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 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 soo 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…)
After @daphnelawless.com on bsky
Nice morning chuckle
Solid, high-quality sneer from Adactio - the end is a particular highlight:
The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.
If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers.
Some dark urge found me skim-reading a recent AI doomer blog post. I was startled awake by this most unsettling passage:
My wife wrote a letter to our infant daughter recently. It concluded:
I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]
Though the theoretical possibility had always been percolating somewhere in the back of my mind, it wasn’t until now that I viscerally realized that P(doomers reproducing) was greater than zero. And with other doomers no less.
Left brooding on this development, I drudged along until-
BAhahaha what the fuck
I can’t. This is beyond parody.Completely lost it here. Nothing could have prepared me for the poorly handwritten wrist tattoo.
Creating space for miracles
Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.Oh how rational! Willing to entertain the idea that maybe, theoretically, the doomsday prediction could be off by a few days?
I’m not sure that I ever strongly felt that I would die at eighty or so. I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.
This guy thought he was getting clean but he was actually replacing weed with heroin
I really convinced myself that “doomsday cult” was hyperbole but uhh, nope, it’s 107% real.yet I hold
space for it
Rupi Kaur should sue
At the start they state
The disappointment of imminent death is all the more crushing because just a few years ago researchers announced breakthrough discoveries that suggested [existing, adult] humans could have healthspans of thousands of years. To drop the analogy, here I’m talking about my transhumanist beliefs. The laws of physics don’t demand that humans slowly decay and die at eighty. It is within our engineering prowess to defeat death, and until recently I thought we might just do that, and I and my loved ones would live for millennia, becoming post-human superbeings.
This is, frankly, bonkers. I’d rate the following in descending order of probability
- worldwide societal collapse due to climate change
- we develop an AI that will kill us all for unspecified reasons
- we establish viable self-sustaining societies outside the limits of Earth
- we develop techniques that allow everyone to live effectively forever
If the first happens, it removes the material requirements for the latter things to happen. This is an extreme form of “denial of the flesh”, the inability to realize that without food or water no-one will be working on AI or life extension tech.
“Im 99% sure I will die in the next year because of super duper intelligence, but in a world where that doesnt happen i plan to live 1000 years” surely is a forecast. Surprised they don’t break their own necks on the whiplash from this take.
I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]
When “The world is gonna end soon so let’s just rawdog from now on” gets real
Teach your children to envy the dead
I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.
My dude you’re so, so, sooo close to realising it, you should spontaneously quantum-tunnel into self-awareness any second now
The storm rages within
Yet I hold F to pay respects
Also, man why do I click on these links and read the LWers comments. It’s always insufferable people being like, “woe is us, to be cursed with the forbidden knowledge of AI doom, we are all such deep thinkers, the lay person simply could not understand the danger of ai” like bruv it aint that deep, i think i can summarize it as follows:
hits blunt “bruv, imagine if you were a porkrind, you wouldn’t be able to tell why a person is eating a hotdog, ai will be like we are to a porkchop, and to get more hotdogs humans will find a way to turn the sun into a meat casing, this is the principle of intestinal convergence”
Literally saw another comment where one of them accused the other of being a “super intelligence denier” (i.e., heretic) for suggesting maybe we should wait till the robot swarms coming over the hills before we declare its game over.
Oh that tattoo is regrettable
:'( sad one. feel bad for the bebe, being raised by insane people.
Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.
This line actually really annoys me, because they are already set up for moving the end date on their doomsday prediction as needed while still maintaining their overall doomerism.
Gumroad’s asshole CEO, Sahil Lavingia, NFT fanboy who occasionally used his customer database to track down and get into fights with people on twitter, has now gone professional fash and joined DOGE in order to hollow out the department of veterans affairs and replace the staff with chatbots.
https://tedium.co/2025/04/06/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama/
Sometimes, checking the Talk page of a Wikipedia article can be entertaining.
In short: There has been a conspiracy to insert citations to a book by a certain P. Gagniuc into Wikipedia. This resulted in said book gaining about 900 citations on Google Scholar from people who threw in a footnote for the definition of a Markov chain. The book, Markov Chains: From Theory to Implementation and Experimentation (2017), is actually really bad. Some of the comments advocating for its inclusion read like chatbot (bland, generic, lots of bullet points). Another said that it should be included because it’s “the most reliable book on the subject, and the one that is part of ChatGPT training set”.
