Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
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.)
New Data Centers in the US Set to Wipe Out 15 Years of Greenhouse Gas Reductions
Somewhat misleading title, as they are referring to pollution reduction efforts solely in the US, not worldwide.
Nearly 15 years worth of hard-won pollution reduction efforts are set to be undone in the United States, as a wave of data centers powered by gas plants enters construction.
Unpaywalled version of the Bloomberg article here: https://archive.li/9Ts5f
This is only if all the planned data centre buildouts go ahead, mind you
Might as well start this off
so we all remember this graph from AI 2027 right? the graph that the whole paper relies on?
well its wrong. not just normal wrong, it’s ‘the authors literally disowned it’ wrong
(ignore the claude mythos purple x i took this from a reddit screenshot) but they completely changed their predictions in december 2025, several months after the original paper was published
That ‘superexponential’ thing annoys me so much. Just the most blatant ‘the line goes up because I really really want it to’, while all their rationalisations for it are just describing exponential behaviour.
We talk about the importance of humanities but it’d be nice if they learnt a bit of maths too.
Not sure if the book also did super exp lines, but the graphs in the singularity is near also have various issues that never got to much deep thought.
Always found it funny that the book admits basically (no direct quote): “sure tech follows an S-curve normally, and that looks exponential at first, but if you take the rate of all historic new techs together on a timeline that clearly is exponential”.
And I just thought, you cant know if it is, thats the point with the S-curve as well, and it messes people up. (Like Disco Stew from the Simpsons), and your N=1, it might not even be a S-curve, it could just have a sudden ceiling.
Despite wanting to believe, I was less convinced.
Back to the subject, a course in business management would have also helped here.
“Sigmoids always add to an exponential curve!” is another standard futurist trope from the 1960s and 1970s. Sci fi authors used to share this diagram with a curve fitted to pony express to trains to automobiles to aircraft to chemical rockets. “Nuclear rocket” and “interstellar spacecraft” were helpfully sketched in as the obvious next steps. Needless to say, we did not develop drives which can reach 10^-3 C around the year 2000 and will not reach 10^-2 C (just 430 years to Alpha Centauri) by 2050.
this is fucking time cube lol
woah damn why does this look exactly like some Kurzweil bullshit
I have not read any Kurzweil for 20 years but I think if you read him most of it will be recycled '50s-'70s tropes. Even nanotech appeared in a Feynmann talk, and Moore’s Law is from 1965. Remember, cranks keep presenting ideas which were refuted long ago as new.
You ever read “The Prospect of Immortality” by the guy who founded the idea of cryonics? Or the “anabolocyte” paper? They’re such trips!
No, reading Larry Niven stories with corpsicles and autodocs was enough for me.
Is this the thing where the baked an asymptote to infinity into their “model”? It was both bad modeling and also made all of their other input “data” completely irrelevant. I remember someone pointing this out at the time AI 2027 dropped, but there was so many other problems with it in the sneer spaces we didn’t talk about it too much among all the other problems. And someone on lesswrong actually pointed it out, but somehow, “we accidentally baked an asymptote into our model that is supposed to be detailed and carefully thought out” wasn’t a breaking point for lesswrongers.
I believe so
Not literally an asymptote, but once you presuppose something as farcical as nested exponentials, your model is doomed to blow up immediately after the last data point.
Actually it was literally an asymptote in the first version of their models they posted to github. They had a term that they were dividing by that ends up going to zero, so the entire equation breaks! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models
So, now we can answer the question from before: what time horizon does the red curve above predict for 2030?
Well, if you plug it into wolfram alpha, you get a time horizon of “-2542 - 11372i”
Yes, that is negative, and that is an imaginary number in there.
What’s actually happening is that when the term in the brackets above hit zero, we end up dividing by zero, and hit infinity. Beyond that, we get a negative number to the power of a non-integer, which gives nonsensical complex numbered answers.
The infinity point for this equation happens at a time of t = To/alpha, and will always occur at some point, no matter what initial parameters you use.
In fact, this infinity point is completely independent of both the time horizon and the SC threshold. If you keep the same alpha and doubling time, you could start with a time horizon of a nanosecond, and have a superhuman coding threshold of 1 trillion years, and the curve will still claim that superhuman coding will arrive before the end of 2029.
