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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Some good news for once: Dublin punk bar the Thomas House have had enough of AI slop.
transcript
A picture of a āno AIā symbol next to the Thomas House logo. "So for the future (literally) weāre not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub.
Weāre right next to Irelandās biggest Art College, lads. Itās not a good look.
We understand bands can be skint but relying on some earth killing app from some paedo Island billionaire is not the way. We got by without it and weāll get by again. If youāre stuck, weāll help.
Yes it has been used here before but consider this the start of the end of it. Thanks, humans.
Three scenes and a comment:
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Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.
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I see another story: some AI bros posting about their āanxietyā about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.
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Iām still sweating and scrolling from my gardenā¦ I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AIā¦
We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that donāt have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it
āWe have to pick between the climate or AIā
No we donāt??? One problem directly affects the other. Stopping AI data centre build-out helps with stopping climate change.
I choose to read this as āyou have to choose which to destroyā
Then hand me that hammer and letās get to smashing those data centres
This kind of humanity-affirming infrastructure work is illegal in most western jurisdictions
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Some folks, who may be familiar to some or more of you, accidentally discovered that if your git repo symlinks
CLAUDE.MDto, say,/dev/urandom, it breaks Claude code.the reason why this works is exactly the reason why claude code sucks so bad. there are protections against this in the file reading tool. however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not. this is the fucking swiss cheese security model of the fucking gold standard of what AI programming can do.
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116779793188712173
The thread is actually about trying to attract and manipulate autonomous coding agents, but theyāve only had limited success so far, which may have been slowed down by the above symlink trick.
however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not
See, if a person had written the system and had some kind of reasonable design or whatever then this kind of vulnerability may have turned into a full skeleton key to crack the entire system wide open. Instead, the superior machine intelligence ensures that all components will break in slightly different ways under slightly different conditions, thus ensuring no single fault can allow an adversary to completely compromise the system, provided of course that they canāt just inject a prompt somewhere because as we all know thatās a structural vulnerability that can completely crack the system open.
IS NOTHING SACRED?!
I checked Wikipediaās history, its been fucked since last year
I checked the image which says December last year.
I havenāt bothered to examine the page history to see when the fucked content was actually introduced. Iām hoping that by posting about it, I can catch the attention of a particularly pedantic sex nerd who will be willing to fix it, for humanityās sake. Let us not let the Adult Bookstore of Alexandria burn; rather, let us chronicle our times with our free hands
gwern:
Iāve been browsing /r/LessWrong for many years, due to having toggled on āsubscribeā and never quite getting around to leaving. I will be leaving shortly, but before I do:
I think this subreddit has gotten so bad over the years it should be shut down or rebooted with a new set of moderators.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/1uabnlx/proposal_shut_down_rlesswrong/
lol
The moderators donāt exist. Sole moderator Oliver Habryka hasnāt commented on Reddit in 3 years, and is extremely busy with vastly more important things like AI safety, Lighthaven, and the actual LessWrong. Spammers continue indefinitely for months until, presumably, they earn a site-wide ban.
The guy who objects to delegating? I guess he decided that nobody on a forum can handle the responsibility of moderation?
When banning people takes several ten thousand word essays going back and forth, how can you trust that responsibility to lesser mortals?
Habryka is too busy writing long screeds warning people not to vote for random junior politicians to moderate
/u/bakkot
Wait, ~bakkot? I knew he was a vibecoder but I didnāt know about the SSC/LW connection.
Person bets big on polymarket to profit from the continuation of the Iran war, gets screwed out of his blood money by site-wide oracle scam, complains on reddit.
Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol (used to be a thing with smart contracts), which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes, and currently like 9 people hold over half the voting power, so yeah.
The future of finance and the future of information aggregation keep overlapping in the funniest ways.
Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol
Amazing that on first glance it looks like a smart contract āall done by codeā thing, but then the reveals comes and it is just a few rich people again.
Well yeah. Just because they call their crypto scheme an Oracle doesnāt mean theyāve actually solved the oracle problem.
