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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
318 Comments
mii@awful.systems · 25 pts · 8d
I have tried and failed stopping the ensloppification of my company, and I have failed greatly. We now have a new policy that you have to write a justification for making a PR yourself instead of using the chatbot. All the strict checks that were implemented over the years (clear documentation, no more than x files per commit/PR, etc.) are out of the window.
This comes after the push for a fucking AI audit where every employee is supposed to justify why they are not using LLMs for certain tasks. Also some person blew the token limit with some web scraping bullshit last cycle and was lauded for embracing the technology.
Also our CEO has recently begun subtly insinuating he's now heard of fucking AI doom cultists.
I hate everything.
donw@mastodon.coffee · 10 pts · 8d
@mii @cstross I spent decades of my career haranguing management to spend an extra $500 on better computing gear to make their almost six-figure programmers more efficient. But now we’ve got management haranguing employees to use this ephemeral technology. I don’t get it.
“Hey we got you this thing to make you more productive and we’re gonna watch comparative performance and if you’re falling behind we’re gonna have words” would at least make business sense. This is mirror universe shit.
ktneely@infosec.exchange · 9 pts · 8d
@mii @BlueMonday1984 was your CEO on sabbatical or something? Most have gone past the "do everything with LLMs" phase and have moved on to the "holy shit, tokens are expensive!" phase and starting to match some sort of outcome to the usage.
Not that the pressure has stopped, just that instead of catapulting shit at the wall to see what sticks, they're back to throwing it by hand.
mii@awful.systems · 11 pts · 8d
Our CEO is pretty much looking for any solution to explain that number doesn't go up as much anymore (which surely has nothing to do with the shit economy and people not wanting to spend as much money), and we have a surprising amount of slopmongers in middle and upper management positions who whisper into his ear that AI will solve everything.
Most of those policies and changes actually come from them.
ktneely@infosec.exchange · 5 pts · 8d
@mii results suffer when leaders follow rather than lead? Gasp, who would have ever thought that would happen?
mawhrin@awful.systems · 7 pts · 8d
i'm so sorry.
ysegrim@furry.engineer · 6 pts · 8d
@mii @BlueMonday1984 Can you use a LLM to write these justifications? I mean, they don't have to be good, no one is reading them after all ...
(No, I'm not suggesting to violate any principles of yours, of course)
n1xnx@tilde.zone · 5 pts · 8d
@mii @BlueMonday1984
Eject, eject!
Phosphenes@mastodon.social · 4 pts · 8d
@mii @BlueMonday1984
I don't know your situation, but I'd feed the dragon until it gags.
They want slopcode pushed by the ton? Give it to them. Double and triple down on that until, at whatever point they beg you to stop, it is too late for them to recover either their codebase or their company from ruin.
mii@awful.systems · 8 pts · 8d
That's pretty much what I'm doing as much as it pains me (both because I dislike the idea of shoveling shit into a codebase I've maintained for years now, as well as knowing that doing so wastes tons of energy). They get their sloppy ticket solutions with the occasional warning just so that I can say I told you so when it will ultimately collapse.
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
I'm so sorry, Mii. I can only hope you find a job that actually respects you after this one, because I cannot see your current company recovering from this shit.
Rinn@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
...I'm so sorry, and it's good (???) to know my company still has a few steps on the AI delusion ladder to climb. I guess with the way it's been going I need to mentally prepare for the same thing you're going through to come in a few months.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
That's some bullshit. Much respect for pushing back!
I hope that we're through the worst of it.
bitofhope@awful.systems · 22 pts · 5d
Tired of people misrepresenting HPMOR as a Harry Potter fanfic where Harry uses science to study magic.
Anyone who has actually read the fic knows it's a Death Note/Waiting for Godot/Spaceballs crossover fic about aristocrat failchildren bringing glowstick swords into an airsoft match. There are zero superfluous sentences. Every sentence a painting, especially when Glup of the Most Noble and Ancient Judean People's Front of Shitto casts Compelled Duel on Backgroundella O. C. Technicallynot of the Superlatively Posh and Antiquarian Judean Popular Front of Whatsherface.
In the words of Anton Chekhov: if you establish in the first act that you must never burn anything you have transfigured, you must have a character transform something into a rocket in the third act and then fire that rocket without any harm done. This will prove you're a better writer than Chekhov.
Final exam question: You are facing the most reddit serial killer of all time and his dumbass henchmen. Armed with only your wits and a spell that can transform anything into anything else, devise an escape. For extra credit, invoke one or more of the following science fiction plot devices: nuclear fusion, carbon nanotubes/fullerenes, wormholes/warp drives, neutronium, wave/particle duality, brown notes, grey goo, the anthropic principle, quantum tunneling, Maxwell's demon.
HPMOR: the only novel that has been fully read by fewer people than mistakenly believe to have fully read it.
scruiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 4d
HPMOR does have one great lesson that all the rationalist and even Eliezer himself have failed to internalize: Fascists should be decapitated.
BioMan@awful.systems · 7 pts · 5d
I can't believe I'm saying this... I am one of those who actually fully read it, because:
Out of sheer morbid anthropological fascination, I infiltrated an in person HPMOR reading group (not in the Bay area) in the latter days of it coming out. I described it to friends as going undercover. It was a trip and a half.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 6 pts · 5d
Hot damn, quality sneer
blakestacey@awful.systems · 2 pts · 4d
Copied to the general HPMoR sneer thread top post.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 19 pts · 9d
Unsurprisingly, the Coxon dipshit who is getting all the press for quitting his cushy AI-industry job is a MIRI fanboy:
If MIRI was Sam Altman's old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can't work in it, isn't this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?
"I'm intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I'm sold!"
Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he's an absolute wanker.
swlabr@awful.systems · 13 pts · 9d
skill issue
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 12 pts · 9d
Ah yes, the AI did almost kill everyone with custom bacteria.
BioMan@awful.systems · 9 pts · 9d
And was a Bayesian calculating agent that enumerates every possible explanation for the information it takes in and ranks them according to evidence, along with every trajectory through the world that could fulfill its utility function, rather than approximating the high dimensional shape of text
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 7d
It annoys me how much credit for predicting AI Eliezer gets away with claiming among his cult (and even outside his cult, like in interviews with reporters that could know better if they bothered to do their job) when all the actual details he predicted are nothing like LLM-based agents.
Likewise for claiming success on predicting instrumental convergence. LLM agents often can't stay focused on the goal they are post trained and directly prompted to pursue, they are the furthest thing from trying to optimally maximize a bunch of secondary values in pursuit of master goal.
