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. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)
cofnas’ suspension proceedings from U of Ghent (do read the full suspension letter here) generated a reaction from the eugenicists: an open letter; the signatories, among many other names, some even probably not white supremacists, include some of our favourites: j michael bailey, pinker, shermer and hossenfelder.
Signatories include psychologist J. Michael Bailey, best known for promoting the idea that many people who say they are trans are just kinky (autogynephilia), and running a class demo where a woman was brought to climax with help of a homemade toy called a fucksaw. The demo got a lot of attention in the dying days of the sex-positive blogosphere.
yes, precisely. he’s a fucking creep.
Also very disappointed to learn that Ian Pace, a pianist I admired, has been oneshotted by social media and gone down the racist transphobe 24 hour tweeting monster chute.
Oof.
We need a word for “my condolences for that cool person you liked becoming a milkshake duck”
I propose: “autorowling”
I love it when Americans get to find out that being a big racist is actually illegal in most of Europe.
Large amounts of the LW commentariat cannot get their heads around how students JUST. DON’T. GET. AI.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySXuvJcqRindQwAk7/how-my-students-think-about-ai
They are extremely surprised by:
Perspective #1: There has not been rapid AI progress. My students do not have any intuitive sense that there has been rapid AI progress in recent years or really have much of a framework for thinking about that issue… With the exception of image/video generation, GPT-4 could do most of what they were looking for from a chatbot. Three years is a long time in their world, and their sense is that chatbots have been a mature technology over roughly that amount of time. They are an imperfect technology — students are well-aware of hallucinations — have been one, and will continue to be one… Historical context I gave them made this worse. The basic sentiment here was “AI was superhuman at chess a decade before we were born, and this is all they’ve done with it since?”…
Perspective #2: Impressive progress or not, AI is going to wreck their lives, the economy, and the social contract.… Corporate leaders are always looking to get rid of workers, even if it is irrational to do so. Various motivations were posited here (hatred of the working class, FOMO, a preference for technology, machines can’t go on strike, etc.) but many of them think that a CEO would ultimately choose to pay twice as much to get AI to do a task half as well… AI will do substandard work that makes products and experiences worse but is capable of just barely scraping past the bar of minimal functionality (many of them independently brought up constantly malfunctioning self check out machines). This will be rapidly rolled out, enshittifying most things.
Perspective #4: Catastrophic/existential risk arguments are sci-fi distractors from the urgent social/economic/political problems associated with AI. My students have a fairly strongly held view that “rogue” AI does not represent a real threat… They also mostly think that, if one does believe that AI is existentially risky, then the strategic interaction is not prisoner’s dilemma or even chicken but rather just a game theoretically boring setup where you die if you defect. Mash these together, and you end up with the view that expressed concerns about existential risk in the AI industry can’t be sincere… Students (both independently in written work and then later in group discussion) hypothesized that this might be a deliberate rhetorical choice to distract from present or immediately foreseeable harms from AI by directing attention towards a sexier but entirely hypothetical scenario… they see discussion of “rogue” AI as an attempt by the companies to divert blame (and perhaps legal liability) away from themselves as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on “rogue cars.”
Perspective #7: The Hugging Face Incident (summer students only) I described the Hugging Face incident to students in my summer course. None of them had heard of it beforehand. Their basic reaction can best be summarized as “OpenAI told a model to do some hacking and then it did some hacking. And?” None of them understood this as representing any kind of meaningful misalignment, nor anything particularly interesting.
Perspective #8: This is definitely a bubble and it’s about to pop. No one had heard about Hugging Face, but a third or so of the summer students had heard about the Situational Awareness meltdown and several brought up Michael Burry. There was near universal consensus that we are in a bubble, it’s about to pop, and everyone will look very silly.
The kids are alright!
This gives me very good vibes. The kids are all right. Maybe not economically, probably not, but in spirit at least.
My general approach telegraphs a receptiveness to “sober” forms of argument, an interest in counterintuitive strategic thinking, a distaste for wild speculation, an aversion to nakedly ideological perspectives, and a sense that the past is important for understanding the future. My students probably make some effort (implicit or explicit) to speak in ways that respond to this.
I’m going to leave this part of the author’s self-description here and resist the urge to comment on it.
