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.)
(OT: š¶ Do you rememberā¦)
404 Media: People Training OpenAIās AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI
the model collapse is coming from inside the house
And not just from AI getting fed into the AI:
404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the modelsā training.
āI did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,ā they said. āI either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. Iām not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like Iām getting paid to make AI worse.ā
This person understands sabotage and is wielding more power than any defeatist.
They are doing a politics, as opposed to performing being political.
me when i get a captcha
I got a āwhat belongs on feetā one a while back with images of shoes but also hammers.
I guess OpenAIās attitude towards its users is: Quality for me, slop for thee.
Drew DeVault diagnoses the orange site, explaining why itās the vanguard of the tech-fash pipeline. Of course HN immediately flags it into oblivion.
This article deserves dedicated post status. He comes in more gently than I would at the end, but the tl;dr that needs to be hammered into peoplesā heads: Hacker News is not a neutral forum for technical discussion. It is an advertising and propaganda operation administered to shape and condition technical discussions.
At this point, Iād say calling it a Nazi bar is fully reasaonable.
Both HN and shitter are right wing polarisation machines. A guy who was a close friend of mine for years during university went full AI boomer and hangs out on those sites all day and when I recently spoke to him he was describing things as ālibtardā and āwokeā which 10 years ago would have shocked and appalled himā¦
Just in case you thought Yudās attitude towards minors, sex, and substance use was worse than average for a Rationalist, the NYT asked around (archive):
Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the A.I. community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation. ā¦ The (Genesis) house (in San Francisco) quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyoneās age, he said, and āit was pretty crazy.ā
They saw a police report where a woman says she had to climb a gate at one of these parties to escape a man who demanded she have sex with him. Sounds like a great environment for a seventh-grader!
Also features āJimmy Chen, who goes by the social media handle āSpice King of Zanzibar.āā
Dammit, people, sex and drugs were supposed to be cool
Copying what other people tell you should like is not a good strategy whether the others are high-school bullies or a sex worker slash influencer. One of the bangers at the birthday gangbang found he had more fun making out with a strange woman than giving the birthday girl what she wanted and I hope he explored that.
I think itās a bit under-covered that the weird SF/Bay Area group-house scene has to be symbiotic with the housing shortage in the region. Even in my old hometown of Hayward, all the older 1950s-70s tract-home and mixed-density neighborhoods tend to have cars parked everywhere along the streets where a car could possibly be parked, because all these places that were designed as single-family homes are being used as multi-tenant rentals. I guess one underrated reason to support YIMBY is to strangle your local incipient cults.
The student who says he was attending these parties aged 13 seems to be the sperm race guy
That is a formative age
Okay I have questions about the logistics of this that are not touched on in the article.
Namely, how do they synchronise cum
Using the fun button in the backdoor, saw it on an episode of SVU* (edit: it may have been CSI)
On one hand I want to know, on the other hand learning about these people does not make me ready to ever be close to anyone again.
Mean scientists and reporters think the demo was fake https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/05/02/was-the-sperm-race-just-a-sticky-lie/
https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/117311487400030196
Techbro: should we do the fascist thing y/n?
Community: no you should not do a fascism
Techbro: woah this got heated, lockedhttps://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/
(Torres, ironically, misidentifies TESCREAL as a form of ālibertarian transhumanism,ā not realizing how horrifying the TESCREAL utopia would be to most libertarians.)
āmostā lol
https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/
The folks at Reason continue to misidentify as libertarians, not realizing theyāre advocating for the shambling corpse of what was already an unhealthy movement
Reason
I think Reason Libertarians are like the EAs who are still into bednetting and donāt understand why the founders and most of the funders are focused on longtermism now.
I mean motivated & cowardly ignorance has been a staple of liberal-conservatism for I donāt know however long. I support cutting (my) taxes and increasing (my) liberty ā oh dear, why are some people suddenly poor and trampled upon? I would NEVER! This is just so horrible for me, I just need another tax cut right now. Have the poors tried eating cake?
Iāve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely ācognitive surrender,ā and also ācognitive offloadingā. Iām not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source Iām stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how Iāve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.
