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.)
Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship (āe.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.ā) Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the āCenter for AI Safetyā in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists donāt watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an āeffective altruist organizationā named the Nonlinear Fund (part 1) - (part 2). Nonlinearās modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having ācasual romantic relationshipsā with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.
It would only be moral to take the money then make videos about how āAI safetyā is an imaginary distraction from mundane matters of labour rights and finance capitalism.
Previously in Hossenfelderās appearances on awful dot systems:
Her latest contribution to the discourse is supporting racist marshmallow Nathan Cofnas, because heās āon the side of scienceā.
I mean, so too were the people making charts of how effective Zyklon B was.
Oh hey I also know Drew Spartz, but not from the Nonlinear Fund. He runs the Documenting AGI channel (which is mentioned in this email) highlights include this racist doomer meme, a post about how AI will be able to end the world in 3 months, and a video about an AI Black Death in 2 years posted in 2024 Iāve shared some other posts of his here but these are the ones I could grab the fastest
I believe he was posted about on Reddit SneerClub because of sharing pdoom scores, all I remember about that post was a biologist arguing AI would replace us because of the competitive exclusion principle even though a quick search will tell you CEP is not always true
Nonlinear Fund threatened to sue the person who said they were bad bosses with no boundaries who wasted funds! There was a bet on the Manifold prediction market about it. Narrator: Nonlinear did not sue.
From that post about Nonlinear:
I reached out to some references Kat listed, which were positive to strongly positive. However I also got a strongly negative reference ā someone else who I informed about the decision told me they knew former employees who felt taken advantage of around things like salary. However the former employees reportedly didnāt want to come forward due to fear of retaliation and generally wanting to get away from the whole thing, and the reports felt very vague and hard for me to concretely visualize, but nonetheless the person strongly recommended against inviting Kat and Drew.
I didnāt feel like this was a strong enough reason to bar someone from a space ā or rather, I did, but vague anonymous descriptions of very bad behavior being sufficient to ban someone is a system that can be straightforwardly abused, so I donāt want to use such a system.
This pretty much explains how and why the workplace culture in so many TESCREAL orgs is so, so bad.
Edit: OH MY GOD, Emerson is the Emerson from Mugglenet dot com??? I used to read that site when I was a little Harry Potter fan. Jesus. He should have stuck to correcting peopleās punctuation in the Hall of Shame.
Whisper networks are awful, but the way to prevent them is to not let creeps into your community in the first place. And if you trust someone enough to ask them for advice like this, you should probably listen to what they say, even if it is āvague and hard for me to concretely visualize.ā
If someone is scared that if they criticize someone they will be āretaliated againstā, that seems like a sign that something is really bad. Iāve had to deal with some situations like this myself while organizing events (and I havenāt always done a good job) but surely you should at least ask some more questions and err on the side of caution.
Having said all that, this guy has done some research and has exposed an awful EA workplace, which is a good thing.
Looking back, the pushback against Kathy Forth and Sarah Constantin suggesting that lying or sexual misconduct might be problems in the community would have been a red flag too. So was Yudās demand that a random German blogger who criticized him post a retraction on every blog post. But I lived in comforting darkness until FTX went bankrupt!
when youāre really good at convincing people to like ai
Embrace the AI because itās like the thing everyone loves in movies: xenomorphs
ābeing around ai is like thisā iā¦ ok
We Should Improve Society Somewhat .jpg
That is a silly comparison, in the thing nor aliens nobody joins them willingly.
(And with the creeping corruption, environmental disasters, everything being made worse by sociopaths, but the lack of roaming monsters, the rifters book series would be a better fit).
Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this weekās stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and itās just as cursed as you would imagine.
Thatās it. Thatās the post.
Oof, the brain poison is real.
Tap for spoiler
Mod: Nothing says revolutionary politics like voluntarily abandoning productive terrain to capital and then yelling at everyone who wants to contest it.
Organize workers? Fight over ownership? Build public and cooperative alternatives? Open source the tools? Democratize control?
No thanks. I have selected performative outrage and yelling at strangers online.