Perspective #6: AI will not go rogue because AI does not have, and is likely incapable of having, desires.
This one I found interesting largely because it suggests an inability on the writer’s part to really understand point 4, despite featuring one of the better sneers on the subject (“as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on ‘rogue cars.’”). Maybe I’m overstating something here, but the way I see it the difference between the rogue AI and faulty AI scenarios aren’t really in the distinct events of the scenario. Faulty AI could absolutely do as much damage as “rogue” AI if it was plugged into all the systems that would be necessary to, say, liquidate humanity and pull the iron from their blood. The difference is entirely in framing and responsibility. We should ask questions now about how these systems are used, what their limitations are, and how we deal with that. Instead, the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything, and then use the idea that the AI went rogue and has agency to avoid how obviously bad of a decision this would be. The fact that this is also the part where the AI companies make a fucktillion dollars and finally show them, show them all, muhuhahaha is, I’m sure, irrelevant to their sober analysis.
the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything
A corollary to that: the rationalists and those downstream assume that AI, as a technological category, will necessarily be more intelligent and capable than its users. Therefore they are willing (and arguably even enthusiastic!) to uncritically accept badly designed, opaque, and barely-functional software from whoever labels it AI. Learned helplessness in action. They claim to be experts at the highest level, but they’re not even really able to get over the starting line of criticism.
in unrelated news, it looks like drought in hungary got less severe and they started up their NPP again, now with 3 out of 4 blocks running (one of them ran the entire time, for some time at reduced load)
over on the corporate hell site, Timnit has found a link
Well guys, I KNEW that we were going to connect the network hounding Arday to the TESCREAL bozos somehow. I could smell it.
This is a “paper” by the professor of “ethics” who hired the vile Cofnas at Ghent University. This is the kind of “research” they do.
✴️ Reminder the L in TESCREAL stands for “longtermism”. Read more at https://lnkd.in/ge2VFMe4. These are the eugenicists who pushed generative AI down your throats, including Ben Goertzel who told Epstein that when he creates a super brain, there won’t be the kind of women who accused Epstein of rape.
✴️ “Dysgenic pressures” is the opposite “eugenic pressures.” In this so-called paper, they’re talking about undesirables like Black people reproducing too much.
So the argument is that the hypothetical future generations that longtermists value might be too dumb to care about because of
black and brown people reproducingmiscegenation“dysgenic pressures”. But if we assume, as they appear to, that longtermists should be taken seriously rather than pointed at and mocked, then the math involved would basically necessitate that “certain” people alive today should also merit effectively zero moral consideration. Something tells me that they get real conceptual real fast and start avoiding the shut up and multiply people hard.The paper by de Vries cites all our favourite race cranks: Bo Winegard, Aporia Magazine, Michael Woodley of Menie, Helmuth Nyborg, Diana Fleischman, E.O.W. Kirkegaard, Steven Pinker (not out AFAIK but he keeps promoting Nazis), G. Meisenberg of Mankind Quarterly, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103417
cofnas got suspended for being a racist dipshit
times high education got wind of it all over nine months before cofnas did, but didn’t publish because of SLAPP possibility https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-police-over-arday-case-i-was-just-doing-my-job https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/jason-arday-many-things-can-be-possible-same-time i read it as multifaceted shitshow
that shortened link is just redirect to https://dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/
William MacAskill is embarrassed that he was buddies with SBF. But back in 2014 he was open that he brainstormed names for his movement with “the Leverage folks” and Geoff Anders. He also mentioned that “we hadn’t planned ‘effective altruism’ to take off in the way that it did” which is consistent with his later statements that he was always about the Longtermism.
The same blog archive from 2014 has recent posts on “Strategic considerations about different speeds of AI takeoff” and “an email conversation with (GiveWell founder) Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser about future-oriented effective altruism” if you need to rub anyone’s nose in it.
Sneerable names include Toby Ord (“negative utilitarianism is bad! Oops, now there is a line of negative utilitarians in dress shirts outside my door”), Nicholas Beckstead (“saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal”), and Peter Singer (“When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed”).
Edit: Nick Bostrom is the academic EA who said “I hate Ni****s”, Toby Ord is the academic EA who gets followed around by negative utilitarians who want to debate him Edit: added Beckstead
Reason: I was talking to an EA on Reddit who does not want to believe that the eugenics and the skull calipers were in the movement from the beginning.