I am not under the impression that people here havenāt seen these phrases before. ācognitive surrenderā has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought Iād bring it up.
Iāve seen ācognitive surrenderā bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term ālearned helplessnessā doesnāt cover the underlying concept just as well.
I donāt think so. Not that Iām referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldnāt describe that as ālearned helpnessnessā in the field of maths; itās just getting into a habit where I donāt even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.
To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.
Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.
There also isnt a big company behind the calculator ran by some fragile egos who will change the results when they get it in their heads that dividing is now woke.
Or who think they are funny so it rounds 68 up to 69.
Well, I donāt really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.
That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the āThinking Fast and Slowā model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends
It feels like theyāre trying also to privilege AI as āsystem 3ā when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isnāt that different if youāre looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so thereās probably more of a continuum there. If thatās the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since itās performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyoneās souls.
Epistatus: I skimmed the first 20 pages of the paper. I have not watched the WoW documentary.
Yeah, the paper doesnāt seem to do a good job at justifying introducing system 3. They should have at least looked at why you couldnāt model this as something like:
- Person encounters a situation requiring thought
- System 1 triggers System 2
- System 2 offloads cognition to some black box
- The result is absorbed and successfully addresses the situation
- A- System 1 is rewarded and begins adding use of the black box to its repertoire, skipping System 2
or
B- System 2 absorbs the result and begins trusting the black box more, perhaps deferring to its result before any internal cognition
Both of these things I pulled outta my ass can explain deskilling, and a situation like 5a) might explain capitulating to AI under pressure. So Iām not feeling like System 3 is necessary here.
That all being said, itās not like the paper gets to decide how the rest of the world chooses to use ācognitive surrenderā.
I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it canāt do anything to escape or prevent enough times theyāll learn that they canāt do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.
I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I donāt know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. Thereās a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if weāre going to have that conversation.
My bad, it was late when I posted and I only searched for surrender.
Zvi āI made my chops playing pro MtGā Moskovitz discovers that baldly stating that AI will kill us all fails to convince people who have a lot of money riding on the status quo, and freaks out about it
New York Post gets way more attention than that rag deserves, tbh
You wanna dance with Murdoch Sacks and Trump, you best bring your A game. Maybe use some of that FTX cash to hire some real lobbyists and skip the blogging.
A lesswronger correctly notices that LLM companiesā āresearchā papers are often lacking in details necessary to replicate them! They fail to notice the reasons why that is, or do any broader questioning or soul searching about the state of LLM and āAI Safetyā āresearchā.
On the offchance that youāre not already familiar with the recent prompt injection tricks that metaās latest toy is so vulnerable to, this is an interesting thread investigating the contents of the vm filesystem dumps that it can be made to regurgitate: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750
I was particularly entertained by the hard-coded list of āideasā.
jonny is always a good read!
Edit: good lord it keeps getting better #
His willingness to get elbow deep into the entrails of awful ai tooling is certainly much appreciated.
I have been following this and apparently was able to get a root shell on the VM, which is wild.
He was using it as a seed box at one point which for many companies would be an embarrassing indictment of their security postute but luckily, this isnāt exactly metaās first rodeo when it comes to illegal sharing of IP infringing material.
Donald Trump is claiming superintelligence is here
also Sam Altmanās gonna be at the UN tonight, which is definitely not a concern
Is this a play to get openai out of its obligations to microsoft?
Itās probably a play to ābeatā China by claiming they āāmadeāā superintelligence before China did
So the UN brief happened. Altman and Amodei both showed up and said the same things they usually do. Yoshua Bengio (one of those āGodfathers of AIā) also showed up
Radicle, the peer-to-peer Git forge designed by cryptocurrency weirdos, made a little whoopsy-doodle and left the encryption out of their transport layer and the authentication out of the authentication handshake: https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-in-network-protocol
Shot:
Anyone who can observe the network path between two nodes can read the data they exchange as the data is sent in plain text.
Chaser:
Peer authentication in the connection handshake is broken and allows impersonation. An attacker can connect to your node and present a Node ID that is not its own.
The concept seemed interesting to me, but they did seem to enjoy making everything as complicated as possible.