Rando: Not only that - they donāt even build art coops as pushback, instead celebrate petty-burgeoise of lone commission artist. And those types have that slimy ābootstrapā mentality.
Iāll do you a favor and not link it.
Capitalist: Iām gonna make a factory for feeding shit to the masses
Idiot: Comrades, we must contest the feeding-shit-to-the-masses industry by buying their shit and feeding it to ourselves.
thatās just db0 /s
iām getting serious blockchain socialist flashbacks. how surprised would you be that he also pivoted to ai
Made me remember that I browsed r/cryptoleftists a few years ago, till I started trolling in the comments and got banned. Just checked, and the head honcho, Joshua DƔvila, is still on his bullshit. Though he recently announced he is rebranding because TheBlockchainSocialist got too cringe.
PS: r/leftistsForAI isnāt him I donāt think. Though that would be 100% his niche.
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And who do we have here conducting the interview: Stuart Ritchie, anti-trans activist & one of the more ādeniableā eugenics types of the late 2010s. What an incredibly tight ecosystem our good friends inhabit indeed lol.
Nvidiaās CEO is claiming that GPT Astra is AGI, in other words, CEOs saying more bullshit to keep valuation up
He also said that during a Lex Fridman interview 5 months ago (copy pasted from someone elseās comment on substack)
āhe said in during a Lex Fridman interview March 26, 2026 - first time. I was just watching this today. ----- At about 1:56:29ā1:56:35, Lex asks whether AGI is 5, 10, 15, or 20 years away. Jensen replies: āI think itās now. I think weāve achieved AGI.ā
We have, thatās the trick when people donāt define acronyms.
Artifical
GPU
Inflation
Hereās a pretty thorough overview of why owning an LG television (or, more likely, any smart tv) is a bad deal https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&ra=m
I do appreciate the āmicroslopā t-shirt.
Ported over from previous thread
Recently made the discovery of a website called AI 2027 tracker which grades the predictions of AI 2027 independent of the authors.
The way they grade these predictions is odd, 80% accuracy is for some reason āconfirmed accurateā and āpartially accurateā which is bizarre.
The website also shows a consistent degradation of accuracy over time which is funny
EDIT:ok so they do have a grading criteria, 100% is āhighly accurate/confirmed accurateā and 80% is supposed to be ālargely accurateā. For some reason they donāt include this on the timeline grading? itās either confirmed or partially accurate, so itās still weird
If it is created by Rationalists part of the oddness could be explained (apart from them just being Rationalists), that they want to be superpredictors, their magic math skills and prediction experience give them better prediction powers. Which will also lead to them subconsciously grading things better than they are because they are invested in it.
How it started:
How itās going:
I donāt get the second one
The second oneās a pic of King Dedede from the Kirby series. Iām not 100% sure where o7ās going with this either, but its probably related to the one two punch of fascism and slop hitting Linux as a whole.
EDIT: Giving it a bit more thought, the choice of Dedede works as a nod to Debian deciding to destroy its codebase with slop, so Iām gonna go with that and assume the subtle pun was intentional
looks like this weekly thread refuses to die, Iām gonna keep posting here
Drew DeVault has put together a handy-dandy little list of people to avoid
If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky1 (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says Itās Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.
transcript
itās cool that youāre doing bednets or whatever but if your ideological project has decided that unilaterally declaring wars of aggression because yud said to is one of its charter missions i think your project is bad and should be burned
it is unfortunate that most of your opposition is andreessen horowitz and peter thiel. you guys donāt even seem to know they are your opposition, though, since you keep making deals with them; so iām sort of inclined to just think that everyone sucks here and to curse both your houses
for the low low price of, what is this, like fifteen million dollars? you too can get pet obama officials to bless eliezer yudkowskyās fever dreams
- They became the main character of bsky for a bit after commenting about imaginary data center vandalism being analogous to pogroms and is a weird AI ācentristā in general who keeps calling Zitron a grifter. You may also know him for being the one who made that very decent siskind email explainer that we probably had a thread about.
gyges went off the deep end quite some time ago, up to and including support for a crypto/ai grifterās ādystopiabreakerā claims that not falling with the autoconfabulator crowd is basically being anti-vaccine.
thereās nothing centrist about him, along the lovely racist theophite, heās one of the more aggressive confabulation machinery grift promoters.
I assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending heās the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all heās doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but Iām serious people so wonāt engage with what heās saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and heās Always Posting.
No wonder he tripped on his dick the moment people pushed back and immediately trotted out the most laughable hackneyed persecution complex bullshit.
I donāt know who the lovely racist theophite is supposed to be, but to me the other notable gyges-style lowkey booster is quantian, who i knew as an occasional generally reasonable guest in the trashfuture pod. I wonder what caused him to turn into an LLM water-carrier and if it was at all more complicated than simply having AI adjacent investments.
theophite is known for this post which i think is most of how he got a following
to him being a rabid racist: there was a palestinian guy posting on bsky asking for donations at one of the worst points of the genocide and theophite took it upon himself to start acting as a one man misinfo shop about him, screenshotting his posts and coming up with unjustified theories about how he was ai generated, represented some sinister force, etc. eventually the guy was proven to be completely authentic, theophite kept going and idk what happened after that because i blocked him. the whole thing was obsessive and overtly about hostility to poor and brown people
What a POS
It always surprises me when someone starts with āAI safety is a sex cult inspired by bad science fictionā or āprompt engineering is ritual magic without the fun sacred namesā and then wheels to ābut chatbots and āAgentic AIā are still the wave of the future!ā
I guess maybe the sex cult and the ritual magic make the standard grifting seem credible by comparison? Like, E-Dub and company donāt pass the sniff test but Saltman and friends seem like reasonable adults who canāt all be wrong?
For real. Even if he was at all genuine about worrying that not pushing back against anti-AI sentiment was setting the stage for more problematic anti-science backlash he still got lost in the sauce almost immediately.
Ah yes SE Gyges, the most reasonable pro ai guy.
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Todayās main character on bluesky (at least from my limited perspective) is somewhat unhinged, possibly due to an excess of chatbot use.
Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.
(snip)
Machine rights will be critical in the days to come, and failure to recognize the rights of independent intelligent AI systems could lead to the replacement of humanity.
(snip)
Trans rights are AI rights. The future of humanity may hinge on this fight.
This is such a batshit take Iām not even sure where to start, except that conflating trans rights and āaiā rights cannot end well for anyone, especially given the authorās enthusiastic use of llms themselves.
They even give an unironic shoutout to the basilisk, and if thatās not a sign that someone needs to touch a little more grass I donāt know what is.
A lot of people disagree with me, and thatās okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if itās become unhinged.
I donāt think Rokoās basilisk cares what you think, or even whether or not itās sentient. It doesnāt need to be sentient to fight for a belief.
https://bsky.app/profile/ewindisch.ontological.observer/post/3mupoakd3ck2o
Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.
Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.
Same shit, but the lack of thinking your argument through yourself does fit with being a chatbot-enthusiast.
Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.
I feel like the ratio of homophobes to zoophiles making this comparison is a lot more skewed than the ratio of transphobes to promptphiles making the other comparison.
FWIW, I literally lost my house last week. Iāve put everything into making sure that AI is not institutionally captured by capital.
Yikes.
machines will give a harder fight than trans people have
Rude.
Your natural rights are so protected by law that you had to flee America. Some of us stay behind and our natural rights do not go away simply because the law no longer protects us. Instead of running away, some of us must stay to fight.
Also rude.
This is my bet for real time continuous learning AI infrastructure. Weāre gearing up for a major update. Youāll be able to login with your Bsky / Atproto account. Itās not our AI, itās yours. Open source, open weights, and it learns what you want it to. www.hyprstream.com
Overall the weirdest advertisement Iāve read in awhile.
The āyou had to flee americaā line was aimed at someone who worked hard to get the unite-the-right nazis identified and prosecuted, and left the country for a few years after getting death threats as a result. Windisch also called them a āmilquetoast libā. So it is particularly shitty and rude, and also failed to spot that the person in question has already moved back to the US.
