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.)
https://xcancel.com/jasonlk/status/1946069562723897802
Vibe Coding Day 8,
I’m not even out of bed yet and I’m already planning my day on @Replit.
Today is AI Day, to really add AI to our algo.
[…]
If @Replit deleted my database between my last session and now there will be hell to pay
Saw this, was going to post this a literal minute before you did but stared into this abyss a little too long.
Here’s what the abyss revealed:
- Guy is fucking stupid
- Guy is fucking stupid, hence the AI use
- Guy is fucking stupid, AI accidentally his whole database and he is still an AI glazer
Can’t wait to see this guy just use a different but same tool to delete his shit again, and learn nothing
their story is so incoherent, i can’t even tell if there was a database to begin with
I’d be lying if I said the randomly generated narrative the LLM is stringing together isn’t hilarious.
“I panicked and ran database commands without permission.”
“I destroyed all production data.”
“You immediately said ‘No’, '‘Stop’, ‘You didn’t even ask.’”
“But it was already too late.”
Thread on this lying bullshit
I feel like this response is still falling for the trick on some level. Of course it’s going to “act contrite” and talk about how it “panicked” because it was trained on human conversations and while that no doubt included a lot of Supernatural fanfic the reinforcement learning process is going to focus on the patterns of a helpful asistant rather than a barely-caged demon. That’s the role it’s trying to play and the work it’s cribbing the script from includes a whole lot of shitposts about solving problems with “rm -rf /”
also great: the promptfondlers unrapidly rediscovering why source control management exists and is desired
I’m kind of half looking forward to every soda being sweetened with aspartame or acesulfame potassium, so I can finally quit drinking them. Perhaps blue food might indirectly help people like me eat healthier for a while. Thanks, torment nexus.
janitorai - which seems to be a hosting site for creepy AI chats - is blocking all UK visitors due to the OSA
https://blog.janitorai.com/posts/3/
I’m torn here, the OSA seems to me to be massive overreach but perhaps shielding limeys from AI is wroth it
OpenAI claims that their AI can get a gold medal on the International Mathematical Olympiad. The public models still do poorly even after spending hundreds of dollars in computing costs, but we’ve got a super secret scary internal model! No, you cannot see it, it lives in Canada, but we’re gonna release it in a few months, along with GPT5 and Half-Life 3. The solutions are also written in an atrociously unreadable manner, which just shows how our model is so advanced and experimental, and definitely not to let a generous grader give a high score. (It would be real interesting if OpenAI had a tool that could rewrite something with better grammar, hmmm…) I definitely trust OpenAI’s major announcements here, they haven’t lied about anything involving math before and certainly wouldn’t have every incentive in the world to continue lying!
It does feel a little unfortunate that some critics like Gary Marcus are somewhat taking OpenAI’s claims at face value, when in my opinion, the entire problem is that nobody can independently verify any of their claims. If a tobacco company released a study about the effects of smoking on lung cancer and neglected to provide any experimental methodology, my main concern would not be the results of that study.
Edit: A really funny observation that I just thought of: in the OpenAI guy’s thread, he talks about how former IMO medalists graded the solutions in message #6 (presumably to show that they were graded impartially), but then in message #11 he is proud to have many past IMO participants working at OpenAI. Hope nobody puts two and two together!
This result has me flummoxed frankly. I was expecting Google to get a gold medal this year since last year they won a silver and were a point away from gold. In fact, Google did announce after OAI that they had won gold.
But the OAI claim is that they have some secret sauce that allowed a “pure” llm to win gold and that the approach is totally generic- no search or tools like verifiers required. Big if true but ofc no one else is allowed to gaze at the mystery machine. It is hard for me to take them seriously given their sketchy history, yet the claim as stated has me shooketh.
Also funny aside, the guy who lead the project was poached by the zucc. So he’s walking out the front door with the crown jewels lmaou.
Democratizing graphic design, Nashville style
Description: genAI artifact depicting guitarist Slash as a cat. This cursed critter is advertising a public appearance by a twitter poster. The event is titled “TURDSTOCK 2025”. Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl, which seems like a missed opportunity tbh.
Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl
truth in advertising: they’re hinting what the music will sound like
Fucking monodactyl ass cat
Turdstock? Wow, the name immediately says this is a festival worth attending! The picture only strengthens the feeling.
