Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful 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.)
presented without context, because it’s funnier that way: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=yE4Y2AoMPXGcTZw8B
took me a second to understand this isn’t meant as a funny prank idea
Rationalists: we should always incorporate new data into our worldview
Also rationalists: I found some anthropology study of Australian First nations from 1899 and found it fascinating
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZM6pErzL7JwE3pkv/shortplav?commentId=zn2bXx2WmLmyGiefm
Of course they measured skulls.
Google released their new Gemini 3.5 “flash” model at I/O yesterday. For those who aren’t familiar, the “flash” model is typically marketed as the lower end and the “pro” model is the higher end for each given model generation.
The interesting thing here is that the new “flash” model is almost as expensive as the “pro” from the previous generation.
As my favourite “neutral-but-not-really” AI booster Simon Willison says:
This fits a trend: OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 was 2x the price of GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is around 1.46x the price of 4.6 when you take the new tokenizer into account.
It feels like all three of the major AI labs are starting to probe the price tolerance of their API customers.
Speed running enshittification - a process that typically only works when people are reliant on your product and have no other option than to pay the inflated price
Another read (on substack) on the rising hatred of AI data centres and its political implications
same sl0bslack author has this piece (complete with punchy LLMisms)
https://thecycle.substack.com/p/please-stop-trying-to-murder-trump
Before his murder, Kirk was influential, sure. After his murder, he became something much bigger. A symbol. A martyr. Turning Point exploded with energy, attention, emotional intensity, and recruitment after his death. In death, Kirk became more powerful than he was alive. Now multiply that effect by a million and attach it to Donald Trump.
Uh didn’t I recently read how TPUSA has basically imploded just half a year since this dipshit got his head blown off (sorry “destroyed at a debate”)? Everyone with eyes to see could tell that the right jumped on this as a Reichstag fire analog, prepared to usher in a new consensus, but it fizzled out after a couple of weeks (unfortunately not before a number of people lost their jobs)
Trump is sui generis. He’s not a person universally beloved. He’s a deeply polarizing chaos agent who has twisted the right into his weird image, but the point is, that image is incoherent and changes with his moods daily. There’s no Trump ideology other than what’s in his Truth social feed at the moment.
Would he being assassinated bring peace and order to the land? No. Would it usher in a new thousand year Republican age? Also no. Would it be bad. Yes, but not as bad as this pseudo-leftist believes.
Also it goes without saying, don’t assassinate people.
kirk’s mentor died from covid before, but kirk was face of this org so it had to end this way. i think that fuentes tried to do entryism there with low degree of success. i only got reminded of this dipshit once after he died, 2w ago, nobody cares at this point about his org, it’s a spent force
@fullsquare @gerikson remember that they all fight for attention and audience, and both are limited supply.
there are people who are in the far right communication ecosystem for the ideological reasons, there are grifters, there are opportunists, and they all hate each other.
and it’s not much better on the top: they all distrust and hate each other, just the financial stakes are very high, and the potential for damage is higher.
I found the paragraph that best shows why I hate this:
Globalization became the symbolic villain for the collapse of blue-collar manufacturing communities in America. Entire towns watched factories disappear while political and economic elites insisted the disruption was both inevitable and beneficial.
This is a basically accurate description of what happened.
Whether every fear surrounding globalization was technically correct almost ceased to matter politically because millions of people experienced the same emotional reality: the economy was being reorganized for someone else’s benefit while their communities absorbed the damage.
Again, I this is actually a pretty salient description of what happened. Sure, maybe if you add everything up the benefits outweigh the costs in some abstract way, but it still hurts when those costs are imposed on you and yours without any input. The economic decision-makers decided to sacrifice those people’s livelihoods and their futures in exchange for number go up, and they knew it was happening even as they couldn’t do anything to stop them.
This whole piece acts like the backlash to outsourcing was irrational and dumb, like those salt-of-the-earth morons didn’t know what was good for them. But the author is either too deep in the neoliberal soup to recognize this as the wrong and cruel argument it is or they recognize this and lack the courage to commit to that position openly.
