Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st June 2026

I checked Wikipedia's history, its been fucked since last year

We are good on opsec

Of course Ezra Klein is hanging out with the worst people in the world. He's always on the hunt for a new gutter to pick up some fetid idea and tart it up for liberals.

Wired has a story about Peter Thiel's Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, "sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!)."

The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

...

Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”

So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.

Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will be...

According to a later post from them there's a chance this is more of a list of attendees at a past or upcoming event, but tbh I don't think there's much of a difference between "member of the nu-money illuminati" and "accepted an invite to hang out with the nu-money illuminati at their clubhouse." I can only assume it has the same statue of a hand clutching a globe as the Deus Ex opening cinematic.

@samvines @techtakes It's also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.

(If they'd led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)

It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.

So when sama suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It's also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can't coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

This feels like yet another case of "what no postmodernism does to a mf". Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but that's entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors aren't "abnormal" and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled.

But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but it's easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of "how do I help people be happy and successful" necessitates asking "how do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person." Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively.

But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, can't really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because he's a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Don't listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.

It terrifies me that this man is a psychiatrist.

“We have to pick between the climate or AI”

No we don’t??? One problem directly affects the other. Stopping AI data centre build-out helps with stopping climate change.

The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn't really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won't shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

The header image is gold.

we don’t actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing

This bit is true though; capitalism is already doing a fine job of paperclip maxxing.

Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol

Amazing that on first glance it looks like a smart contract 'all done by code' thing, but then the reveals comes and it is just a few rich people again.

which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes,

Wait that's even fucking dumber than I thought it was, good grief

Everything I've learnt about prediction casinos is against my will and all of it is somehow the dumbest shit imaginable. I went through crypto, NFTs, the metaverse, and 3 years of AI bullshit, and nothing reached this level of psychic damage before.

LB: Enormous fan of that chud griping in /r/CryptoCurrency of all places, and getting laughed at for falling victim to a scam.

The AI safety company when they actually have to make their AIs safe instead of just making vague suggestions

it's nice to have a preprint about a phenomenon that has been weaponized years ago. it's easy to say that in retrospect, but it was easy to say that in advance too. there are also bots that might try to do something similar on lemmy

however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not

See, if a person had written the system and had some kind of reasonable design or whatever then this kind of vulnerability may have turned into a full skeleton key to crack the entire system wide open. Instead, the superior machine intelligence ensures that all components will break in slightly different ways under slightly different conditions, thus ensuring no single fault can allow an adversary to completely compromise the system, provided of course that they can't just inject a prompt somewhere because as we all know that's a structural vulnerability that can completely crack the system open.

that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)

please god let them block ChatGPT access like they did with Fable. it would be so fucking funny

Glitch just wrapped a Youtube series by putting their final episode onto big screens in multiple countries. There's been a lot of media noise about the difficulty of getting films into theaters, and a lot of blaming Glitch, but there's not been any understanding about what Glitch actually did differently that is scaring Hollywood. I think it's that, just like with the Youtubers producing Backrooms and Iron Lung and FNAF, the thing Hollywood misses is the audience demographic. Glitch and other Youtubers are targeting an emerging young-adult audience which wants edgy, gritty, emotionally sincere content that fills the gap between PG-13 and R ratings. To older folks, e.g. Murder Drones is facile cringe, while to tweens (young teens, PG-13 sensibilities) it's too intense and scary. But it's a happy medium for catcher-in-the-rye emo young adults, which is why every second t-shirt sold at Hot Topic has a murder drone on it.

By literally no coincidence, Glitch's next greenlight is a grimdark gritty deconstruction which critiques the dystopia of Disney parks, illustrated by their brand-new 2D animation department, designed by a former Disney showrunner who left because Disney wouldn't let them tell stories aimed at young adults. (Dana Terrace, not Alex Hirsch.) Disney's not the only game in town; Turner previously ran shows by Owen Dennis and Rebecca Sugar while putting pressure on them. Lotta animators with big dreams who have been told "no" by big producers; in particular Lauren Faust supposedly has been waiting for decades for somebody to give her an animation team without creative limits, like Glitch just gave Terrace. (Faust worked on The Iron Giant and animated the character of Sawyer in Cats Don't Dance; the sheer poetry of her career could be enough to transform the industry (again).)

Honestly, a black comedy about the rats and/or the AI bubble would probably make bank. The years of sneers people have cooked up on them would provide plenty of material for the writers, and there'd be plenty of catharsis in seeing those responsible get ripped into for 2-ish hours straight.

When I emailed Denecke, he told me Bootstrap Bio had ceased operations due to lack of funding. (The company’s former chief science officer, Qichen Yuan, was indicted for attempted sex trafficking of a child in September 2025. His case is ongoing.) But before the company unraveled, its early investors included Malcolm and Simone Collins, whom you may have heard of.

The op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html

Newport I mostly know for pretty mid lifehack / business books for the Tim Ferris crowd, pre-pandemic. "Doom trolling" does have a better ring to it than "critihype." Maybe he was holding his tongue until he got tenure or something.

NVIDIA bonds

Turns out your best customer debtor being one Cyprus GDP in the hole might actually lead to cashflow problems.

This situation is the first time I've become aware that there was a longtime Dimes Square hangout called Kiki's. I'm gonna go ahead and consider that a mental health check that I happily passed

What's a Dimes Square lady to do?!

/u/bakkot

Wait, ~bakkot? I knew he was a vibecoder but I didn't know about the SSC/LW connection.

The moderators don't exist. Sole moderator Oliver Habryka hasn't commented on Reddit in 3 years, and is extremely busy with vastly more important things like AI safety, Lighthaven, and the actual LessWrong. Spammers continue indefinitely for months until, presumably, they earn a site-wide ban.

