Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd November 2025 - awful.systems

Just had a conversation about AI where I sent a link to Eddy Burback's ChatGPT Made Me Delusional video. They clarified that no, it's only smart people who are more productive with AI since they can filter out all the bad outputs, and only dumb people would suffer all the negative effects. I don't know what to fucking say.

habryka:

I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week.

FUCKIN

Hey, remember Grokipedia?

Its article on Newton's law of gravity is, like, 50% rendering errors by weight.

interesting writeup on detecting ai music (newgrounds bans ai content)

https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-moderation/how-to-detect-ai-audio

Continuation of the lesswrong drama I posted about recently:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=nMaWdu727wh8ukGms

Did you know that post authors can moderate their own comments section? Someone disagreeing with you too much but getting upvoted? You can ban them from your responding to your post (but not block them entirely???)! And, the cherry on top of this questionable moderation "feature", guess why it was implemented? Eliezer Yudkowsky was mad about highly upvoted comments responding to his post that he felt didn't get him or didn't deserve that, so instead of asking moderators to block on a case-by-case basis (or, acasual God forbid, consider maybe if the communication problem was on his end), he asked for a modification to the lesswrong forums to enable authors to ban people (and delete the offending replies!!!) from their posts! It's such a bizarre forum moderation choice, but I guess habryka knew who the real leader is and had it implemented.

Eliezer himself is called to weigh in:

It's indeed the case that I haven't been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it'd had Twitter's options for turning off commenting entirely.

So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven't been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.

Uh, considering his recent twitter post... this sure is something. Also" "it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience" no shit sherlock, deleting a highly upvoted reply because it feels like too much effort to respond to is in fact going to make people unsympathetic (at the least).

Meanwhile in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, they published a deluxe illustrated version of A Feast for Crows which is blatantly obviously "AI" "art", Like it's bad generic souless fantasy "art" where you often can't even recognise which character it's meant to depict. And now the responsible art director is in damage control mode, claiming that they'd ever use "AI" and unsubtly blaming the hired "artist" (one Jeffrey R. McDonald), even though it takes like 15 seconds to spot that these illustrations are completely inappropriate for the book. It feels like they hired the cheapest they could and didn't care about anything else than cost-cutting.

And behold, the publisher is on record saying they'd do exactly that:

Mr. Malaviya’s primary goal is growth. After the collapse of the Simon & Schuster deal, it became clear Penguin Random House could not buy its way out of the decline, so much of its growth will have to come organically — by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees … Last year, the company laid off about 60 people and offered voluntary buyouts for longtime employees.

Some of the fan backlash with samples of the "art", if you must hurt your eyes: thread 1, thread 2.

Other than warped architecture, wonky perspectives, Escherian objects etc., the characters don't even look like or dress in the colours of the chapters they're "Illustrating". Those who know the fandom know how important heraldry is for the series, there's no sigils in the illustrations and people wear the wrong colours, etc. This is the series were a noblewoman showing up to a party in a green dress rather than black was a declaration of war. Tywin Lannister, famously bald, is depicted in his funeral with long hair and wearing a crown, you know, to illustrate the passage that says he never wore a crown in his life. He also looks identical to King Viserys from the House of the Dragon TV series. His daughter Cersei is shown mourning him with a blue dress, as in the same character whose house colours are red-gold, in the same chapter that states she's wearing funeral black.

At some point a character has a crucifix on the wall

Yud:

one of Earth's top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work

It's Aella.

PR for AI slop generated DWARF support for ocaml. Expectation: doesn’t work

Reality: replicates existing support from another project including attribution to the author.

good god

The statistics back up his unease. Buy-now-pay-later services have exploded to 91.5 million users in the United States

with the rapidly checked population number I found (340.1m), that's 26.9%

..., with 25% using the services to finance their groceries as of earlier this year

perfectly normal, I'm sure nothing can go wrong here. and this won't be tied in with just the recent SNAP shit, either

what's the german word for "the feeling you get when you know the bolts on the rollercoaster are shaking loose incrementally and you can see the Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly Event coming up"?

@cityofangelle.bsky.social comments:

HAHAAHHAHAAHHAAA

Anthropic has posted two jobs, both paying $200K+.

FOR WRITERS. (Looks like a policy/comms hybrid.)

ANTHROPIC.

IS WILLING TO PAY HALF A MILLION A YEAR.

FOR WRITERS.

Whatsamatter boys, can't your plagiarism machine make a compelling case for you?

LOL. LMAO, even.

at://did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/app.bsky.feed.post/3m5z5da4mvk24

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/post/3m5z5da4mvk24

Windscribe's twitter account being transphobic.