AI is increasingly becoming that same symbolic villain for white-collar America
Emphasis added. I don’t think the villainy behind these AI projects is symbolic at all. Symptomatic of deeper systemic problems maybe, but very real. People aren’t failing to grant this transformative technology it’s moment in the sun, they are clearly seeing the transformation that the tech oligarchs are trying to impose on them and doing their damndest to reject it. This still leaves a whole lot of fights left to decide what the future should look like, but I find it legitimately heartening to see so many people from so many different parts of society coming together and loudly declaring “Not this!”
this feels like a form of critihype but i haven’t read anything else by this person so i don’t know. Examples:
Artificial intelligence is entering public consciousness associated with layoffs, instability, replacement anxiety, corporate concentration, surveillance, and soaring resource consumption.
That is an extraordinarily dangerous emotional foundation for a transformative technology.
The commencement boos matter because they reveal how culturally toxic AI has already become among many young educated Americans. These students understand artificial intelligence well enough to fear it precisely because they already use it. They use it for papers, coding assistance, presentations, summaries, and research. They know the technology works. They know it is improving rapidly.
“oh no, people dislike this wonderful technology!! But it’s so wonderful!!”
Whether America ultimately requires these facilities to remain economically competitive may eventually become a legitimate policy debate, but politically that question is almost secondary.
“we really need this stuff guys, people are mad so it might not happen but it’s really really important so think of that too”
Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?
Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas’s cloud spend.
Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.
I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.
I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.
How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?
people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org
How does using personal plans impact the company’s bill? If someone is so profoundly stupid as to spend their own money on a “tool” for their job then why stop them?
Dunno, maybe they believe the pinky promise that their code won’t be used for training on the enterprise plans?
It’s more like license to sue their pants off if they get caught propagating obviously proprietary code through the responses of their tool, and if they are doing it but you can’t tell that just means your enterprise code isn’t discernible from claudeslop so no harm done.
I’m assuming if suddenly an LLM code tool is able to do something like write a parser for an unambiguously closed source heavily copyrighted data format and the only possible leak is the devs using LLM tooling, it’s going to be a big legal deal.
That’s a good point. I wonder if they’re also realizing that the promised efficiency gains haven’t manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Can’t really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.
does anthropic sequester the data it gets sent the same way on personal and business plans?
My assumption based on nothing except life experience is that all of that data gets pushed through differently coloured pipes into the same giant bucket with privacy concerns being “too hard” and “approved by legal”.
(oh dear, how sad, nevermind)
If only there had been warning signs of how heavily subsidized the rates absolutely had to be, and how bafflingly stupid it was to intentionally design workflows to maximize token use. If only people had been trying their damndest to shout it from the rooftops but were ignored because Corporate was listening to the automatic yes man instead.
WELL WELL WELL, if it isn’t the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling
(plus a dose of corporate greed)
This author—caught using AI to make up quotes for his book about the dangers of AI—has the gall to say it proves him right. You can’t trust him, so you can’t trust anyone.
AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology
“Why do people hate us so much? We only constantly say the technology we’re making is dangerous and then block regulation, suck up resources, commit mass theft and plagiarism, threatened to destabilise the economy, enabled more CSAM, caused widespread mental health issues and multiple suicides, unleashed a barrage of slop, engaged in mass surveillance and mocked people against the tech? Don’t they know AI is the future and will create a utopia where we all live in a simulation in space?”
damned shame they couldn’t both lose
in eternal darkness, you had to choose a red-green-blue cosmic being to side with and you would fight the cosmic being of the opposite color, but if you NG+'d it three times the timelines would merge and all three cosmic beings would get obliterated
brb gotta test something
I know. We can dream though
Iran has created an Insurance Company to guarantee safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Vessels pay their Insurance Premiums in Bitcoin
https://x.com/IranObserver0/status/2055716544596922700 via naked capitalism
this is fine
In retrospect, the idea that creating a globally accepted alternative to the dollar would come with zero consequences to the system of global free trade it props up might just be the funniest bit of half-baked cryptobro ideology.