And indeed, reddit user mambo-12345 tried modifying the simulation parameters to drop the initial time horizon to 15 nanoseconds instead of 15 minutes, and the resulting curve still had a peak for the estimated superhuman coder arrival at 2026.5 years and a median at 2035. Credit to them for inspiring me to take a closer look here:
Have I misunderstood what they meant by ‘superexponential’? I thought they were doing exp(exp(t)) but I am inferring that it’s somehow even sillier than that?
It was something stupider and sillier yeah. The link explains, but to tldr; exp(some complicated term) where the “some complicated term” has a division by a number that eventually goes to 0. I think it was… them trying to represent “horizon time” (as in that one stupid METR graph that gets repeated everywhere) increases happening faster and faster?
Lobste.rs dropped the vibecoding tag because a prominent LLM enthusiast had a sad and huffed off in a fit.
These people have the worst victim complexes. I’m tired of hearing them complain as if anyone with any real power isn’t fully on board with what they want.
Per the recent moderation log, identifying whether posts had substantial LLM involvement seems to no longer be allowed. I am exceedingly disappointed in this. I have been lurking for over a decade and was considering asking for an invite within the past year or two as hackernews and every other source of programming news and project updates have become completely unbearable, but now if lobsters is committed to “neutral” slop platforming I don’t see the point.
I just don’t see this as sustainable, the moderation level required to keep a link aggregator free of low effort slopped nonsense when the rules are this fuzzy is impractical and all incentives are against it.
Oh, buddy, big feelings
Very disappointing, even if I was only ever a non-registered lurker. Gave in and DNS-blocked it and HN this morning (I had a HN-filtering userscript which in hindsight was just cope).
I really dislike how he believes that LLMs and fascism are “separate axes”. Where does he think the LLMs come from? Does the stork deliver them? Is ChatGPT powered by magic fairy dust? Does he think that Sam Altman is a great defender of liberalism and democracy who definitely hasn’t donated tons of money to Donald Trump?
I really dislike how he believes that LLMs and fascism are “separate axes”. Where does he think the LLMs come from?
valsorda worked at google for a very long time, well past when it became clear that they were no longer the good guys. his motivation for this was (only very slightly paraphrased) “well, it’s better than whatever else I might get in my home country” (italy)
he’s also had a few choice other takes over the last few years, enough such that I stopped following his work. I would not be too surprised if he turns out to be quite a shit in some years to come
I can’t help but think it’s another instance of the unquestioning Californian Ideology assumption that all new technology is inherently liberatory.
We try to confine that shit to SF
It’s not working, I spotted a probable hackernews all the way out in Modesto last week, they’re like the goddamn nutria now
This can either be read as San Francisco or Science Fiction, and both readings work perfectly
He works for google, so he probably still thinks they’re not evil.
I am saying that the anti-fascist communities ended up […] uninterested in using LLMs
:O
It’s unfortunately common that authors see their work posted, join the site, but then only use us for traffic. Hopefully this time helps them understand the difference between a symbiotic and parasitic relationship.
This feels like a very weird thing to say. (I’m reminded of some weird things Elon Musks mom said about how twitter users should be more grateful for all the traffic or something).
I mean the bit above it makes sense (making a hard only ‘25% of post can be self promotion’ seems like a recipe for disaster however) but this added line made me raise a few eyebrows.
This is a weird side-effect of Lobste.rs culture, it really dislikes being just a collection of links on the front page that increase traffic. And there have been multiple attempts to place links there via deception. Plus the community will give you hell (and flag your submissions as spam) unless you do the needful and comment a bit.
That said it’s really easy to work around by just making good content, having an RSS feed, and letting the community discover your stuff and post it. Or ask a buddy with an account to do it for you. But that in its turn requires actually learning how the community works.
Thanks for explaining, im not a lobsterite so I dont know how the community there works.
Lobste.rs is analogous to methadone treatment for Hacker News, prove me wrong
Now it’s not even good for that anymore.