This has been argued out over at least five different discussion pages.
“Conspiracy” is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).
A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:
Despite Malparti warning that “it would be a waste of time for everyone” I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as “the unique solution” to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be “eventually achieved”, with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a math book review that said “Do not use for anything.”
“This book is not a place of honor…”
“Do not use for anything.”
That’s really harsh since I have a few bad books that are at least useful as monitor stands
New piece from 404 Media: Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”
On a related note, Baldur Bjarnason has chimed in noting how he called this exact shit happening:
Remember when I told you that using these LLMs was like giving US tech a bigotry dial for all your writing?
Utterly rancid linkedin post:
text inside image:
Why can planes “fly” but AI cannot “think”?
An airplane does not flap its wings. And an autopilot is not the same as a pilot. Still, everybody is ok with saying that a plane “flies” and an autopilot “pilots” a plane.
This is the difference between the same system and a system that performs the same function.
When it comes to flight, we focus on function, not mechanism. A plane achieves the same outcome as birds (staying airborne) through entirely different means, yet we comfortably use the word “fly” for both.
With Generative AI, something strange happens. We insist that only biological brains can “think” or “understand” language. In contrast to planes, we focus on the system, not the function. When AI strings together words (which it does, among other things), we try to create new terms to avoid admitting similarity of function.
When we use a verb to describe an AI function that resembles human cognition, we are immediately accused of “anthropomorphizing.” In some way, popular opinion dictates that no system other than the human brain can think.
I wonder: why?
I can use bad analogies also!
- If airplanes can fly, why can’t they fly to the moon? It is a straightforward extension of existing flight technology, and plotting airplane max altitude from 1900-1920 shows exponential improvement in max altitude. People who are denying moon-plane potential just aren’t looking at the hard quantitative numbers in the industry. In fact, with no atmosphere in the way, past a certain threshold airplanes should be able to get higher and higher and faster and faster without anything to slow them down.
I think Eliezer might have started the bad airplane analogies… let me see if I can find a link… and I found an analogy from the same author as the 2027
fanficforecast: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HhWhaSzQr6xmBki8F/birds-brains-planes-and-ai-against-appeals-to-the-complexityEliezer used a tortured metaphor about rockets, so I still blame him for the tortured airplane metaphor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gg9a4y8reWKtLe3Tn/the-rocket-alignment-problem
JFC I click on the rocket alignment link, it’s a yud dialogue between “alfonso” and “beth”. I am not dexy’ed up enough to read this shit.
Yes the 2 rs in strawberry machine thinks. In the same way that an airplane flies. /s
E: it gets even worse as half the AI field says the airplanes fly like how birds do. That is why the anthropomorphization is bad. Because it both doesn’t think as in the function, nor think as in the system. And by anthropomorphizing people make it look like it can do both.
Dijkstra did it first, but it is very ai-booster to steal work without credit or understanding, I guess.
The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
This is too fucking dumb to even be called sophistry.
slophistry
of course MBA came up with this
an airplane doesn’t flap its wings
You ever see a random shitpost video, like the backgroud music, look it up and realize you already have the vinyl record? That just happened to me.
additional layer is that according to comments first track is also used in chinese nature documentaries
And as the same channel demonstrates, there are ways to fly without any wings at all
spoiler
…as well as with them!
Man, it’s really true what they say: the West can’t meme.
Its almost like flapping part isn’t a requirement for something to fly.
In the late 2000s, rationalists were squarely in the middle of transhumanism. They were into the Singularity, but also the cryonics and a whole pile of stuff they got from the Extropians. It was very much the thing.
These days they’re most interested in Effective Altruism (loudly -the label at least) and race science (used to be quiet, now a bit louder). I hardly ever hear them even mention transhumanism as it was back then.
Did rationalists abandon transhumanism?
Is it just me? What happened?
As to cryonics… for both LLM doomers and accelerationists, they have no need for a frozen purgatory when the techno-rapture is just a few years around the corner.