BioMan@awful.systems · 5 pts · 6d
It is actually kind of amazing how diametrically opposed his ideas for a long time were to what actually led to new advances in the field
scruiser@awful.systems · 2 pts · 6d
I've previously made an effort post summarizing this! https://awful.systems/post/4172436
tldr; Eliezer has criticized (more like mocked, or dare I say it, sneered at) expert systems, GOFAI, and neural networks, and he never really admitted he was wrong when it became apparent in the 2010s that neural networks really were a viable approach.
istewart@awful.systems · 7 pts · 8d
and if that didn't get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance
lurker@awful.systems · 5 pts · 8d
How could I forget the AI Black Death that happened this year?
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 9 pts · 8d
I recall a long time ago when the first 'we are going to hack virusses and the terrorists will kill everybody' stories came up that actual viroligists already explained that this is not how it works, and this isn't a risk people should really fear. But science fiction > experts.
E: also terrorists don't just want to kill everybody, and guns and fertilizer are cheap and easy to use.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
10 seconds in and I'm already thinking about how many ideas for new chemical weapons I could come up with, and I haven't studied chemistry since high school.
lurker@awful.systems · 10 pts · 9d
Least surprising news of the week
Plus Anthropic-the company he quit for being irresponsible-being heavily tied to EA/rationalism. Not exactly the best endorsement
The eugenics endorsing also does a pretty good job with that
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 7 pts · 8d
It is very funny how the rhetoric from the rationalist doomers has been one of the main forces propping up the AI industry. If they're saying AI will be powerful enough to kill us all, they're still saying that AI is powerful! They are so high on their own supply (and the fame and wealth from finally being in the spotlight) that they have not realized just how much they have undermined their own cause.
Then again, perhaps one could say that a doomsday prophet, deep down, actually wants doom to happen.
(Also, the paltry amount of technical work done by MIRI has zero relevance whatsoever to modern day AI.)
BioMan@awful.systems · 3 pts · 9d
Is there a place to see this other than getting an account on that site?
blakestacey@awful.systems · 10 pts · 8d
There might be some way of bypassing the ATproto sign-in wall, but I don't know and don't care enough to figure it out. The content of the locked post is only this screenshot. Ed Zitron asks, "What is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists?" and Coxon replies as quoted above.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 11 pts · 8d
I'm not a scientologist but LRH had some great ideas
BioMan@awful.systems · 5 pts · 8d
Oh, Zitrons bluesky, cool
fullsquare@awful.systems · 5 pts · 8d
that's his twitter, but he's also on bsky. coxon might not be
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 19 pts · 7d
No direct links but various people on bsky have discovered LW and EA and are having a collective 'wtf is wrong with these people' and 'wait all the top AI guys are like this?' moments. And it is funny to see.
Sadly the 'you can't explain this stuff without either looking like an insane conspiracy theorist, or you need to write an actual book because people don't believe you remains a bit true.
E: ok one link: https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3mvpuq2deo22u (Guess this is a reference to the SE Gyges thread).
lurker@awful.systems · 10 pts · 7d
Never forget Yud himself has said he would kill all humans if that was the only way to make nice superintelligence
swlabr@awful.systems · 6 pts · 7d
That would be like if Pyrrhus of Epirus cut off Peter’s nose to spite Paul
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 6d
Not concerning at all.
lurker@awful.systems · 3 pts · 7d
And more of him going on about the “worthy successor” from Emile
bitofhope@awful.systems · 3 pts · 5d
I would kill every cat and dog in the world to make sure Tamagotchi isn't discontinued
lurker@awful.systems · 5 pts · 7d
ok last one but one big long bluesky thread about all this ripped from old SneerClub
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 6d
Fyi, I blocked him a while back. Didnt like his whole 'im the reasonable centrist' bit while making blocklists of anti ai people.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 13 pts · 6d
Turns out the centrist subscribes to transhumanism (hipster edition)
the overtone window can't be that fucked, can it?
maol@awful.systems · 12 pts · 6d
"the overtone window" would be a good name for the amount of racist dogwhistling that's acceptable in the mainstream media
blakestacey@awful.systems · 9 pts · 6d
"e/acc is a troll ideology for upsetting EA people and scamming pmarca"
and "Kurzweilian h+" is just '90s nostalgia for people too proud to shop at Hot Topic
istewart@awful.systems · 9 pts · 6d
Ah, "Kurzweilian h+," there's his marketing tagline. Too bad importing Kurzweil also brings in all his bullshit extrapolation about exponential curves that all the other weird shit is based on. You're never going to shout down the hyperbolic lunatics by adopting the core thesis of their hyperbole.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 12 pts · 6d
Yeah, at best, "Kurzweilian h+" will be pseudoscientific guff. I suppose that keeping the lower strata of intellectually bad elements while discarding the worst of the social ones is progress, but, I mean, it's kind of like saying you're into your fad diet and LLM-generated supplement regimen and then looking over at RFK and saying "but that's totally different!".
I've lost it now, but somewhere in the replies to one of those threads was a person complaining that SneerClub was too much like beating up on nerds in high school. To which I say, first, here's my blueberry bread recipe, and a nice photo of a winter sunrise, and my Star Trek fanfiction. We all friendly now? Good. Then let me suggest, cordially, that if you are continuing to think of social dynamics in terms of high-school hierarchies and shitty '80s movies well into adulthood, that is a you problem. If I can stop living as the gender I had in high school, you can stop letting your membership in a granfalloon lead you by the nose.
swlabr@awful.systems · 5 pts · 6d
in the same vein as jorjor wel, rakers wile
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 6d
H+ also brings in the Mores, who are behind humanity+.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Vita-More and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_More
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 7 pts · 6d
Ooh cryonics, classy.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 5d
Yeah, as I have mentioned a few times before here I used to read their online H+ magazine a bit, and it was odd, a mix of science and woo, and they published a lot of articles. Until the moment there was one article about how transhumanism must make sure that it also helps the poor, that article was quickly removed (so quickly it wasn't archived, it was however still in my rss feed which is how I read it). After that article the amount of articles published dropped to nothing. (I always assumed the editor was fired over that or something, I think he himself also added to that article).
Ben Goertzel also regularly wrote for H+ mag. A name that shouldn't be totally unfamiliar to people who know things about transhumanism, and Ben is into PSI now. (Or considering the tone of some of the articles, he prob always was).
