(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
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.)
A few days ago, Aella the rationalist sex worker with all the bright-eyed questions about under-18s, sex, and consent was accused of sexual assault by another sex worker:
Aella personally sexually assaulted me, doxed our location on live cam, has expressed dangerous opinions about sex with minors and is someone I’ve seen have problems with drinking. She is absolutely not a safe person, period. x dot com/SummerHartxxx https://archive.ph/JcCgb
At least LeCun is still relatively compos mentis (if you ignore his little 10yr stint at one of the most evil companies going…)
Heinlein was in many ways a bit of a dick, but this plan to “write” a sequel to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is deranged
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4mtqQKvmHpQJ4dgj7/daniel-tan-s-shortform?commentId=Du24ppBLK77ZHP7Bn
Rapey rationalist gets a grant pulled.
More background in this thread.
“well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” - this guy, probably
Help, i invented roku’s basilisk and now my remote control doesn’t work
You failed to participate in the design and manufacturing of the perfect remote, so now your TV is permanently locked to Duck Dynasty reruns
Well looks like GNOME is in danger of being significantly sloppified next.
Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME, and should be developed someplace other than GNOME GitLab.
Former security guy of GNOME basically demanding that everybody who bans LLM security reports should be removed from GNOME.
Have you heard that most AI bug reports are “slop?” Not so in 2026. That was true for most of 2025
oh yeah
year-1was actually awful and terrible. butyear+1will be fantastic and everyone not using it is a moronIf it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time.
Something of a tangent… thinking back to 2022-2023 my expectations for what the LLM companies would actually achieve by now were actually too high? Like I would have thought they would have figured out a better architecture for gluing functionality and symbolic logic to LLMs than just calling tools with the output text stream and feeding the tool outputs into the context window.
If it had been only a year they’ve been saying that, I might almost buy the logic. But it has been 4 years since Chat-GPT came out and they’ve been making the same promises the entire time.
4 years and more money has been spent on AI than anything else in human history outside of war.
Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME
How. That
is(E: was) the policy of curl and they are AI centrists.After all of curl’s noise about their deluge of slop reports and halting bounties because of it, I was surprised to see they would be so amenable to slopping curl itself. I suppose it’s yet another case of “all those other AI users are doing it wrong; because I understand the codebase and definitely totally use the bullshit machine responsibly then for sure I won’t produce slop”
the fomo is very strong in this one, but also it lacks substance entirely
Presented without comment: Apparently Yud is now making AI-generated Isekai games with catgirls
https://johnqpulp.substack.com/p/reviewing-ai-media-everything-that
That is a big head on the guy.
Creating a visual novel and then not letting the AI generate character reaction png’s you can put over the backgrounds you reuse is quite something.
The bartender is also on the wrong side of the bar.
Look at this pasted-in floating dorkus. Absolute cinema
Yeah I saw that and I realized it was worse, as he had the ability to combine images, the weird backgroungs were somewhat intentional.
I am demonstrably fucked in the head and thus continually tempted to wonder how a story could be done better. With plenty of the B-movies we’ve watched for Monsterdon, I’ve been like, “Well, if they had gotten rid of this character and streamlined like so, they’d have delivered better on the promise of this interesting idea…”. Yud has burned the impulse out of me. There is no critique, only sneer.
Yeah realizing the weird grave ending wasn’t weird, it was just because the catgirl killed herself (weird fridgeing) made the story not really fixable imho.
It’s so fucking lazy. Generic whitebread fantasy setting, tedious dialogue, lazy ending. As storytelling, it is the triumph of entropy.
Goddamn South Park did “why don’t you just grind in the forest to level up” twenty years ago tomorrow.
“AI is gonna kill us all guys!”
Looks inside
Using AI to make sexual fantasies about catgirls
do these guys actually want us to take them seriously???
It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is… More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It’s like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You’re edging under the pretense of ethics.
This is his rationale:
(For the otherwise confused, I do not advocate that people individually refuse to avail themselves of pre-superintelligent AI or AGI. Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage; because the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real; and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. I would give it all up in a heartbeat if there were an effective and collective treaty to stop it all at once. Don’t be the “Yet you participate in the system. Curious!” meme.)