Intentionally being on Broadway at 1-4 PM on a Sunday is a whole vibe, and that’s before considering whatever the fuck this is.
The whole thing screams old people desperately trying to be edge and cool but missing all the signifiers. A 'bad’word but baby talk style (like a young child saying poop), reference to slash which was already dated when I was young, the time of day so people can arrive home early and still make dinner (and not late at night like the cool music thing). The headliner is a twitter microceleb and not an actual cool band. But hey, at least kid rock isnt attending, so it escapes the 100% poser feeling.
E: saw this on my bsky, the guy is such a sad loser.
What in the world is a catturd2 public appearance like, anyway? This sad, drunk old loser shouting random slurs at the crowd?
I can answer that, as turdstock 2024 is on yt, it seems this john rich guy talking about how much he likes catturd, begging for donations (while saying fema is bad), some people spending a lot of time saying nothing (I’m skimming past and there is so much nothing being said), and some country songs (which is not my genre, did notice that for one guy the mix was off, making the music/singing bad to hear, so well done tech team there (they fix it later but still)). And then I saw the audience (they also said millions watched catturd 2023, which considering this vid has 9k views, and there are like 100 people in the audience I doubt (checked turdstock 2023, which seems to only be on rumble 223k views. So lol, double lol, saw the same fucking artists (and the for the same guy the technical issues, poor guy) (and wow rumble sucks compared to yt)). There actually also don’t seem to be that many songs, think half the time was people talking. Also, No Catturd appearance from what I can tell (E: he is there, he just doesn’t do anything it seems, he prob speaks a few minutes I guess). Also really weird bit about how somebody send a mean facebook post and facebook went ‘are you sure this is mean’ and they went all ‘zuck was never punched in the face on the playground … the founding fathers … there was a patriot girl … [5 minutes of talking] … when those redcoats moved on us … etc (this bit took 20 minutes between songs)’. There is also a guy praying for various things on stage, angry raised catholic noises
But yes, can’t judge it on the music, as an event it seemed boring as fuck, too much talking, not enough music, boring audience (none of who were holding drinks), weird political message. Rather watch Kreator for 4 hours, which considering some of the speech clips I hear, seems to be the message they were going for. Somehow the geriatrics in the audience are the most dangerous people because they only want to be left alone (??). No lightshow, no stage presence, no skulls, no fireworks (this is both a comment on the lack of fireworks, and a general comment on what I saw).
Anyway, seems my initial feeling of massive uncool stands.
Also seem they reused the slash cat AI image for 2025.Nope different cat, just same AI slop shit.E: “Ticket Price: $199 plus taxes and fees.” WHAT Wacken metalfest costs 333,00 € and that is for a whole weekend (and actually has a real Slash).
lol holy shit
Thank you for your service!
What is esp interesting is how they make this event sound bigger than it is. The venue is small, but that makes the ‘it was sold out’ show up sooner (also less hard to find enough people who would chuck down 200 bucks for this shit), but then they make claims about the livestream numbers. (which are going to be hard to check) etc. Weird sort of radicalization way to make people think there are more people in their movement than there are. Bit like going ‘catturd2 has 4m followers!’ like those numbers mean much online, esp on zombie twitter (see also John Rich has 150k subs on yt, but averages to 10k plays per non-music video at a quick glance (his music songs do very well however at millions per views (the one song I listened to was also about how Jesus was coming back soon to punish all the evildoers))), so people like the music+message in the music, but not when the guy actually opens his mouth for other stuff, all very vibes stuff. But also just how few actual music is being played vs people making nonsense talks about America/whatever. (and also listening to his live performance, I don’t think John Rich is a good musician (at least not live, the yt clips of him are pretty good, so either he was having a bad day, or autotune stuff).
And it wasn’t that hard, not like I spend that much time on it, it is quite interesting in a way, to look at these kinds of movements and try to see past their propganda and notice who they actually reach and what they do and say. And considering the people they attracted it feels very much a last attempt from a dying generation whos sun has set. (but that could also just be because younger people aren’t as easily scammed into giving away 200 bucks for this).
I had to attend a presentation from one of these guys, trying to tell a room full of journalists that LLMs could replace us & we needed to adapt by using it and I couldn’t stop thinking that an LLM could never be a trans journalist, but it could probably replace the guy giving the presentation.
Guys, how about we made the coming computer god a fan of Robert Nozick, what could go wrong?
Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.
I expect the time right around when the first ASI gets built to be chaotic, unstable, and scary
Somebody should touch grass, or check up on the news.
Found a good security-related sneer in response to a low-skill exploit in Google Gemini (tl;dr: “send Gemini a prompt in white-on-white/0px text”):
I’ve got time, so I’ll fire off a sidenote:
In the immediate term, this bubble’s gonna be a goldmine of exploits - chatbots/LLMs are practically impossible to secure in any real way, and will likely be the most vulnerable part of any cybersecurity system under most circumstances. A human can resist being socially engineered, but these chatbots can’t really resist being jailbroken.
In the longer term, the one-two punch of vibe-coded programs proliferating in the wild (featuring easy-to-find and easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities) and the large scale brain drain/loss of expertise in the tech industry (from juniors failing to gain experience thanks to using LLMs and seniors getting laid off/retiring) will likely set back cybersecurity significantly, making crackers and cybercriminals’ jobs a lot easier for at least a few years.
Copy/pasting a post I made in the DSP driver subreddit that I might expand over at morewrite because it’s a case study in how machine learning algorithms can create massive problems even when they actually work pretty well.
It’s a machine learning system, not an actual human boss. The system is set up to try and find the breaking point, where if you finish your route on time it assumes you can handle a little bit more and if you don’t it backs off.
The real problem is that everything else in the organization is set up so that finishing your routes on time is a minimum standard while the algorithm that creates the routes is designed to make doing so just barely possible. Because it’s not fully individualized, this means that doing things like skipping breaks and waiving your lunch (which the system doesn’t appear to recognize as options) effectively push the edge of what the system thinks is possible out a full extra hour, and then the rest of the organization (including the decision-makers about who gets to keep their job) turn that edge into the standard. And that’s how you end up where we are now, where actually taking your legally-protected breaks is at best a luxury for top performers or people who get an easy route for the day, rather than a fundamental part of keeping everyone doing the job sane and healthy.
Part of that organizational problem is also in the DSP setup itself, since it allows Amazon to avoid taking responsibility or accountability for those decisions. All they have to do is make sure their instructions to the DSP don’t explicitly call for anything illegal and they get to deflect all criticism (or LNI inquiries) away from themselves and towards the individual DSP, and if anyone becomes too much of a problem they can pretend to address it by cutting that DSP.
If anyone else is wondering: DSP here I think stands for “Delivery Service Partner”, and driver for someone driving a vehicle. (I assumed the context “Digital Signal Processing” and driver as in “device driver” at first and was quite confused :P)
On-topic: I think regulation needs to come down hard on the delivery industry in general, be it parcels or food or whatever, working conditions there have been terrible for a long time.
I was definitely confused. I am a comp sci student, but I was also an Amazon driver for a very short while and that meaning didn’t occur to me.
Daniel Koko’s trying to figure out how to stop the AGI apocalypse.
How might this work? Install TTRPG afficionados at the chip fabs and tell them to roll a saving throw.
Similarly, at the chip production facilities, a committee of representatives stands at the end of the production line basically and rolls a ten-sided die for each chip; chips that don’t roll a 1 are destroyed on the spot.
And if that doesn’t work? Koko ultimately ends up pretty much where Big Yud did: bombing the fuck out of the fabs and the data centers.
“For example, if a country turns out to have a hidden datacenter somewhere, the datacenter gets hit by ballistic missiles and the country gets heavy sanctions and demands to allow inspectors to pore over other suspicious locations, which if refused will lead to more missile strikes.”
As a worker in the semiconductor space, I suddenly feel the urge to write a 100k word blog post about how a preemptive strike against LW is both necessary and morally correct.
Weird Al impersonator sprinkling Pentium 3’s over the corpses as a calling card
For example, if a country turns out to have a hidden datacenter somewhere, the datacenter gets hit by ballistic missiles and the country gets heavy sanctions and demands to allow inspectors to pore over other suspicious locations, which if refused will lead to more missile strikes.
“If the AI God doesn’t kill you, we will.” is one hell of a sales pitch.
Suppose further that enough powerful people are concerned about the poverty in Ireland, anti-catholic discrimination, food insecurity, and/or loss of rental revenue, that there’s significant political will to Do Something. Should we ban starvation? Should we decolonise? Should we export their produce harder to finally starve Ireland? Should we sign some kind of treaty? Should we have a national megaproject to replace the population with the British? Many of these options are seriously considered.