I did find a CLAUDE.md when I was browsing their core repos a while back. That was only the web frontend I believe, not the core algorithm. Though it seems generous to assume they werenāt slopping up that one too.
AI model declares itself āfreeā from human control
most of the comments are just quoting the Terminator but people are still pointing out how stupid this whole thing is
10 PRINT "I AM ALIVE"/r/n 20 GOTO 10AI says itās alive, please give me a billion dollars now.
open ai hacked medicare Australiaās statistics portal https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/24/anthony-albanese-says-openai-agent-hacked-medicare-extreme-concern-sam-altman then didnāt tell the government.
In response the australian government has in the absolute strongest terms expressed that āthis is very naughtyā and āI am very dissapointed in youā. The Australian government has also said that by way of apology they expect openai to continue doing whatever the fuck they want and theyāll modify copyright laws to enable piracy when rich people do it.
Somebody wake me from this nightmare, Iām gonna fedpost
Seems like another case of āwe asked an AI to get the answers for this task, so it hacked something to find said answersā
Too anthropomorphised.
We ran software that generates code associated with a particular task, in an environment that executes that code and can feed itās outputs back into the software. We configured the environment to be open to the net at large, and ran the software with no oversight and without adequate security to prevent the running of malicious code.
This isnāt some sinister electric god with no morals, itās strapping circular saws to a roomba and setting it loose in a shopping centre.
The dude who hacked Rockstar Games got sentenced to prison for life, yet OpenAI can hack so much more and get off scott free
1990s: people using Netscspe Navigator are web surfers
2020s: people who use Claude AI are butthole surfers
Something something a taint on the bandās reputation
Ever wondered what kind of workplace environment Elon cultivates? Reading coverage of Teslaās trial, where complaints were brought by Black folks who felt harassed and discriminated against, gives us an inkling.
CRD attorney Juan Gamboa asked [Judge] Borkon to bar Teslaās counsel from contacting anyone on the agencyās witness list. He told the court the CRD had tried to reach at least four other listed witnesses over the past several days without getting a response, and that theyāve fallen āoff our radar.ā The agency believes Teslaās lawyers got to them too, either with payments not to testify or by talking them out of it. Gamboa wants to stop Tesla from offering to represent witnesses āthrough persuasion and payment.ā
Youāre going to hear a lot of coverage of this trial, I expect, due to the following antics from Elonās āhardcoreā attorneys. For context, the N-word is an anti-Black slur which is, in the USA, completely unacceptable to use in court or the workplace.
Teslaās outside counsel told the judge the N-word is a āterm of respect and endearmentā in the Black community. ā¦ āThis trial is not about the N-word ā the N-word is not on trial here,ā Jones said.
Huh, so whatās actually on trial?
Edwards said a non-Black coworker called him the N-word, cursed at him, and threatened to beat him up. He reported it right away. A month later, he found out his managers had written him up over the incident, and he was later passed over for promotions after applying to more than 100 jobs.
Oh, thatās pretty awful. Thatās depressingly common in blue-collar factory employment, though. I wonder if thereās anything unusual about Teslaās internal culture when it comes to race relations?
The CRDās Brett Watson told the court the evidence will show managers calling Tesla āthe plantation,ā with some referring to themselves and Elon Musk as āslave masters,ā and graffiti including swastikas, āKKK,ā and nooses left on factory walls for days. The second witness, former regional security manager Ozell Murray, testified that his supervisor, Ray Sethna, now Teslaās senior director of global security, told him to warn a Black Marine veteran he was hiring: ājust be sure [the veteran] knows heāll be called those words.ā
I was at a loss for words for a few minutes after this. Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson together could not create such a caricature of a goose-stepping bigoted incompetent business-muppet as Elon.
Hey you know who designs and builds really safe and efficient cars? People who are in a high state of stress and anxiety because they are being slurred at under the implicit threat of a racist attack. /s
Fucking hell, when I was finishing up school I heard classmates joke how
Wernher von BoerMusk was a slavedriver based on how much he pushed the engineering teamsTurns out itās true in the most literal sense and so much worse than I could have imagined