I wanted to highlight this post from our own @self: https://mas.to/@zzt/115545758401562713

the feeling of launching an unreal tournament 2004 server by telling ucc-bin, the unrealscript compilation environment that knows itself as UnrealOS, to evaluate the editable scripts that made up the core of unreal tournament, its rich web admin interface, and the ecosystem of tools and facilities that make it nicer to host than quake, and remembering that unrealscript and self-hosted servers are both long dead and all this tech is used to make kids gamble in fortnite now

betrayal, that’s it

I hardly ever ran a server, as during the era I lived out in the country and could only get barely-capable rural wireless broadband, but it is galling what Epic threw away, especially now that they've memory-holed UT2K3/2K4 off of storefronts like GOG. It was perhaps the first commercial game I remember having a completely seamless cross-platform experience with, including Linux. As long as I had my CD key and the data files handy, it didn't matter what OS I was installing on, just download the installer and go. I remember provisioning entire LAN parties and having a blast (and then reusing the CD key didn't matter because we were partying out in the country with no chance of a good online experience anyway). Glad I was able to snag it from GOG before delisting, because I don't know what happen to my original Mac DVD.

found this sneer-y blog post prompted by some linkedin lunatic posting his "agentic cockpit"

I feel like "we'll just build a world model" is on the same level as saying " we'll just solve the P vs NP problem."

::: spoiler img text How to draw an owl:

1. draw some circles. (drawing of circles)
2. draw the rest of the fucking owl. (very skillful and detailed drawing of an owl)

:::

https://superuser.com/questions/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chromes-optguideondevicemodel-safely-its-taking-up-4gb/1930446#1930446

Can I delete the Chrome's OptGuideOnDeviceModel safely? It's taking up 4GB

. . .

I also founds mentions of bunch of various flags you can potentially disable to turn the whole feature off, e.g. chrome://flags/#optimization-guide-on-device-model - but I've seen at least 5 other ones mentioned in several sources, with various people claiming for each that they don't work . . .

Now Chrome can hog your VRAM too. Yay

Don't worry if you only have 8GB and need the other half for anything, Chrome will probably relinquish it. This is very intelligent, as all the browser has to do is simply load another 4GB file from disk the next time you do anything.

Off topic: if the Culture novels are ever adapted for television, all of the Culture people/ships/etc should have Scottish accents.

Armin Ronacher, creator of the vastly popular Python Flask and Jinja framworks, comes out in defence of DHH, saying his racist diatribe about the ethnic make up of London was in fact not racist, and the state of Israel, that it's apparently fine that it remains an oppressive ethnostate in order to 'preserve its particular cultural identity'.

https://lobste.rs/s/necwp9/praise_dhh#c_r1jvrx (archive)

https://mastodon.social/@alatiera/115531823601853748

I tried using Fluidsynth only to find that drums don't work. I looked around on github and found that they are toying with copilot to fix a related issue and that vibe code has already been merged 🙃

I saw this, so now you all get to: Alex Karp performs a stationary Gatotsu with a sabre, don’t ask me why.

::: spoiler E: reference explainer and visual description The Gatotsu is a fictional swordfighting style from the manga/anime series Rurouni Kenshin wielded by Saitou Hajime, one of the main characters. It also refers to the frequent stance and movement Hajime makes when fighting.

In the video, Alex Karp stands next to a young woman. One may surmise that he is trying to impress her with a display of sword mastery. In his right hand he is holding a broad, curved sword, maybe a sabre. His left arm is outstretched at shoulder height in front of him, pointing at an imaginary target, and the sword is pointing at the same target, held at the same height with the flat side parallel to the ground. He performs an awkward looking thrust, as if mimicking the Gatotsu as mentioned above. In the rest of the video he is playing around with the sword, sometimes performing the same thrust and otherwise tossing it limply around in his hand.

There is text at the top of video reading:

Your CEO: Powerpoint

Palantir CEO: :::

Super forecasters update timeline by 150% their og forecast.

Fucking dumbasses

Whitehouse AI czar (rightfully) imo pointing out that it's pretty shit behavior to shout fire in a movie theatre and instead of admitting fault just typing ¯_(ツ)_/¯ in chat

PERHAPS WE SHOULD HAVE TITLED OUR PREDICTION AI 2027 DIFFERENTLY???

The bailey: AI 2027 😱 The motte: ahem actually we had a footnote that said AI 2030, so we don't need feel the need to retract/apologize/or slightly edit our fearmongering website.

Let this be an albatross around scoots neck forever lmaou.

Headline per Thegamer: Krafton CEO Admits He Used ChatGPT For "Faster Answers" To Avoid Paying Subnautica 2 Co-Founders

Checked back in on Framework's rotting corpse.

The company's retired their official Discord server (in the Blade Runner sense), about a month after the mod team jumped ship over the company's fash turn. There's discussion on the Framework forums about it, too.

