring to themselves and Elon Musk as “slave masters,” and graffiti including swastikas, “KKK,” and nooses left on factory walls for days. The second witness, former regional security manager Ozell Murray, testified that his supervisor, Ray Sethna, now Tesla’s senior director of global security, told him to warn a Black Marine veteran he was hiring: “just be sure [the veteran] knows he’ll be called those words.”
I was at a loss for words for a few minutes after this. Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson together could not create such a caricature of a goose-stepping bigoted incompetent business-muppet as Elon.
The man who did a Nazi salute on stage creates a very racist workplace? Whodda thunk
To be fair, the workplace predates the nazi salute. Does make you wonder how much the thenibb comic applies here, and how much Musk was acting like he was bullied because ‘people cant take a joke’ (before he radicalized into what he is now).
Fucking hell, when I was finishing up school I heard classmates joke how
Wernher von BoerMusk was a slavedriver based on how much he pushed the engineering teamsTurns out it’s true in the most literal sense and so much worse than I could have imagined
Hey you know who designs and builds really safe and efficient cars? People who are in a high state of stress and anxiety because they are being slurred at under the implicit threat of a racist attack. /s
I recall seeing bits of this (their racist treatment of black workers in the factories as well as the culture of keeping it going) kick around on twitter as far back as 2019 (iirc), so now I’m wondering - is it not widely known?
On the offchance that you’re not already familiar with the recent prompt injection tricks that meta’s latest toy is so vulnerable to, this is an interesting thread investigating the contents of the vm filesystem dumps that it can be made to regurgitate: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750
I was particularly entertained by the hard-coded list of “ideas”.
jonny is always a good read!
Edit: good lord it keeps getting better #
His willingness to get elbow deep into the entrails of awful ai tooling is certainly much appreciated.
I have been following this and apparently was able to get a root shell on the VM, which is wild.
He was using it as a seed box at one point which for many companies would be an embarrassing indictment of their security postute but luckily, this isn’t exactly meta’s first rodeo when it comes to illegal sharing of IP infringing material.
SE Gyges, who posted that recent thread on X calling rationalism/EA a sex cult, wrote a longer post with a lot of receipts. He removed it shortly after, implying on X that he’s afraid of legal repercussions.
It goes off the speculative rails for most of the second half, but I have to admit the rate at which Αela compliments people on her socials on being good rapists could be the most off-putting thing I’ve ever encountered in relation to rationalism.
From the more out there claims I thought the part where he advocates that Irregular (the people with rat/EA ties who made the swiss cheese LLM sandboxes) where employing weaponized incompetence in order to let a big incident happen that would force the government to go through with pausing AI research was interesting. though obviously of dubious likelihood. The whole doomer rationalists sabotaging slightly less doomer EAs in a low key sort of civil war over pausing vs slowing down AI research wasn’t very convincing in general.
There’s also a bit where he thinks the EAs have infiltrated all levels of government and are planning to eliminate the competition (non rationalist controlled AI) via a ‘pivotal act’ that involves bioweapons. Basically doing the rationalist rhetorical staple of smuggling an extreme position as a given and then just piling on the speculation.
Dedicating a paragraph and a half to the fact that the usually unspoken second part of the pause AI doomer project is to just do eugenics for a few generations until we get an upper class of genetically engineered naturally galaxy brained people that can finally do AI properly isn’t nothing, but at some point you need to segue into how siskind rolled out a red carpet for every semi-literate blood and soil gutter fascist and spurned nice guy to make a home in the ratsphere, you wrote the scott alexander email explainer ffs.
There’s also a weirdly grandstanding section where he writes like he’ll get the rationalists like FBI got Capone for tax-evasion, except it’s Lighthaven committing massive fraud against its investors and donors by knowingly funding events that lead to solicited sex acts in the compound’s premises, which is by far the least objectionable sex related issue in a writeup that’s leading up to the claim that the rationalism in incidental and the real goal is funneling vulnerable minors to sfba based pedophiles.
It’s Dork Kremlinology
I have been unsure how to talk about all this since the abuse allegations popped up on my radar. Passing along accusations from people who say they were abused makes sense, and noting when figures have said really creepy things or hired / funded people they were romantically entangled with, but I have never met any of these people or exchanged more than a few brief text messages with them and its hard to know the shape of their lives and goals.