And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious!
I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.
If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?
The closest thing Yud ever had to a job or a business was selling pulp fiction on Amazon. He is not the person to talk about pressures that working people face! (the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap)
Considering how much compensation he gets a MIRI, he could afford to hire an artist out of his own pocket and he would end up with something better and not be funding the technology that he claims is going to kill us all…
On the other hand, that artist might have some sort of creative vision of their own that could irrevocably taint Yudkowsky’s Authorial Intent. Even worse, he would have to prominently credit their contributions, rather than attributing to Claude only the menial labour of piecing together his sacred vision.
and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.
What exactly about “the frontiers” does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?
“now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real
I’m baffled by this too. If I was Yud I would prefer to fall behind than to give money to the people I wholly believe will end the world so they can keep developing the things that I believe will end the world.
Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage
So I’m assuming this means “well less people using AI doesn’t mean less damage overall done”, which is dumb because AI has very well documented effects of damaging the individual who uses it: just look at all the AI psychosis and suicide cases.
and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.
you could do this without using the AI by looking at papers and stuff but most AI papers are riddled with hype so that might be difficult
The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
Yeah, rationalist utterly fail at understanding collective action, or really anything besides lib-brained centrist methods of action. Well, maybe even lib-brained centrist is giving them too much credit, because even milquetoast liberals will occasionally avoid using products for ethical reasons. See Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, where Eliezer basically explains how all other action besides an international total ban on AI and GPUs is pointless. (I think he is trying to avoid people bombing data centers, but Elizer’s “logic” is also implicitly against stuff like going to town halls to complain about data centers.)
I think the ‘trap’ might just be something akin to addiction? Once you’ve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why ‘people [shouldn’t] individually refuse to avail themselves’ of chatbots – it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!
I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.
Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.
Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game’s afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, “Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!”
Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.
Joyless and also bloodless. Like, there is plenty to criticize about the “I guess I got isekai’d to Gor and now I’ve got a sexy slave harem” premise. But somehow he still manages to write with barely any actual empathy for the victims of that system, foregrounds how hard it is for our hero to bravely abstain from that sweet wolf sex and how maybe it’s not even the right thing to do, and then after confronting the horrifying realities for all of one scene proceeds to write the character out of the story without even giving her a fucking name in the text. Like, he somehow wrote a story about rescuing sex slaves that feels more pro-sex-slavery than a story that just embraces the sleaze of it.
“My name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you.”
“Master, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered.”
“I cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant.”
“But Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant.”
“Oh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant.”
“Master, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master.”
[much later]
“Oh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died.”
It feels like this has to be some kind of karmic balance to the webfic ecosystem for the existence of the John Brown Isekai.
Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.
It’s funny because the only way to be above tropes is to be incoherent and meaningless, and yud is kind of that
Yeah, when I think of rationalists I definitely think of their belief in “compassion for everyone”.
In fact their emphasis is on care and compassion for the as-yet-unborn, not on people who are actually alive right now. Which does give them something in common with a lot of followers of a certain Jewish guy from Galilee…
ah yes, compassion towards everyone, a thing that people obsessed with IQ definitely evince
…so we’re admitting its an apocalyptic cult? awesome. so glad these guys dominate the AI industry
also, ‘compassion for everyone’??? several rationalists promote mass deportation because of ‘ethnic purity’ you yourself support Richard Lyn!!!
also also, ‘consort with prostitutes’?, Scott do you know how many sexual assault/abuse allegations your fellow rationalists have?
It has been a while since I read a Gospel, but I don’t think Jesus hired the sinful woman for a threesome and some light flogging (or asked the centurion to lend him his boy overnight).
IMHO, being an escort is a much more honest profession than being a professional blogger on a Nazi site.
part of the infuriation with Aella’s bullshit is that not all the women, or even many of the women, who feel compelled to participate are active sex workers. but I guess wading too far into details about consent and power structures might preclude Scott’s 90-second guest appearance at Aella’s next gangbang, soooooo
I have no first-hand experience or evidence to prove this, but I feel like any sex workers’ union worth its salt would drum Aella out as a class traitor.
Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world? Isn’t that more something that John of Patmos came up with after bingeing on the local mushrooms?
