Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

Oh what the fuck why can Mozilla not just STOP. Just... STOP. Honestly sick of this shit.

Sounds exactly like what happened at iNaturalist.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I did paid work in Japanese translation once, I stopped because the ungodly amount of work wasn't worth what they pay you. The tech people really have no idea what they're breaking by moving fast here.

Sounds like the thing to do is to say yes boss, get Baldur Bjarnason's book on business risks and talk to legal, then discover some concerns that just need the boss' sign-off in writing.

One of the core beliefs of rationalism is that Intelligence™ is the sole determinant of outcomes, overriding resource imbalances, structural factors, or even just plain old luck. For example, since Elon Musk is so rich, that must be because he is very Intelligent™, despite all of the demonstrably idiotic things he has said over the years. So, even in an artificial scenario like chess, they cannot accept the fact that no amount of Intelligence™ can make up for a large material imbalance between the players.

There was a sneer two years ago about this exact question. I can't blame the rationalists though. The concept of using external sources outside of their bubble is quite unfamiliar to them.

I was wondering why Eliezer picked chess of all things in his latest "parable". Even among the lesswrong community, chess playing as a useful analogy for general intelligence has been picked apart. But seeing that this is recent half-assed lesswrong research, that would explain the renewed interest in it.

KeepArseNX

lead dev: Jia Tan

It definitely feels like the first draft said for the longest time we had to use AI in secret because of Woke.

sigh

anyone got a good replacement?

I also learned Bitwarden bought into AI reading this. They don't appear to have let vulnerability extruders ruin their code as of this writing, but any willingness to entertain the fascism machines is enough for me to consider jumping ship.

Plus, the authors currently suing OpenAI have gotten their hands on emails and internal Slack messages discussing their deletion of the LibGen dataset - a development which opens the company up to much higher damages and sanctions from the court for destroying evidence.

For a moment there I was worried that ffmpeg had turned fash.

Anyway, amazing job ffmpeg, great responses. No notes

Grimes was married to Elon Musk and performs at events for 'heretical truth-tellers' sponsored by Peter Thiel

as someone who identifies greatly with diogenes, i say: do not trust anyone who compares themself to diogenes

Given that this is the person who composed the ode with the hook “we appreciate power”, let’s just say that my take re their opinion in this post is rather minimal

Some juicy extracts:

Soon enough then the appointed day came to pass, that Mr. Assi began playing some of the town's players, defeating them all without exception. Mr. Assi did sometimes let some of the youngest children take a piece or two, of his, and get very excited about that, but he did not go so far as to let them win. It wasn't even so much that Mr. Assi had his pride, although he did, but that he also had his honesty; Mr. Assi would have felt bad about deceiving anyone in that way, even a child, almost as if children were people.

Yud: "Woe is me, a child who was lied to!"

Tessa sighed performatively. "It really is a classic midwit trap, Mr. Humman, to be smart enough to spout out words about possible complications, until you've counterargued any truth you don't want to hear. But not smart enough to know how to think through those complications, and see how the unpleasant truth is true anyways, after all the realistic details are taken into account." [...] "Why, of course it's the same," said Mr. Humman. "You'd know that for yourself, if you were a top-tier chess-player. The thing you're not realizing, young lady, is that no matter how many fancy words you use, they won't be as complicated as real reality, which is infinitely complicated. And therefore, all these things you are saying, which are less than infinitely complicated, must be wrong."

Your flaw dear Yud isn't that your thoughts cannot out-compete the complexity of reality, it's that it's a new complexity untethered from the original. Retorts to you wild sci-fi speculations are just minor complications brought by midwits, you very often get the science critically wrong, but expect to still be taken seriously! (One might say you share a lot of Humman misquoting and misapplying "econ 101". )

"Look, Mr. Humman. You may not be the best chess-player in the world, but you are above average. [... Blah blah IQ blah blah ...] You ought to be smart enough to understand this idea."

Funilly enough the very best chess players like Nakamura or Carlsen will readily call themselves dumbasses outside of chess.

"Well, by coincidence, that is sort of the topic of the book I'm reading now," said Tessa. "It's about Artificial Intelligence -- artificial super-intelligence, rather. The authors say that if anyone on Earth builds anything like that, everyone everywhere will die. All at the same time, they obviously mean. And that book is a few years old, now! I'm a little worried about all the things the news is saying, about AI and AI companies, and I think everyone else should be a little worried too."

Of course this a meandering plug to his book!

"The authors don't mean it as a joke, and I don't think everyone dying is actually funny," said the woman, allowing just enough emotion into her voice to make it clear that the early death of her and her family and everyone she knew was not a socially acceptable thing to find funny. "Why is it obviously wrong?"

They aren't laughing at everyone dying, they're laughing at you. I would be more charitable with you if the religion you cultivate was not so dangerous, most of your anguish is self-inflicted.

