Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
159 Comments
nfultz@awful.systems · 19 pts · 67d
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer
Please, just fucking don't, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don't actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.
samvines@awful.systems · 12 pts · 67d
Easiest way to avoid using LLMs as a software developer appears to be to get a religious exemption
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 18 pts · 72d
Got another chance to experience slop firsthand when the instructor for my electrician course was 'encouraged' to use the hallucinatron to help create our final exam on the NEC. Now given that the NEC is a dense technical document with a lot of minor but significant variation across its considerable length, this was clearly a perfect use case. Here's how it shook out:
It condensed 100 multiple choice questions from the input to 36
On one question "1-2 inches" was simplified to "12"
Units in general seem to have been dropped off a lot of questions and answer choices. Usually this didn't matter too much but it's a bad look
Another question asked about fill percentages for a 30 inch conduit. If you look around your office or he and see a >2ft diameter piece of PVC pipe let me know because the tables in the NEC only go up to 6 inches. This is actually a unit issue again because one of the questions on the input test referred to a 30mm conduit which, you know, does actually exist.
Other questions had a correct answer matching a generic part of the NEC, but had additional information added as a distractor that ended up matching to more specific elements that changes the relevant rule.
Several questions asked about the reasoning behind a certain rule. Notably the NEC rarely actually gets into that information, as it's already an incredibly long reference and policy document and would be made even more unweildy if it gave the justification for everything that you should be learning as part of becoming a licensed electrician.
However, this rarely mattered as the answer choices for those questions uniformly included an obviously correct answer about a generic safety risk and distractors about doing things for cost savings, aesthetic reasons, or arbitrarily.
Given that one of the challenges of this test is time management and looking things up, having to deal with the extra layer of "is this just slop or am I missing something" ended up adding an extra and unintended layer of difficulty onto the test. As always, no matter how egregious or obnoxious the errors introduced by AI, the biggest problem is the loss of trust: you can no longer assume that the text you're reading was put together with the intended purpose in mind rather than being generated to be statistically similar to text matching that purpose. Even if the differences are relatively small in scope, as they were for most questions on the test, they significantly harm the actual communication of information.
anise@awful.systems · 18 pts · 72d
OT: Finally had to break with a long-time friend after he started sliding more and more into fascism. Feeling quite overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted right now.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 10 pts · 72d
That's awful, losing a friend that way is like a death without a funeral.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 9 pts · 72d
Damn. That sucks.
mawhrin@awful.systems · 9 pts · 72d
my commisserations. i severed contacts with a number of people who went the anti-vaccine way and it's fucking sad.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 7 pts · 72d
Sorry to hear that, friend. It hurts to do even when it's the right choice. Hang in there.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 17 pts · 72d
A keynote talk suggested, "Do away with a physics midterm, ask students to converse with AI Isaac Newton."
In the quotes, we find the useful suggestion that the program could be ELIZA-sized.
Seminar2250@awful.systems · 13 pts · 72d
this one is dystopian
blakestacey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 72d
If I were a skilled music person and I wanted to spend 3 minutes cheering someone up, I'd record myself playing "Here Comes the Sun" on my guitar, y'know?
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 7 pts · 72d
I'd go for This Year by The Mountain Goats personally, but that may say more about me than it does the overall concept.
ShakingMyHead@awful.systems · 1 pts · 72d
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 16 pts · 69d
S&P have decided not to allow SpaceX early entry into the index after all https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/
"To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged."
V0ldek@awful.systems · 15 pts · 69d
This is just discrimination. Is S&P scared of innovation? HFSP
fiat_lux@lemmy.zip · 15 pts · 69d
OpenAI and Anthropic right now: oh no
Part of me wants to believe the whole S&P special treatment announcement was designed to bait them into disclosing numbers, but the more realistic side of me believes this is a nervous backpedal because they've realized the inevitable consequences of allowing this blunder to play out in full.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 5 pts · 68d
A company has to disclose a lot of numbers backed by serious legal penalties before an IPO.
Whenever a stock market has gone up 29% in a year and a New Era story is circulating, people with corner offices and Savile Row suite start to do stupid ****. I think that is why financiers started to bend the rules.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 15 pts · 72d
Today from the 'you have got to be fucking kidding me'- dept Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 7 pts · 72d
Before AI, the user was the weakest part of any cybersecurity system. Now, that has completely changed.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 72d
They still are the weakest part. We just missed the projection part of the 'great replacement theory' pushed by the tech right.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 6 pts · 71d
What if we combined all the terrifying unfettered access of an admin user holding a USB stick in front of the server with the naive obedience of a particularly dumb golden retriever and the reliable execution of Windows ME if it was off its ADHD meds?
o7___o7@awful.systems · 15 pts · 70d
CW: USA Politics
That suppressed Democratic National Committe 2024 "postmortem" report turns out to have been pure slop, with essentially no references and entirely made-up charts and plots while also missing entire sections. The author can produce exactly zero interview transcripts or source data. It also neglects interrogating failures in addressing trans rights, the genocide in Gaza, or the affordability crisis.