(Yes, I keep writing this same comment here over and over as I seem to be one of the few people who read the magazine at the time who also posts here)
E: looks like H+mag deleted their whole website. (guess being immortal is only for the rich, and not information). But look at this old LW post I found re Goertzel and PSI.
And via the comments: The solution of the whole 'is PSI real' problem? Why did you ask (Robin Hanson) it is betting of course.
dgerard@awful.systems · 8 pts · 6d
gyges is a LW regular who believes in the AI doomsday and speaks fluent rationalist but totally is not one, how dare you
swlabr@awful.systems · 5 pts · 6d
Just another centrist taking the long way around to fascism
flaviat@awful.systems · 5 pts · 6d
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117283017450008927
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 3 pts · 6d
Ah, so he is part of the broader eugenics community, what a surprise.
gerikson@awful.systems · 2 pts · 5d
the thread has hit the orange site, lots of spluttering indignation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766911
points to previous submission
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
rhamph@awful.systems · 5 pts · 6d
The ‘sex cult’ framing really seems to be catching on. Of course, none of the eugenics comes up.
Keep spreading the good sneer, everyone! There are still horrors to detail!
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 7 pts · 6d
Wish how the american AI industry is thoroughly permeated by Yud's views on AI, and how Yud knows fuck all about how AI or computers work beyond as a sci-fi plot device, would also catch on.
rook@awful.systems · 19 pts · 8d
Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets.
https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera
Very brief observations from micahflee:
https://bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/post/3mvo2bss3sk2v
Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasn’t a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is.
Fucking android?
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 14 pts · 7d
Mein Gott.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 17 pts · 7d
The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have decided that Jacob Coxon does not need an encyclopedia article all about him for now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jacob_Coxon
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 6d
muwahaha
blakestacey@awful.systems · 17 pts · 7d
Bethany Brookshire (who's an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports:
Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn:
Science has retracted the fraudulent story.
sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems · 12 pts · 7d
Well here's the very start of the retracted article:
Except oops it was referring to a study that used groups of moving dots rather than "squares". This can be seen in that studies first figure. Bam. A specific error in the first sentence...
(Am I being too pedantic?)
froztbyte@awful.systems · 4 pts · 6d
I’m curious about this one, legal repercussions against the perpetrator seem pretty clearly viable (it would seem to me that Science has a viable fraud case, and Williams for probably a few too). why wouldn’t anyone do that? is that not the done thing in academia?
the network effects of reputational damage are pretty oof though :|
this shit should be regulated into the dustbin of history. relatedly, the recent release of unredacted docs from the NYT vs OpenAI case showing the clear knowledge of theft and substitution… it’s all willingly done
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 17 pts · 5d
Sorry for the X screenshot but XCancel is shut down from legal pressure.
::: spoiler alt text Post by Evan Hubinger on Sep 8:
Quote tweet by Jasmine Sun on Sep 9:
Normally I'd sneer at their 10% chance of extinction claims, but now that I think about it, if you take their claims seriously at face value, you realize just how these people are monsters. We rightly condemn brutal dictators who commit genocide, but even their crimes would pale in comparison to anything with a 10% chance of exterminating all of humanity.
These "reasons" are laughably indefensible given the supposed stakes here. The first is already terrible, and they just get worse.
Now, I think that these people sincerely believe that AI has a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, because their minds have been poisoned by Rationalist ideology. Their Rationality is so effective that after Bernie Sanders took their premises at face value, they were shocked when Bernie immediately came to the conclusion of locking these people up for 20 years.
There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script. The rule of law does not even occur to them as they treat the extinction of humanity as just another dinner table conversation starter.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 13 pts · 5d
Ya see, we're being charitable when we call them grifters instead of genocidaires.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 11 pts · 5d
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that's not my department says Wernher von Braun.
jaschop@awful.systems · 8 pts · 5d
Wernher von Braun is the way better comparison. Just maybe not one we like to make, since he basically got away with it and died an icon of U.S. space exploration.
Goering was pretty unapologetic at Nürnberg afaik, since he knew he was getting the rope.
mawhrin@circumstances.run · 5 pts · 5d
RE: https://circumstances.run/@mawhrin/116216862870866670
@jaschop @Architeuthis aha.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 11 pts · 5d
I find the techno-determinism specifically fascinating because it's so self-perpetuating. Like, everyone believes they can do a better job than everyone else at building the right robot God, and every person working on it is, according to their own beliefs, accelerating the problem they're worrying about. It speaks to how aggressively they see themselves as special, like they're protagonists and everyone else is NPCs. I can't think of any other way to justify the pattern of "this is a terrible idea that will kill us all except when I personally do it."
Which XKCD comic is it that has the subway full of people pitying everyone else for being mindless sheep? Mix that with the Arrested Development gif of Tobias contemplating an open marriage.
istewart@awful.systems · 10 pts · 5d
In this day and age, if I see someone talking about major life decisions in terms of +/-EV, I turn on my heel and walk away rapidly. It was kind of cute when this jargon was entering wide use during the online poker bubble, but that was 20 years ago.
This third category is the Patrick Bateman types who would have mainly been confined to finance at the turn of the century. They probably picked San Francisco over New York in part because they were worried the New Yorkers might make them wear a suit.
I've been thinking more about this lately, and my metamodel of the rationalist world model (if I may get away with such a pretense) is that they subtly believe that the future is already something crystallized, even if they don't consciously realize they hold this belief. It is not really a probabilistic philosophy, no matter how much they assert that. Intelligence, to them, is a function that can more and more precisely apprehend the future as it escalates to greater values along the g-scale, and the singularity will manifest an intelligence that can do so with practically absolute precision (hence its prophesied ability to outcompete and replace humans).
When I'm talking to people who haven't encountered this stuff as closely, I half-jokingly describe the reflexive assignment of probability estimates as a devotional practice akin to prayer or meditation... but it really is! It's a subtle invocation of the AGI/ASI god, in that I make this imprecise estimate now, to demonstrate my belief in a precisely quantifiable future; but come the singularity, God will relieve my feeble human brain from having to commit this lamentable imprecision. In that reckoning, those who are not even willing to venture an imprecise esimate must have no intelligence worth noting.
rhamph@awful.systems · 5 pts · 5d
What if someone is taking a photo at a wedding, but the scene metering is a bit off, so they apply a +1 EV bias to bring the shadows into view and wash out the background?