LB: Enormous fan of that chud griping in /r/CryptoCurrency of all places, and getting laughed at for falling victim to a scam.
which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes,
Wait thatās even fucking dumber than I thought it was, good grief
Everything Iāve learnt about prediction casinos is against my will and all of it is somehow the dumbest shit imaginable. I went through crypto, NFTs, the metaverse, and 3 years of AI bullshit, and nothing reached this level of psychic damage before.
zitron got a scoop on openai: 8.8B loss in 2024, 60.3B loss in 2025, 1.17B from ms + softbank, promises more detailed analysis later https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
So when sama suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!
tbf i expected that ed got openaiās s1 at that point. anything more detailed would be nice to see. that also suggests that saltman knows that leak occurred, and maybe who leaker is
CW: barely disguised transphobia
āfriendly neighborhood transhumanist liberalā asks why bans on āconversion therapyā for trans folks are being enacted without looking at the science, which theyāre surprised is non-existent
Why do these people always want to give trans people the wrong hormones? It keeps coming up.
I think this is particularly important for the hormonal treatment of dysphoria in adolescents, where the evidence for gender-affirming care seems mixed. [ā¦] Given all this, I was shocked that when I ran GPT Deep Research I wasnāt able to find a single study that would evaluate the use of birth-sex-affirming hormones to decrease dysphoria.
The āevidenceā he has provided up to this point:
- A snippet from a Chat-GPT transcript. We canāt see the prompt, but the output starts with āYouāre right.ā
- Two reddit comments about doubling down on (cis) gender roles. One of which uses the cursed words ānofapā and āautogynophilicā
- A case study from Poland about someone who (possibly?) wasnāt transgender but had schizophrenic symptoms that mimicked it. The case study ends by saying WPATH guidelines would have handled things appropriately.
- A tweet from a woman who mentions getting mild dysphoria after taking hormonal birth control.
Quite the nerve holding actual science to an impossible standard while his position is just vibes. None of his(?) evidence even mentions taking cross-gender hormones. If anything the tweet is weak evidence against his position.
Iād expect to find these sort of studies in the UN or UK reports that recommend banning āconversion therapyā for gender identity.
Imagine writing so many words about transgender healthcare while being this oblivious to how politicized the UK policy documents are.
Anyway after making it to the end that was a lot of words to say he couldnāt find any evidence for the position he wanted to be true holy smokes. His weird hang up on ācrystallizedā gender identity is bizarre. He seems to be hoping that there are people toying with changing gender and itās not too late to āsaveā them via conversion therapy before itās too late. We
āHey listen, Iāve been listening to these gender critical feminists and I think they might have a point. Check this out, what if we used psychiatry and hormone therapy to enforce traditional gender roles and normatively gendered bodies, but without creating trans people?ā
The poster deftly doesnāt address the real moral question: what if conversion therapy (either for homosexuality or trans identification) worked ? Would it be ethical to allow it?
This is the difference between politics/ethics and science. As the old saying goes, just because you can do something doesnāt mean you should.
Gender-affirming care? Why of course! I am all for forcefully affirming your assigned gender!
iāll just quote it straight because i canāt make it any funnier:
maia arson crimew š“ āŖ> @crimew.gayā¬ SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thielās private society that doesnāt have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.
We are good on opsec
According to a later post from them thereās a chance this is more of a list of attendees at a past or upcoming event, but tbh I donāt think thereās much of a difference between āmember of the nu-money illuminatiā and āaccepted an invite to hang out with the nu-money illuminati at their clubhouse.ā I can only assume it has the same statue of a hand clutching a globe as the Deus Ex opening cinematic.
Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will beā¦
Of course Ezra Klein is hanging out with the worst people in the world. Heās always on the hunt for a new gutter to pick up some fetid idea and tart it up for liberals.
Wired has a story about Peter Thielās Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, āsitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the countryās largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).ā
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: āMoney (Does?) Buy Happiness,ā āBring Back Nuclear,ā āNavigating WWIII,ā āBattlefield Technologies,ā and āHowās Your Sex Life?ā Other talks include āBuild-a-Cult,ā moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and āBuild-a-Party,ā run by a former White House national security official.
ā¦
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are ālooking for loveā and offers to include āSingle Man,ā āSingle Woman,ā or āOtherā respondents in āfuture matchmaking.ā A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as āmeaningful connections for exceptional people.ā
So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.
Iām sorry are you telling me that there peopleās social circle includes the same like 50 oligarchs and apparatchiks and theyāre making a dating site for themselves? I know they lost Epstein but this is just pathetic.
Congrats to lesswrong, another one of their big ideas has reached the mainstream. (And it is eugenics).
Skeet from motherjones "Some of the same billionaires who bankrolled AI now admit the technology could one day kill us all.
And theyāre funding a new plan to stop itāgenetically engineered genius babies."
