Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

And here is the complaint, via evacide.

So oil prices are down again, and on nothing but a promise from Trump and a promise from the EU. The economy has proved remarkably resilient to me; the attack on Iran is like, wild nonsense number 17 that the USA regime did that I thought would trigger a major recession, and didn't.

I mean don't get me wrong, things are much worse now than 3 years ago, clearly. But they're not like, Great Depression worse. They're not even 2008 worse. It's just a certain level of degradation (cost of living is higher, purchasing power is lower, concentration of wealth is higher etc.) that people got used to as the new normal. People can get used to lots of things.

To make the IT analogy, I think the global economy is like Twitter. Sure, it feels like a Jenga tower held up by thoughts and prayers, but it's holding up. When Musk took over I really did think his catastrophic management philosophy would completely break Twitter, but no, it trudges on. Yes, moderation is now nonexistent, and I'm told it's down more often, and often in "soft downtime" like notifications not working, or DMs, or some other feature, or it's working but slow, and so on. But clearly the site is up most of the time and more or less functional. Users just get used to degraded quality as the new normal.

I predict AWS will 1) get slower and costlier thanks to "AI", with higher downtime, at higher stress for the workers; 2) the leadership will refuse to see or admit or even consciously be aware of this; 3) the worsened services will be the new normal. I predict similar developments for the socioeconomic situation of the world, too; though I'm not ruling out a spiral into complete recession, either.

to follow this one up: there is now a new study about AI agents being dogshit at keeping code working over the long term

I wonder if one of the reasons Pete Hegseth is going so hard after Anthropic is that he and other idiots in the Pentagon unironically believes shit like AI 2027 and so wants to soft nationalize the frontier companies so to control the coming AGI. Considering that one of the uses the DoD allegedly wants LLMs for is fully autonomous weapons that at the very least have a very distorted view of what the technology is capable of. Or they want an accountability sink so they can kill people with even less accountability. ...probably both.

I find it darkly hilarious that the doomer crit-hype is finally coming around to bite them, not in the form of heavy handed shut-it-all-down regulation to stop skynet, but in the form of authoritarian wackos wanting to make sure they are the ones "in charge" of skynet.

Reading comments cause I was bored, and had the misfortune to stumble upon this horribly formatted piece of work allegedly written by Claude

"Selling your soul to the company store is not just fun, it is also invigorating!"

this is just wages paid in crypto but adapted to new era in a way that doesn't make sense

Man, that harper piece is a full DnD alignment chart of the most online bay area weirdos you've ever seen.

I was not ready

AI was going to give us all universal healthcare but we didn't believe hard enough and now all we have is this.

"Our lethal capacities. Our ability to fight war."

These are two different things. But I fear he doesn't get that.

Actually the race-realism use last week, combined with this one, makes me realize that for them it's just a fancy way of saying "world-view" [or what they consider to exist, and be true, which is not the craziest use of the word, but I would say unhelpful, and probably a small in-group marker].

It's just a way of calling biases/prejudice legitimate.

And you know what, inasmuch the models have a "world-view" it IS annoyingly american in many ways. (at least the wrong kind of american.)

I was low-key hoping for a technical philosophical article, which argues that to find any of this shit useful you need a distinctly american understanding of reality.

I mean I guess given how the current guy took a chainsaw to American soft power, industrial capacity, economic prospects, and so on I guess our wildly over funded military is probably the only comparative advantage we unambiguously hold onto.

you gotta give him a morsel of credit, he's got his buzzword and he's stickin' to it

It was very good, and I'm glad I clicked through to the link to Robert Kingett's story "The Colonization of Confidence", which deserves its own highlight.

Even if the constant reminders that I'm trapped in the machine are painful.

Systemd

Jesus.

I've been advocating for a hall of fame of projects that explicitly reject LLMs; ctrl+f "Gentoo" on this very comment thread for the few examples I heard about.

Eh, straight pip with venv and pip-tools for support worked fine anyway. wrong uv!

As for systemd... time to look at the BSDs? Was Debian among the anti-slop projects? Would be nice if they took an interest in preventing the slopification of one of their core system.

It's true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they needn't be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life.

This bothers me more than I can explain.

ICE as autoimmune disorder presupposes that it's normally a good thing to have ICE around and it's just malfunctioning as an exceptional state of things. If ICE is an immune system (malfunctional or not), what are we immigrants?