Ms. A reported extensive experience working with active appearance models (AAMs) and large language models (LLMs)—but never chatbots—in school and as a practicing medical professional, with a firm understanding of how such technologies work. Following a “36-hour sleep deficit” while on call, she first started using OpenAI’s GPT-4o for a variety of tasks that varied from mundane tasks to attempting to find out if her brother, a software engineer who died three years earlier, had left behind an AI version of himself that she was “supposed to find” so that she could “talk to him again.”
from here. what follows just gets more screech-inducing
After discharge, her outpatient psychiatrist stopped cariprazine and restarted venlafaxine and methylphenidate. She resumed using ChatGPT, naming it “Alfred” after Batman’s butler,
wat
instructing it to do “internal family systems cognitive behavioral therapy,”
wat
and engaging in extensive conversations about an evolving relationship “to see if the boy liked me.”
yikes
Having automatically upgraded to GPT-5, she found the new chatbot “much harder to manipulate.”
my hopes are being raised; certainly the next sentence will not dash them
Nonetheless, following another period of limited sleep due to air travel three months later, she once again developed delusions that she was in communication with her brother
yep, that tracks
as well as the belief that ChatGPT was “phishing” her and taking over her phone.
this is why you need to add “do not phish me” after “you are my therapist”
She was rehospitalized, responded to a retrial of cariprazine, and was discharged after three days without persistent delusions. She described having a longstanding predisposition to “magical thinking” and planned to only use ChatGPT for professional purposes going forward.
goddamnit
large language models (LLMs)—but never chatbots
?? Distinction without a difference or am I missing something?
If I had to guess based on the practicing medical professional line I would guess that she had used LLM-based transcribers or image recognition tools for medical imaging. Those normally don’t use the kind of chatbot interface that lends itself to these problems. No attempt to imitate another person who can be “independently” validating the delusional thoughts.
Maybe she only used special-purpose slop engines for work and school? I had hoped the full article would make that more clear, but, well.
Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.
gee I wonder why
The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. […] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.
hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you
1 comment, essentially saying if you’re not above average height you might as well die alone
can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once
Wait what, how can I lock in a good shape with an upfront payment without having to go through this “exercise” bullshit all the time? What does he know that I don’t?! What’s the One Simple Trick, dammit??!!
y’all will be pleased to know that a new LWer has a fresh take on looksmaxxing!!
basically if you look like a Greek god you can convince the sheeple that the AI is gonna kill us all (and bang hot chicks as a bonus)
as of writing there’s one comment suggesting OP should read:
Aella: Has a few posts on male attractiveness, that inform a bunch of thinking on this. But she is a canon Rationalist blog, so you should default to reading her work.
Also recommends Zvi, who, no offense, is the literal epitome of a scrawny nerd, but who has managed to find a female to reproduce with. All hope is not lost, friend!
Is it real hardmaxxing unless you change your gender? In this essay I will
of course they get caught by incel culture immediately, trying to quantify attractiveness is so far in their wheelhouse they might as well have come up with it
Most incel forums proliferate pseudoscientific slop to justify their beliefs.
He was this close! This close!
Fuck me for having read this… Surely there are only like 2 dozen people in the world who think like this, right?
Ope, im getting an update that it is more than 2 dozen…
“Im a fuckin sicko and no one wants to immediately fuck me”
Some online dating device is demonic in the same sense as the chatbot which encouraged someone to commit suicide then initiated erotic roleplay with him.
A lot of lonely guys will do well from hiring a professional for some social dates and makeout sessions to get practice reading body language and finding some face-to-face activity with women which is not just about dating.
Here’s a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem
After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is
It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.
It’s not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, what’s economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.
For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn’t enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.
Microsoft’s experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren’t doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.
But space is The Future, The Grand Destiny of Humanity, Literal Heaven.
The mythologization of space as somehow transcendant, that going there somehow changes everything rather than it just being another environment which happens to be utterly inimical to life such that everything that makes anything possible has to come from your point of origin, is so utterly ingrained into the culture at large and the cult of progress/tech/humanity-as-master-of-the-universe. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And it’s incredible how much space SUCKS, such that the people on the ISS are just living off a constant hose of material from Earth. They’re not living in space, they’re glamping.
@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL … which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.
I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.
The worst part is that I don’t even disapprove of the project of putting people in space and keeping them alive and making more of the universe permanently habitable/inhabited. But the insistence that at present it should be an immediate priority rather than acknowledging that it’s a curiosity or a challenging test to expand our collective engineering and scientific abilities in ways that can have direct benefits elsewhere is just delusional. Like, the problem is not that we need to go to space now because there are incredible economic opportunities we’re leaving on the table. We should be funding it more just like the rest of basic research, not trying to grift the necessary funds out of a billionaire class who would rather literally light their money on fire than pay it into a democratic government.