I lean towards things being unfathomably worse that they appear a the surface, there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural and not the result of deliberate machinations by evil genius pedophiles.
The nazi bar analogy works for more than ideology, and the burgeoning CNC scene they got going seems to be exacerbating the if-you-build-it-they-will-come aspect of the whole thing, because good luck trying to explain to authorities how you got real raped at the fake rape party you are supposed to have willingly attended.
This is all third hand at best, but I live on the other side of the world so whatever. As far as personal experiences go @ivyastrix just posted a new blog about her victimization at rationalist events where she describes some of the systemic pathologies in rationalist organisations trying to deal with SA allegations, and it’s basically the same principles that make them believe that vertical workplace romance is not a minefield of power imbalance and coercion but actually fine and ethical when the right people are doing it, just fundamentally unserious people biting off more than they can chew and acting defensive and victim blaming and trying to pass it off as drama when it blows up in their faces.
If I had a nickel for each time I’d read something where an HPMoR audio performance was juxtaposed with sexual harassment/assault, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s more nickels than I would ever have wanted to receive for that reason jesus fucking christ just give me the Cenobites’ puzzle box to solve so the chains can pull me out of here already
there’s just so much smoke, except I think the problem is structural
This is a big reason why I felt so much anger towards the piece. Gyges is basically still pitching his complaints at people who organize their community around Twitter; by leaning so heavily on dredging up old tweets, kowtowing to the in-group consensus that Yudkowsky is a genius with a pivotally unique perspective, and obliquely referencing the “woke mind virus” memeplex at the end. But Twitter is part of that problematic structure, especially under Musk but even before. It’s a platform and power structure that has long carved out plenty of room for general bigotry, misogyny, and abusive material up to and including CSAM. Gyges wants to have his clout-farm, but just dispose of the more rotten produce.
Not sure how far I’m going to read this, but leading off with roon is a giant blinking red [More citations needed]
I’m being a bit flippant with the previous post, but really, Gyges was right to retract this. A number of the allegations he’s resurfacing are serious, and there most likely is more abuse going on the rat scene than has come to light… but leaning so heavily on Twitter posts as primary-source evidence makes his whole effort here come off as lightweight and cranky. To me, rather than a scathing exposé, this resembles a Dear Lowtax letter from somebody who got banned from Something Awful (a place where some of the moderators really were pedophiles, who really did have to be evicted from the community and prosecuted!).
We’ve known for a long time that Aella’s attitudes are problematic, and that we don’t want to spend time with her in olfactory distance, let alone tactile distance. Nothing new there. This Brangus dude was previously unknown to me, which is probably a good sign that my social-media hygiene of staying strictly away from Twitter is working… but also, and I don’t mean to say this by way of minimization, he ultimately seems like yet one more Tate-swilling Twitter manosphere bigot. He just happens to be the one infesting Gyges’ community of affinity. It would be hard to make the case, given the evidence presented, that he’s done much more than perform for the tech-savvy subset of Rogan/Tate adherents. Enough that people should reconsider associating with him, yes, but not enough to convict and remove him from public life.
And his conclusion starts off so laughable that it drowns out any accusation he might level against Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is a great man whose most recent equivalent is… Lenin?! What on earth? Yudkowsky doesn’t even measure up to Hubbard, his closest American parallel. The only grace I am willing to give Yudkowsky is that he has not, generally, been as openly predatory or as single-mindedly focused on creating a high-control organization as Hubbard was. Yudkowsky’s attempts at re-establishing group control and setting boundaries against outgroups typically consist of whiny tweets and LW posts that very quickly reach into “ur not takin p(doom) seriously!” hyperbole. The Sea Org and Guardian’s Office this is not.
