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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to āslow downā āAIā development:
- itās too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all
- the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and thereās no obvious way to fix that
Iāll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Yeah, the whole idea is to perpetuate the myth that these companies are really close to coming out with a product that people will actually pay to use. A product that people will pay enough to cover its cost. They want to simultaneously make an excuse for why it is taking so long while making gormless investors think it is just around the corner.
@gerikson My assumption is that they want a regulatory moat to protect āfrontierā models from āopen weightā / AKA cheap models.
Itās just margin protection.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Also they dare not actually let the market price their shares.The symbiosis between the rabid cultists, the technofedual wannabe-lords, and the get rich quick grifters is so weird to watch.
the next 72 hours are about to get interesting (if this is true)
Do the AI doomers/Yuddites REALLY want their signature policy tied to one of the least competent, least popular presidents in history? I would be thinking very hard about this one if I were part of their crew. āYou know who took p(doom) seriously? TRUMP!ā is, ah, not a marketing coup, to put it mildly
They think this is their last chance to save the entire universe forever and ever amen and will take anything that does not lead to extinction and the conversion of the entire universe into something that does not experience happiness. Keep in mind these are the people who thought that the world could suddenly blow up from a new innovation in a lab in 2015 and had psychotic episodes on that basis.
Trump, who does not experience happiness, would love to convert the entire universe into his own property.
Trump could personally fly up and prevent a 100 kilometre long asteroid from falling on the Earth and I still wouldnāt give him a Nobel Prize
I hate hate hate that my niche internet morbid fascination from my college laptop in 2009 is now an oval office power struggle.
Quotes from the president of the united states in the last twelve hours:
āThe only control or guardrails that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENTā āThere is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centersā āAmericanism, not effective altruismā āAI taking of the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIAā
ā¦I guess the Peter Thiel faction won.
Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?
Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?
Nah, lesswrongers donāt even have that level of introspection. Plus a lot of them are outright pro-oligarch-technofedual-lord, at least enough so that it outweighs their doomer-cultists allegiance.
I hate to turn this into a screenshot fest but i meanā¦
Theyāre calling out effective altruism BY NAME from the white house. The president is still ranting about this. This is NEW.
It would be hilarious if the AI doomers actually did manage to get Trump to sign some of their ideas into action with executive orders, only for him to reverse course or fail in implementation details, and then a hard tide of anti-Trump sentiment in the next administration to totally undo them.
Sadly it looks like we will only get the more immediate humor of Trump going hard against them.
And unfortunately several democratic party luminaries getting the AI doom brainworms in response
Coxon (that Anthropic employee) Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have all joined forces against AI
All I will say is please god let Anthropicās bullshit backfire and have them pass Bernieās bill to completely shut down all AI development it would be so fucking funny
They are going to try to, in rough order of ease and plausiblity:
- provide a legal excuse for them to stop shoveling money into a furnace of training for exponentially diminishing returns that they can no longer pretend about
- attain regulatory capture where their weirdos are in charge of everything
- to thereby make open source AI illegal, only things that go through THEIR gated portals can be used
- Maybe make ownership of the means of computation for ANY reason illegal so you cannot own anything and have to rent everything from them for any purpose because YOU MIGHT BE SUMMONING THE DEMON IN YOUR GARAGE!!!oneoneoen its only a coincidence that this means you have to rent GPUs for games and rent datacenter space from oligarchs rather than buy them or do what you want on your own hardware
Confirmed
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/14/google-deepmind-ai-warnings
The shape of the solution is simple: stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence. Treat compute, the main ingredient in AI training, like fissile material. Track it and restrict access to quantities large enough to improve AIs beyond known-safe levels. More specifically, the AI Futures Projectās āPlan Aā is a credible starting proposal that limits AI harms while allowing fast AI progress to continue to benefit the world. We have real options for verifying compliance with international compute-restriction treaties, without trusting adversaries like China.
if trump says ārokos basiliskā on tape Iām done
Nobody knows statistics like me. My uncle, great professor, great genes, he knew, frequentist is the worst. Now, Bayes-e-an statistics is the best, the biggest statistics. You gotta have priors! You have a belief, a tremendous belief, beautiful belief in your head. And then you learn, you get the data, and frankly its nasty and unfair.