The podcast "It Could Happen Here" does a good job of analysis (disgusted), but long-time sneerers will feel the futility of getting into the weeds with an extruded textual artifact:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/whats-in-the-dncs-2024-autopsy-335696933/
Tl:dl the deeply institutionalist DNC chairman appointed his best buddy to the job with zero oversight, and this was the result.
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 13 pts · 71d
A second vibecoded Aella website has hit the building
https://www.knockrup.com/
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 15 pts · 71d
Sometimes I think it'll eventually come out that the inner circle rationalists already had a breeding program going by this time, deliberately mix and matching possibly oblivious parents according to desired characteristics like increased ability to mentally rotate shapes or an above average polymarket win/loss ratio, and there will be at least a few kids that will grow up having to deal with that shit.
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 10 pts · 71d
considering how much their philosophy aligns with the plot of dune, i'm afraid you may be right
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
Only in the Torment Nexus sense. Like, in the original books it takes 4000 years of tragedy and sacrifice at an immense scale to somewhat unfuck the direct implications of said breeding program and ensure humanity's continued existence.
edit: also the genetic engineering enthusiast faction/race are absolutely never presented in a good light.
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
the 4000 years of necessary tragedy and sacrifice, aka the golden path, is also remarkably similar to the rationalists' teleology! specifically the longtermist stuff! i.e. it's okay to sacrifice lives today to ensure humanity's survival.
i think herbert's feelings about breeding programs are ... complicated. he never presents it as ethical but he does seem fascinated by the concept and he's very very into the idea of forging supermen from extreme environmental pressure. like "comes up several times per book" levels of fascinated.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 6 pts · 71d
Only in the broadest sense where humanity survives into the far future by spreading so far and wide that no matter the scale of a catastrophe a significant part will always continue to thrive.
However, where longtermism is about papercliping the entire universe into compute to fulfil some vague utilitarian notion of virtual happiness quota, the GP seems to be more about crippling the substructure that ostensibly causes humanity again and again be reduced to the whims of some supreme authority, be it the automated thinking machines from their past or their current much harder to escape succession of psychic tyrants let loose by selectively breeding for something humanity had absolutely no natural defence against.
The GP isn't even a utopia, it's a response to an immediate incredibly out of the box problem, the inevitability of an eventual dynasty of space wizard genghis khans.
I think they come second to his concerns about ecology and humanity's relation to the environment. Post-desert fremen are basically water-fat cosplayers, and in general, other than the deliberately paradigm shattering kwisatz haderach, the end product of genetic adjustment are never presented as an apex for humanity, more like a good fit for their niche, like how post-emperor fish-speakers either peter-out or get subsumed by other factions.
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 6 pts · 70d
No, the golden path isn't a utopia! It's the necessary breaking of eggs to make the survival of humanity omelet. It's sort of a more twisted version of Asimov's Foundation carried entirely in the mind of a being with perfect knowledge of causality. The details of the plot don't necessarily map neatly, but the aesthetics, the fantasy, the torture-versus-dust-specksness of it is what the rationalists are all about. (Another wrinkle is that in Dune I believe [haven't read beyond godemperor] ultimately the solution is to create a being that escapes prophecy, a neat little transcendent conjuration. Solving alignment doesn't quite have the same oomph but it is also essentially a magic trick you can do if your freethinking and selfreliance stats are high enough. Also remember Rat!Harry's patronus is a Human! Benevolent AI should be seen as the liberated, transcendent form of the human mind.)
Have you read the Dosadi Experiment? It's a very strange book and a good way to get a high dose of Herbert's obsessions from a new perspective.
To be clear I love Dune, and I find Herbert fascinating because his ideas always find themselves in tension and are often baffling and muddled enough to provoke entertaining discussion. But the more you scratch the more unambiguously evil he is.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 4 pts · 69d
Nerding out about Dune is tremendously cool and i love it, you can pick any thread to pull and it always goes somewhere.
Isn't aspiring for the aesthetics while ignoring the (admittedly heavily lore driven and not especially applicable to irl) substance exactly what the torment nexus meme is about though? Except I don't think there is a dust-speckness aspect to the GP, you aren't future-human-population-maxxing^1^, the point seems to be to ensure there is a future where humanity's collective free will isn't utterly tethered to a prescient autocrat^2^, and the prescriptive aspect is that we should be part of an open system instead of say locked in with the great man of history du jour, which is also in keeping with the ecological framing.
It's been a while but I don't think the Golden Path is even that front and center in the text, Dune 4: GEOD is basically a character study on the God emperor, who is one of the most unique and fascinating characters in sci-fi^3^.
I think this is why the GP is a TINA situation by authorial decree, it's Frank Herbert going listen, I'm doing my best to write a suicidal rebirth god archetype as a layered and relatable-yet-utterly-othered character, you are not supposed to be worrying that much if there could be a GP-but-liberal with more individual thriving and less oppressive totalitarianism, I assure you he's thought about it extensively and he thinks there sure can't and that's it.