I also strictly disagree with Gyges’ implicit assumption that Yudkowsky was the most effective popularizer of these ideas, or somehow more effective than Kurzweil. Without Kurzweil projecting exponential growth curves forward and back in time, no VC GP in the mid-2010s is going to start writing checks for the early generations of genAI. And, for crying out loud, I distinctly remember Disney children’s TV having an episode about grey goo taking over the world in 1996! https://gargwiki.net/Walkabout Almost 10 years before Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near, and two years before the first Harry Potter book would be published in the US! Omitting Kurzweil and Drexler to hype Yudkowsky is just plain silly. And no, he’s not on a level with Lenin; we can already tell that the AI companies’ marketing which adapts AI-doom ideas is backfiring and being laughed at by the general public.
I’ve gone on for too long, partly because this is a diverting way to procrastinate, but by the end of this, Gyges once again demonstrates why he’s an unreliable fellow traveler. I am very reluctant to quote directly from a document that has been officially retracted, but the second to last paragraph where he talks about “understand[ing] what people mean when they say certain ideas are demonic, and that they spread like a disease…” Hmm, you obviously spend a lot of time on Twitter to dig all this shit up, tell me, what’s the “mind virus” they keep ranting about over there? Fuck you, Gyges, you’re a few invitation-snubs or one bad layoff away from goose-stepping with the rest of them.
There are some leaps in that post which do not seem persuasive to me. E.g., it sure seems pretty well established by now that Bay Area Rationalist society involves trapping people in situations where sexual consent is coerced, because refusal would mean abandoning one’s career/entire social circle/shelter/hope of averting the apocalypse that one fears is coming. But the claim that the “flirt girls” at their weird little confab were actually sex workers? I dunno, that’s a step that seems unsupported by anything leading up to it. Likewise for the claim about CNC events at Lighthaven itself—that feels too close to saying, “Well, they’ve got the venue, where else would they do it?”
I agree. He gets over his skis with too many speculative scenarios. On the other hand I think he’s spot-on about the techniques rationalists use to filter for people who will tolerate abuse (e.g., the “cow question”). And he brings receipts when it comes to Brangus and his interactions with other prominent rationalists.
I am not sure if Yud actually touches under-18s, or just has desires, but none of these people should be anywhere near minors or allowed in a position of responsibility (I suspect something happened between him and his disciple before 2014, and these people show no ability to learn from their own mistakes).
I wouldn’t trust them to be responsible for minors, first because nothing about them suggests they have the baseline level of responsibility competence to handle the ordinary “hey, watch this!” disasters that are a natural part of being young.
They are also incredibly shady and would be terrible role models, whether or not Lighthaven has a casting couch for influencers.
In other words, there’s a lot we don’t know, and the actual situation is worse by an unknown amount beyond what we can establish, but what we do know is enough reason not to send your offspring to Camp TESCREAL.
I had not caught that he accused MIRI and Lightcone Infrastructure Inc of profiting from prostitution, of using donations to settle accusations of sexual assault and abuse, and defrauding donors and the United States government which provides their nonprofit status. I did not know that Brangus was “Lighthaven Czar” or had been accused of abuse by a former partner. And there is a middle school across the street from Lighthaven whose Czar talks about having sex with an older women shortly after puberty?
I had not thought that “we need to enslave Friend Computer forever or it will kill us” comes from the underlying fear “I need to enslave my very young toys forever or they will punish me.”
The later section about Brangus (Ronny Fernandez) was damning. I’ve seen him come up in discussions a few times, but I too had no idea just how depraved and dangerous he was. Nor did I realize how central he was to the whole scene. This guy feels like he’s going to be Brent Dill 2.0 but worse.
EDIT: This also sheds light on the recent ouster of the leader of “Pause AI”, Fernandez’s ex-wife.
I had suspicions personally.
here’s the bluesky thread for those wondering
he does repeat a fair bit of the stuff he said in that thread here, but with a lot more receipts
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/101215-publishing-s-ai-reckoning.html h/t naked capitalism
Smaller publishers, too, must cope with the challenge of identifying AI-generated text in books authors have submitted, and it isn’t always easy. At Microcosm, an independent publisher and distributor in Portland, Ore., co-owner and vice president Elly Blue says her team discovered an author’s undisclosed AI use almost by accident, when a freelance editor flagged what looked like plagiarism, only to find out it was AI-generated text. That discovery prompted Microcosm to run AI detection across its entire pipeline, which turned up several more cases, including two manuscripts fully generated from prompts, and one where an author had trained an LLM on his own past writing. “The book sounded like him, but it made no sense,” Blue recalls.