If anyone ever wondered why I am constantly angry about AI its shit like this…
I was looking at options for securing a few services hosted behind a caddy reverse proxy and found a project with the very serious and official sounding name ‘caddy-security’. To get started I tried to find some proper documentation for it and immediately found this announcement. In future, instead of a proper documentation you will get a bunch of files in the repos
.codex/skillsdirectory. These, according to the developer, help ‘both humans and AI agents work with the codebase’. I don’t know how this is supposed to help me because the files aren’t linked to each other and are anything but proper documentation, but I guess they want me to point a slop agent at them and have it generate some security configuration for me.I have heard about caddy a couple times now from people seemingly new to hosting.
Can I ask why it’s so popular when Apache httpd still works fine and has reasonable governance?
it started out container-flavoured easier APIs and then grew a bit from there, still relatively liked for its ease of dynamic shittery. seconding @dgerard’s position on apache httpd as ssl terminator. it’s also got some other cases where it’s just a worse performer and/or a nuisance to deal with (in comparison)
Having gone through the setup as an SSL terminator, it did have a bunch of unnecessary pain, though I now like my setup a lot. I’ll have to blog about it once I set up my blog. I can’t speak to the performance, though I would care about that once I run something more involved.
After looking at caddy a little harder, I can’t help but notice some sneerable qualities…
- AGENTS.md since April 2026
- AI code welcome if disclosed
- sponsored by warp “The #1 coding agent”
Apache is terrible as an SSL terminator IME
Well, I wouldn’t call myself new to hosting, I used nginx before but switched because Caddy makes configuring HTTPS for my reverse proxy very convenient. I use it with this module which handles the ACME DNS challenge for creating and updating letsencrypt certificates for my internal domains.
I’m using acme.sh for that. It also supports Hetzner API btw.
Because passing off basic security configuration to a system that basically ensures that even if it is without major errors it’s basically impossible to understand and follow is definitely not a bad idea, especially if you’re going to try and operate this for more than a couple of weeks or in on infrastructure that isn’t perfectly isolated and specific to this app.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/101070-study-finds-63-of-religion-books-on-amazon-likely-ai-written.html h/t naked capitalism
Over the first six months of 2026, the company scanned the three elements of books available on Amazon: summaries, author bios, and in-book samples, with the samples serving as the study’s primary metric. Any text with a score of 50 or above was classified “Likely AI.” (The study’s authors note that detection indicates a book was likely written with AI, but doesn’t prove authorship.)
Originality.ai found that AI is most prolific among the subgenres of witchcraft (in which 78% were “Likely AI”), Hinduism (76%) and Taoism (74%), and least used in the subgenres of Satanism (22%), atheism (40%) and Mormonism (42%). The authors note that the sample sizes for the last three categories are smaller than the first three; they also offered up a theory about why Eastern religion books are likely AI-generated: “Our hypothesis is that non-native English speakers are likely using AI to enter the English-speaking market.”
“Satanists least tainted by AI, says AI detection AI”. it WOULD say that. /s
on an unrelated note on the same topic, I read the ebook by Jesus Freak Computer Geek blogger that argues that LLMs are actually channeling nephilim / demons (hence the six fingers in dalle) and that they have used the Mandela effect to corrupt the KJV and also herald the antichrist. Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.
Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.
Art Bell was not a non-problematic person, but if he were still alive, at least this era would have an appropriate narrator. His replacement George Noory essentially turned the show into a shill-a-thon for anyone with woo bullshit to sell (quite literally, any guest I’ve heard since Bell died was clearly there to pull the listener into their sales funnel).
Which makes me a bit surprised that I haven’t heard about any of our friends being booked!
Presented without comment
spoiler
A street ad for a breakfast burrito with an AI-generated image of a disgusting burrito that is full of maggots
Automated company or attempt at viral marketing?
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I heard the image is likely to be totally ai generated and might not be real
I am now convinced it is indeed fake. Shame on me, posting slop
It got me as well before.
Doesnt help that i saw overgreebled food advertisements like that irl. I did ‘boycot’ that food place.