"So there's no sense in which you're smarter than a squirrel?" she said. "Because by default, any vaguely plausible sequence of words that sounds it can prove that machine superintelligence can't possibly be smarter than a human, will prove too much, and will also argue that a human can't be smarter than a squirrel."

Importantly you often portray ASI as being able to manipulate humans into doing any number of random shit, and you have an unhealthy association of intelligence with manipulation. I'm quite certain I couldn't get at squirrel to do anything I wanted.

"You're not worried about how an ASI [...] beyond what humans have in the way of vision and hearing and spatial visualization of 3D rotating shapes.

Is that... an incel shape-rotator reference?

If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington – measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation – it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.

How do you write like this? How do you pick a normal joking observation and then add more words to make it worse?

First comment: "the world is bottlenecked by people who just don't get the simple and obvious fact that we should sort everyone by IQ and decide their future with it"

No, the world is bottlenecked by idiots who treat everything as an optimization problem.

The dumb strawman protagonist is called "Mr. Humman" and the ASI villain is called "Mr. Assi". I don't think any parody writer trying to make fun of rationalist writing could come up with something this bad.

The funniest comment is the one pointing out how Eliezer screws up so many basic facts about chess that even an amateur player can see all the problems. Now, if only the commenter looked around a little further and realized that Eliezer is bullshitting about everything else as well.

42 minute read

Maybe if you're a scrub. 19 minutes baby!!! And that included the minute or so that I thought about copypasting it into a text editor so I could highlight portions to sneer at. Best part of this story is that it is chess themed and takes place in "Skewers", Washington, vs. "Forks", Washington, as made famous by Twilight.

Anyway, what a pile of shit. I choose not to read Yud's stuff most of the time, but I felt that I might do this one. What do you get if you mix smashboards, goofus and gallant strips, that copypasta about needing a high IQ to like rick and morty, and the worst aspects of woody allen? This!

My summary:

Part 1. A chess player, "Mr. Humman", plays a match against "Mr. Assi" and loses. He has a conversation with a romantic interest, "Socratessa", or Tessa for short, about whether or not you can say if someone is better than another in chess. Often cited examples of other players are "Mr. Chimzee" and "Mr. Neumann".

Both "Humman" and "Socratessa" are strawmen. "Socratessa" is described as thus:

One of the less polite young ladies of the town, whom some might have called a troll,

Humman, of course, talks down to her, like so:

"Oh, my dear young lady," Mr. Humman said, quite kindly as was his habit when talking to pretty women potentially inside his self-assessed strike zone

I hate to give credit to Yud here for anything, so here's what I'll say: This characterisation of Humman is so douchey that it's completely transparent that Yud doesn't want you to like this guy. Yud's methodology was to have Humman make strawman-level arguments and portray him as kind of a creep. However, I think what actually happened is that Yud has accidentally replicated arguments/johns you might hear from a smash scrub about why they are not a scrub, but are actually a good player, just with a veneer of chess. So I don't like this character, but not because of Yud's intent.

Socratessa (Tessa for short) is, as gerikson points out, is a Socratic strawman. That's it. It's unclear why Yud describes her as either a troll or pretty. He should have just said she was gallant.* She argues that Elo ratings exist and are good enough at predicting whether one player will beat another. Of course, Humman disagrees, and as the goofus, must be wrong.*

The story should end here, as it has fulfilled its mission as an obvious analog to Yud's whole thing about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.

Part 2. Humman and Socratessa argue about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.

E: if you were wondering, yes, there is eugenics in the story.

E2: forgot to tie up some allusions, specifically the g&g of it all. Marked added sentences with a *.

I couldn't even make it through this one, he just kept repeating himself with the most absurd parody strawman he could manage.

This isn't the only obnoxiously heavy handed "parable" he's written recently: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHLdf8SB8oW5L27gg/on-fleshling-safety-a-debate-by-klurl-and-trapaucius

Even the lesswronger's are kind of questioning the point:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHLdf8SB8oW5L27gg/on-fleshling-safety-a-debate-by-klurl-and-trapaucius?commentId=BhePfCvbGaNauDqfz

I enjoyed this, but don't think there are many people left who can be convinced by Ayn-Rand length explanatory dialogues in a science-fiction guise who aren't already on board with the argument.

A dialogue that references Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, no less. But honestly Lem was a lot more terse and concise in making his points. I agree this is probably not very relevant to any discourse at this point (especially here on LW, where everyone would be familiar with the arguments anyway).