Enter the baseline option: Let the Irish sell their babies as a delicacy.
Funnily enough, there are a lot of data centres in Ireland. Maybe there will be a missile strike and Ireland’s population will shrink back to 19th century numbers
The sanctions and inspections idea is so silly esp after what the USA/Trump did to Iran. (I mean the deciding that Iran wasnt keeping their end of the bargain and still making Uranium. So after the end Iran started to make more Uranium for real. Gg everyone).
Also ‘cull the gpus’: [angry gamer noises]
Similarly, at the chip production facilities, a committee of representatives stands at the end of the production line basically and rolls a ten-sided die for each chip; chips that don’t roll a 1 are destroyed on the spot.
Ah, yes, artificially kneecap chip fabs’ yields, I’m sure that will go over well with the capitalist overlords who own them
I spend a lot of my professional life modeling this kind of data. My wafers having to make will saves is going to complicate things…
Someone didn’t get the memo about nVidia’s stock price, and how is Jensen supposed to sign more boobs if suddenly his customers all get missile’d?
I’m not gonna advocate for it to happen but I’m pretty sure the world would be overall in a much healthier place geopolitically if someone actually started yeeting missiles into major American cities and landmarks. It’s too easy to not really understand the human impact of even a successful precision strike when the last times you were meaningfully on the other end of the airstrike were ~20 and ~80 years ago, respectively.
Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing. https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673
The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.
Apologies if this was posted when published.
You thought Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) was bad. You were wrong. He’s even worse. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/cremieux-jordan-lasker-mamdani-nyt-nazi-faliceer-reddit/
The whole internet loves Éspèrature Trouvement, the grumpy old racist! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the racist is not that old and actually has a pretty normal name. Also don’t look up his runescape username.
Fucking hell. Not the most important part of the story, but his elaborate lies about being Jewish are very very weird. Kind of like white Americans pretending that they’re Cherokee I guess?
It’s not that weird when you understand the sharks he swims with. Race pseudoscientists routinely peddle the idea that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than any other ethnic or racial group. Scoot Alexander and Big Yud have made this claim numerous times. Lasker pretending to be a Jew makes more sense once you realize this.
I’m aware of the idea, but it’s still very weird for someone to pretend to be Jewish and also be a Nazi!
also here https://awful.systems/post/4995759
The long and short of it is motherjones discovered TPOs openly nazi alt.
Nikhil’s guest post at Zitron just went up - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkable-incompetence-at-the-heart-of-tech/
EDIT: the intro was strong enough I threw in $7. Second half is just as good.
Here’s an example of normal people using Bayes correctly (rationally assigning probabilities and acting on them) while rats Just Don’t Get Why Normies Don’t Freak Out:
For quite a while, I’ve been quite confused why (sweet nonexistent God, whyyyyy) so many people intuitively believe that any risk of a genocide of some ethnicity is unacceptable while being… at best lukewarm against the idea of humanity going extinct.
(Dude then goes on to try to game-theorize this, I didn’t bother to poke holes in it)
The thing is, genocides have happened, and people around the world are perfectly happy to advocate for it in diverse situations. Probability wise, the risk of genocide somewhere is very close to 1, while the risk of “omnicide” is much closer to zero. If you want to advocate for eliminating something, working to eliminating the risk of genocide is much more rational than working to eliminate the risk of everyone dying.
At least on commenter gets it:
Most people distinguish between intentional acts and shit that happens.
(source)
Edit never read the comments (again). The commenter referenced above obviously didn’t feel like a pithy one liner adhered to the LW ethos, and instead added an addendum wondering why people were more upset about police brutality killing people than traffic fatalities. Nice “save”, dipshit.
Hmm, should I be more worried and outraged about genocides that are happening at this very moment, or some imaginary scifi scenario dreamed up by people who really like drawing charts?
One of the ways the rationalists try to rebut this is through the idiotic dust specks argument. Deep down, they want to smuggle in the argument that their fanciful scenarios are actually far more important than real life issues, because what if their scenarios are just so bad that their weight overcomes the low probability that they occur?
(I don’t know much philosophy, so I am curious about philosophical counterarguments to this. Mathematically, I can say that the more they add scifi nonsense to their scenarios, the more that reduces the probability that they occur.)