Did Christ actually talk that much about the literal end of the world
Nobody knows exactly what he talked about, but the view that he passes the bar for historicity but seems to have been more of a the-end-is-nigh witch doctor type character as the new baseline has gained a lot of ground, especially with biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman breaking into popular science writing.
Also John’s apocalypse has the whole coded anti-roman-empire screed going for it beyond the psychedelia, so it’s arguable Jesus was the more direct doom prophet, but for a more distinctly jewish flavored apocalypse.
tbc I’m not a mysticist at all, and I generally understand and agree with the historicity arguments. I haven’t read Ehrman, though. Do you know if his work is where does the “end-is-nigh witch doctor” idea comes from? Afaik neither Paul nor Josephus nor Tacitus describe him as such, and as I understand those are the main sources we have. Like, I can understand that this is a hypothesis someone floated around but I’m curious why this would be the consensus among historians.
Apparently he has a book called Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium so that’s likely to have you covered. I read “How Jesus Became God” from him at some point which might have touched on this, but it was mostly about the evolution of the messiah concept itself, like how the ‘son of man’ was supposed to be it’s own specific thing and not just a euphemism for messiah, or how the term in jewish apocalyptic literature is pretty much completely separate from where the christian interpretation ended up.
Overall a very readable book, I remember liking it but it’s really been a while.
“consort” and “compassion” are doing some serious lifting there
Oh God both Yud himself and now that SE Gyges character have responded.
I originally believed Yeshua was a misspelling of Yoshua-as in Yoshua Bengio, but no he actually wrote out a fake conversation with Jesus where he compares himself to Jesus. holy shit
We constantly build a case for how they are building a weird christian proto cult and he just tweets it out.
It feels like there’s something particularly sacrilegious about someone who actively proud of their Jewish heritage having a Messiah complex. I mean I guess there was the one guy but I seem to remember it being a really big deal at the time.
which fanfic prompt is worse:
a) Yud has to do the Dragonball Z fusion dance with Jesus in order to defeat the basilisk
b) Yud isekai’s as Jesus
I can’t answer that. I keep laughing maniacally when I try to think about either one.
They actually both converge to a retelling of SCP-8008.
It is also funny that one of the people who cant spell his name is not some nobody, but Kurzweil in “the singularity is near”.
good lord, the egos on all of them
How much of a complete fucking idiot do you have to be to publicly acknowledge the Zizians in the middle of an ongoing PR disaster about your clan being on the women like to be raped they just don’t have the balls to admit it ideological bandwagon. Hey everyone, check out how my writings caused the Zizians1! Specifically by making them think we are ridiculous hypocrites for making huge claims about being scientifically unblackmailable and then paying a bunch of hush money to sexual assault victims who threatened to make a fuss. Yeah, the part where we where trying to cover up systematic abuse didn’t help either.
- Just like Jesus caused the crusades! !
I think deep down these people think PR is unethical , because the world is always better if everyone tells the Truth, so having to massage the message is Bad. Same think for voter preferences - having to appeal to the average voter instead of only listening to the people who have read and internalized the Sequences feels deeply wrong and I really don’t think these people have enough imagination or empathy to change that.
Not only that, they view commonsense moral and ethical reasoning as a PR constraint, i.e. look at the discourse around the hiring of Caroline Ellison to an EA org that handles significant sums of money. Lot of commenters were merely framing it as a PR problem and not a basic commonsense ethics problem.
I mean the alternative would require (or at least allow) asking difficult questions about influential figures in Rationalism as a movement. By describing concerns about ethics or character solely in terms of perception you can avoid actually engaging with how shitty these people are by appealing to the general sense of in-group superiority.
Creepy rationalist says the quiet part out loud.
(“RMN” = “Red Means No” = CNC parties = Consensual Non-Consent parties = Pretend sexual assault parties)
EDIT: He elaborates.
They get some replies
… … I’m writing this mostly because I’m finding it horrifying that it appears the LessWrong consensus reality is treating “nonconsent” stuff as a cornerstone of how it views women. This somehow seems to increasingly to be the case, seems wrong to me, and contributes to the erasure of some things I consider important.
