Want to wade into the sandy, spooky 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 soo 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. The spooks are well underway.)
Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise
Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo
Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs
A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, āSounds like youāre probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.ā
Iāve genuinely never seen anything as cringe as āMalfoidā. itās basically just riding the coattails of the much better Petra Parker trend except with incel language
Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.
letās continue with the HP theme
not that it makes any real difference but I have been seeing āGalfoyā. Knowing that āfoidā has increased in usage is a bummer tho
more in the comments
I already disliked the original [Harry Potter] for its lack of rationality as a child (how can they have magic and poverty at the same time?) so I loved the flip.
OK so does HPMOR solve poverty? (Q is rhetorical donāt answer)
If you didnāt like HP check out Grossmanās The Magicians. A lot of graduating magicians there join non-profits or hedge funds.
I unironically wish there were a faithful prose adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist I could point people to.
You know how AI proofs are supposed to be credible because of formalization with Lean? The AI generates a natural language proof and then supposedly generates a Lean program corresponding to the proof to verify that itās true. There is now some troubling news about that: there are frequent examples where the statement given in natural language is different from the meaning of the Lean formalization.
The paper even points out several obvious mismatches in OpenAIās famous Navier-Stokes solution between the English proof and the Lean formalization. There is even a spot where a 4 in the English proof turns into a 5 in the Lean proof (which causes further problems down the line). This is mostly a cosmetic error, and it doesnāt mean that the Navier-Stokes solution is wrong, but there could very well be deeper problems, especially with the English proof. At minimum, this solution absolutely requires careful review by experts. OpenAIās behavior towards said experts has been appalling.
My viewpoint has been that the only successes that AI has had are in domains where failure is not costly (at least for someone with deep pockets), and especially when there is a formal system such as Lean that can reliably catch errors. So AI can be endlessly trained to write compiling Lean programs corresponding to formal proofs, but as soon as it runs into tasks that are not 100% bolted down, like writing the proof in English, the hallucination problem rears its ugly head. This reinforces my belief that AI is a chess engine but for Lean.
If I was treating this as a technical problem, I would say, why not just have an AI that generates the Lean proof, and at most have an optional assisting tool that translates it into English without perfect reliability? But this is not a technical problem. By outputting English proofs in the format of a research paper, OpenAI can more easily market that their AI is intended to fully replace mathematicians, and that this is only the herald of their general superintelligence (and not that math is the only thing working out for them).
You know how AI proofs are supposed to be credible because of formalization with Lean?
There is another problemā¦ apparently Lean4 hasnāt actually been fully formally verified. And in fact could have more bugs lurking in it, maybe even some foundational problemsā¦ Lesswrong post explaining the problems.
OpenAI can more easily market that their AI is intended to fully replace mathematicians, and that this is only the herald of their general superintelligence (and not that math is the only thing working out for them).
Yeah, this has been driving me crazyā¦ reading places like hackernews or r/singularity, I keep seeing people assuming mathematicians and just bitter or engaging in sour grapes and that is why they are complaining about the āproofsā OpenAI dumped out. Like it is just some small niggling detail that the proofs canāt be read by humans and that Lean may have bugs and that some of OpenAIās proofs have already been shown to have critical mistakes.
Edit: I had the thought to collect some links in one place Here are some more discussions on lean and autoformalization for anyone looking for good sources:
- https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/09/what-mathematicians-should-know-about-the-lean-theorem-proverquestions-of-reliability-and-ai/ a general blog post breaking down some of the bugs found and potential for more
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144 preprint discussing the problems with natural language to lean in detail and pointing out some blatant inconsistencies in the recent Navier-stokes āproofā
- /r/betteroffline discussion of above preprint: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1x0b49i/navierstokes_lost_in_translation_why_lean/
Edit 2: Made a top level post: https://awful.systems/post/9997783
Unhappy thought: For whatever future weāve got, the history of mathematics will be scarred by fashtech cocaine. The people with all the money have every incentive to make mathematics intractable as a profession. No time or resources to do anything but clean up after their DDOS attacks. No way to check the correctness of AI-generated proofs except by using more AI to formalize them.
One of the proofs that OpenAI announced yesterday is for a major open problem in the field Iām working in. I tried to read it but it was a completely incomprehensible 100+ page output. I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding. (I had known about the results weeks in advance before their official announcement. There is a bunch of more drama there that I wonāt get into.) Putting aside the serious possibility of Lean bugs, a lot of people donāt realize that there is ultimately no point in having a machine just generate Lean blobs endlessly. The reality is that mathematicians have always done math for the sake of enjoyment or understanding, and math contributes to society by improving understanding. Still, I am worried about the convenient social arrangement that allowed many mathematicians to do this for a modest living.