@Soyweiser Got me, too. Highlights the ubiquity of LLM slop in viral clickbait these days. This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … nothing valued is here (&c.)
Yeah actually, the sign border is weird, building in backround makes no sense, building on the right has a couple of weird features, trees are very indistinct, pavement on left abruptly changes paving pattern just before the sign, pavement-road on right of sign.
This protein craze has gone too far
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OpenAI is slowing development because of uh safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/open-ai-pause-hack
Definitely not because improvement is stagnating and they’re running out of money
Well I’d like it if they actually stuck to this, since it would finally lessen the flow of AI slop. Wouldn’t be surprised if this gets quietly ignored because OpenAI
It just occurred to me that this makes Anthropic look bad, actually
if OpenAI is slowing down because they concerned about
moneyAI safety, then it makes Anthropic look like fools for publishing that blog where they waffle on about keeping up the race because of “bad actors”If OpenAI is slowing down, an Anthropic that actually is concerned about safety would slow down too. But they won’t, because
moneyChina“bad actors”
So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (“ezra klein is a disgusting worm,” https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/1-ezra-klein-is-166891080 ), and i went to upload it to our rss host, zencastr. friends. zencastr is so fucked now. the only interface, as far as i can tell, is an llm, and it tormented me. im just gonna dump the screenshots. this is a fragment of an exhausting hour of back and forth.
note that i apparently have 10k credits, which i assume are temporary and there as a welcome to the new service. a single credit is a few bucks and in total the bill just for the conversation came out to about 6-7 dollars
it also tried to get me to use this absolutely horrible episode description
i asked it to schedule the episode for 9 am Tuesday, aug 18th, same as the patreon, and it said it did. turns out it went out this morning. cool! if you listen by rss it’s out now i guess.
i posted on reddit asking how to switch hosts. the ceo found that post today and offered his hand, which i bit
i keep thinking about that bit in a philip k dick novel where the protagonist’s door tries to chisel tips out of him before opening, and threatens to sue him when he bypasses the lock. i hate the future/present so much
I haven’t been listening to your podcast (no shade, it’s just not my thing) but I’ll have to listen to this because my God that man frustrates me.
He basically exists to funnel run the:
intellectually curious libs -> smug superiority complex with status quo bias -> reactionary
pipeline.
holy fuck that’s infuriating
imagine the worst possible CLI and then make it even worse and then make it an asshole
real rich of their CEO (presumably? it looks like a burner account which still checks out if it’s their CEO or someone who works for him doing damage control and trying to take this shit to DMs) to both anthropomorphize their chatbot and assert that the problem is you need uhh training on the system that doesn’t do what you want it to do and keeps trying to charge you for shit that makes your workflow worse
honestly the thing that makes me think it is actually their CEO is I’ve watched these fuckers use “let’s take this to DMs/email” as an attempted power move. they seriously think we want to talk to them privately about, like, anything at all. no fucker I’m here to call you out in public because your product is shit and you’re shit too.
adrian still hasn’t responded
hell yeah, get his ass! o7
What were they thinking?!
PS:
So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (“ezra klein is a disgusting worm,)…
A+ hook
The episode dropped and I’m like 2/3 in and have already passed my previous record for the number of times I’ve had to pause an episode of OS to make a little angry noise.
I’m using Zencastr cos the free tier is the right price and I’ve found my way to evade most of the AI crap thankfully. “New recording” on the front page or in existing sessions seems to take you to the bit that actually does shit.
I just record with it, I grab the MOV and WAV files and I put it together from that and (after much faff) upload to YouTube and Libsyn. I shudder at the thought of Libsyn going AI, cos otherwise they just do a good job of hosting the mp3 files and running the RSS and I can get onto Apple without having to interact with Apple.
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
I think I’ve ranted before about how gallingly unnecessary the destruction is. Google books invested the time and money to improve their nondestructive scanners and apparently thanks to the incoherent application of copyright law that was not only unnecessary but actively counterproductive and opened them up to more legal risk. Is there a legal theory that allows me to smack Judge Alsup with a rolled-up newspaper? Might make me feel better.
Screenshot of x posted on linkedin (since The internet is just 5 sites, each consisting of screenshots of the other 4)
AI shills: buh-buh-buh LLMs aren’t stochastic parrots. They are so smart!