And: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3q8uu2k6AfaLAupvL/the-tale-of-the-top-tier-intellect?commentId=oHdfZkiKKffqSbTya

Reading this felt like watching someone kick a dead horse for 30 straight minutes, except at the 21st minute the guy forgets for a second that he needs to kick the horse, turns to the camera and makes a couple really good jokes. (The bit where they try and fail to change the topic reminded me of the "who reads this stuff" bit in HPMOR, one of the finest bits you ever wrote in my opinion.) Then the guy remembers himself, resumes kicking the horse and it continues in that manner until the end.

Who does he think he's convincing? Numerous skeptical lesswrong posts have described why general intelligence is not like chess-playing and world-conquering/optimizing is not like a chess game. Even among his core audience this parable isn't convincing. But instead he's stuck on repeating poor analogies (and getting details wrong about the thing he is using for analogies, he messed up some details about chess playing!).

ITT: new synonym for promptfondler: “brain cuck”

Pls dont kick dogs 😭

nostr neatly covers all obsessions of dorsey. it's literally fash-tech (original dev, fiatjaf, is a right-wing nutjob; and current development is driven by alex gleason of the truth dot social fame), deliberately designed to be impossible to moderate (“censorship-resilient”); the place is full of fascists, promptfondlers and crypto dudes.

exploding-heads, openly trumpist lemmy instance, fucked off there when admin got bored of baiting normal people, make of that what you will

Jack Dorsey seems to like throwing money at it:

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has endorsed and financially supported the development of Nostr by donating approximately $250,000 worth of Bitcoin to the developers of the project in 2023, as well as a $10 million cash donation to a Nostr development collective in 2025.

(source: wiki)

fuck nostr. flere and fullsquare covered the details well tho

I feel like the private leaderboards are also more in keeping with the spirit of the thing. You can't really have a friendly competition with a legion of complete strangers that you have no interaction with outside of comparing final times. Even when there's nothing on the line the consequences for cheating or being a dick are nonexistent, whereas in a a private group you have to deal with all your friends knowing you're an asshole going forward.

only have 12-days of puzzles

Obligatory oh good I might actually get something job-related done this December comment.

unrelated extreme political rhetoric in slides, such as “fuck [name]” and “punch [group]”.

why are they so bad at this

How old is this utterance (the source link doesn't work for me). From context it looks like just after Charlie Kirk got freeze peached.

not outside of the fascist playbook to claim that they are the real victims. The example that comes to mind is the myth of white genocide, but also literally any fascist rhetoric is like that.

It’s well trodden ground to say that genAI usage and support for genAI resonates with populist/reactionary/fascist themes in that it inherently devalues and dehumanises, and it promotes anti-intellectualism. If you can be replaced by AI, what worth do you have? And why think if the AI can do it for you?

So, of course this stuff being echoed in spaces where the majority are ignorant to the nazi tilt. They can’t and don’t understand fascism on a structural level, they can only identify it when it’s trains and gas chambers.

It's been a while since I used Reddit. Is the thesis that subscribers to ChatGPT will be rounded up and killed? By whom? For what stated reason? It sounds like a weird inversion of victimhood, considering the number of GenAI user (even if they're just casual users) and the massive money and hype around GenAI by companies and way too many govs.

What's a government backstop, and does it happen often? It sounds like they're asking for a preemptive bail-out.

I checked the rest of Zitron's feed before posting and its weirder in context:

Interview:

She also hinted at a role for the US government "to backstop the guarantee that allows the financing to happen", but did not elaborate on how this would work.

Later at the jobsite:

I want to clarify my comments earlier today. OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments. I used the word "backstop" and it mudlled the point.

She then proceeds to explain she just meant that the government 'should play its part'.

Zitron says she might have been testing the waters, or its just the cherry on top of an interview where she said plenty of bizzare shit

He said that Common Crawl is “making an earnest effort” to remove content but that the file format in which Common Crawl stores its archives is meant “to be immutable. You can’t delete anything from it.”

makes me wonder if it's some crypto hangover

In 2023, he sent a letter urging the U.S. Copyright Office not “to hinder the development of intelligent machines” and included two illustrations of robots reading books.

cheerleaders for creepiest weirdos in sv try to deflect criticism by becoming impossible to parody

sv does have for some time a peculiar understanding of this and also some other terms, like "consent", "ownership", "privacy", "safety",

wasn't common crawl the one that pulled a similar trick to goog's "if you label a thing as $x we won't include you"[0]? I could swear I heard their name in association with some derpshit intake management stuff above and beyond the typical fundamental "free/open scraper set" problems

[0] - a tactic google first pulled with Streetview cars pulling in a pile of wifi beacons and tying it to location - "if you don't want it just rename your AP to '{prefix} - {apname}'". a reply that was just dumb and aggravating but also it fucking sucks that basically no standards have taken this problem to heart in the ~15y hence

@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 It enrages me that early on in the article, the founder states that ‘Fair use’ a US construct for US copyright law only, means they can apply it to the Worlds data. The USA signed up to the Berne convention. It’s imperfect, but dammit, the signatories are meant to uphold copyrights of every country who signed up. Not ignore it and decide US copyright is the only law.