They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules.

1. Yes they are

and

1. It's worse than that, they're vibe coding critical operating system components

Take "Morgellons Disease," a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:

Nitpick but this is unusually sloppy for Doctorow. 1) People with Morgellon's don't believe they have wires growing out of sores, but fibres (which upon examination turn out to be cotton for clothes). 2) The original Morgellons is a putative children's disease «wherein they critically break out with harsh Hairs on their Backs, which takes off the Unquiet Symptomes of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions.» Which is quite different from the modern condition, whose sufferers have skin sores anywhere in the body with fibrous material looking like lint, dandelion fluff etc., and not particularly associated with convulsions. And 3) The association between the two was made by Miriam Leitao, a mother who believes her son suffers from the disease, and has gone to countless doctors and media trying to prove it's real. So it's an attempt to legitimise the postulated disease by cherry-picking something "historical" that vaguely resembles it.

Kind of wild that the guy who popularized "enshittification" as a term will die on the hill that the technology which drives the industrial enshittification of all human media is fine actually, because some people find the plugins useful.

The one-shotting phenomenon (or how a positive initial experience with the technology seems to lead to a heavily biased view of its merits) should probably be considered a distinct cognitive bias at this point.

Turns out a lot of bright people can't deal with a technology being utterly subjective in its efficiency, and also how that's specifically the part that reduces it to being so narrowly useful as to force the existential question, given the insane resource burn and the socioeconomic disruption that's part and parcel, even if like Doctorow you think that their rape and pillage of artist's rights and intellectual property in general isn't an especially big deal.

Also, local LLMs are hardly extricable from the whole mess, they are basically a byproduct, and updated versions only will keep coming as long as their imperial size online counterparts remain a viable concern.

Man, it's frustrating to see him end up going down this route because the opening part of this is actually one of the better descriptions of AI psychosis I've seen, and i appreciate his emphasis on the way the delusion is built up in the sufferer's mind rather than trying to game out what's happening "inside" the chatbot. Even his point about how LLMs aren't bad in exceptional ways for a new technology is pretty cogent. But his insistence on defending his own use of these things (and others who do so in "centaur-configured" ways) rather than thinking about how it interacts with all the relatively normal ways that this technology is wildly destructive is a very conspicuous blind spot.

Like, you can absolutely drive a nail with a phone book, and given the wider surface area it even has the advantage over a traditional hammer of being harder to smash your fingers. An individual craftsman may well decide that this is a useful tool and in some cases worth using over other options. But if the only source of these hammer-books was an industry that relied on massive uncompensated use of creative work passed through exploited third-world labor, ground rainforests to dust to create special "old-growth paper", placed massive and unsustainable burdens on existing road infrastructure to collect these parts and deliver them, and somehow had been blown into a speculative bubble that represented something like a quarter of the entire US economy by promising that if they created a big enough book then one guy could hammer all the nails at once and they could lay off all the carpenters, I think it's justifiable to look at the people using it as a normal tool and ask them "what the actual fuck are you doing?" The usage statistics they represent and the user stories they tell are used to justify not addressing any of the harms necessary to enable this tool to exist in its current form, and are largely driving the absurd valuations that keep pumping the bubble. Your individual role in those harms as a small-time user who finds it occasionally useful may be incalculably small, but it is still real.

Like, it feels like I agree with Doctorow on basically all the premises here. He seems to have a decent grasp on how the things actually work (even if he's wrong about Ollama specifically being an LLM in its own right) and their associated limitations. He draws a decent line separating criticism from criti-hype. He is basically correct about how much of a bastard everyone involved in the industry at a high level is. But maybe because so many of these things aren't really exceptional (save possibly in their sheer scale) he can't seem to conceive of a world where things happen any differently, or of the role his actions and words play in reinforcing the status quo even as he writes pretty explicitly about how fucked up that status quo is.