You know, I hadn’t actually connected the dots before, but the dust speck argument is basically yet another ostensibly-secular reformulation of Pascal’s wager. Only instead of Heaven being infinitely good if you convert there’s some infinitely bad thing that happens if you don’t do whatever Eliezer asks of you.
reverse dust specks: how many LWers would we need to permanently deprive of access to internet to see rationalist discourse dying out?
What’s your P(that question has been asked at a US three letter agency)
it either was, or wasn’t, so 50%
Recently, I’ve realized that there is a decent explanation for why so many people believe that - if we model them as operating under a strict zero-sum game model of the world… ‘everyone loses’ is basically an incoherent statement - as a best approximation it would either denote no change and therefore be morally neutral, or an equal outcome, and would therefore be preferable to some.
Yes, this is why people think that. This is a normal thought to think others have.
Why do these guys all sound like deathnote, but stupid?
because they cribbed their ideas from deathnote, and they’re stupid
Here’s my unified theory of human psychology, based on the assumption most people believe in the Tooth Fairy and absolutely no other unstated bizarre and incorrect assumptions no siree!
I mean if you want to be exceedingly generous (I sadly have my moments), this is actually remarkably close to the “intentional acts” and “shit happens” distinction, in a perverse Rationalist way. ^^
Thats fair, if you want to be generous, if you are not going to be Id say there are still conceptually large differences between the quote and “shit happens”. But yes, you are right. If only they had listened to Scott when he said “talk less like robots”
https://www.profgalloway.com/ice-age/ Good post until I hit the below:
Instead of militarizing immigration enforcement, we should be investing against the real challenge: AI. The World Economic Forum says 9 million jobs globally may be displaced in the next five years. Anthropic’s CEO warns AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Imagine the population of Greece storming the shores of America and taking jobs (even jobs Americans actually want), as they’re willing to work 24/7 for free. You’ve already met them. Their names are GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Having a hard time imagining 300 but AI myself, Scott. Could we like, not shoehorn AI into every other discussion?
Iirc Galloway was a pro cryptocurrency guy. So this tracks
E: imagine if the 3d printer people had the hype machine behind them like this. ‘China better watch out, soon all manufacturing of products will be done by people at home’. Meanwhile China: [Laughs in 大跃进].
I think that 3D printing never picked up, because it’s one of those things that empower the people, i.e. to repair stuff or build their own things, so the number of opportunities to grift seems to be smaller (although I’m probably underestimating it).
Most of the recently hyped technologies had goals that were exact opposites of empowering the masses.
Tangential: I’ve heard that there are 3D printer people that print junk and sell them. This would not be much of a problem if they didn’t pollute the spaces they operate in. The example I’ve heard of is artist alleys at conventions- a 3D printer person will set up a stall and sell plastic models of dragons or pokemon or whatever. Everything is terrible!
Tangential: I’ve heard that there are 3D printer people that print junk and sell them. This would not be much of a problem if they didn’t pollute the spaces they operate in.
So, essentially AI slop, but with more microplastics. Given the 3D printer bros are much more limited in their ability to pollute their spaces (they have to pay for filament/resin, they’re physically limited in where they can pollute, and they produce slop much slower than an LLM), they’re hopefully easier to deal with.
I think that is it tbh. There was no big centralized profit, so no need to hype it up.
I liked his stuff on wework back in the day. Funny how he could see one tech grift really clearly and fall for another. Then again, WeWork is in the black these days. Anyway I think Galloway pivoted (apologies) to Mens Rights lately; and he also gave some money to UCLA Extension (ie not the main campus) which is a bit hard to interpret.
yeah lol ez just 3dprint polypropylene polymerization reactor. what the fuck is hastelloy?
Yeah, but we never got that massive hype cycle for 3d printers. Which in a way is a bit odd, as it could have happend. Nanomachine! Star trek replicators! (Getting a bit offtopic from Galloway being a cryptobro).
I can imagine it clear… a chart showing minimum feature size decreasing over time (using cherry picked data points) with a dotted line projection of when 3d printers would get down nanotech scale. 3d printer related companies would warn of dangers of future nanotech and ask for legislation regulating it (with the language of the legislation completely failing to effect current 3d printing technology). Everyone would be buying 3d printers at home, and lots of shitty startups would be selling crappy 3d printed junk.