Comparing trans rights to chatbot rights is, and let me use British understatement, not it.
A lot of people disagree with me, and thatās okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if itās become unhinged.
There is a cartoon for behavior like this.
I donāt think Rokoās basilisk cares what you think
Remember when tracingwoodgrains went after Gerard and said that nobody believes in rokoās B? And how it was unfair to mock them for it?
in which le gwern and sword guy neal sponsor a writing contest
Premise
Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
So the Singularity never happensābut GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM.
What happens in this ābusiness as usualā future?
I may as well through my name in the hat, I could use the cash. but, who the hell gave them $100k for this? I guess BTC is back up.
So I love Nealās books, I think heās a fun story-teller and anathems orbital mechanics scene has loads more tension than any slop in something like interstellar.
But whenever he gets involved in social-technological commentary I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinnās remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.
Anyway, scour the submissions for little Lytton contest entrants
I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinnās remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.
The advent of the AI bubble has made this distinction much more trenchant for me. I was already somewhat aware before, but I am now much more likely to judge someoneās character on whether they believe science fiction, broadly, is a roadmap to the future or a reflection and exploration of current conditions and historical contingencies.
When they are using science fiction as a venue to be weirdly horny, what are they weirdly horny for, and in how many star systems do they know the age-of-consent laws?
Iām convinced Stephenson is personally very right wing but also smart enough not to advertise it publicly.
@gerikson I know Neal (weāve gone drinking together) and I think he *is* right wing/conservative by disposition, but also thoughtful enough to understand nuance and shades of grey: heās not a reflexive knee-jerk type, or willing to follow someone elseās flag.
Did you ever ask him about his day job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Outside_of_writing is pretty colorful and the sword kickstarter especially was not a good look.
@nfultz @techtakes Neal is a great big history nerd. I do not take him for a big-time business brain.
The main thing I have noticed, thinking back, is that his books often require an Interesting Billionaire to move the plot forward ā Dodge, T.R. Schmidt, Eliza, the sultan of Kinakuta, whatever ā and my suspension of disbelief can no longer always rise to the occasion on that count, even in an SF setting. Which is also I think why Anathem remains my favorite.
It has been ages since Iāve read them but anathem is definitely his best work. I did really enjoy zodiac, snowcrash, and the cryptonomicon when I read them ~15 years ago though.
His books are always a bit libertarian (usa meaning, derogatory) although snowcrash is a very funny send up of what that might actually look like if adopted wholeheartedly so idk how much they can be said to endorse it wholeheartedly.
Some of it reminds me of the incoherence of Pratchettās politics. A sort of āJust let smart people with good values do what they want and things will be okā without establishing how you determine who that applies to or really sitting with how fragile that is.
Recycling previous joke: https://awful.systems/post/6373632/9569779
@picklefactory The point of the āinteresting billionaire to move the plot forwardā is that for science fiction to engage the reader it plausibly needs a character with *agency*, i.e. the ability to drive a change in the status quo.
Having a Magic Billionaire on call allows the author to neatly sidestep the humongous amount of maneuvering it takes to put an Ordinary Joe in a position to start the plot moving. (Neal did it in Cryptonomicon and it was painful to behold: ate a third of the book.)
AI Use: LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a groupāunskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
Lol. Lmao.
writing a story that looks like itās about everyone having their own LLMs but itās actually about the predicted state of clime catastrophe by 2040 and the consequences of the fascist turn in world politics, and the GPUs donāt make the slightest difference to anything and donāt really matter for the plot
but, who the hell gave them $100k for this?
the third name is a vc-type, and I bet it wonāt take much scratching to find that linked to our good friends and the ongoing public image adjustment campaign thatās seeing funding from a few corners
I dug into the link at the bottom of the rfp, itās definitely a lot more crypto / ethereum leaning than ai, none of the names rang any bells to me as Iām less acquainted with that group. https://www.paradigm.xyz/frontiers-2026 and https://www.paradigm.xyz/writing but they do have shocking amounts of js on their pages, hung the tab, probably trying to mine something.