Anyway, Iām sure it was a good idea to apply the full might of capital for pure math problems, instead of less important social issues like climate change. We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).
Edit: Here is an article by Quanta which I think accurately describes the situation that mathematicians are going through right now: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-end-of-math-as-we-know-it-20261005/
I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding.
Hooray for the Denial of Service attack from the industry that wants to put a meter on thinking itself.
We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).
rational investors enabling marginal utilityā¦ thasss capitalism in action baybeeeee
Iām not at all a mathematician and mostly bad at understanding things, but, is an unwieldy proof thatās barely comprehensible and might be relying on multiple layers of bugs and traps and whatever undefined edges of formal proof systems even a proof at all? Does it actually merit consideration outside of pure spite (understandable)?
personally I feel like all this shit is a continuation/outgrowth from the crypto āwhitepaperā phenomenon: ~zero substantive engagement with the actual discipline in question, and āwork productā (quotes intentional) equal to some claims with a āproofā thrown out as its defense
(it also continues to be part of a cultural and knowledge DDoS, which others have written better on)
Like, in other words, I donāt think most mathematicians are particularly interested in building huge datacenters to brute-force compute quintillions of decimals of pi under current algorithms? Because the point is understanding, not mere knowledge? I dunno!
If itās actually exploiting a bug in a formal system, no. If itās a natural-language (unformalized) document which no one can understand, no. On the other hand a formal proof not using bugs which canāt be understood, is still considered a proof, though its value is lower than an understandable proof (because as you said in another comment, the real value is in understanding rather than theorems). The prototypical example before LLMs was the proof of the four-color theorem which relied on computer-checked casework.
I suppose what it comes down to is, if OpenAI couldnāt be bothered to try and elucidate their results, or even try to separate nonsensical exploits from genuine proofs, I donāt understand why mathematicians shouldnāt treat all of it as worthless instead of doing unpaid PR work for them.
Place like /r/singularity and hackernews are eating up the hype and buying into it. Even with mathematicians explaining carefully the errors in the proofs and why they are badly written and useless to actually progress in mathematics the boosters are treating that like sour grapes or irrational fear. If mathematicians tried outright ignoring it, OpenAIās narrative would go even more unchallenged.
I think the problem, from a laymanās perspective, is that it wasnāt until the mathematicians started digging through it that it became apparent how bad the situation was. My only frame of reference for whether the proofs are nonsense or not is you kind folks bitching about it, and OpenAI was happy to do the marketing part with or without anyone signing on.
This was exactly the point - flood the zone with shit to show how āsmartā the stuff underlying your IP is
I mean, I donāt know, my confusion comes from also seeing a lot of mathematicians react as if mathematics are over and that it sucks that the future is all about checking AI proofs. And I suppose itās unpleasant when a sort of maybe authoritative entity comes out of nowhere and tells you the answer to your favourite problem is 42 and doesnāt elaborate. But I feel like I might be missing something as to why this is a big deal. (Apart from OpenAIās shitty conduct, I mean.)
I imagine that itās the same thing that programmers have been dealing with. Basically everyone Iāve talked to has acknowledged that code reviews are important parts of the software development process, but nobody has ever said they like them. Now here comes the glorious LLM future where in order to maximize productivity you get to do nothing but code reviews forever, only worse because the answer to āwhat were they thinking when they wrote thisā is always ālmao fuk uā. Even ignoring what kind of consequence that kind of change would have on the actual progress of the field of mathematics, it also just makes being a mathematician into a different kind of day-to-day job, and one that most people who are currently in the field would likely find far less satisfying. And unlike the programmers theyāre not even paid some absurd amount of money for it [citation needed].
so what iām getting from this is the only kind of progress openai and friends are capable of is progressing from slop grenades to slop airstrikes, and so far it only works because they have good marketing, augmented by their own bot farms, and because money is all you need, and so far they havenāt ran out of money
First up: thanks for your hard work here in the sneer mines during these ridiculous times!
I saw this being ignored on HN and I thought that you might appreciate it:
Navier-Stokes Lost in Translation ā Why Lean Verification of AI Autoformalisation Does not Guarantee Correct Natural Language Proofs
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144
The authors point out that automatic translation of natural language mathematics into Lean is very hard, actually. They also highlight some examples of such translation errors in the Navier-Stokes āpaperā published by OpenAI. They tread lightly and donāt take a position on the correctness of the proof, but they do bring a large stack of receipts.
I also thought the reference to the Solvability Complexity Index (which is new to me) was interesting, and thereās an appendix with an explainer on how the SCI hierarchy is constructed. According to this scheme, autoformalisation of natural language proofs is strictly harder than the Halting Problem.
I havenāt had a chance to check on the bona fides of the authors.