As for the rest of the shiny futuristic dreams, they have give way to ugly practical realities:
-
no magic nootropics, just Scott telling people to take adderal and other rationalists telling people to micro dose on LSD
-
no low hanging fruit in terms of gene editing (as epistaxis pointed out over on reddit) so they’re left with eugenics and GeneSmith’s insanity
-
no drexler nanotech so they are left hoping (or fearing) the god-AI can figure it (which is also a problem for ever reviving cryonically frozen people)
-
no exocortex, just over priced google glasses and a hallucinating LLM “assistant”
-
no neural jacks (or neural lace or whatever the cyberpunk term for them is), just Elon murdering a bunch of lab animals and trying out (temporary) hope on paralyzed people
The future is here, and it’s subpar compared to the early 2000s fantasies. But hey, you can rip off Ghibli’s style for your shitty fanfic projects, so there are a few upsides.
-
Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn’t seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don’t have a copy of any of Kurzweil’s books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they’re surely way off.
Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don’t doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I’ve seen a couple of signs of that already.
Yes, there was a big hype in the upcoming biotech revolution in popular transhumanist media a ~decade ago. Lot of it seems to have fizzled out or gone nootropics like stuff. (And even that is meh).
It’s possible that the most popular fora for discussions of the other topics were drowned out by AI doomerism and the people who are interested in them simply left.
One of the most popular and controversial ways in recent times to use technological means to improve human condition and overcome its natural limitations is gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy. Transhumanism is woke now — hell, “trans” is right there in the name!
Yeah this kind of stuff is why im not the biggest fan of the tescreal label.
still holds - it’s still a bunch that needs a label and that’s the label
even as TREACLES was right there
(i asked emile, they said it was TESCREAL is very searchable. i mean fine)
Tired: Sand Hill Road
Wired: Treacle Mine Road
Because it is nice to have something entertaining for a change:
https://bsky.app/profile/willsmith.fun/post/3lmi2bjrao22t
Wow, that latest chat with Adam Patrick Murray about the Nintendo Switch 2 was quite the ride! The bit on the console’s dock secrets and the MicroSD Express storage had me glued. It’s amazing to see how these tech advancements are sculpting new landscapes.
Speaking of tech wizardry, have you thought about having Christian Perry on the show? As the CEO of Undetectable AI, he’s taken the whole generative AI world by storm, much like the Switch 2 is taking over gaming news! With over 15 million users and standing as a top AI writing tool, Christian’s insights into AI’s hidden workings promise to intrigue your audience, especially when it comes to how his tools seamlessly pass for human writing without tripping any detectors like GPTzero
Undetectable AI, everyone. Astounding.
Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Don’t have a source more concrete than this yet:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365
(and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)
It’s a lot like this:
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)… ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I’ve had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).
Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.
But “AI”… it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn’t. There’s nothing to learn from resulting failure, except “don’t use AI”.
In this case, given shopify’s general behaviour, I won’t be sad at all though if they crash and fail.
I also thought ‘guess LLMs dont work as an editor’.
And blockchains did massive damage, all the ransomware crime would be impossible if the tech world had not jumped into blockchain as much as they did and created and kept maintaining the ecosystem. (It also caused the techbro people who now pivot to AI rise, so it is connected). Note that the damage done by BEC is still greater than ransomware, so not cybersecurity advice.
But I get your point, I think a real example would be facebooks pivot to video. Which destroyed companies.
Yes, that’s true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldn’t be sad anyway if they went away…).
What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didn’t willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didn’t put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.
blockchain targeted libertarian post-goldbug pro-cyberpunk-dystopia fuckheads, llms target management types (you will replace workers with machines!), maybe that’s why
yeah, no I agree that blockchain is a bad example, just think we shouldn’t understate the massive damage that has done. Not just in actually damaged systems but also just in additional cost that now everybody has to worry about this. Same as how AI is not just causing climate change problems by running it, but the scraping as well has increased the cost of running a webserver by 50% in load alone. (which on a global scale is just horrid). And then there is the forcing of it in everything, the burning of the boats.
Extreme sent at 4am energy.
Some more low effort image posting. This zine was in Connolly Books for free. I’m not sure who the author is, but I thought the text was spot on and the illustrations were great. Sorry for no captions/transcriptions
Tired: Propaganda of the deed
Wired: Propaganda of the Sneer
I don’t think whoever wrote this zine goes here, but they should!
Otoh having different groups of the sneer, sneercells (no wait that name needs work) if you will. Can also be useful, esp as authoritarianism etc increases. (Not that I think govs would go after us, apart from an infiltration risk).