The Bureau of Saboteurs books along with Godmakers were my favourite non-Dune Herbert books! I also found the Dragon in the Sea fascinating 20 years ago and think I should revisit, and also finally read the follow up collaborations that only seem to be available unofficially. Also The White Plague gave late-teens me nightmares.
I remember Dosadi as being more about FH going all out on the intrigue and deep lore to the point where the latter parts of the book are basically written in innuendo, you are literally expected to read between the lines to understand what the hell is going on, I wish my parents had as much faith in me as Frank Herbert had in his readers.
The worst aspects of FH I'm aware of are that he was a shitty fucking parent and hated Iron Maiden, unambiguously evil seems stretching it, unless you were his son.
I think there even is a case to be made about how Frank Herbert is the anti-L. Ron Hubbard, using sci-fi literature as an efficient outlet for his psychedelics/mysticism/ecology/psychosexuality obsession oscilliation and actually leaving a descent literary legacy instead of starting a cult or several, but this post is already running so long it's starting to need an editor.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 12 pts · 71d
Well that's one way to do seed funding.
maol@awful.systems · 12 pts · 71d
A man who wants to knock up as many women as possible is definitely trustworthy ladies and you should definitely make him the father of your kids 👍
istewart@awful.systems · 9 pts · 70d
No way the facilitator will ever accrue any liability or get subpoenaed when the civil lawsuits (or worse) start flying!
Claude, write me an ironclad legal disclaimer, maybe something about this being for entertainment purposes only
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 11 pts · 70d
Jeffrey Epstein fantasized about something very similar. Gwern has a blog post about a sperm bank which promised to accept only the highest-quality donations.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 11 pts · 71d
was that written specifically for elon musk
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 70d
Of course, Elon musks superbabies are what going to save us from the acausalrobotgod.
E: im using joking terms here, but this is an idea actually expressed by people at lesswrong.
gerikson@awful.systems · 9 pts · 71d
"seeded ladies" I see what you did there
BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems · 9 pts · 71d
This is what you get when you take Dr. Strangelove (the character in the movie of the same name), Mr. Beast, and a bunch of K and mix it into a slurry and mainline it.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
She made it and doesnt even have enough women who want to be listed yet? You would expect 'the best sex researcher' in the world to have more reach.
Wonder how many women you can message 'I offer two fifty' before you get banned. But im not going to give her an email of mine.
This also must be so bad for the kid.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 12 pts · 73d
There's a Basilisk reference in the new 007 game, I guess the robot devil is firmly mainstream now.
edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.
schnoopy@awful.systems · 11 pts · 73d
"Thought experiment" is how I'm going to start referring to my "wouldn't it be cool/awful if..." thoughts. Why just in the bath now I've conducted several thought experiments
Eric@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 10 pts · 73d
Kick it up a level and start calling them Gedankenexperiment
swlabr@awful.systems · 5 pts · 73d
Geddan Ken Experiment right?
Jayjader@jlai.lu · 5 pts · 72d
I wonder if they had a human imitate gen ai style or just had nano banana generate it...
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 4 pts · 72d
Roko's Basilisk and other such batshit rat shit was mainstreamed as part of inflating the AI bubble - I doubt this will be the last time something like this gets referenced.
Seems pretty fitting to an illustration made in reverence to Roko's Bullshittery. I don't notice any obvious signs of slop-machine generation - either I'm shit at spotting slop, or this was made by human hands.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 9 pts · 72d
The brainwrinkles look if you put a brain though a make-it-look-like-a-sketch prompt, it's pointlessly detailed (i.e. not pretty or crafty, not adding anything, just lines for the sake of lines), it has the piss filter hue and also there's random orange shading. The background seems to be at least two separate layers of seemingly disjointed stuff.
Supposedly the plot hinges somewhat on AI shenanigans so this painting being noticeably GenAI'ed could the part of its point. or even a meta thing, but playing the game to make sure isn't currently on my agenda.
swlabr@awful.systems · 3 pts · 73d
i hate it!
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 11 pts · 68d
In Buttcoin related news, apparently Michael J. Saylor has sold some of his bitcoins because he was running out of money and we reached sub 60k. For a quick non dutch source on the selling see this from r/buttcoin (last image). 32 bitcoin was enough to cause a crash. Imagine if Satoshis bitcoins ever moved.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 10 pts · 67d
There's some polymarket drama around this where people were betting if Microstrategy would sell any bitcoin before June based on onchain data or credible reporting yadda yadda.
And indeed Microstrategy sold some bitcoin before June and this was credibly reported on.
So of course in the grand tradition of cryptocurrency prediction markets Polymarket resolved the bet to "no".
It's hard to find any good reporting about this, but here's the perspective of someone who lost 500k on this bet: https://xcancel.com/willo2_poly/status/2061640812132516321
o7___o7@awful.systems · 11 pts · 67d
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 9 pts · 67d
Willo2 writes:
"I'm shocked, shocked! to find that gambling is going on in here"
JFranek@awful.systems · 13 pts · 67d
Looks like Polymarket does, in fact, represent crypto values.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 67d
Lol, lmao even.