Honestly it makes me think of the finale of his second Martin Hench novel, The Bezzle. After drilling into the business of the private prison operator that is making his friend's life hell and separating the merely fucked up parts from the things that might actually have consequences if word got to what passes for cops in that tax bracket, he doesn't go to the papers or start reaching out to the SEC. Instead he goes to the bastard at the head of it all and blackmails him into making his friend's remaining incarceration less hellish and leaving him alone. And his friend, who started all this by begging for help unraveling this shit, rightly calls Marty a coward for it. There's something ironic in seeing Doctorow here seemingly make the same judgement: abuse and apathy are sufficiently normal that we shouldn't even bother to try and make the world better, just find ways to shelter ourselves and the people we care about from the consequences. And hell, I guess even there I'm not immune to it. There are reasons why I'm posting here and not waiting out front of a hotel with some engraved brass. Still, on the continuum of such things I'm disappointed that the guy who wrote that scene is stuck in the normalization blues.

He knows how LLMs work, right? This really is just cope because he got called out for being weird about using them. Really fucking disappointing

I feel like at this point I want to highlight the ones that took a clear stance against LLM code. On a chardet thread, people listed:

• Gentoo
• Servo
• Loupe
• Qemu
• postmarketOS
• GoTo Social
• Zig

guess i'll have to write my own unifiedpush provider

The specific article's framing pisses me off...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei picked a major fight with the Department of Defense last month, asserting that his company’s AI models couldn’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or direct autonomous weapons systems.

As to who picked a fight with who, the DoD wanted to change the terms of their contract, to which Anthropic apparently compromised on every term except for mass surveillance of Americans (fuck the rest of the world I guess) and fully autonomous weapons (cause a human clicking "yes to confirm" makes slop-bot powered drones so much better). This wasn't good enough for this authoritarian strongman administration, so Pete Hegseth took the fight public with tweets first. So the article framing it as Anthropic "picking a fight" is a bullshit framing. I mean, they did kind of bring it on themselves hyping up their slop machine like it was a sci-fi AGI, but they didn't start the fight.

For one, “it’s 100 percent in the government’s prerogative to set the parameters of a contract,” Snell & Winter partner Brett Johnson told Wired, effectively meaning there may be very little chance of an appeal.

So they find a quote about contracts, but a Supply Chain Risk isn't just the DoD deciding on contracts, it is a specific power that has specific mechanisms set by legislation. If (and it is a big if with the current Supreme Court's composition) the court actually considers the terms set out in the legislation (including, most problematically for the DoD, a risk assessment and consideration of less intrusive alternatives), I think the DoD loses. Of course, the SC has all too often been willing to simply defer to the executive branch's judgement, even if the process for the judgement was "Trump or one of his underlings made a choice on a spiteful or idiotic whim, announced it on twitter, and the departments underneath them rushed to retroactively invent a saner rationalization". If the DoD decided to just end the contract (without all the public threats of SCR or invoking the Defense Production Act) Anthropic wouldn't be in a position to sue and this drama wouldn't have been as publicized in the first place.

But the lawsuit itself takes a dramatically different tone.

Yeah because one set of a language is a CEO trying to grovel and backtrack on one of the rare few ethical commitments he has ever made, and the other is making a court case about the actual law.

whoever loses, we win

https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1rrhzhc/doge_lead_in_deposition_details_how_he_emailed/

Behold: the Silicon Valley masters of opsec.

I’ve heard of it, including in some outlets that (at the distance I am to it) seemed to pass the sniff test

but I’ve also seen it kick around TPOT

so I’d definitely want to seek out the advice of an expert if I cared about it

Actually had a therapist introduce me to it. It can be a useful model, and if I were to boil it down to a single adage it would be: pay attention to how you talk to yourself. But I don't think it is as simple as saying you contain a multitude, each part was developed to help the person survive and as you get older you might collect more parts and suppress others. It actually reminded me a bit of Lacan and the developmental stages.

I recall there was a recent critical piece about it but I can’t remember where it was.

Zoe Curzi reported that IFS was used within Leverage Research and that after she escaped the cult, she used Internal Family Systems therapy to heal and accept that Leverage did not offer unique insights.

If this is the real reason:

It's because, for a long time, most of their content was behind a signup wall with no obvious workaround. I don't know if it still is or not. If it isn't, we can change it.

It is baffling that this isn't communicated upfront to the users. Really weird move orange site.

CFAR seems to have pivoted back to focusing on the workshops. Their winter 2025/2026 fundraiser only raised $10k with a goal of $125k. The curriculum sounds very New Age:

If you’ve been to a CFAR workshop in the ~2015-2020 era, you should expect that current ones: ... Have roughly 1/3rd new content, mostly aimed at practical ways to be less “seeing like a state” when applying rationality techniques, and to be more “a proud gardener of the living processes inside you / a free person with increasing powers of authorship.” (We've been calling this thread "honoring who-ness.")