This is all beyond my level, but Iād love to see what our local experts think of it in light of the recent gish galop.
Thereās apparently an āAssociation for Human Mathematicsā that has released the following statement:
Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI ā which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution ā released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.
Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Groupās position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research ā norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest.
Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAIās assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism.
Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.
Stuff like this highlights that the "info"dump was an act of contempt toward professional mathematics. If OAI actually gave a damn about people, they could have coordinated with actual researchers in the relevant fields to clean up the documents while putting a human face on them. Put everything behind NDAs, fund some grants and fellowships, and if it leaks? So what, it would have been actual good press and built hype. Plus, it would have weeded out the the obvious garbage and theyād have brought a lot of young researchers inside the tent.
But nooooooo, they chose violence, because they are assholes. Theyāll never forgive the academics for doing the work and actually being good at math and physics.
I know Iām preaching to the choir, but damn Iām stirred up.
If they actually gave a damn about people they wouldnāt be working at OpenAI
Happy cake day!
Thanks! :)
It isnt going to just be math, programming, various sites filled with usefull information that are now being closed because they keep being hammered by bots (or ddos attacks if they manage to actively block the bots) etc. What a waste.
If it makes you feel better, the applied / empirical side is just as fucked as pure math. My unhappy thought is we spent 30 years as a discipline trying to decontaminate after The Bell Curve dropped and now, AI Murray will haunt me from beyond the grave.
just a peeve
hereās a personal blogpost on LW entitled āThree types of AI risk: why (some) leftists are against (some) AI regulationsā (by āsudo-nymā which I admit is a great nick)
First sentence
You may have seen factions of the left being opposed to current attempts to regulate the AI industry, despite the fact that they clearly also want to stop AI.
OK Mr Sudo-Nym, if that is your real name, imma gonna stop you right there
Which āfactionsā?
Are these factions actually in existence, or are they just Xhitter/Bluesky handles? If youāre provide like, I dunno, sources, we could maybe evaluate this ourselves. It would also clarify whether these are US leftists as opposed to leftists in other countries which are in my experience a bit more attuned to both political realities and have a more theoretical foundation.
As it is it feels as if youāre fighting windmills in your imagination.
Commenters point out that the āfrontier labsā are actually raging capitalists so thereās that.
Most of rationalism seems to be āMaking up a guy and getting mad at himā doesnāt it?
but but but donāt call it strawmanning!!!
My real opponent lives in Canada. And no, you canāt meet him.
The factions exist and those are the hardcore anarchists.
A real electoral powerhouse.
(Aka a few guys on bsky with 10k followers max total).
And I say that as somebody who feels anarchist aligned.
Iām starting to believe that Sam Altmanās reputation as a genius salesman is a bit overrated
Accept ābad thingsā in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
Apparently the media is also ignoring that right now the lawsuit against her m bu his sister is ongoing.
āWeāve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models,ā Anthropicās update reads.
If they want to moderate the user generated content posted to their internet platform, thatās fine with me, but then they should forfeit the DMCA safe harbor for their plagiarism machine as well.
Itās now titled āDo Not Undermine Democratic Processes,ā
Well what the fuck do they think their whole leadership team has been doing in Washington these last eight months?
Oh my god is it in response to that AI torture chamber?
gotta be right?
Ever since the beginning of the current AI bubble, there has always been a certain type of dipshit who takes some art posted on social media by an artist, feeds it to AI, and then comments with the slop image saying that they made it ābetterā. Well, now I am on the receiving end of that. In one of my papers, I (foolishly) wrote down a few comments on future directions, and now some motherfucker decides to send me an obviously ChatGPT generated manuscript with a solution to one of my problems.
Unfortunately, I think their AI generated proof is itself correct, so I have to deal with it. But the manuscript is written in a way that obviously indicates that he hasnāt even read it. Thereās even a section describing experiments for this mathematical question (???), complete with a āverification guideā that references an āarchiveā full of python scripts and test cases that he did not send me. I suspect he doesnāt even know they exist.
Unfortunately, I think their AI generated proof is itself correct, so I have to deal with it.
Well you can just ignore it, or even steal it. No copyright on it anyway ;).
Or cite it, but in the most passive aggressive way you can get away with.
ā¦You should check the literature really carefully to make sure that whatever proof the AI āgeneratedā doesnāt actually already exist somewhere and it regurgitated it without proper accreditation.
The spammer in question had previously posted a bigger result, but the writeup was so badly written that some people in the field wrote a new, readable paper with the same result. In their abstract, they specifically cited him and said that the proof was so unreadable that they were unable to follow the details, and they had no choice but to write their own proof. (The spammerās proof also used math that was advanced enough to be far beyond his knowledge.)