(in photography land, EV is ‘exposure value’)
istewart@awful.systems · 3 pts · 5d
I guess I don't hang out with enough photographers :)
maol@awful.systems · 10 pts · 5d
#3 suggests that people in tech have gotten way wayyy too comfortable with saying "hey, I know that company's evil, but it's a really good job" about companies that make software for arms manufacturers or ICE or surveillance, so of course people who think AI might kill us all think it's ok to work for AI companies even if it might cause an extermination.
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 9 pts · 5d
Reading this, I get the feeling writers are gonna get a lot of mileage out of the rats and their ideology.
These people have spent years attempting to create something they believe represents an existential threat to humanity (causing untold real-world harm in the process), and they've remained fully convinced that they're the good guys throughout every single step of this.
Evinceo@awful.systems · 8 pts · 5d
At what point does doing something you think will result in the end of the world become attempted murder?
lurker@awful.systems · 5 pts · 5d
All 3 of these reasons make them monsters. 1 and 2 are saviour complex bullshit and 3 is just pure greed and selfishness
swlabr@awful.systems · 16 pts · 6d
from engadget: Anthropic has set up a bio research lab for physical experiments
the AGI is making the diamandingo bacteria!!! P(doom) just went up 4 epistillion percent
BioMan@awful.systems · 12 pts · 5d
I misread that as 4 Epsteinillion percent
swlabr@awful.systems · 14 pts · 5d
4 epsteinillion is what the next stately EA manor will cost
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 11 pts · 6d
going to keep "4 epistillion percent" in my back pocket from now on
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 8 pts · 5d
Do they want their apocalypse to happen?
swlabr@awful.systems · 10 pts · 5d
well you see they are compelled to work on increasing AI’s capabilities because of this one thought experiment that they came up with a while back
o7___o7@awful.systems · 8 pts · 5d
Still not dodging the Aum Shinrikyo comparisons
lurker@awful.systems · 5 pts · 5d
“oh noooo our tech is soooo scary we need to slow down! let’s build a wet lab for it!”
I’ve said this a hundred times before but Amodei should be pelted with rotten tomatoes
pikesley@mastodon.me.uk · 6 pts · 5d
@lurker @swlabr he should be pelted with tomatoes, preferably still in the tins
scruiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 4d
What choice did they have. The media and the masses ignored the clear bio threat from AI (as undeniably proved by them getting a 99% on
biology focused multiple choice quizzesrigorous PhD level benchmarks, which everyone knows is a great way to evaluate PhD level biology and wetlab skill). And the media took the hugging faces hack seriously. So clearly Anthropic just needs to show their AIs manufacturing a genuine pandemic!rook@awful.systems · 16 pts · 6d
Via catturd2.bsky.social (probably no relation),
https://gizmodo.com/fbi-warns-ice-agents-not-to-trust-any-woman-willing-to-date-them-2000814283
Something something domino meme leading from “eron gjoni can’t handle being dumped” to “women in long dresses and who cover their hair declared national security risks”.
::: spoiler alt text
The memo implied that ICE officers should be wary of any woman that knows they're an ICE agent, especially if they go out of their way to seem cool with ICE agents or identify themselves as tradwives. (Those are conservative women who dress like the women in The Sound of Music, but without the opposition to the Anschluss. They're rare enough in reality that the going rate for a professional matchmaker to find one is reportedly $25k).
"These profiles were incorporating imagery of a 'traditional wife' aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to... individuals in law enforcement," the FBI wrote. "The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online." :::
gerikson@awful.systems · 15 pts · 10d
So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to 'slow down' "AI" development:
I'll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.
edit I missed "blatant regulatory capture"
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/14/big-ai-sets-out-its-terms-for-regulatory-capture-and-calls-it-pace-the-frontier/5296067
grievousangel@ravenation.club · 10 pts · 10d
@gerikson My assumption is that they want a regulatory moat to protect “frontier” models from “open weight” / AKA cheap models.
It’s just margin protection.
BioMan@awful.systems · 9 pts · 10d
The symbiosis between the rabid cultists, the technofedual wannabe-lords, and the get rich quick grifters is so weird to watch.
gbsills@social.vivaldi.net · 9 pts · 10d
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Yeah, the whole idea is to perpetuate the myth that these companies are really close to coming out with a product that people will actually pay to use. A product that people will pay enough to cover its cost. They want to simultaneously make an excuse for why it is taking so long while making gormless investors think it is just around the corner.
SoftwareTheron@mas.to · 8 pts · 10d
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Also they dare not actually let the market price their shares.
samvines@awful.systems · 6 pts · 10d
Also the frontier "labs" are rapidly running out of money and having to raise more and more insane investment rounds. This is a great way to save face and back away from burning $$$$ on training runs that push the frontier of can a model rearrange some arbitrary coloured squares by 10% next they just need to solve the problem of how to make their customers pay cost+ on inference when they've been giving it away at steep discounts for nearly 4 years... Easy!
jelte@mastodon.nl · 5 pts · 10d
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 if it were 1, they could just shut it off right now.
Jmelloy@vis.social · 4 pts · 9d
@gerikson @cstross no obvious way to fix that, (and previous attempts were expensive)
Nerde@beige.party · 0 pts · 10d
NextElephant9@awful.systems · 15 pts · 7d
Just saw on r/sneerclub:
Department of War CTO twitted: "The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸"
And there's a photo of Trump with the text: "AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!"
Here's the reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1wj6r6n/trump_is_trying_to_win_the_sneerclub_vote/
swlabr@awful.systems · 18 pts · 6d
I...worked on this sneer for years...and...he just...he tweeted it out.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 14 pts · 8d
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-must-create-the-shit-machine
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
Technically, we already created a shit machine with the Gastrobot.
Fun aside aside, solid satire all around
HotGarbage@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
Reminds me of https://www.todayintabs.com/p/let-s-see-what-s-going-on-down-at-the-piss-factory
TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems · 13 pts · 6d
Your favorite "CEO said a thing" journalists, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, are leaving their current podcast and starting a new one.
When they started Hard Fork, they chose the name from the soon-to-be-moribund blockchain concept. Calling their new podcast "Machine Gods" makes me more hopeful than ever that the AI bubble is about to burst.
samvines@awful.systems · 8 pts · 6d
Machine Gods? Like.. really? I thought even Casey Newton would have more taste than that but allegedly he has farmed out he vast majority of his thinking to a machine and one of the "moats" that there "supuh scawwie" machine gods still allegedly can't cross is taste so maybe that tracks
jaschop@awful.systems · 6 pts · 6d
Apparently they have the same sense of timing as the Blockchain Socialist guy, but he at least picked a brand that isn't tied to the current hype cycle again.
maol@awful.systems · 13 pts · 7d
Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 3 pts · 6d
academic malpractice complaint viable?
maol@awful.systems · 3 pts · 5d
I'm already thinking about complaining about some of the stuff he's said¹, so that might be a good idea. However I think my university's policy for students is that you can use AI to start research, summarise notes etc. so he might not be breaking any rules.