No masks in their photo of a workshop posted February 2025 (2024 was a pretty bad year for airborne infections where I live, and alienated educated young people are more likely to wear respirators than normies, so I would expect to see someone in that room wearing a N95 or Flo). If building warm and nurturing relationships is important then it helps to be able to eat together and see each other's faces. The venue is about a 90 minute drive from Oakland, CA (the East Bay).

This paragraph leapt out at me:

On Day 4 of the four day workshop, we spent three and a half hours on an activity called Questing, in which participants took turns being the “hero” (who worked on whatever they liked) and the “sidekick” (who assisted at the hero’s direction) for ~10 minute chunks. This activity was extremely well-liked (did best of all activities on our survey; many said many great things about it).

If you read that and say "doesn't that sound like Effort Exchange in the Dragon Army Barracks?" you should go home and rethink the regrettable things you learn on the Internet. I look forward to reading the book on LessWrong, the splinter sects, and just how much they had in common after a hard day gardening in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Before FTX collapsed my model of LW was something like cryptozoology enthusiasts who trade posts and sometimes meet at a con, now its more like Scientology. Early Scientology offered a community and a path to self-improvement.

The four-day live-in rationality workshops at CFAR remind me of the live-in blog fests and conferences at Lighthaven. Someone in the comments to the January 2016 posts asks why pay $4,000 for a workshop in the SF Bay Area when you can learn similar content at a college where you live or from free online courses (the commenter later recanted this blatant heresy). Its hard to argue that in-person events in the SF Bay Area are an efficient use of funds, but they let people who already live there keep themselves busy.

Hello from the Center for Applied Rationality! ... We have a new experimental mini-workshop coming up soon (June 2025) and hopefully more workshop content to follow after! ... Pricing is $750 for the CFAR event, plus another $450 to sign up for Arbor (at Lighthaven in Berkeley). This is notably cheaper than the $3900 we've historically charged for most mainline CFAR workshops, since it's a more experimental program -- future workshops will likely be more expensive than this test. https://less-wrong.livejournal.com/4396115.html

This post claims that they could not find anyone doing anything similar https://acritch.com/cfar-scaling/ I know a US military veteran who had a critical thinking course which he pulled out whenever he had a training day to occupy, so maybe they needed to look outside their bubble?

I somehow missed how American leftists were instrumental in urging the Iranian people to oust the Shah. Leftists like... Jimmy Carter[1]

edit this is typical US-centrism, other people don't have any agency, it's all about America

[1] I know, I know, about as left-wing as Genghis Khan

to what extent does he actually believe this? is that even a meaningful question? i think this narrative is way too esoteric and absurd to really convince anyone, so it doesn't even appear valuable if his goal is to flood the zone with post-truth nonsense.

Hmm, he's still sticking to tweet-threads on Twitter. We'll know he's fully cracking when he resorts to Ackman-style unreadable text blocks on there.

Really weird focus on Brooklyn.

they're both worse

I tend to like her education takes. Like the first piece of hers that I read.

Depending on your DNS provider, you may not be able to use archive.today without infinite captchas. I believe Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and NextDNS are affected this way. Google (8.8.8.8) apparently is not.

That specific instance of Archive Today seems to have been taken over by activists who edit their copies of some pages and performed a DDOS attack (although all I know comes from social media posts and news stories). https://www.avclub.com/archiveis-under-fbi-investigation

Man, I wish I had enough money to fuck around with nonprofit shenanigans

It's theoretically possible to keep them separate, but I would assume in this case that it's evidence that regardless of intentions CFAR and lightcone are sufficiently closely linked to be basically the same organization. I mean, if there's not a separate legal entity then I would assume anything involving money is going to require the same person or persons to sign off on the transaction, regardless of what the board looks like.

Really not liking the ratio of tech industry sneer to ZOG NWO thought control rant in this one, honestly. (Not to mention the latter gives way too much credence to the absolute nonsense brain chippers love to spout about neuroscience.)

I mean there are a few good sneers in this piece but the author seems to be a "jewish conspiracy seeks to control the world" type nazi, and I don't think we want to platform that kind of rhetoric