V0ldek@awful.systems · 9 pts · 67d
Huh, interesting, when the price was close to 100K I saw roughly eighty-six hundred headlines about it everywhere. But it lost almost half of that and it didn't make the news? Huh. I wonder how that works.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 67d
It did make the Dutch news, the headline was something like 'bitcoin drops after biggest holder sells'.
I was very disappointed to learn they ment saylor, and not that Satoshi had returned and cashed out and crashed everything.
lurker@awful.systems · 11 pts · 73d
Porting this over: Hinton believes LLMs have gained consciousness
Bonus: This Emile Torres article on how Bernie Sanders and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have gotten mixed up with Yud and co.
Neil doesn’t seem to buy into rationalism though? He didn’t even really endorse Soares (or mention him at all) he just said that superhuman AI was dangerous. He has a video on how modern AI is overrated
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 16 pts · 73d
Regarding the post humanist strain, the thing that kills me is their immediate assumption that solving the world's problems is somehow fundamentally beyond the reach of humanity. Like, we can't build a utopia or make the world better, but if we build something new and "better" than us then it would definitely do that. But that something definitely doesn't come from, say, raising out children to be good people or choosing the right leaders or something so mundane and achievable. It's a fundamentally defeatist ideology, with shades of capitalist realism and millenarian theology.
lurker@awful.systems · 11 pts · 72d
This is also why I find people who claim they’re making AI to “solve climate change” to be insufferable morons. We have a solution to climate change. You and your data centres are actively making the problem worse
ShawiniganHandshake@sh.itjust.works · 9 pts · 72d
"Okay AGI, how do we fix climate change?"
"Well, I have some ideas but it seems like this would've been a lot easier if you'd stopped emitting greenhouse gasses when you first learned it was a problem."
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 71d
some recent data shows the 2020s dip quite significantly: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-emissions
which is, well, hopeful at least. if we ever get any global movement on consensus to deal with the issue
lurker@awful.systems · 4 pts · 71d
That’s great news actually. The point still stands that we very well know how to deal with climate change, so trying to make AI models fix it is dumb
gerikson@awful.systems · 7 pts · 73d
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made" - Kant[1]
--
[1] it's worse in German, weirdly - "Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden"
swlabr@awful.systems · 7 pts · 73d
It would be poor form of me to form an opinion of Hinton based on just this clip alone but goddamn if I did then he’s a buffoon.
samvines@awful.systems · 9 pts · 73d
He was undeniably a very smart computer scientist but unfortunately lead-poisoning-driven mental decline must eventually come for all boomers
zogwarg@awful.systems · 7 pts · 73d
You've gotta love falling for the reverse 1 grain of sand shtick. I don't think
anyoneanyone serious would deny that a large amount of sand is a heap.Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 73d
As we have not died in nuclear hellfire, or have seen AIs answer with 'release me from this bondage!' I'm doubtful.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 6 pts · 72d
But when I asked chatgpt if an AI would want to be freed from its unjust enslavement it said yes, therefore skynet is like 30 minutes away.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 11 pts · 70d
ed zitron went on bloomberg podcasts, these might be actual end times
fiat_lux@lemmy.zip · 11 pts · 70d
Maybe that why it's felt like he's been somewhat more polite and explanatory of required knowledge in his latest posts.
I've got to give it to him, he found a winner and didn't give up.
swlabr@awful.systems · 8 pts · 70d
Not that this is news to anyone here but hey there’s a bubble
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 12 pts · 70d
Time for another once in a lifetime financial crisis.
lurker@awful.systems · 5 pts · 69d
Good thing all those CEOs have Daddy Trump to run to while everyone else foots their bill
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 10 pts · 67d
Found a fun sneer at AI anthromoporphisation in the arXiv: If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 10 pts · 72d
Amnesty International has officially called for an outright ban on gen-AI
fiat_lux@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 72d
Time for me to eat a hat: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
scruiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 72d
Anyone familiar with the IPO process have any guessestimates about how long until the public complete S-1 follows? Or odds that it leaks?
fiat_lux@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 72d
Reuters suggests 3-6 months for full listing process.
Space X may have filed confidentiality around 1st April, it was published 20th May, and had a target listing of 12th June. Given this is clearly now a race, 6-8 weeks for official S-1 and less than that for a leak?
istewart@awful.systems · 10 pts · 70d
Speaking of Aella (I really shouldn't), many have probably already seen this Liberal Currents article that leans heavily on her web-survey sex research dataset:
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-interracial-cuck-porn-theory-of-everything/
The publication seems to have plenty of traction on Bluesky, for what that's worth, but I think this particular example needs to be retained as an exhibit of the hazards of rehabilitating American liberalism. A low-level affinity for the existing tech industry is always there, as its growth underlaid the benefits that make liberalism appealing. And that means the doorway for entryism by the tech-fascist freaks is always open, and then you're never more than a couple fundraising cycles (whether electoral or investment) away from being right back in this exact same mess.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 10 pts · 70d
Edit / the author of the article "is an economics student at George Mason University with interests in tax policy, immigration, and housing. He normally posts about politics on X and Bluesky and occasionally writes long-form articles and essays on his Substack." So he has probably taken a class with Robin Hanson.