Aaand breathe.

The rat video starts with him proclaiming that in rationalism he "found his people", that was the point where I bailed.

Huh, what happened? Would you mind linking some more details?

I just saw this. I sent an email to Framework a few days ago asking if they would delete my account and letting them know this was the reason.

Hey it's the character.ai guy, a.k.a. first confirmed AI assisted kid suicide guy.

I do not believe G-d puts people in the wrong bodies.

Shazeer also said people who criticized the removal of the AI Principles were anti-Semitic.

Kind of feel the transphobia is barely scratching the surface of all the things wrong with this person.

'I don't believe people have an attribute called gender'

That must be one of the more dumber things I have read in a while.

Its also one of the authors of "Attention Is All You Need", one of the founding texts of the AI ideology.

https://www.ibtimes.sg/dramatic-video-captures-moment-openai-ceo-sam-altman-served-legal-notice-onstage-during-san-82346

"An investigator from the San Francisco Public Defender's Office lawfully served a subpoena on Mr. Altman because he is a potential witness in a pending criminal case," spokesperson Valerie Ibarra said in a statement to SFGATE.

In a post on X, the group wrote that one of their public defenders had managed to serve Sam Altman with a subpoena, requiring him to testify at their upcoming trial. They explained that the case involves their previous non-violent demonstrations, including blocking the entrance and the road in front of OpenAI's offices on multiple occasions.

"All of our non-violent actions against OpenAI were an attempt to slow OpenAI down in their attempted murder of everyone and every living thing on earth."

So it's not because he's being prosecuted.

This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.

"I don't understand recursion" energy

Also where they keep the warp engine and the zero point energy generators. Wake up sheeple.

Broke: Wyoming gold mine

Woke: Wyoming bison ranch

Bespoke: Wyoming AI lab

Lmaou thats some good cope right there

Part of me wants to see Google actually try this and get publicly humiliated by their nonexistent understanding of physics, part of me dreads the fact it'll dump even more fucking junk into space.

This is a joke, right?

E: my enshittified brain thought that this was some kind of AI enabled smart ring that also told the time. This is kinda fun actually, tho I would never get one

Casio and their target market are my kind of nerds. Taking a silly idea and an iconic design and pushing the engineering to its limits entirely for the bit is absolutely unhinged and I'm so happy they did it.

As a gshock fan, the "democratization" of that initial gshock ring is amazing lol

@istewart @cstross

I like mailbox.org so far with their servers in Germany

I am using posteo.de. They are good but I dislike that they have no option for using your own domain which makes switching provider really annoying. If I had to choose a provider again I would probably go with mailbox.org.

haven't seen them before, but a short tour around their infra/systems providers isn't particularly exciting - depending on both your threat model and what-you-want in a vendor

some parts/pages do provide some detail in encouraging depth, but I'd have to do a much more full review to give you a good answer

there's been a couple of "where email" threads over the last year, tuta's still one of the top options on that but you can check the threads if you want to see some of the other promising options

I'm in the same boat. From what I've read I am planning on migrating to tuta when it runs out.

Im very very happy on Fastmail. They are sensible people who offer mainly email (and calendar stuff) with no overpromises. Their servers are hosted in the USA tho, so that may affect your choice.

What do you mean by decline? Years ago I've been involved in a local ruby community in Poland and even back then his takes were considered unhinged.

BlueMonday has had a tendency to go off with a half-assed understanding of actual facts and details. Each individual instance wasn't ban worthy, but collectively I can see why it merited a temp ban. (I hope/assume it's not a permanent ban, is there a way to see?)

Not permanently, by the looks of it.

Looks like a hobby project of someone who has very particular views about computers.

I'm not sure what kind of neural network are they planning to run on a custom FPGA based GPU with 4GB RAM shared with CPU

I regret to inform you that the creator is a coiner

https://cloudhead.io/whoami/

also all-in on AI

https://bsky.app/profile/cloudhead.io/post/3m4w2bqtajs2f

It sounds a little like “natural language is an awful way to unambiguously specify systems… but what if there was a special computer language that you could use to create computer programs in? 🤯” combined with a something that sounds a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choreographic_programming which already exists, but I guess represents a new frontier for vibe coding distributed systems, which are famously amenable to yolo development.

I would assume nothing stops them but I would love to get an analysis of why they may not be looking into this from someone who actually knows what they're talking about. Best I can come up with from a complete layman's perspective is that they're concerned about the valuation they'd end up with. Not sure if the retail market had enough juice to actually pay for a company that is hypothetically one of the most valuable companies in the world, and puncturing that narrative might bring the whole bubble down (in a way that costs a lot of normal investors their shirts, of course).