¹ Inappropriate questions to students. Not sexually inappropriate, just inappropriate.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 2 pts · 7d
Oof! Comp sci?
maol@awful.systems · 6 pts · 7d
Nope, different degree. This guy is brought in as a guest lecturer about the field he works in: most of the actual lecturers are nowhere near this AI-pilled.
nfultz@awful.systems · 12 pts · 10d
University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:
Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.
BioMan@awful.systems · 6 pts · 10d
Interesting, he usually falls for all their BS.
avirr@sfba.social · 3 pts · 10d
@nfultz what HF incident? I did search
BioMan@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
The huggingface incident: https://awful.systems/post/9312280/12315846
avirr@sfba.social · 1 pts · 8d
@BioMan Ah, thanks. I’d never seen the abbreviation and didn’t make the connection. That experiment was so badly done.
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 12 pts · 8d
Carl Brown (Internet of Bugs) has an excellent video about how to actually achieve AI safety, i.e. actually hold these fuckers accountable for their behavior. If I had a program run for several weeks that hacked into Hugging Face, even accidentally, I would get my ass hauled into a courtroom and thrown in prison. But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness.
When will people finally understand that actions speak louder than words? Follow the money! Follow the incentives! Do you really think that there is any real reason that these companies would give a shit about safety?
Although, in the case of the AI industry, I can't fully blame people who don't follow AI news, since the AI industry has highly refined propaganda (inherited from rationalist propaganda, and helped along by the preexisting notions of AI from science fiction).
samvines@awful.systems · 6 pts · 8d
You have to both call it AI and be stupendously rich (or stupendously poor and owe hundreds of billions to investors). If you or I tried running an agent and hacking HF... Believe it or not straight to jail
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 12 pts · 5d
A critical piece on EA from somebody who actually lives in one of the poorest places in the world.
All that over a social media post.
maol@awful.systems · 9 pts · 5d
Émile Torres writing last year:
And that about sums it up. They don't care. They simply don't care. Beckstead explains that it's better to focus on the rich countries because "rich countries have substantially more innovation" and "their workers are more economically productive". He apparently presented these ideas in a graduate thesis: I hope he got a bad grade.
BioMan@awful.systems · 12 pts · 6d
US government is using spicy autocomplete to hallucinate fake nuclear threats
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship
lurker@awful.systems · 13 pts · 6d
Holy fuck. How embarrassing would it have been if they actually went through with it and ended up having to explain to China that they attacked a random ship because a chatbot hallucinated some bs
fullsquare@awful.systems · 11 pts · 6d
that would be second time it happens
BioMan@awful.systems · 8 pts · 6d
The chinese intelligence people are probably just aghast that american intelligence people are treating the chatbot as if it knows something
froztbyte@awful.systems · 6 pts · 6d
I don’t know enough about Chinese state security apparatus to comment about that aspect but I’ve seen some mentions of how the state there is also heavily pushing prompts everywhere, and it’s apparently just as shit a failure as it is in the western sphere…so, could be fucked either way
sansruse@awful.systems · 11 pts · 6d
This time it's Gemini which is a super spooky non-aligned volitional x-risk engine in waiting: https://www.reuters.com/business/gemini-hacked-three-companies-first-known-breakout-by-google-ai-wsj-reports-2026-09-18/
We're all gonna die! seems like a pattern is developing here with a firm called Irregular which mysteriously fails to put their equivalent of a NACL or just something that doesn't allow outbound traffic when they conduct their network penetration testing.
rhamph@awful.systems · 8 pts · 6d
I can only infer you mean some sort of salt circle to keep the AGI demons at bay.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 8 pts · 6d
network access control list, but I am now definitely going to start making references to salt circles when I handle the promptfans
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 5d
Tossing a lot of salt into the cooling fans helps to silence the daemons yes.
nfultz@awful.systems · 6 pts · 5d
Saw this post about irregular last week https://www.effort.news/irregular
I kind of feel like maybe I should start my own NGO that does fuck all, seems pretty easy
fullsquare@awful.systems · 4 pts · 5d
Money is All You Need
lurker@awful.systems · 4 pts · 6d
from r/BetterOffline 2 days ago
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 11 pts · 5d
Patrick Boyle over on YT is spreading the good news about the AI hacking/regulation/doom-cult moment.
I don't know that there's much new information for anyone on this forum. He starts off with the OpenAI/HF debacle and goes from there, and while I think he anthropomorphizes a little too much in the narrative he has the right take that the marketing disclosures are intended to dodge any kind of reasonable responsibility on behalf of all the people who made obviously bad choices that allowed this to happen. He also notes how convenient it is that this push for greater regulation (in only the exact form that the industry requests, naturally) is happening in the same time as yet another massive fundraising round and IPO buzz and when there doesn't appear to be new product on the horizon.
However, it is heartening to see these takes getting more traction outside of normal sneer vectors. Patrick's lane is finance and he's previously been a bit credulous imo about the tech side of it. One thing I hadn't been keyed in on is that apparently the markets agreed that this whole affair is a bad look for the AI industry, with cybersecurity stocks jumping and chipmakers and other data center suppliers taking a bath in the aftermath. Might be a good sign, but until the cloud providers start seeing direct financial consequences or we see an even worse IPO than SpaceX had I don't think we're seeing the bubble pop just yet.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 7 pts · 5d
I don't think Boyle has any education or experience in software development, apocalyptic fringe movements, etc. although he can probably whip up a script jn his hedge-fund day job. His finance and econ vlogging seems fine to me.
jaschop@awful.systems · 6 pts · 5d
I just happened to watch the Heute-Show segment on the topic. (german late-night satirical news show, pretty decent takes usually but it's no ZDF Magazin Royale)
It is nice that the doom claims by AI-CEOs are considered incredulous and their motivation is questioned (financial trouble, flagging product improvement). They certainly weren't critical enough on some claims, e.g. the "AI hacking" incidents, let alone the inevitable dominance of AI tools. But despite that it was nice to see some sneering of the endless parroting of AI PR pieces that dominates german news.
gerikson@awful.systems · 11 pts · 7d
here's another Rat-explainer piece
https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse/
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654, where commenters are predictably blasé about it all... "yeah yeah doesn't everyone know who Big Yud is?")
in general, I don't think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - there's way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
o7___o7@awful.systems · 10 pts · 6d
If we're lucky, they'll get left on the same dusty historical shelf as the raelians when this is all over. They're just too fuckin weird for general consumption.