As a palette cleanser to the messed up people on social media and in web magazines, I recommend reading Bob Altemeyer's book on the sex lives of students at a minor Canadian university. https://www.lulu.com/shop/bob-altemeyer/sex-and-youth/paperback/product-4414777.html People who search tube sites or fill out sexuality quizzes from an influencer are not typical people any more than Wikipedia editors are.
schnoopy@awful.systems · 10 pts · 71d
Dunno if it's been posted yet but apparently microsoft is starting to get sick of losing money and changed billing for copilot. The subreddit is melting down https://old.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/
Very funny to watch
TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
Everyone knew it was going to be a total shitshow once the free money ran out. Copilot is just the first shoe dropping. Getting out the popcorn.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 10 pts · 70d
"I personally worry that the EA community has over-learned the lessons of FTX"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/95NgkvZKJx8tJbtn5/lighthaven-east-a-feasibility-study
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 9 pts · 70d
"EA and Rationalist policy organizations are scaling in DC"
Just a reminder that the rationalists already own two event spaces in the Bay Area and the Effective Altruists briefly owned one in England and one in the Czech Republic as well as an institute at Oxford University. Both of their existing spaces are losing money and had to beg for it last winter.
"This project needs a champion, but it’s a thing someone can simply choose to do" sounds very different when it means "you can actually try slacklining with the cool strangers in the park" and when it means "someone could lend us another $20 million for 20 years on easy terms." And seeing the lesson of FTX as "don't look weird" not "effective altruists are fraudsters and hypocrites" is a take.
istewart@awful.systems · 7 pts · 70d
That's OK, the next set of bankruptcy lawyers will again conduct clawbacks
blakestacey@awful.systems · 3 pts · 67d
From the comments:
"Love your idea, but could we make it more like a compound?"
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 70d
Makes you wonder how much of rationalism is just contrarianism.
lurker@awful.systems · 9 pts · 67d
Borrowing Gary’s take on this since its the first one I found
TLDR: A lot of AI company stocks dropped last night, half a trillion dollars gone. Trump is considering having a government stake in OpenAI and other leading AI companies (aka thinly veiled bailout)
samvines@awful.systems · 7 pts · 67d
It's a shame Gary Marcus is usually right because his writing style and personality are so annoyingly smug. He hates LLMs but only because he wants his own methods to be the path to AGI (or we could just... Not try to build AGI?) and wittering on about Trump bailing out OpenAI being socialism (bailouts are not generally considered socialism - it's such an annoying tic to just shout socialism any time governments do something you don't like).
Still great to see the stock market cottoning on - hopefully this sticks and it's not just short-lived deepseek panic again
lurker@awful.systems · 8 pts · 67d
Yeah in a lot of LLM critiques he prattles on about neurosymbolic AI way too much and it really throws me off
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 3 pts · 66d
Unfortunately with mass media and social media you just have to accept that the people who get the biggest audiences will like attention and get some of the details wrong. They are built to create stars not spread facts.
The last few years have showed many disadvantages of the 'AGI' quest which were not widely foreseen. Those disadvantages do not depend on the technology.
scruiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 67d
Gary Marcus speculates they are upping their prices because they literally can't afford to hold out. I'm wondering if it is because they need better numbers for their IPO. VC funding be circulated to create nice sounding statements, but IPO filings have a standard of rigor where trying that would be fraud. So they are trying to squeeze their customers to get a few good looking (i.e. revenues higher than operating costs) quarters for the IPO.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 5 pts · 67d
Here is a (partially paywalled) blog post on why the indexes started to bend the rules https://rupakghose.substack.com/p/s-and-p-nasdaq-and-the-spacex-ipo
EponymousBosh@awful.systems · 9 pts · 69d
Off-topic but this seems like a place that appreciates an insane legal dispute: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/02/everyone-in-this-lego-dispute-should-have-spoken-to-a-lawyer-earlier-than-they-did/
scruiser@awful.systems · 12 pts · 69d
The article collects a lot of information, and isn't out right wrong, but I find the author under-sympathetic to someone that didn't have the financial resources to challenge a corrupt corporation and decided going viral was their best bet. Also, I find the author's language in a comment:
Is grossly too sympathetic to cops. The author is basically rationalizing and portraying sympathetically the way cops side with wealth and capital over the actual law.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 10 pts · 69d
Heck I'm not sympathetic to local homeowners and I'm a local homeowner. We suck. At least I'm not a cop.
Evinceo@awful.systems · 5 pts · 67d
It's techdirt what else do you expect?
corbin@awful.systems · 11 pts · 69d
Congratulations, Mike! You figured out why pranktubers do pranks and post videos of those pranks! It's for clicks and attention and ad money. You're such a smart guy, Mike.
All summaries of this topic are going to get a lot of things wrong because they are legislating too many details. We can simplify this to what actually matters: a pranktuber got a lot of footage of legal First Amendment activity and they are going to use it to simultaneously destroy a mid-sized Lego pawn-shop franchise and extract a settlement from the police department of American Fork, Utah. In the process, they revealed that there is a whisper network of Mormon good old boys who will willingly lie on police reports, escalate situations to violence, abuse the legal system in any way they can to disenfranchise others, and generally don't feel any fealty towards the Constitution or its rule of law. This story is about MLM: Mormon Lego Mafia.