I considered trying to get an account there, but the last ~18 months or so have made me feel the same way about Lobste.rs as I do about Bluesky. If you’re just running a lower-traffic version of the thing you’re trying to “improve” upon with slightly different moderation policies, you’re not going to build a lasting platform or community.
came here to post that. Genuinely having to reconsider being an active user there now
It’s been a day, and the mods are not sitting still:
I see you were one of the people whose comment got censored. I presume the censored comments were about the parody of the “pelican on a bike” animation on the OpenBSD 8.0 release page.
So now people can’t even discuss criticism of LLMs on lobsters? Insane.
Oh, so that’s what it’s referencing. I can’t really tell if the release artwork and song are poking fun at AI slop itself or people who criticize Fish Linucks for accepting slopped code contributions in the base system while NetBSD is lauded for not doing so.
New Odium Symposium premium episode. We talk about Julia Galef guest hosting the Ezra Klein show to shill superforecasting
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/ezra-klein-is-2-172872571
The php exploit might not have been a big deal.
“I don’t think this PHP vulnerability is that exploitable. I think that 5 years ago people would’ve understood this, but now people are being deluded by their LLMs telling them they have an exploit when they don’t.”
I expect that we will see this a lot, as it turns out most of the exploits generated are not working, not new, or not a big deal. I also expect this to cause more burnout among cybersecurity people, and that people will autogen ‘fixes’ which will be lower quality than the bugs, and massively increase attack surface. (Heard one php fix was 12k lines of code).
My suggestion is to have offline backups and move a lot of your important stuff out of the cloud (or get backups of those). But you should do both anyway.
E: I saw the EFF fear mongering with ‘25% of all exploits found ever were found this October, secure yourself’ and looking at how stuff is still up everywhere, compared to 25 years ago, and I them I realized this is all critihype again.
E2: not a lone voice https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/i-want-my-wednesday-back/
(Cloudflare did say they saw exploits however. Not sure if those were real or ‘attempts at’ or just marketing).
Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Too bad I’m gonna keep hearing “AI did PHP” for weeks.
The British something or rather is like “stockpile water cause the internet might go down and kill the plants due to the hackpocalypse”
@schnoopy @techtakes If you stockpile too much water, though, Thames Water will find a way to blame you for their financial misconduct.
70% of websites utilize PHP, thus revealing People’s Hidden Preference for PHP
Why do I need an iphone duo when I already have a modded nintendo 3DS?
You could make some really nice ASMR with it.
The ease and comfort of Liquid Ass
We talking about Allen Wittman’s joke product, or Apple’s joke of a UI design?
(Its obviously the latter - Apple’s Temu frutiger aero is a fucking insult to my eyes)
I hear it’s pretty slick!
Yeah the Nintendo 3DS is incredible. Unironically my favorite videogame system.
To wow people who need a computer to think for them?
Good blog post ‘“Who Owns ROM Hacking?” And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With’ on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.
I want to point out that SMW Central doesn’t ban people for being pro-GenAi, nor are they barred from anything just for being pro-GenAi. They simply can’t upload content to the site that was created with GenAi. Despite this, GenAi users believe that, because SMW Central has rules against GenAi content, SMW Central must feel the need to “control or dictate” what they do.
This context transforms the statement substantially. When this group of individuals says “nobody owns ROM hacking,” what they mean is that they should be allowed to publish their work wherever they want without consequence.
Kind of reminds me of the people who, around the time the (UK) smoking ban was introduced, made “It’s my right to smoke anywhere I want” their whole personality.
OT: popping in for a second since I’m not drowning in homework for once (midterms start friday) to say carpal tunnel stripping is really good.
(so far I’m averaging in the high 80s last I checked).
Good luck with your exams.
going thru it myself, can report that non-graded “suggested exercises,” with exams being the only graded material, is not any better
Good luck with the midterms! I’m supposed to be studying for some myself…
LW’s contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn’t spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects.
If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW’ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author’s not really joking much.
live-reading notes (spoilers, of course)
- before question two, I would already be flipping off the camera, ranting about boundaries, and making it clear that I do not respect whatever’s decided to ransomware my machine
- this is all text hypnosis, isn’t it? sorry no, that’s not gonna work on me, I’m not going to become electrosensitive just because you said so
- antennae only work in the body when encapsulated and you did not do a secret surgery on me
- wait, is this…serious? like, is this an actual attempt at wargaming? this is so fucking facile though! I have seen Kingsman!