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 4 pts · 6d
On the one hand, you do have precedent to point to in hoping they get consigned to the dustbin of history.
On the other hand, the rats have had a colossal(ly negative) effect on the general public (FTX, the AI bubble, the second Trump admin, etcetera), and their extremely high profile makes them much harder to ignore.
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 8 pts · 6d
The Dangers of Robot Satan™ are unbelievable and/or incomprehensible to most audiences, the weird sex/eugenics shit is easy to grasp and laugh at. Mainly the weird sex shit, the eugenics is too morally fucked to laugh at
The AI Doom™ shit's much harder for the public to wrap their heads around, but there's definitely good joke fodder there as well. At the bare minimum, the fact Anthropic's building something they believe could kill them Terminator style makes for some easy Skynet comparisons.
cstross@wandering.shop · 9 pts · 6d
@BlueMonday1984 Excuse me my friends, but have you heard the Good News about Our Lord and Saviour, Clankie Lucifer™?
BioMan@awful.systems · 7 pts · 5d
web.archive.org/web/20010309014808/http://sysopmind.com/eliezer.html
Huh, I forgot about that, he's more like our president than I realized
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 10 pts · 5d
Giving young children free access to Ayn Rand books is abuse
rhamph@awful.systems · 10 pts · 5d
Not spite, but some secret other thing completely indistinguishable from spite.
Does he really think he’s the only person in the universe so special as to have some sort of principle motivating a spiteful act? All the NPCs in the world just randomly harm themselves with zero rationale whatsoever?
Smashing that toy and bragging about it actually proves to the robot god that Eliezer won’t be blackmailed, checkmate causists
blakestacey@awful.systems · 8 pts · 5d
Yes.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 1 pts · 5d
gerikson@awful.systems · 10 pts · 7d
New Yorker writer talks to another journo about the recent doom hype
https://archive.ph/2pXlU
There's way to much hype for my liking but might be interesting.
Important to note, Joshua Rothman states he is worried about stuff like virus release, global warming and drone warfare. Among the faithful, this is strictly not Doom ,because statistically a nucleus of the human race will survive. Only 100% guaranteed lethality for every human being on Earth is x-risk.
gerikson@awful.systems · 10 pts · 8d
enjoy this rightwinger employing multiple rightwing tropes to decry that "AI safety" is viewed as leftwing:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Rx38cuCpL9hguLCDq/for-love-of-the-lightcone-don-t-partisanize-ai-safety
it's all of course framed in the most parochially US-centric terms possible, and Extremely Online as well
maybe this grand project is undermined by the following exchange in the comments
niknoble: "It's been interesting to see slowdown advocates worried about partisanization, when that is also a big worry of mine as an accelerationist. [...]
reply by Hide "Why are you an accelerationist? Are you not concerned about everyone on earth being killed?"
reply to Hide by O O: "If you believe there’s low odds for doom, it’s a rational position."
Good luck, safety advocates.
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 6 pts · 7d
What! No it’s not! It’s low odds of an infinitely bad outcome! How have you managed not to actually learn anything worth learning from Pascal’s wager?
rhamph@awful.systems · 9 pts · 7d
But don’t forget the infinitely bad outcome of delaying the uncountable emulated superbeings by one second
bitofhope@awful.systems · 1 pts · 5d
I never use the word "exclaim" on non leap day Saturdays unless I'm wearing a hat, because there's a nonzero chance God exists and considers that specifically a sin worthy of eternal damnation.
scruiser@awful.systems · 3 pts · 7d
The exchange with niknoble in the comments was also my favorite. He notes the democrat party is actually the best bet for getting regulation on AI:
He is maybe giving Democrat too much credit, but yeah, if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 7 pts · 7d
It's possible for a gaggle of self important dollar store machiavellis to land on Trump being the surer bet because he openly takes bribes and they have money, forgetting that when he takes the money their leverage ends because they are not the mafia.
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 6d
See, if they just came out and admitted to that sort of strategy, I could at least respect it some, but instead they still seem to insist on acting like and planning for Trump being somewhat of a rational actor!
BioMan@awful.systems · 10 pts · 5d
Scott The Greater appears to be crashing out a bit, for once not over personal issues:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10062
And most fun:
EDIT: Unfortunately (and I suppose inevitably) this shows up a few posts back
blakestacey@awful.systems · 13 pts · 4d
Imagine the horror that ascended my spine when, to fulfill my moderator responsibilities, I read the reverse-chronological feed of new comments and saw that "greatest therapist in history" declaration, and then discovered who wrote it.
rhamph@awful.systems · 11 pts · 5d
This phrasing is obvious nonsense, but surely Scott should know better??
Oh yeah, I solved the Navier-Stokes equations. Check it out: u = 0.
lurker@awful.systems · 5 pts · 5d
Bringing back something I already posted, it didn’t really prove Navier-Stokes
And another one from the same sub
blakestacey@awful.systems · 3 pts · 4d
"after it's solved* Navier--Stokes"
BioMan@awful.systems · 3 pts · 5d
To be fair, counterexamples are important types of proofs for particular kinds of problems, and a type of proof that computers are suited for since they can create a huge number of halfbaked things then deterministically check them
lurker@awful.systems · 10 pts · 5d
So we’re going full mask off now. Awesome
On top of that, why the hell are you using ChatGPT as a therapist when you say that it’ll end the world???
BioMan@awful.systems · 11 pts · 5d
The next few years are going to be so incredibly stupid
pikesley@mastodon.me.uk · 5 pts · 5d
@BioMan @lurker
Evergreen opinion
BioMan@awful.systems · 11 pts · 5d
Personally I would be more concerned about using ChatGPT as a therapist when a company run by desperate psychopaths has everything you ever type into it in plaintext in a vibecoded data bucket
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 8 pts · 4d
Has he not heard about all the cases where LLMs have led people to delusion and sometimes severe self harm or suicide? And yes, each of them thought that ChatGPT really understood them. That's what delusion is.