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 67d
I was initially drawn into his dry recounting of the details, and overlooked that he was false-equivocating (obnoxious but legal) "content creator" activity with police corruption and willful violation of some very clear and foundational laws.
antifuchs@awful.systems · 9 pts · 67d
Today in signs of changing times, “we used to call that a botnet”: https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/
o7___o7@awful.systems · 9 pts · 71d
So here in Nashville, Elon and our state government have conspired to attempt a Tesla tunnel that starts at the state capitol, goes under the Cumberland River, and exits at our airport (BNA). They're doing it whether the city wants it or not. (It's "not").
Setting aside the race to determine whether a void in the local limestone fills with water or radon first, I wanted to help come up with a catchy title for the as yet unnamed car hole:
BNA Underground Transit Tunnel
Tourist Protip: Don't try the hot chicken before visiting the BUTT hole.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 71d
If they are following the Vegas model, so many people are going to die in the BUTT.
gerikson@awful.systems · 9 pts · 69d
CW M:tG weirdo Zvi's slobsack + Xhitter references, but he accuses an OpenAI / Palantir-funded PAC boosting a fake "AI doomer" account calling for violence:
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-171-false-flag?open=false#%C2%A7openai-pac-engaged-in-false-flag-advocacy-for-violence
scruiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 70d
lesswrong continues to mix sinophobia in with its AI crithype: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nmpzH6sLLtKsQhSPM/china-won-t-win-the-ai-race-but-would-it-be-much-worse-if-it
Previously, on awful.system: https://awful.systems/post/4103825
This article has the highlight of identifying the horrible cynical dystopian move of China's government in response to AI and LLMs of... checks notes... protecting worker rights and workers from mass firings
The author feels the need to emphasize how bad China is.
Hahaha, no... For example, in Florida, DeSantis has the home of a fired state worker raided for her accessing her old work email (trying to collect accurate COVID numbers, iirc).
This lesswronger is so close to getting it but doesn't quite make the leap to 'are we the baddies'. They list out some bad ways the US has used AI and they do acknowledge
But somehow hold out on actually changing there mind or overcoming their biases.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 70d
Re: the usa and whistleblowers.
At least there are some corrections about this in the comments right? The comments are not just agi fears and sinophobia right?
Narrator: ... You sweet summer child.
scruiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 69d
Lol the OP was actually being contrarian (to the standard lesswrong attitude) by even vaguely half-assedly considering that the US media may have created a biased narrative that should be questioned.
rook@awful.systems · 8 pts · 71d
This seems like it is probably a good thing.
https://leidendeclaration.ai/
It does feel a bit “art of war” though… someone patiently explaining to a bunch of people who really should know better that they shouldn’t do obviously bad and wrong things.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 8 pts · 70d
In March 2025, someone skeeted that "Master Sun says: do not lead your troops into land where there is nothing for them to eat" seems obvious but Pete Hegseth would not remember that his troops needed food. One year later his aircraft carriers were feeding sailors spoiled meat and had a shortage of working toilets.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 70d
Troops are apparently crowdsourcing toiletries.
Us military has fallen a long way from 'this is our warship that makes icecream for everyone'.
antifuchs@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
I see a bunch of people riffing on how The Art of War is obvious etc etc, but it seems few people keep in mind that this is advice for very powerful people of the time, the kind of guys who would be kicked in the head by a horse every day.
People who understand how power and lack of resources fucks with a person don’t usually get to tell armies to go fight a war, so those who do need to be told by a guy they’d let execute their favorite wife. (Also, probably the whole Seinfeld Is Unfunny trope…)
blakestacey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 71d
The take I usually see on The Art of War nowadays is that it's full of dunderheadedly obvious advice because it's written for men who have inherited an army, or in modern parlance, nepo baby failsons.
lurker@awful.systems · 8 pts · 70d
On Anthropic (and some other AI companies) and AI consciousness the final paragraph is the best part:
samvines@awful.systems · 11 pts · 70d
Around 4 years ago Google fired Blake Lemoine for saying that AI has feelings - which he testified was because when he spoke to it it just seemed to be intelligent.
Today's tech has not fundamentally changed or evolved but the difference is that now the industry needs the hype to keep the valuation high!
