Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)
The Inside story of Leverage Research
This should be interesting, it’s about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though might be a bit too culty. Don’t know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.
edit: The companion piece about the background of why she wrote it is quite a ride, if only for the biographical tidbits: she is indeed very cult adjacent, she had a spiritual experience and now believes in capital G god, she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.
Also the Leverage article was contracted to appear in the New York Magazine but she pulled the story because of uh declining trust in the field of journalism, but then she goes on to imply that the real problem was that the article was shaping up as a bit too pro-Leverage:
I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.
edit edit: Why can’t these people ever be normal: Why I Was Part Of The Neoreactionary or Dissident Right Movement In 2020
edit edit edit: Jesus fucking christ she’s Curtis Yarvin’s baby momma.
Too many sneers while reading it, I did a full post: https://awful.systems/post/8886134
she got engaged to an unnamed far-right writer but they broke up when she got pregnant.
Ironic considering all the anti-black racism.
As reported by local Wyoming paper Cowboy State Daily, Meta’s closed-loop water-cooling system bred a metal-resistant bacterium and now the municipal wastewater system has refused to accept Meta’s wastewater. To be crisp, Cupriavidis, which literally means
“loves to eat copper”“lives on copper”, already was metal-resistant; this wasn’t a de novo adaptation. Edit: used wrong root for translation, whoops.Yet another point in favor of evaporative cooling. Standing water, recycled water, and grey water are too complex to treat as recyclable. Also another point against cheaply-designed rush-built datacenters.
How do we know this isn’t the AI god creating the first diamondoid bacteria?
Easy, we are all still non-paperclip like.
What’s the significance of bacteria being metal-resistant?
copper surfaces tend to discourage bacterial growth, which is an important feature for pipes that supply potable water where there isn’t a constant moving water supply. Having bacteria that thrive instead of die in the presence of copper means that your whole water supply can get a bacterial infection it cannot shake.
The Atlantic is now defending AI. Or maybe they have for a while and I hadn’t noticed until this article got my blood pressure up: https://archive.is/qvbJZ
Author is a chud who used to write for The Free Press: https://muckrack.com/elias-wachtel/articles
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/02/smooth-ai-criminal-drives-first-end-to-end-agentic-ransomware-attack/5266073 h/t naked capitalism
llm exploits langflow cve in other llms. smdh. what a time to be alive.
also https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/ditch-your-phone-and-join-the-summer-of-ludd-the-offline-festival-happening-in-nyc from same
However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can’t recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated “from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale,” without backing up any of the encrypted data.
As usual, even when these things display legitimately impressive capabilities they still fuck up in ways that completely negate the whole point of doing it in the first place.
Who had “poop-analyzing AI toilet camera” on their bingo card?
Smart Pipe Inc. is a Registered Sex Offender
LWer: politics is really hard to be Rational about, so how about we just forget all about it?
Bad: arguing about prison abolition
Good: arguing about how to fastest get to the closest Muni station
Love the second example of immigration because not only does it completely miss the crux of the issue (free movement is a human right and must not be conditional) but also boils down to “actually this IS measurable and provable but Charlie doesn’t like the outcome so lalala whatabout Germany”
This gets dangerously close to acknowledging that the rationalist method isn’t actually very useful for any area where it isn’t trivial.
I keep bouncing back to this one and I think that the core objection is that the method of discourse that they’re trying to advance here is fundamentally incapable of handling people actually disagreeing. Like, the whole concept of “identifying a crux” basically requires that there’s a central point of agreement somewhere. In my experience a lot of these issues are better understood as tradeoffs and compromises. It is simultaneously true that some people will do terrible things left to their own devices and locking them up seems to be one of the only things society can collectively agree to do about it and also that locking people up is fundamentally cruel and it’s bad that we do it. The challenge isn’t in identifying the central point of agreement between those two but in managing their fundamental incompatibility.
This could have been a tweet. I seriously 100% believe that this logorrhea could have been a single Xart. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
This could have been a tweet.
It could. Thanks elon for allowing walls of text as tweets… ;)
til soyweiser’s current char build is chaotic semi-evil
(I jest I jest)
Chaotic annoying.
E: now im wondering, did musk destroy the saying on purpose? Did he overhear somebody complain about some long meeting of his they just attended with ‘this could have been a tweet’ and go: ‘we will see about that’. He is petty enough for it, after all he most likely went after USAID because USAID was going after starlink.
Chaotic annoying.
So, the default for any PC
US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it…
I dunno who “Bentham’s Bulldog” is, but they live up to their nick and I like the cut of their jib:
The community is reduced to downvoting, sputtering, and “the real influential philosophers
live in Canadaare working in industry, not academia”:All this “Omnicient evil demon reads your source code” stuff really feels like Turing would have a thing or two to say about it. (Since one needs to have some even worse bends in logic to believe FDT, as Bulldog states it, is good, it’s kinda moot here.)
rationality is when i spend hours arguing on the internet about whether Omega could defeat Super Saiyan Goku
And FDT asks: what action would my algorithm outputting make me expect to be the richest if it was settled at the start of time?