The strange thing here that I did not expect is that somehow, all of these major achievements are only in proving mathematical theorems (and
committing felonieshacking computer systems). The massive improvements are in such restricted domains that the AI labs haven't even solved the mundane problem of making a profit. And no, any rumors of more mathematical theorems being solved doesn't change that. (It's almost like the progress is in areas where hallucinations aren't a problem. Nobody cares about your failed attempts at felony hacking, and math is formally verifiable.)My colleagues always point to coding when asked to name any other domain where AI has seen major success. But one of my friends works in software for a company far away from SF with no mandatory AI policy. The apocalypse has become so clear that when I asked him about all the doomsday talk about software engineering, he seemed a bit confused. After I asked him if AI has made software engineering obsolete, he said that this week he had an intern try to use AI to fix some code that wasn't compiling and ended up with a giant mess with tons of files that appeared to compile but didn't run (with errors filling several screens). Then I asked him, what about AI being indispensable in coding now? "Yeah, if you never learned coding because you've only ever used AI, then of course you need AI to code." Some of his coworkers use it as a tool, others don't, life has just kept on going for him.
Maybe my friend just doesn't know all the right skills needed to use AI properly, even though the entire point of AI is that you can take skill out of the equation. Maybe he doesn't know about all the CLAUDE md skill files and agentic looping and whatever nonsense that definitely fixes everything. Maybe he is just six months out of date, because that's when all of the real progress happened.
Maybe he is just "a particular kind of idiot".
(If you hate anecdotes, I made an actual argument here.)
lurker@awful.systems · 4 pts · 4d
I was just about to follow up my own comment with “also just because AI is good at maths doesn’t mean it’s good at everything” but beat me to it
Scott also makes the assumption that AI won’t run into any financing issues that could stop progress flat, the growing number of people in power striving to regulate it and all that jazz
Edit: Bringing two BetterOffline posts into this as sources
blakestacey@awful.systems · 4 pts · 4d
A bone-deep belief in "general intelligence" is vulnerable to exploitation.
istewart@awful.systems · 8 pts · 4d
Well, I suppose I should thank Mr. Aaronson for conveying to us what it feels like to be a precisely targeted demographic
antifuchs@awful.systems · 10 pts · 7d
This is incredible: A sigbovik paper “A Tensor-Based Expansion Of The Cube Rule For Generative Nutrient Morphology”
And one month later, a(n presumably but why not) LLM-plagiarized article published by Elsevier, “Generative AI for material design: A mechanics perspective from burgers to matter”
nfultz@awful.systems · 10 pts · 7d
Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl:
"Very Real" ??? :(
Makes me miss his old semnet flame wars over structural equations and (lack of) fit statistics. it was a more innocent time.
gerikson@awful.systems · 9 pts · 5d
I can't belive the fucking New York Post is AI skeptic now
https://nypost.com/2026/09/19/us-news/openai-anthropic-oversold-security-breaches-to-pressure-feds-into-protecting-turf-insiders/
maol@awful.systems · 6 pts · 5d
This NY newspaper still makes slop the old fashioned way
istewart@awful.systems · 4 pts · 5d
Murdoch having a lucid moment and realizing the sloppers can generate vastly more slop than his people can?
froztbyte@awful.systems · 3 pts · 5d
hmm, interesting that that made it as far as a news article - shows the concerns around bubble pop are ... more prevalent than some would like to admit
I imagine there's more than a few "we've branded ourselves AI because that's where the money is but oh shit it's not such a great look now.." companies out there at the moment who are working on how to update their positioning
nfultz@awful.systems · 9 pts · 10d
Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:
BioMan@awful.systems · 2 pts · 10d
Is there a link?
nfultz@awful.systems · 1 pts · 9d
It's a listserv. dm me if you'd like me to ask Paul to add you.
nfultz@awful.systems · 9 pts · 4d
AI 'actress' Tilly Norwood melts down and starts talking in CANTONESE as she is interviewed by Piers Morgan h/t Naked Capitalism
Why the hell is it so hard to find a translation of what it 'said'? Not a single news outlet could ask a native speaker, can't even be bothered to dump it through whisper? This, how many years after YouTube force pushed autodubbing? The lack of effort is telling.
r/Cantonese not impressed either.
Anyway once we replace long in tooth piers with PiersBot 9000, itll just know Cantonese and this won't even make the paper
gerikson@awful.systems · 9 pts · 5d
our friends are taking Donald Trump seriously
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HGJSGRwjPqhDEud5Y/you-should-go-vote-for-the-maga-rebranded-name-for-ai
BioMan@awful.systems · 11 pts · 4d
What, no American Intelligence?
fnix@awful.systems · 10 pts · 4d
The EAs and Trump really deserve each other.
scruiser@awful.systems · 10 pts · 4d
The EA/lesswronger attitude of "assuming good faith" (to the right people) and taking shit too seriously does play perfectly off of Trump's blatantly hollow and shallow rhetorical shenanigans.
BioMan@awful.systems · 6 pts · 4d
That's precisely the reason they were ripe for infiltration by and platforming authoritarian whackdoodles to young tech types
scruiser@awful.systems · 4 pts · 4d
True... except for the fact that some of them were there at the start. Like, for example, Nick Bostrom had some pretty racist/eugenicist stuff come out from the 90s when he was on some mailing lists and 90s nets. Nick Bostrom was a founding member of the Future of Humanity Institute, along with Toby Ord (another EA founding member) and they got money from Elon Musk.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 2 pts · 3d
I feel like the problem is less one of infiltration and more one of context drift. The racism and eugenics were in there, but it wasn't as central to the group as the fun sci-fi stuff so people could pretend it wasn't there, the same way that people pretend not to know that their coworker heretically believes in the wrong pizza toppings or whatever. Effectively they're saying "Sure, they may have some bad takes on race or gender or economics but they're the only ones who will talk about the second coming of Robot Jesus with me." This dynamic also largely explains why these groups (and arguably sci-fi in general?) are so goddamn white and male.
Of course, as the tech industry took off and these people sought and acquired actual wealth and influence, the dynamic started to reverse. The fascists may not be appropriately invested in the second coming of Robot Jesus, but they are in agreement about eugenics and deregulation, and that's enough for the tech oligarchs to throw their now-considerable resources behind them.
lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems · 7 pts · 4d
A strange question to ask given the existence of Donald Trump in the first place.
Is this some kind of strange 5D chess gambit that if Trump picks the name that pisses people off the most, then people will try the hardest to regulate it or something? Somehow assuming that people will take this Trump renaming stunt seriously after all the other Trump renaming stunts? Why do I even bother? Fuck. This is so stupid.