The guy who objects to delegating? I guess he decided that nobody on a forum can handle the responsibility of moderation?

As I recall the impetus for this was that the team working on grok's code generation ability was preferring to use cursor. Imagine making a model so shitty that even the kind of ai-brained buffoons who want to work on fucking grok don't want to use it. Now consider that apparently that model is grok itself.

The more I read the less it makes sense, largely because the LLM that they used to fluff up the original napkin pitch decided it should promote high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off. Yeah, building a community around ct scanners seems definitely the way to go.

Towards the end they basically stop just short of claiming that building the medical tricorder from startrek is the inevitable outcome of this pivot.

We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.

Deploying this stuff at scale at so called midjourney spas while supposedly working with FDA to eventually get approval just screams that the actual business plan is letting Peter Thiel collect full body scans indiscriminately.

Surprisingly, "democratizing ct scanning" doesn't appear anywhere in the post.

@o7___o7 @BlueMonday1984

https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/114239625973584335

1. Shit piles up at the bottom of the hill

2. Bottom of the hill elevates until it reaches the enshittifiers

3. Dinosaur eats man

4. Woman inherits the earth

Why do these people always want to give trans people the wrong hormones? It keeps coming up.

I think this is particularly important for the hormonal treatment of dysphoria in adolescents, where the evidence for gender-affirming care seems mixed. [...] Given all this, I was shocked that when I ran GPT Deep Research I wasn't able to find a single study that would evaluate the use of birth-sex-affirming hormones to decrease dysphoria.

The "evidence" he has provided up to this point:

1. A snippet from a Chat-GPT transcript. We can't see the prompt, but the output starts with "You’re right."
2. Two reddit comments about doubling down on (cis) gender roles. One of which uses the cursed words "nofap" and "autogynophilic"
3. A case study from Poland about someone who (possibly?) wasn't transgender but had schizophrenic symptoms that mimicked it. The case study ends by saying WPATH guidelines would have handled things appropriately.
4. A tweet from a woman who mentions getting mild dysphoria after taking hormonal birth control.

Quite the nerve holding actual science to an impossible standard while his position is just vibes. None of his(?) evidence even mentions taking cross-gender hormones. If anything the tweet is weak evidence against his position.

“Hey listen, I’ve been listening to these gender critical feminists and I think they might have a point. Check this out, what if we used psychiatry and hormone therapy to enforce traditional gender roles and normatively gendered bodies, but without creating trans people?”

Bwahaha I didn't believe you but it's there. Gotta find the option in about:config to kill it.

Who is that for? "Ahh I'm so angry, why are you showing me big words and multiple paragraphs phone? where are the emoji bullet points? Ahhh — oh hey it got replaced with something vaguely related and unchallenging. Thanks firefox"

While we're suggesting stuff, you can just make a nuudel instead!

(It's a free german Framadate instance.)

i've had a good experience with rallly, in case you're looking for alternatives.

Hey we got lisp out of it.

It makes a twisted sort of sense that so many of them go into life coaching. In their hermetically sealed subculture of highly paid, socially inept nerds, it probably pays the bills to set yourself up as an authority on reading social cues.

This sort of stuff makes me feel bad for Ozy. After a decade pushing back against this shit the community still likes it.

Did you see the Brent Dill stuff today?

Prometheus the AI startup is a bit on the nose isn't it?

A close friend of Epstein told me he was an integral part of a group called Edge, a strange organization involved in what my source called “the TED Talk community” that would serve as his primary gateway to the scientific world.

Edge, which has called itself “the world’s smartest website” and claims to “redefine who we what and are,” would hold TED Talk afterparties in Monterey Bay called “The Billionaire’s Dinner,” where people like Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt of Google, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Pinker, Richard Thaler, Joichi Ito, Margaret Levi, Frank Wilczek, Richard Dawkins, and many of the world’s high-profile scientists (including Nobel prize winners), business executives, and intellectuals would show up. Edge’s website calls itself the online version of “The Reality Club” which, the site claims, was an “informal gathering of intellectuals who met from 1981 to 1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms and elsewhere,” the hallmark of which was a “rigorous and sometimes impolite (but not ad hominem) discourse.”

Epstein had close ties with Edge’s founder, John Brockman, a self-described cultural impresario who on his bio page introduces himself with an uncredited quote that reads, “If the creation of contemporary culture had a global hero, his name would coincide with that of John Brockman.” He claims to have invented the term “intermedia” as well as “intermedia kinetic environments.” Epstein bankrolled Edge’s events and financed the majority of the organization—from 2001 to 2017 Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total $857,000 received by Edge. He was photographed at Edge’s premiere annual event, The Billionaire’s Dinner, several times between 1999 and 2011. Multiple photos of him have been scrubbed from the website, such as one with Brockman’s son in 2003.

Media coverage of the Epstein case has given considerable attention to his absurd scientific pursuits, like the New York Times story about how he wanted to seed the human race with his DNA, or how he wanted to have his penis frozen and resuscitated in the future, and I myself heard from people in the black book that Epstein had told them he had a cloning lab down in Mexico and that he was very into “transhumanism.” Followers of the Epstein story have debated whether these were signs of a true mad-genius supervillain or whether they were elitist hot air. I’m here to tell you that all of this bullshit, every bit of it, came from Edge and its assemblage of chinstrokers. The transhumanism, the cloning, the “What is up? What is down?”—all of it is perfectly at home on the deranged pages of Edge.org.

From "I Called Everyone In Jeffrey Epstein's Little Black Book" by Leland Nally, Mother Jones, October 2020

A step up from last week's uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I'll take it, but they've still got a ways to go to convince me that they're not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029

The Edge from U2?!?!

“PED” (Program for Evolutionary Dynamics)

You can't make this shit up.