E: Hell, I myself am prob a risk factor. First the Dutch secret service should have file on me (else they are not doing their job, I was active in student activism, and did STEM (which also had an active (and targeted for infiltration, we know because counterhacks) hacker group) education (a known terrorism risk increaser), before my faulty brain wiring caused me to drop off the map a bit, and I know several of these groups have been targeted for infiltration recently, and long ago). I also have had just too many official twitter police accounts follow me and then unfollow me without liking a single post for it to be just a coincidence (three times being enemy action). Of course, I’m now old and passive, so if they still think I’m a risk they certainly are not doing their job (I could be a source of information however). But this is enough for me to consider that my real life identity is known enough to be a risk. And this is just about the Dutch police/secret service, there is also the risk of TracingWoodGrains like people trying to get all up in your (social) networks to try and get validation from themotte. And I have read enough stories about cybercriminals that you need to think about this stuff long before it is actually needed, also I’m paranoid.
Samizdat of the Sneer?
One more pic:
Subtle dig on Nick Land not being relevant anymore considering that drawing is of him 30+ years ago.
What does he look like now? I shudder to think.
BALD
Moldbug really is the one exception here isn’t he?
And the least deserving too!
From according to yt, that was him in 2017. This is the clearest I could (quickly) find, others are just low res webcam things.
Yowza.
Time waits for nobody.
context
Okay, one more pic, the back cover. Can’t say how reliable these sources are.
Any idea why the flag reassembles the Swiss one (the proportions are wrong though)?
It’s the network state flag. Which I presume is based on the Swiss flag, because they are horny for the idea of a small, rich, well-connected country that profits from mass murder and exploitation.
Oh, I only knew of some of it, thanks
She Licking my County till I back away is this anything?
How much of this is the AI bubble collapsing vs. Ohiophobia
Would you invest in commercial real estate, knowing there was a non-zero chance your tenants might come in one day to discover a thoroughly intoxicated JD Vance in a compromising position with the break-room furniture?
So many of the responses pointing out how bad this is for the local communities in Licking County (lol), but I feel like this has to be a case where the bezzle is collapsing more than a decision causing new harm, right? The bubble wasn’t sustainable and those jobs were unlikely to manifest past the initial construction, especially since data centers aren’t exactly labor-intensive to run.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt for those communities, especially in the midst of the economic ruin left in the wake of Hurricane Tarrif, but I feel like there’s an important lesson being lost here.
it’s also such a weird position for critique to take, imo; DCs don’t really do much in the way of Local Job Generation, and I’d fucking bet that each of these locations also got selected because of favourable gladhanding credits (tax incentives, power incentives, etc)
I suppose “all the ${whatever business} that got bought out and flattened (for buildout space) is still gone” is maybe one harm, but again… these things don’t get built on high streets
“Imagine a technology so useless you cannot run doom on it” https://bsky.app/profile/sosowski.bsky.social/post/3lm63a2srgc24
Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic. Unfortunately it also looks like the distinctive AI art style was pretty key to preventing the usual set of AI generated image “tells”. Mirrors, hands, teeth, etc are all very visibly wrong.
Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic.
This entire enterprise is just shamanry, we are like two steps away from “throwing a goat into a volcano makes your next prompt more realistic”
deleted by creator
education secretary linda mcmahon speaking about AI in schools. please enjoy
https://www.youtube.com/live/lxrg28zBv94?t=7567s
saw this at https://bsky.app/profile/joshkovensky.bsky.social/post/3lmfr3ssn5s2j, but I recommend watching first so you don’t spoil what you’re about to hear
Pre-watch: With the prior knowledge that her main job prior to this was wrestling promoter, the ol’ overtonussy is preeeetty loose
Post-watch: lol
I hate you so much for the word “overtonussy”.
You need to have levels in several subclasses of extremely online to even understand that.
[✅] “achievement” unclocked
Hello fellow memebuild enjoyer
You’re welcome!
overtonussy
Mods, crush his skull /j
oh good for once it’s not me thinking up the cursed word
Slather us in steak sauce and serve with a baked fucking potato because we are so cooked.
hold the fucking phone. The secretary of education is the wife of VINCE FUCKING MCMAHON? I thought this was a “no relation” situation but no, it’s real.
Don’t look up who the president is, it might come as a shock /s
If Democrats win the midterm I think they get to shave her head.
Tired: AI
Wired (and delicious): A1