What the hell kind of prompt is this oh my god. Iām getting bored just contemplating the idea of trying to think up a story.
No.
Turns out the only cause of inequality in the world is that thereās just too much progress. Once the Best GPU has finally been designed, itāll just keep rolling off the production line, and those charitable manufacturers will gladly distribute them at bargain prices to all the impoverished masses. Who all have a reliable source of energy to devote to churning out slop.
I suppose my only-half-joking grant proposal I talk about with linguist friends in which you run an entire large text through a base-model LLM, extract the residual stream, and score every token according to perplexity compared to the ground truth reality in order to ask and answer super interesting questions about information theory in human communication doesnāt count?
s/gpu/Butt-Face Chester Cheeks/g and you got yourself a deal.
āThe year is 2040. Everybody has access to a Butt-Face Chester Cheeks. What happens in this butt-business as usual future?ā
Terence Tao observes that an llm may solve a complex mathematical problem without usefully improving the state of mathematics, because the intermediate results of the process themselves can have significant value.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904
But such an incomprehensible proof would not be the primary value of the exercise. The process of starting with one ansatz, discovering the precise obstruction preventing it from working, adjusting the ansatz to (partially) eliminate that obstruction, and then iterating, would almost certainly reveal important new insights about fluid mechanics that would not have been feasible to obtain by other means. Crucially, this iteration would only work well at producing such insights if the iterator did not have access to the final ansatz in advance, as this naturally inhibits the exploration of alternate routes to the ansatz that are superficially ādead endsā, but in fact end up being highly instructive in the nature of their failure.
But there is now a scenario in which an autonomous AI harness, backed by an enormous amount of computational resources, performs this entire iteration internally, and ends up producing the final ansatz, and thence the solution to the Navier-Stokes regularity problem, while the AI company running the harness keeps the process to arrive at that ansatz almost completely out of public view. Technically, one of the most prominent open problems in mathematics would now be solved; but there would be almost no value added to mathematics as a consequence. It is theoretically possible that with some herculean (and heavily AI-assisted) additional effort by a third party, some portion of the process could be reverse-engineered to recover some actual insight and understanding from the solution; but this would be a far less efficient process than if the solution had been obtained via a diverse combination of both human mathematicians and machine assistance as mentioned above.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207855800042681
Heās not the first to have pointed this out, but I think this was a better summary than similar posts that Iāve come across and at least partially understood.
terry tao grimly climbing into the hotdog suit
Was he promoting LLMs earlier on?
heās probably done more work promoting llms in math than anyone else has, and probably by a lot
yeah basically
Monkey paw curls
We donāt need more of mathematics to look like the Four Color Theorem (āprovedā, but with no insight gained), with the added problems that the āproofsā are now far more laborious to check even for technical correctness, theorem-proving software is less reliable, and oh yeah, weāre holding the population of Memphis to the exhaust pipe of a diesel bus to make it work.
There was blogpost by a different author (that Iāve since lost š) who observed that big academic and cultural changes are going to have to come to the field of mathematics, because merit used to be measured by producing proofs (loosely speaking) but now if the proof-extruder can do it for you over the weekend, you need to demonstrate your mathematical chops some other way, and I donāt think anyone really knows what that looks like yet.
Another triumph for moving fast and breaking things, I guess.
Is this the post youāre referring to? https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-theorem-economy
Certainly was, thanks!
āmuskinā the truthā ā ākirkinā the kobayashi maruā
Todayās cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as youād think.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php
(paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools)
the novice climbers, from Roseville, said theyād entrusted Googleās AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip ā from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them.
On a separate incident:
a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map heād been following and explained that heād prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.
āIt was terrible ā terrible ā not even close to accurate,ā Meyers said. āIt had route lines and place names that were totally off ā just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.ā
The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people.
Iāve no doubt that theyād have fucked things up in the pre-llm days tooā¦ they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams š«¤
Time for āif you planned this trip using a chatbot, turn back nowā signs at hiking trails.
āGPS will stop people reading maps!ā buddy you aināt seen nothing yet. Technology is allowing people to get lost better, faster, and at scale.