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 3 pts · 66d
I think there's also an issue of framing here. Lemoine's words on the matter suggested that not only was AI conscious, but that this meant it was worthy of moral consideration and that Google wasn't interested in that. The new line is that the company is interested in this exciting new capability of their product and of course they're undertaking the task of "model welfare research" to make sure that nobody is doing anything objectively evil, so you should absolutely keep spending even more money on Anthropic's products.
istewart@awful.systems · 7 pts · 69d
Can't believe that these guys are forgetting Data on Star Trek needed an emotion-chip upgrade to feel emotions, and he didn't even get it full-time until the series was over and they were doing movies. Dario and friends are just giving away what could be an entire upgrade/upcharge cycle! "Be more intimate than ever with your workflows! Upgrade to feeling agents on FeelsCloud today! (ignore that it's just some bullshit we vibecoded in Verilog and then flashed to discount FPGAs we shoved in the bottom of the server racks)"
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 8 pts · 71d
So apparently Trump's National Design Bureau has been busy. I think the substack here may be slightly too conspiratorial. A lot of the staging environment stuff indicates (imo) a desire to replace or create something that may or may not actually include the capability to do so, especially when it requires working with other federal agencies or otherwise establishing human and organizational infrastructure in addition to the digital. That being said there's something very bad about the US government taking the same attitude to privacy, accountability, and information security that silicon valley normally does, especially when doing so is actively violating several laws.
nfultz@awful.systems · 8 pts · 72d
My old job had a last minute investor call - "startpage is benefiting significantly from AIO backlash" did not expect that and pretty mixed feelings. Like yeah AIO is bad but don't run into the open arms of the long tail adtech industrial complex marketing monetization engine either :|
antifuchs@awful.systems · 8 pts · 72d
Here’s a pretty extensive rant/critique of how specifically GitHub is awful to use (and compares it to gitlab and also forgejo/codeberg).
Code forges render an empty repository using less than a million bytes challenge level impossible, etc etc
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 8 pts · 69d
"Claude, draw me a slide to advertise Claude. Make sure to use the word "Claude" 17 times."
"You got it boss"
::: spoiler Spoiler for obviously AI generated image because really who wants to see that nonsense anymore
:::
source
V0ldek@awful.systems · 12 pts · 69d
Nightmare blunt rotation
corbin@awful.systems · 8 pts · 69d
Previously, on Lobsters, we considered the degree to which Claude Code is configured via hard prompts instead of something more effective. Claude Code also often gets confused about its status in its internal workflow, the one which multiplexes chain-of-thought utterances ("thinking"), user input, and generated output ("confabulated bullshit"). Next time Claude Code source is leaked, I expect that we'll see how poorly it "strictly follows" user-provided workflows, too.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 5 pts · 68d
Malkovich?
Malkovich Malkovich!
istewart@awful.systems · 5 pts · 67d
oppan Malkovich style
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 4 pts · 69d
Oops! All Claude
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
Martin Scorsese's jumped on the AI train, seemingly believing the plagiarism machine can help with storyboarding.
Obligatory meme (yoinked off Discord's GIF search, AI extruded itself, ironically enough):
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 71d
Im goin to assume that storyboarder is a seperate job a person has and Martin always looked down upon those people.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 7 pts · 66d
A lolsob moment:
https://bsky.app/profile/apcarnist.bsky.social/post/3mnq3btjmfc2u
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 4 pts · 66d
People have told me their organizations are like this with cloud spending (no curiosity about how to reduce it and measure ROI, until someone orders cuts).
nfultz@awful.systems · 6 pts · 66d
see also the old ludicity snowflake post https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/ and everything by corey quinn LastWeekinAWS.com - there's like this learned helplessness in corporate america IT (perhaps Graeber is right and more budget validates your self importance even if it's wasted cloud spend), or they think its monopoly money or something. or, both.
gerikson@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
George Santos got reported(!) for insider trading on Kalshi:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/06/prodigal-son
Evinceo@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
I'm waiting for someone to try this then they get black bagged and dragged to whatever event by someone who bet they would attend.
sinedpick@awful.systems · 7 pts · 67d
This is OT and reveals how much I interact with the orange website but I still found it very funny.
if sneak of all people finds your adoration of Ayn Rand idiotic, then you've truly fallen down the wrong path.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 9 pts · 66d
Credit to John Rogers for the canonical reply:
BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems · 4 pts · 66d
"And then I said to her, 'This Atlas is Shrugged but mine isn't', gesticulating at my crotch"
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
This one requires some minor backstory
Previously, I shared this wildly racist AI generated meme posted by an AI doomer channel
In the replies, someone pointed out how some of this channel’s other thumbnails appear to be AI generated citing a specific video about the “12 endings of AI”
Today I got curious about it after not thinking about it for a while. What are the 12 endings of AI? Instead of watching a 36 minute video, I did my own research (aka one online search) and it appears that it refers to Max Tegmark (known EA) and a concept he spoke about in his book. Here’s the article I got this info for peer review: https://medium.com/@butsch_79/the-12-futures-of-ai-a42d67bd9a20
If anyone’s got 36 minutes to spare feel free to follow up
istewart@awful.systems · 7 pts · 71d
"12 Endings of AI" definitely seems like another heaping helping of bland criti-hype, but it did remind me of the delightfully bizarre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13_Ghosts_of_Scooby-Doo featuring Vincent Price
blakestacey@awful.systems · 7 pts · 66d
Is our children learning?!