FDT is a largely half-assed1 attempt at working backwards from “the timeless multidimensional robot god can’t blackmail me from the future if I’ve already made up my mind about stuff, very strongly like” into something more formalistic so Yud can pretend to address roko’s basilisk without acknowledging it.
I think there’s also some “here’s how two robot gods who can perfectly emulate each other might work things out” sprinkled in, but worse than it sounds.
- They never got back to the peer reviewers
here’s how two robot gods who can perfectly emulate each other might work things out
Just gotta solve the halting problem, no biggie for a superintelligence or Eliezer.
‘ole yuzzie has already solved the halting problem: he can never fucking stop writing
First they came for rsync, and I cared nothing, for I do my backups with borg…
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
Ahhh come ON
Unfortunately I’m just going to have to continue using it for now, otherwise that’s months of work and (mostly) upload time that I can’t waste at the moment. Also, what’s the alternative…?
So Anthropic slopmaxxxed a hamfisted Chinese AI lab detector into Claude Code. And I’m kinda surprised at how much hate Anthropic is getting for it on the orange site.
Did anyone else read the old Star wars Novel Darksaber by Kevin J Anderson? The Hutts kidnap/hire the designer of the original death star to build them one of their own, and while the new Republic is gathering up the requisite heroes to do what they do to death stars we get to see the Hutts cutting corners and embezzling. The fleet arrives just as they’re ready to turn it on and instead of blowing our heroes up the subpar construction fails and it just fucking explodes.
No idea why that came to mind all of a sudden after reading this piece.
Kevin J Anderson
I’m so sorry.
I never said it was a good old Star Wars expanded universe novel.
LWer: slavery was bad and abolishing the slave trade was a net good
LW commenters: really?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDZcsojmRXo5qKNBm/surprising-facts-about-the-slave-trade
(I can kind of understand that intellectual honesty can prompt people to question a narrative, and in some ways I respect it, but there comes a time when you need to ask yourself “am I being the best person I can be by defending slavery” and back away from the keyboard)
At times you need to ask yourself, does the devil need more advocates? And how much does he even pay?
Did a quick search but is that post really talking about the abolition of slavery and not mentioning Haiti once?
casey newton, well-known fawning stan of promptfarmers, has now started on some mildly revisionist wording
you could’ve been engaging with this point for 2+ years casey! why *now you spineless shit? goose-goose-meme.jpg
In his op-ed, Altman offers up the usual list of future AI miracles to justify the disruptions to come: “the power to heal people, to discover cures and to deliver abundance on a scale the world has never known before. In the meantime, though, what AI is delivering at an unprecedented scale is annoyance.
Does anyone actually believe this? What the heck does bullshit-text engines or fake-image-generators contribute towards discovering ANYTHING, delivering ANYTHING, producing ANYTHING? The only thing there is any argument for at all is delivering quick-and-dirty code, which is hardly connected to any of those tired promises.
Does anyone actually believe this?
Current copium is that if it can solve Erdos problems after a fashion then the cancer annihilating molecular biology breakthroughs can’t be that far behind.
Also since just shovelling GPUs and reddit posts into a data center forever probably won’t do the trick they’ve settled on the questionmarks on the list before Profit! being Recursive Self Improvement, meaning that since automatic code generation is somewhat improving it follows that pretty soon LLMs will just code themselves out of their current predicament of being unsustainably resource intensive hallucination machines and build AGI on their own.
I really like how in the past couple of years they’ve decided model collapse just isn’t a thing anymore.
They just don’t call it model collapse, and that fixes the problem. (Somebody on bsky said ‘hey that isn’t actually model collapse, read this article on it written by the AI company’. And then the article described model collapse, but didn’t call it model collapse, it was amusing. (And I went into it, thinking I could be wrong, going ‘ah so it is only related to a specific set of instructions’, but then the article also showed that models without those instructions had the the problem (in a much smaller way, but the bad instructions were spreading due to synthetic data))).
They just don’t call it model collapse, and that fixes the problem.
Reminds me of OpenAI’s blog post explaining the goblins. It described textbook model collapse, but somehow avoided saying the actual words “model collapse” even once.
I was talking about that one, shit didn’t I even mention the goblins? Lol, sorry about that.
every week of work with biologists brings another “guess we doin circles now” moment. there’s simply so many things that were never measured, measuring them requires knowing what are you doing, proper experimental design and interpretation of results, that are affected by myriad factors and dozens of feedback loops. none of that is in training data of course, and even if it was it would help very little because humans measuring that would make better use of these results first. but don’t worry about that, machine god will learn relativity from three video frames and will make peter thiel immortal right away
The people who believe it are the MBAs and tech bros. They believe it because they desperately want for it to be true so that they can lay off all their staff and make 100% profit (these are not clever people and they haven’t considered that if no-one has any income they won’t have any customers. However, they do value geese).