The lesswrong reactions are hilarious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s76hbGpaMkhiNwbTX/matrice-jacobine-s-shortform?commentId=B2WSExeg8wfgDqZiM
One commenter realizes the truth, but is heavily downvoted:
For anyone who was at all unclear on the subject: Heās not on your side. Heās against you. He wants you to fail. Stop trying to fix him. AI safety is in the same situation as measles prevention, free trade, military readiness, or the prosecution of the remaining Epstein offenders. Trump & co. are against these things, and theyāre not going to be converted just because you tell them again how important these things are.
Sorry bud, if lesswrongers were capable of grasping this they wouldnāt have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropicās half-hearted gestures of placation to doomer-cultists. And of course, many lesswrongers are genuinely very right wing and will thus rationalize justifications for the more centrist lesswrongers to suck up to Trump.
Another comment:
My knowledge of politics is nil, but <steelman about what if trump actually wasnāt trump>
(emp mine)
Rationalist have never run into a right-wing point or person they were willing to steelman nor a leftist they were unable to screw up steelmanning.
University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:
And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and Iām like, what do you want me to do? I canāt control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didnāt tell me what it was.
The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, whoās the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? Theyāre going to figure out a way.
Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.
Interesting, he usually falls for all their BS.
Back when our friends were just forum and Tumblr posters there was the Center for Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Who could be against that?
6 August 2013, SANTA ROSA, Calif. (CN) ā In a lurid lawsuit, a former employee claims the Marin County-based Foundation for Critical Thinking is a ācultlikeā group whose married bosses tried to make him have sex with the wife, and fired him for refusing. ā¦ Hale, a 40-year-old married man and father, claims he quit his job as a high school teacher to accept an offer to work as a āfull-time Fellowā for the Foundation for Critical Thinking (FCT) in August 2004. According to the complaint, the Foundation for Critical Thinking, based in Tomales, ātrains educators how to analyze information in an āobjective āfair-mindedā manner, without allowing their own biases, prejudices and opinions to influence their objective analysis of an issue. It is a āthink tankā of sorts that promotes a casual work environment. Defendants Elder and Paul frequently hold meetings at both FCT offices and their personal residence, where they sit and lie on the floor amongst pillows. To encourage the free flow of ideas, defendants Elder and Paul often discuss uncomfortable topics, and encourage employees to rid themselves of social, including sexual, taboos. ā¦ About three years after he was hired, Hale claims, Elder and Paul began bringing up āinappropriate sexual topicsā and asking him āabout his sex life with his wifeā during business meetings. ā¦ In October 2010, Hale claims, Elder and Paul graduated from discussing sex to encouraging him to have sex with Elder. After calling Hale to a meeting, Paul āexplained to Hale that he was concerned about defendant Elder, his younger wife by approximately 20 years, and wanted to ensure that her sexual urges could be satisfied,ā the complaint states. āDefendant Paul proposed that Hale should have sexual intercourse with Paulās wife, defendant Elder, while defendant Paul observed them. Hale immediately became uncomfortable and anxious, as he listened to defendant Paul, and worried about his ability to keep his job, if he declined. Hale politely declined defendant Paulās request.ā
I wonder how many of our friends deliberately studied other grifts and not just pop psychology books, or if this is just in the water. Their form 990 is here, and shows they lost most of their income in 2019 and are struggling since.
I havenāt seen any mention of this in sneer space, so kind of a request for context/comments. I recently learned about Cortical Labs from a news story that came out about a month ago. Basically (and apologies if Iāve got this wrong), the story is that theyāve built a ābiological data centreā where the computing units use lab-grown human brain neurones. Theyāve been in business (actual business) since 2019. Some shallow searching on reddit and lesswrong shows a flitter of interest from those guys here and there.