Its not the only social media platform they've abandoned - they left Bluesky and Mastodon to court fascists on Twitter a while ago.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has caused backlash for Activision after AI slop Calling Cards were discovered in-game.

Beyond causing large-scale backlash on Reddit, Twitter and basically everywhere else, its also gotten called out by US Congressman Ro Khanna (also on Twitter).

In other news, it appears that Cloudflare has pulled a Crowdstrike

edit: looks like the problem resolved after a few hours

Sometimes, I get to peer into the AI pilled brain, and it is... uh... not good.

But now if I suffer from Imposter syndrome I can remind myself that some other people take advice from clankers.

https://bsky.app/profile/carnage4life.bsky.social/post/3m634z3r7kk2l

Transcript:

The fact I can login every morning and ask an AI to review all my emails and chats from yesterday then given what it knows about my goals and my role it should suggest what I could have done better is amazing.

Bubble or not, AI is huge for personal productivity and overall improvement.

Yud as Modok

Mozilla continues to double down on AI, promising to "do for AI what we did for the web" in their latest (probably AI-extruded) blogpost.

In related news, I found a toot thread attributing the current shitfest (and AI's popularity in general) to "a strong majority of even the actually well-intentioned, smart leaders in tech [getting] their brains fully cooked by these heuristics machines". Where the OP is finding those "well-intentioned, smart leaders", I do not know.

Somehow, HPMoR could have been even worse.

I ruled no intelligence enhancement magic in HPMOR because otherwise it turns into Project Lawful.

https://xcancel.com/allTheYud/status/1992265494507008382#m

Databricks CEO: “we’ve already achieved AGI fam, the haters just keep moving the goalposts”

Saw a video talking about Google officially releasing “nano banana pro” which i regret to inform you is a real product and that the video was not a shitpost.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/harnessing-hybrid-intelligence/202511/the-psychology-of-collective-abandonment

Article I found randomly because... I was trying to add the Psychology Today blog to uBlacklist so I stop seeing their articles lol

It lost me a little towards the end, but it's heartwarming to imagine a world where tech fascists screaming about the Antichrist have a few* billion dollars less and actual charities have a few more.

*where few = [3, ∞)

Presented without comment. (Don't have source, but I did find another link mocking Grok glazing Musk)

Paul Campos - The medium is the mob

Discusses the "reverse Flynn effect", filter bubbles, and infopollution via GenAI

The generic abyss of artificial intelligence | John R. Gallagher

All this business talk from CEOs about AI automating work comes down to them not valuing the input of workers. You can hear the jubilant ejaculative rhetoric about robots because robots represent firing all the workers. CEOs see their workers as interchangeable laborers who fit inside of templates. They want workers who pull the levers of templates. They’ve always wanted this since the individual revolution. But now the templates are no longer physical commodities but instead our stories, our genres.

Call it template capitalism. Social media companies are already operating under this logic through the templates they force on users. As the car companies have done by forcing drivers into templates. Or shoe companies have accomplished with standard sizes. There’s nothing stopping the knowledge sectors of the economy from extending that logic to workers. Knowledge workers are being deskilled by making them obey the generic templates of LLMs.

Template capitalism hollows out the judgment of individual knowledge workers by replacing slowly accreted genre experiences with the summed average of all genres. Under this system, knowledge workers merely ensure the machines don’t make errors (or what the AI companies have just relabeled “hallucinations”). The nuance of situated knowledge evaporates, leaving behind procedural obedience. The erosion of individual judgment is the point. Workers who diverge from the ordained path of LLMs are expendable. If you challenge the templates, you get fired.

They've always wanted this, indeed. There's some comfort to me in the reminder that this year's layoffs are no different than the last cycle, except maybe the excuses are thinner.

210 IQ is not enough

Being really "smart" (along some axis) doesn't make you succesful or even happy.

NAS: Found out just now that Simone Veil’s pictures for sad children is back online, and has been for a while now. Her art meant a lot to me when I was reading it. Just letting you all know in case it meant something to you too.

Adam Mastroianni has the audacity to claim that people don't seem to join phygs any more, gets clip art from Astral Codex Ten and hosts a vlog for Inkhaven guests https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance

sorry my brain's already clocked out for the day (/week?), so [insert sneer here]

context is this

Meanwhile, the $800 million Kraken raised across its two recent rounds of financing further solidifies the company’s balance sheet before its planned IPO next year.... Prior to the two rounds, Kraken had raised only $27 million in venture capital.

simply a mere 29.6x amplification. perfectly normal. 12000000% in line with the economic market shift between checks notes Less Than A Decade Ago and now

Little late but just found out that Google has partnered with Movember to push Gemini.

Not content with forcing AI on anyone and everyone, Apple has forced the lying machines on AI-rejecting writing software Scrivener.

Internet Comment Etiquette: "Fixing the AI Coke Ad" nsfw, happy friday