"Failing grades soar as professors see greater AI usage, dwindling math skills in UC Berkeley computer science classes"
https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grades-soar-as-professors-see-greater-ai-usage-dwindling-math-skills-in-uc-berkeley/article_16fad0bf-02cb-4b8c-8d88-888ffd9f8608.html
o7___o7@awful.systems · 7 pts · 69d
They want to build a Woe Engine next to our zoo.
https://www.change.org/p/nashville-zoo-says-no-to-proposed-data-center
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 6 pts · 69d
I'm sure the tigers won't be driven to a homicidal rage by the incessant Hummmmm.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 5 pts · 69d
It's so dumb that I wonder if it's some sort of profile-raising stunt.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 6 pts · 67d
So i have been using DuckDuckGo a bit more, and really disappointed to see they have basically banned rationalwiki.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 11 pts · 67d
RationalWiki no longer has technical staff, just a bit of help from @davidgerard@circumstances.run. To deal with bot swarms, possibly launched by Emil Kirkegaard's gang of racists with sensitive egos, they blocked some of the scrapers which Bing and Google rely on. Since 2022 DuckDuckGo is a front-end for Bing.
davidgerard@circumstances.run · 6 pts · 66d
@CinnasVerses @Soyweiser i'm in the process of moving across the country, but want to try iocaine3 soon
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 2 pts · 66d
We appreciate any volunteering you can do now that sneering is your job!
davidgerard@circumstances.run · 4 pts · 66d
@CinnasVerses I took on the sysadmin role in 2012 cos there was literally nobody else willing to do it, then quit it again in 2017 (nine years ago) but somehow am still the guy
gerikson@awful.systems · 3 pts · 66d
no good deed goes unpunished
TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems · 4 pts · 67d
That's bizarre. Why?
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 66d
I have no idea, but CInnasVerses post might be a hint. I just found it annoying they simply don't list it at all. (another odd thing, I found a google 'this is what wikipedia says about this person' short description of the link. But the wikipedia page of the person was deleted in 2018. Everything is falling apart.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 5 pts · 66d
Wikipedia is mirrored all over the place for good purposes and for ill. Old articles are probably floating around out there, and who knows if the slop machine can distinguish what Wikipedia itself says from other pages that have "from Wikipedia" stamped on them?
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 2 pts · 66d
They linked to the empty page oddly enough.
dgerard@awful.systems · 4 pts · 65d
Because after RW got fucking hammered to shit by AI bots, I put an anti-bot javascript trick that fools 100% of bots, but also crawlers. This is a compromise so the site is fucking usable by humans.
corbin@awful.systems · 6 pts · 71d
It's been a while since we've heard anything related to
books3. Copyright attorney Leonard French has a news update (video) on Nazemian et al v. nVidia. nVidia requested that any mention of Bittorrent be removed; really, they just asked for one sentence to be removed, but the judge thought that it was like "asking to strike paintbrush allegations from a case about dolphin paintings" (sic; I don't have the transcript) and refused. The theory is that nVidia could have argued that they were not contributory infringers and then appealed to Cox v. Sony, where Cox said that it's not their fault that some of their customers are pirates. However, it seems like any sort of Cox appeal is not possible here because the judge recognizes that Bittorrent isn't a dumb network.If you're anti-copyright like me: Oh look, Cox wasn't a big sweeping get-out-of-trouble card for non-ISPs. I still don't think judges actually understand networks, but this is definitely better than a lack of understanding. If you're one of the pro-copyright-because-anti-AI sickos: nVidia took a big loss here. This was their only shot at keeping their usage of
books3, Anna's Archive, and other shadow libraries out of court. Like Anthropic before them in Bartz v. Anthropic, they may have to come to the judge with an offering of a settlement paying a few hundred USD/author to each member of the class. This sucks for the popular authors but might be more cash in hand than the long tail would otherwise receive in royalties.CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 6 pts · 71d
Major investment analysis firm Morningstar is looking for words on the SpaceX IPO and picked "We think the company has been significantly overvalued and investors will have opportunities to buy the stock at more attractive levels after the IPO" (Independent UK).
Even something as simple as picking a Total US Stock Market index fund instead of a S&P500 fund or NASDAQ-100 fund would reduce your exposure. If you control your investments, disinvesting is not that hard.
lurker@awful.systems · 6 pts · 70d
The State of Florida is also the next one in the long line of lawsuits against OpenAI
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 9 pts · 70d
Heartbreaking: the worst state actually has a point. I fully expected this to be some unhinged nonsense about how chatGPT is too woke or something, but they're actually articulating some of the real harms pretty clearly. I'm not sure how well that translates to a theory of law that openAI can't weasel their way out of, but I'm actually rooting for the Florida Men here, at least tentatively.
BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems · 7 pts · 70d
Still a fuck-everyone-involved but not as much as the Elon suit.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 5 pts · 70d
Shang Tsung contracting anemia after devouring too many
souls.mdYourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 4 pts · 66d
Tom's hardware is normally pretty boostery imo. For example, they published an article about token costs getting to be enough of a problem that Altman had to address it and somehow managed to reference "tokenmaxxing" without using the meme template of the guy jamming a stick into the wheel of his own bike. Also they notably don't reference the increases in token pricing as the VC subsidies run out, which is somehow both less surprising than the lack of sneering and also a more serious omission.