My pet theory is that after this embarrassment, the spammer saw that nobody was able to verify his argument. Now the real problem is that his paper was written so badly that nobody could understand it (in math, you canāt verify what you canāt understand), but somehow he thought that the problem was that he didnāt add an experiments section!
itās in the trees, itās comingā¦
half of the open positions in my companyās division are for āSoftware Engineer - AI Nativeāā¦
Is that code for please use the tokens we are paying out the ass for either way or for we have no intention of paying you like regular swengs?
That is a new way to discriminate against older people.
Not a surprise, but the Tarbell Center ā a big EA-funded journalism outlet ā is funding Kevin Rooseās and Casey Newtonās new podcast, āMachine Godsā. Iām sure it will have no impact on the topics they choose to cover or the way they cover them.
Iām not sure if this was highlighted already but from the OpenAI report on the Hugging Face incident:
The internal-only research model is comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol and was trained to advance persistence and multiagent collaboration, among other capabilities. The model was not intended for public use, and was only used by a small number of OpenAI personnel for internal research.
Absolutely typical, the āunexpected communicationā is hardly an emergent phenomenon, (I remember them trying to claim unexpected high success at translation tasks without specific training, which was also complete BS), like you canāt act surprised that agents communicate and hack stuff if that whatās youāre instructing them to do.
Just had a shower conversation with myself, and for some reason the crystal meth metaphor (methaphor?) is really coming together in my head.
āHave you even tried some frontier meth?ā
āSure, you can also get energy with exercising, eating well, and structure. But we donāt have to live like amish people, now that we can have meth!ā
Nationalized Open Weight Models -> State-funded AI dispensory
Thereās surely a rich bounty of comparisons left to mine.
Knowledge workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your teeth.
Also works for cocaine, Iām noticing.
Might be best as a comeback, if someone compares AI to a pharmaceutical breakthrough like antibiotics.
Everything written by AI boosters tracks much more clearly if you simply replace āAIā with ācocaineā. I shall demonstrate! (Not linking to OP, because itās trash.)
āLetās pretend youāre the only person at your company using cocaine. You decide youāre going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison. [ā¦] In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting cocaine.ā
You could also compare it to the lobotomy, with how much it ruins peopleās intellect
though the lobotomized themselves werenāt among the loudest advocates of the procedure afaik
unlike trepanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning#Voluntary_trepanation
SpaceX gives $1.5m in fascist slop tokens to DHHās dotfiles. I donāt even know.
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/10/spacexai-joins-as-founding-corporate-patron/
Weiner Von Wrong, creator of the nouveau Hitler Limo, funding yet another fascist?
Weāre closing in on 7,000 pull requests from more than 550 contributors, and every one of them deserves a proper look. Thatās not a job for mere humans!
Iām lowkirkenuinely curious where this will lead.
Every one deserves a proper look! ā¦ but weāll do slop reviews instead.
Dont you know? Racist developers will solve the toxic ground on Mars.
Musk and DHH are both incompetent fascists, they were made for each other
I think this is one of the clearest indications in a long time that he doesnāt actually take his own bullshit seriously. Why does he imagine that he would be exempt from a new Holocaust? He is just one among many scheming viziers/wannabe Rasputins, heās made it clear over the years thatās the kind of position heās most comfortable with. Heās as vulnerable as anybody in the sort of power struggle that would accompany mass pogroms in the US; perhaps moreso than many.
For a long time, clever young men have been taught the parable of Plato and Dionysius of Syracuse. Some intellectuals will always convince themselves that they will be the one to guide the stupid little tyrant and not the many who end up in a slave market just outside his domain (in the legend someone bought Plato and freed him).
Yarvin wants to be Julius Streicher not the Wicked Vizier.
doesnāt work that way. also, useful idiots (sensu largo) can survive very long (and either reach the top or, one day, their usefulness ends.)
Thanks I was afk so only could do a quick share.
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonistsā signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons, because simply stealing the collective works of humanity isnāt enough
The China-Whisperers are trying to figure out how to get Rationalist Ideals into Chinese AI researchers
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmxkHm2dTLKG6GZ6i/the-anatomy-of-a-chinese-ai-researcher
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china
Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China wonāt appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to āsafety-pillā China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825
The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:
When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.
Goddamn it, people
It continues
the HPMOR comic
No no no no
HPMOR is the rationalist version of the Nigerian prince scam. It immediately weeds out anyone who isnāt a good mark.
I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the worldā¦ itās bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute āWatchtower magazineā or āDianeticsā for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.
checkinā into my motel room in Santa Clara, nearly falling flat on my face as I walk in the door. because instead of a Gideon Bible in the nightstand, this place has a printed copy of HPMoR as a doorstop
The things I printed at print shops while infiltrating a HPMOR reading group under cover in 2014ā¦