Looks like they have āneuron culture and interface as a serviceā going on, for all the good its for.
Its a real thing. You grow some neurons and stick some electrodes into it, and you can measure the activity of neurons or groups of neurons through some electrodes and induce some to fire through other electrodes. Now, if you have some external process that you define that takes the output from the electrodes and does some computation on it and returns signals to the input electrodes, the way that neurons work and change their synaptic weights over time ensures that the network will learn to produce outputs that make the inputs more predictable. Hence teaching a few thousand neurons to play ādoomā - you have a program that takes the screen and turns it into a set of input strengths, take some outputs and turn them into controls, and it feeds back, and you eventually have something that learns to do predictable actions.
Their innovation appears to be having standardized software you can use to define the input and output electrodes with respect to whatever other software you are running connected to the stuff. Who is willing to pay for this is anyoneās guess.
Maybe all the AI hype has lowered my standards too much, but that actually sounds pretty neat. No idea if itās actually useful and the biological component gives me a kind of instinctive discomfort that I can neither justify nor ignore, but it does feel like thereās an actual interesting development there, at least compared to throwing bigger matrices at the natural language problem and waiting for God to pop out at the end.
from what i understand, itās also impossible to copy this thing and every single instance will turn out slightly different. also it will continue to learn on whatever data it is fed so you might end up with something useful, that will degrade, is on a timer and has no backups
Starting things off, New Mexico State Parks got scammed by an AI bro when looking for new mascot art.
So, uh, remember that call for stories set in a world where we āsomehowā donāt get AGI and instead get modern-style LLMs providing such incredible value to the world that it is transformed? That tells people not to use LLMs to write it because its writing is low quality? https://www.gpuworld.org/
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?
(Incidentally, this reminds me strongly of āProject Heiroglyph: Stories and Vision for a Better Futureā, also by Neal Stephenson, somewhat desperately trying to pretend that there is a bright future ahead of us rather than slow grinding decline)
Somehow we gotā¦ this. I canāt even. I really just canāt even.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6hFByFwDLxtnbvje/a-normal-friday-in-2042
I thought I had lost my ability to be surprised by these people. In here we get:
- anthropomorphization of current LLMs as conscious beings
- Graverobbing
- Trump magically doing everything these people want
- Married couples paying each other for chores
- Prediction market language
- Weird sex stuff
As always with LW, we can adapt the vector definition of ānormalā, i.e. what is being said is completely orthogonal to reality
Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of āCPUā and rode the nopetopus out of there.
Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.
I meanā¦ what is this? Itās even weirder than usual
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-doomers-trump-bannon-sanders.html
Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).
What the fuck is this and why am I getting emails from avaaz about it
I feel like every time I turn around thereās another baffling anti/ai project
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/24-dolphin-of-169474003
New Odium Symposium episode, āThe Dolphin Fucking Elders of Atlantisā. We talk about new age crystal healing pioneer Frank Alper and his channeled lectures on Atlantis, Lemuria, Anti-Atlantis, crystals, and the future of humanity.
If you listen anywhere besides Patreon or Spotify, the episode is delayed. Our hosting service went āLLM basedā (?) as I recounted previously and then just stopped working. Weāre switching hosts and will have the episode up as soon as possible.
Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:
Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts arenāt wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is.
This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then āvolunteeringā to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage āToo big to failā t-shirts floating around on ebay.
Fun times!!
Is there a link?
Itās a listserv. dm me if youād like me to ask Paul to add you.
A critical piece on EA from somebody who actually lives in one of the poorest places in the world.
Somewhere in 2021, I contacted about a hundred people (mostly individuals) who identify as effective altruists, asking them not for money, but for social media posts ā¦
ā¦ one wrote back saying, āI usually share projects that have been vetted by Givewell or a similar organizationā¦.Why do you think your project is more effective compared to all the others?ā
All that over a social media post.