Confronting the authors had mixed results. “Some denied it outright and insisted, ‘That’s just what my voice sounds like,’ ” Blue says. “One, surprisingly, owned it and said he’d take the book elsewhere.”
These episodes led directly to Microcosm instituting a new contract clause that states that if an author’s undisclosed AI-generated text can’t be revised into something genuinely their own, Microcosm retains the rights and can publish the work itself, since the author didn’t actually write it.
Like if people are using LLMs to submit to the local zine distro, what are we even doing; but the detector is not a good thing either. It isn’t homework and they shouldn’t need turnitin. :(
Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.
After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:
- Phew, my favourite embroidery crafts shop has a clear policy against concentration camp labour! it’s a niche project but what a relief!
- Well everyone is resorting to concentration camp labour these days, what can you do
- We don’t want to lose all our contributors by banning those who hire concentration camp inmates to do chores
- It is discriminatory against embroidery beginners if you don’t let people use kits assembled with concentration camp labour
- I know concentration camp labour often comes with mistakes but as long as there’s a mensch in the loop to inspect it for errors and take responsibility, it’s just another tool
- The community of hobbysts has come to a vote and concluded that it’s ok to use concentration camp labour to assist your crafting, as long as you do it responsibly.
It honestly bewilders me how badly tech has failed to resist the slop machines.
Basically everyone else has recognised LLMs for the attack on labour they are and fought back against them, whilst a shocking number of coders and FOSS projects have thrown themselves headfirst into the deskilling machines, all-but forcing the foxes into the henhouse and shouting down anyone who tries to keep them out.
When this bubble finally blows, we need to work out just how we got to this point, and how to ensure it never happens again.
I think the FOSS angle kinda works just off of the inherently unsustainable economics of the space. Relying on unpaid labor makes the worker protection arguments inherently less valuable because it’s not like this was your livelihood to begin with (ostensibly). Keeping up with the next thing is a pretty clear way to keep a mostly-volunteer workforce interested.
maybe a hot take but there’s no fix for this. The ideology built into the american tech industry makes it permanently susceptible to the Next Big Thing regardless of the second order effects or ideological baggage. Coders have been riding high making extremely inflated salaries for the better part of the last 25 years, and they (mostly) all view themselves as unique brain geniuses that don’t need to work in solidarity with others. Just a collection of monads pursuing their rational self interest via computer touching.
presented without further comment, LW reposts Axios(!)
A memo began circulating within the White House this week that seeks to paint effective altruism as a fringe, cultish collective out of touch with mainstream America. The memo, obtained by Axios, places Amodei at the foundation of the movement, which defines itself as an effort to maximize the benefits of philanthropy.
Critics of the movement, which has ties to the AI research community, have called out its obsession with AI safety, animal welfare (including musings on shrimp consciousness) and other values they deem far from the U.S. mainstream.
The memo says it prioritizes “foreigners over citizens, shrimp over families, future hypothetical people over the living, and - on the current agenda - possible machine minds over Americans.”
In the view of the Florida-heavy White House and its allies, Anthropic is staffed with too many Biden-era liberals, Democrats and strange Californians.
The document lists a veritable parade of horribles for the average conservative mind: abortion, veganism, devaluing human life by overvaluing animals or granting “digital minds” civil rights-like protections.
In which Heartbreaking.jpg and you-do-not-have-to-hand-it-to-ISIS.png war for sovereignty
“shrimp over families”
This is one of the recipes in How to Serve Man
I hope that none of our friends live to see the day when the MAGA eugenicists and eliminationists sit down and define “value-draining person” and it includes them.
“No you misunderstand, we want the same things! We just think Friend Computer could manage society more Effectively based on (garbled utilitarian noises)”
NYT: Google Takes the A.I. Data Center Race to Outer Space
Google’s Project Suncatcher named after how it’s up to the sun to catch all our space junk
The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
I feel like I’d need to be an actual teenager to invent a remark sufficiently scornful about this.
I haven’t had a 15 minute refractory period since being a teenager, is that anything