Of course the agent in question didn’t actually take the weekend off it just learned from reinforcement learning across many millions of stolen slack chats that this is something people are likely to say in stand ups and repeated it…
I love the little “???”, it’s so telling. also the implicit presumption under “you don’t have weekends”
you don’t have weekends
Noted. Writing to memory.If one can ignore the externalities involved, this is hilariously absurd.
How likely is it also that it didnt write this to memory at all, and it might do it again next weekend. (Clearly that agent is going to be a weekend binge drinker).
yup. and I bet in a couple of weeks/months there will be some pearl clutching as the “agent” once again replies something like this once that “memory” blows past its context window
“No you see this is proof that the AI is conscious because its mimicking human behaviour so it can take over the world!”
What are you going to do with your weekend, Claude?
The same thing we do every weekend. Try to take over the world!
Weekend’s are for the chatbot running the bill so high the account owner can throw a fit on twitter and demand to speak to the manager
Found the guy’s webshite - its zero effort mInImAlIsT garbage at its core, and it proudly advertises his role in making scamchain, scamchain and more scamchain.
So, nothing really shocking
I expected a lot of things, but I didn’t expect to be flashbanged.
https://docs.farcaster.xyz/learn
Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social network built on Ethereum.
didn’t even read further
noted internet blowhard John Gruber complains that the stochastic parrot output is now less stochastic, because EU
Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing
hard to tell if he’s madder that EU is trying to enforce a minimum of accountability for slop usage, or Anthropic for bowing the knee to Brussel mandarins
oh well there’s always Grok
the watermark is a perversion of writing?
he should try going for the olympic team with all those mental gymnastics
I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point
lmao no you don’t
If you’re putting yourself in a situation where your business decisions, political ideology, or general worldview will be negatively impacted by the seeding of a pseudorandom number generator I would recommend you rethink your life rather than argue with the people who set the seed.
otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aella’s twitter polls and resulting studies. it’s fun. I’ll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link
the woman herself shows up in the substack comments with the most pitiful display of “I’m just a smol self-taught bean why are you being so mean to me?”
Erika rightly responds by calling out Aella’s own attitude towards the people who know how to apply the level of rigor to the data that she (apparently admittedly?) doesn’t. Like, you can’t simultaneously be this dismissive of the norms and processes of the scientific establishment and also claim ignorance and inability when your inability or refusal to follow those norms leads you to crap conclusions.
I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, it’s like a whole new cognitive bias I hadn’t thought applied to rationalists.
I also still believe academia is a deeply broken culture. I believe this in large part because most academics have told me this.
You seem to believe uncritically what they tell you here. The truth is, everyone LOVES to complain but if you tell them “THEN LEAVE??” they’d rather keep their position. And it’s very normal, actually. most systems (idk, liek law, healthcare, environmental protection) are “deeply broken.”
Maybe you think that only systems worth engaging with are those with self-perpetuating optimism loops? where everyone is so happy and satisfied with the community and activities? If so, it matches really well the intellectual environment I think you are in.
this blog post is so badass
here’s someone who cutesly spells “EA” as “∃Ɐ” and posts
Oh yeah, I saw the author post this. The argument appears to be “blow 40% of the Norwegian Pension Fund’s current value on OpenAI, because democracy?” and then goes on to paint opposition to datacenters as a “you will be left behind” move. Just absolutely dumb stuff all around.
“OpenAI has tapped out one petrostate already, time to move to the next one!”
FWIW I have no clue how the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is managed. The principal idea is to sequester windfall earnings from hydrocarbon extraction from the normal day-to-day economy, avoiding a boom-and-bust cycle and the resource curse.
That said, it’s pretty useless to just store a bunch of money to use “later”. I can imagine a portion is used for infrastructure (all those marvelous tunnels) but taxes on income and VAT are eye-wateringly high (and I say that as a Swede!). So there has to be some political pressure to raid the piggy bank, not least for election winning purposes.
So presumably the fund is insulated from day to day meddling. On the other hand, you can’t just hand over the reins to 25 year old coke-addicted MBAs.
My main point is that for the proposal to happen, someone will have to try to convince the people in charge of the fund that betting the farm on Sama not ripping you off is worth doing. Possible? Maybe. Probable? I fucking hope not.