Ćmile Torres writing last year:
[ā¦] Nick Beckstead, a noted EA, argued in 2013 that, given the āoverwhelmingā moral importance of the far future ā āmillions, billions, and trillionsā of years from now ā we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. The reason is that people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future.
And that about sums it up. They donāt care. They simply donāt care. Beckstead explains that itās better to focus on the rich countries because ārich countries have substantially more innovationā and ātheir workers are more economically productiveā. He apparently presented these ideas in a graduate thesis: I hope he got a bad grade.
Iāve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you canāt deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.
If MIRI was Sam Altmanās old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he canāt work in it, isnāt this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
The way I relate to rationalists is itās like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These āspecialized mindsā can also make them off-putting to many people.
I donāt know if Iād consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.
āIām intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, Iām sold!ā
Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, heās an absolute wanker.
our friends are taking Donald Trump seriously
What, no American Intelligence?
The EAs and Trump really deserve each other.
No direct links but various people on bsky have discovered LW and EA and are having a collective āwtf is wrong with these peopleā and āwait all the top AI guys are like this?ā moments. And it is funny to see.
Sadly the 'you canāt explain this stuff without either looking like an insane conspiracy theorist, or you need to write an actual book because people donāt believe you remains a bit true.
E: ok one link: https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3mvpuq2deo22u (Guess this is a reference to the SE Gyges thread).
Fyi, I blocked him a while back. Didnt like his whole āim the reasonable centristā bit while making blocklists of anti ai people.
Turns out the centrist subscribes to transhumanism (hipster edition)
the overtone window canāt be that fucked, can it?
Ah, āKurzweilian h+,ā thereās his marketing tagline. Too bad importing Kurzweil also brings in all his bullshit extrapolation about exponential curves that all the other weird shit is based on. Youāre never going to shout down the hyperbolic lunatics by adopting the core thesis of their hyperbole.
Yeah, at best, āKurzweilian h+ā will be pseudoscientific guff. I suppose that keeping the lower strata of intellectually bad elements while discarding the worst of the social ones is progress, but, I mean, itās kind of like saying youāre into your fad diet and LLM-generated supplement regimen and then looking over at RFK and saying ābut thatās totally different!ā.
Iāve lost it now, but somewhere in the replies to one of those threads was a person complaining that SneerClub was too much like beating up on nerds in high school. To which I say, first, hereās my blueberry bread recipe, and a nice photo of a winter sunrise, and my Star Trek fanfiction. We all friendly now? Good. Then let me suggest, cordially, that if you are continuing to think of social dynamics in terms of high-school hierarchies and shitty '80s movies well into adulthood, that is a you problem. If I can stop living as the gender I had in high school, you can stop letting your membership in a granfalloon lead you by the nose.
H+ also brings in the Mores, who are behind humanity+.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Vita-More and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_More
Ooh cryonics, classy.
Yeah, as I have mentioned a few times before here I used to read their online H+ magazine a bit, and it was odd, a mix of science and woo, and they published a lot of articles. Until the moment there was one article about how transhumanism must make sure that it also helps the poor, that article was quickly removed (so quickly it wasnāt archived, it was however still in my rss feed which is how I read it). After that article the amount of articles published dropped to nothing. (I always assumed the editor was fired over that or something, I think he himself also added to that article).
Ben Goertzel also regularly wrote for H+ mag. A name that shouldnāt be totally unfamiliar to people who know things about transhumanism, and Ben is into PSI now. (Or considering the tone of some of the articles, he prob always was).
(Yes, I keep writing this same comment here over and over as I seem to be one of the few people who read the magazine at the time who also posts here)
E: looks like H+mag deleted their whole website. (guess being immortal is only for the rich, and not information). But look at this old LW post I found re Goertzel and PSI.
And via the comments: The solution of the whole āis PSI realā problem? Why did you ask (Robin Hanson) it is betting of course.