When I emailed Denecke, he told me Bootstrap Bio had ceased operations due to lack of funding. (The companyās former chief science officer, Qichen Yuan, was indicted for attempted sex trafficking of a child in September 2025. His case is ongoing.) But before the company unraveled, its early investors included Malcolm and Simone Collins, whom you may have heard of.
Has it been 2 months already? I was wondering when they would turn up in the news again.
E: Iām not serious, I came across this video on yt which fulfilled my āevery 2 monthsā thing already. It was actually a bit interesting, as it turns out both of them have a long mostly unscrubbed online history which they tracked down and analyzed, turns out she has a history of being a weird quirky person, and they both have an air of āwant to become internet famous/create an internet scamā sort of thing.
The comments on that vid are great as well (wait for it) check this one out:
It is rich for you to skewer anything Simone and Malcolm miss with their podcast when they post 5 days a week (you neglected to mention) and you canāt even maintain your schedule or throw up a post on bluesky when you are off schedule. Also, because you two are genetic dead ends you donāt know that a mother of 5 cannot be a night person, she was up with a baby when she emailed. Malcolm and Simone talk in different rooms because she always is looking after a baby, and babies can randomly make noise so Simone can mute and Malcolm can take over. Maybe you can meet a baby one day and learn how they work. But I will say this episode is better researched than the usual āread article titles and giggleā podcasts you put out.
This comment was left by none other than āDiana Fleischmanā Yes, that one, the evolutionary psychologist, and partner of Primal āIām no longer allowed near studentsā Poly (For those who remember sneerclub from reddit, he was a regular subject. For example).
Amazing how small this nazi nerd world is. And how bad they are at defending their own. Feel free to leave āad hominemā reactions to that. (I will not as my yt profile links back to my real life).
Geoffrey Miller could do with a RationalWiki entry https://www.primalpoly.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)
How is it that whenever I learn something new about this family itās always a new way for them to be awful to each other or their kids?
Good News, Everyone! Longtime Dimes Square hangout Kikiās has been shut down - due to nonpayment of taxes (some allegations of wage theft too?)
This situation is the first time Iāve become aware that there was a longtime Dimes Square hangout called Kikiās. Iām gonna go ahead and consider that a mental health check that I happily passed
Whatās a Dimes Square lady to do?!
zitronās last podcast calls anthropic/openai top brass weirdos and cultists they are, describes their beliefs about building the machine god as bad philosophy and something that must go hard when youāre 12 https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-ai-industry-must-stop-doom-trolling-w-cal-newport
The op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html
Newport I mostly know for pretty mid lifehack / business books for the Tim Ferris crowd, pre-pandemic. āDoom trollingā does have a better ring to it than ācritihype.ā Maybe he was holding his tongue until he got tenure or something.
idk i think itās new that someone in mainstream sort of calls them cultists, namedrops EY as cult leader and fanfic writer and everything that you could hear about in our circlejerk, but also shortly before EZ said that heās been called doomer and a crank but now heās vindicated to a degree not thought possible. this all happens after drop of that openai financial info, so EZ also held off, and EZ is PR guy so i guess he knows what heās doing, and maybe he thinks this might be it, or maybe he doesnāt have anything better and plays his hand in best way he can. i wonder what comes next
Somewhat buried by EdZās exposĆ©ā¦ Nvidia trying to raise $21Bn with bonds this after Google raising money tooā¦
Seems that even the mag 7 know the jig is nearly up and are trying to liquidate and get as much cold hard $$$ as they can now
NVIDIA bonds
Turns out your best
customerdebtor being one Cyprus GDP in the hole might actually lead to cashflow problems.
https://xcancel.com/heyJohnEe/status/2062755881255833695
Video description: A tesla driver positions a doll head hanging from a chain such that the teslas autopilot safeguard thinks the driver is safely looking at the road.
Of course, the āAI Controlā in Firefox for Android conveniently doesnāt include the āmake-a-jerkoff-motion-to-llm-summarize a-pageā āfeatureā Mozilla has added.
Bwahaha I didnāt believe you but itās there. Gotta find the option in about:config to kill it.
Who is that for? āAhh Iām so angry, why are you showing me big words and multiple paragraphs phone? where are the emoji bullet points? Ahhh ā oh hey it got replaced with something vaguely related and unchallenging. Thanks firefoxā
I am out of the loop, what settings do I gotta change?
I believe in about:config itās mostly under
browser.ml.browser.ml.chat.enabled => False, browser.ml.enable => False and extensions.ml.enabled => FalseI think are the minimum changes?options, summary, off