- if it acts sufficiently like a human cell then it can’t set aside resources for ulterior purposes
- human cells can’t be airborne, can’t survive in other species, etc.
- WP says Bell’s palsy rates are like 1 in 2.5k, so something like 1 in 6.25mil people are just straight-up either immune or insta-killed due to double Bell’s palsy
- it stops crimes: mugging, mugging, and huh there’s no more examples! is abortion a crime? is crossing state lines to get an abortion a crime? where’s morality coming from? I have read Prime Intellect!
- the problem with dictators is “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”? no, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects
- protagonist is literally crossing a picket line
- protagonist wins an argument with their high-school civics teacher! surely not an authorial stand-in moment
- oh wow, the chatbot is both the perfect Taylor-style manager and the perfect Ford-style manager? again, so facile; I have read Manna!
- the chatbot manager makes the protagonist into a beefy hunk through hard work rather than bodybuilding, again totally not a self-insert wish-fulfillment moment
- protagonist’s little sister, who is totally not sneerclub stand-ins, has to admit that the chatbots are way smarter than her and will always outclass her
- don’t worry, we can still do all-American things like grilling pork ribs, in fact the pigs like being eaten now, don’t worry about the remarkable similarities between pigs and humans
All I see around me is stagnation," she gestured at the gas stations nearby with cracked pavement,
*gasp* cracked pavement
“crime,” she continued, pointing towards a sketchy neighborhood to the west,
*faints* minorities
We created god, and it thinks exactly like a SV tech worker commuting to work.
Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.
Prime intellect! There are dozens of us!
It’s more surprising to me that lesswrongers either haven’t, or have seemingly taken nothing away from it
e: on second thought, they might hate it because it is too ‘deathist’ or whatever
Damn that AI is verbose and boring, a high ‘this AI takeover could have been a skeet’.
(Also doubt a lot of people would notice as in my exp where a computer has an unexpected popup the first thing people do is try to close that thing with as little reading as possible. (Yes, parents, the message you kept ignoring for 2 weeks, which you didn’t tell me about was the operating system telling you the computer was having trouble, I can’t help you fix the problem after it totally stops working)).
Turns out slop prose isn’t any less galling after you put it in quotation marks.
I stopped reading after the picket line, this is too boring. Does it ever bother to explain why the economy keeps chugging along, people still go to their old jobs, and money still works? Hasn’t finance basically collapsed? I really can’t go on if this isn’t addressed, this is too annoying.
Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Don’t Vibe Code
(slightly dated (Mar 2026) but first time I heard of this guy)
Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.
The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.
The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.
So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto…
Serve Robotics lost $55.80 for every hour its robots were ready to take an order at the end of last year. The first advantage its investor deck lists for them is ‘No driver wages.’
versus
78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot
Found a cluster of negative reviews for Yud’s book Scott Alexander’s review managed to land on the list somehow
To single out a specific review
For example, they describe trees as “self-replicating factories that spin air into wood” and conclude that “any intelligence capable of comprehending biochemistry at the deepest level is capable of building its own self-replicating factories to serve its own purposes.”
So an AI could self replicate…because a tree can?? not all trees even self-replicate so the metaphor isn’t even right
Someone in the comments of this review also said that AI is on track to master…metabolism. somehow
Someone in the comments of this review also said that AI is on track to master…metabolism. somehow
LLM-intermediated poster experiencing model collapse due to overtraining on “One Weird Trick To Shed Belly Fat” ads
I wish Wikipedia had more coverage of the Dyson Tree because I have so many questions despite not having studied physics or biology since I was a teenager (what about cosmic rays! there is so little light for it to feed off in the outer solar system! and trees don’t do well in extreme cold)
It is amazing in a way, there are computer scientists who work at the highest level of their field, so they understand computers better than most, but they have more trouble than you or me installing linux.
Understanding something doesnt mean you can build it.
(I know this will be met with ‘well then you dont understand it deep enough’ and that just reminds me that there always will be place for god in the gaps of science).
New OpenBSD is out and the commemoratove artwork is definitely trying to say something about genAI.