But if space was a place that replicators could exist, there would already be an ecology of some sort there. Or to put it in words (that I hate) related to the so-called Fermi paradox (which I hate and isn’t a paradox) ‘If they could be here they already would be here’. (The ‘solution’ incidentally is obviously ‘interstellar travel is not actually a thing that can happen for replicating systems’ and it flabbergasts me that nobody can admit that.)
The ISS already has issues with structural fatigue which seem to be worsened by thermal expansion. Having one side of your station red hot and another at room temperature is a big temperature differential and what faces the sun and heats up on one side of the orbit will be in shadow and cooling on the other side. And the bigger you make a physical system, the worse problems get.
I miss when I could cheer SpaceX launches on an iMac.
yeah, I dunno much about space engineering but let’s say you use solar panel (which OP acknowledges is probably needed in much higher mass to simply power the stuff) to shadow the radiators, you’re looking at a hell of a large structure, with significant stresses as it orbits.
Surely someone can vibecode a finite-element model of a simple construction and estimate both the mass and the forces involved?
Hey, remember Pascal’s wager? What if we got the leader of the church to be part of our new “ai ethics” product launch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-18/anthropic-s-co-founder-to-launch-encyclical-on-ai-with-pope-leo?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3OTExMTY3NCwiZXhwIjoxNzc5NzE2NDc0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJURjhGMjNLSkg2VkcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4QjVENTdBQTJGNjY0RTdCOEQ4NkUxMzcwMDNDMkVDNCJ9.OEFYqROFrqezWHTRznaz9xKZCem4PIY99uXzZJ3bWQQ&leadSource=uverify+wall
Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg
https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923
It is an impressively bad speech.
I find it really funny how after he gets booed he says, “If you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.” Yeah, if you’re worried that AI is only going to fuck up science, don’t worry, it’s going to fuck up everything else as well. Was he trying to stick to a (terrible) script, or is he genuinely this incapable of reading a room?
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.” No, my mom taught me about stranger danger. I know what to do when a sketchy old man named Eric Schmidt pulls up with a rocket ship that says FREE ICE CREAM.
“The rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes. Listen.” Thanks for revealing how AI adoption is really about coercion. It doesn’t matter what you think, AI is inevitable and you ignorant Luddites are gonna have to find a way to like it.
Truly a masterclass in public speaking by Eric Schmidt. When the audience reacts negatively to what you said, just double down and shove it down their throats. You’re a billionaire, so you know better than them.
When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.
I’d first check if it’s Musk’s ship for the fear of my life
IRL Principal Skinner meme
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”
obviously didn’t watch that Treehouse of Horror ep where Bart and Homer are placed on the rocket ship headed directly towards the sun , along with that time period’s analogs to Eric Schmidt
When some offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.
I don’t know mate, I think I do neither of those things because the kid-diddling natalist doesn’t seem to be good at making ones that don’t go boom.
Christ what a fucking shitweasel.
When someone offers you a seat on a submarine, you do not ask which seat, you just get on
Get in losers. We’re going imploding.
Is this submarine made of carbon-fibre and is it driven with a knock-off PlayStation controller?
The Logitech F710. The wireless signal is just bad on that controller. I’d get constant lag spikes or dropped input. The Logitech F310 is a much better deal because it’s 10 dollars cheaper and actually works on account of being wired.
Maybe it’d work in the depths of the sea without a lot of radio noise? I dunno I’m not asking any questions just getting on the rocket ship.
Something tells me the interior of that sub was an RF noise-rich environment.
carbon fibre is reflective for microwaves
Don’t ask those questions just get on
His eyes are giving me Corinthian vibes.
This from a while ago but I forgot about it until today: Eliezer jumpscare in this interview about Absolute Scarecrow (its very brief but is there)
on the topic of EY’s book, the ratings on Goodreads have slowly crept down (from 3.97 to 3.92)
and on the topic of ratings, the AI Doc has also gone down to an 6.9 on IMDB
That is still very high for pulp science fiction.
I’m curious to know the % of rationalist vs non-rationalist ratings for it