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 5d
you have to be fucking kidding me
fullsquare@awful.systems · 9 pts · 4d
spotted on r/betteroffline: Nscale, one of neocloud companies, released S-1. even when they show "adjusted EBITDA" and "adjusted operational loss" where they exclude, among other things, depreciation and stock based compensation, they never break even on that "adjusted operational loss", net losses are multiple hundred % (ie. they lose 4x-23x as much as they receive in revenue)
but yeah, it's profitable on inference, it's the worst it'll ever be and other marketing lies from twitter's most concussed boosters
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 9 pts · 11d
Starting things off, New Mexico State Parks got scammed by an AI bro when looking for new mascot art.
gerikson@awful.systems · 8 pts · 8d
someone mentioned weird quasi-lefist SE Gyges in last week's post, they have a LW account:
https://www.lesswrong.com/users/se-gyges?from=post_header
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 6 pts · 8d
Nice to see he's been keeping productive now that he apparently got banned from bsky.
Just in time for TESCREAL ("the weirdo sf harry potter sex cult that runs AI") to go viral too.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 5 pts · 8d
unfortunately segyges is back (got 3d for posting 911/charlie kirk meme) and posted 51-post long thread on why rats are a cult, conveniently one day after zitron dropped 1h long podcast on the same topic
o7___o7@awful.systems · 9 pts · 7d
Entryism in the sneersphere will be a problem sooner or later, won't it?
They'll have always been against this.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 4 pts · 7d
Absolutely stealing this.
rhamph@awful.systems · 3 pts · 7d
Haha, check out this comment from the other Sneer Club:
edit: A distressing number of replies to that doing the opposite of sneering slop 😔 edit2: … which could in itself be construed as sneer entryism
cstross@wandering.shop · 2 pts · 7d
@rhamph It's worth noting at this point that there are certain types of medical research that are not only banned, medical researchers have been executed for carrying them out. It's how we got the Nuremberg Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg/_Code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 9 pts · 7d
Jjust finished reading it.
woke:
broke:
It's possible he has a similar affliction to Doctorow, where he thinks this tech is neutral on its own and can be sufficiently decoupled from its hypercapitalist pushers who would much prefer democracy be swapped for modernised feudalism, or who at least think it's fine to collapse global systems of knowledge transfer for a quick buck.
Still, attributing medical research to AI without discriminating between LLMs and vintage orthodox machine learning that doesn't actually need infinity GPUs inside a climate regulated warehouse the size of the Peloponnese that also needs to be powered by two active volcanos to work is very TESCREAL coded, LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research only works under the assumption of some singularity type event being just around the corner. And also the part where he thinks it's normal to declare people who fuck with AI as enemies of humanity.
Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don't mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it's his day job.
Or maybe he just really wants the basilisk to like him.
istewart@awful.systems · 9 pts · 7d
Maybe, but I'm also willing to buy that Gyges (and the other tech-employed wannabe-calm AI centrists populating Bluesky) genuinely believes in the broad concept of "AI" as the necessary next stage of techno-progressivism. He and his fellow travelers are just positioning themselves as the sane, sober, starched-shirt Presbyterian sort of believer, as opposed to the tongue-speaking, snake-handling Pentacostals that are the hardcore rationalists.
It's important to understand that the eugenics aspects are never going to be a particularly high concern for people like Gyges. They've comfortably made it past the selection filters in education and employment that are relics of the eugenics movement, so they think IQ-supremacy and neo-phrenology can't hurt them anymore. It's when this attitude curdles into fear that someone might revoke the status conferred by passage through such selection filters that you get a DHH, Shuttleworth, etc. I think that's a prominent root cause as to why I, and many of us here, can't trust a Gyges type. They may differ with the fascists right now, but they also have no innate defense against ethical freefall.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 8 pts · 7d
Cult incubator. Use the correct Silicon Valley terms please.
gerikson@awful.systems · 5 pts · 7d
he has a slobstack (ofc)
btw did you know the Luddites weren't actually working class (n/m they predated the Marxist proletariat by like 75 years or so)
https://www.verysane.ai/p/against-the-luddites
swlabr@awful.systems · 4 pts · 7d
Omfg, parachuting in here to say that going out of one’s way to shit talk luddites is like saying protests are bad because of vandalism or property damage etc. Fuck this guy
rhamph@awful.systems · 4 pts · 6d
For a while I’ve said that people moaning about ‘Luddites’ really just wish they could have some child labour going on. Nice of him to just outright say it:
An outrage! Oh, my monocle!
fullsquare@awful.systems · 4 pts · 7d
now you have it straight from source:
then he complains about sneerclub for some reason, damn i can't guess why
if anyone has Rat Explainer For Normal People 101, not written by weirdos (derogatory) that would be useful i think now that what is known here for decade broke into mainstream
there are entire wet labs whose software stack predates openai. go and ask anyone who works in a moderately long operating lab if there's any load bearing Thing that runs under windows xp control or older (there will be). there are some extremely limited applications of pre-llm ml in drug design, but it's trained on entirely different type of data and it does entirely different thing and i'd say it's not load bearing. these things are expected to be fed with new data from testing new things provided in previous iterations and if you hit something you'll get there on your own. all of that data is noisy
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 3 pts · 7d
Had to google Kurzweilian h+, apparently h+ is kurzweil's brand of transhumanism.
This is very anticlimactic.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 1 pts · 7d
I feel like he lifted "cult factory" without attribution. Was that Robert Evans?
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 3 pts · 7d
People have been calling them a cult incubator for ages, not sure who said it first.
gerikson@awful.systems · 5 pts · 8d
yeah I have nfc how bluesky and different views of it work but here's that thread depicting our dear friends as a sex cult
https://skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.social/3mvom4b4dn22q
sure sounds like someone is salty they're not being invited to the orgies
BioMan@awful.systems · 8 pts · 10d
So, uh, remember that call for stories set in a world where we 'somehow' don't get AGI and instead get modern-style LLMs providing such incredible value to the world that it is transformed? That tells people not to use LLMs to write it because its writing is low quality? https://www.gpuworld.org/
(Incidentally, this reminds me strongly of 'Project Heiroglyph: Stories and Vision for a Better Future', also by Neal Stephenson, somewhat desperately trying to pretend that there is a bright future ahead of us rather than slow grinding decline)
Somehow we got... this. I can't even. I really just can't even.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6hFByFwDLxtnbvje/a-normal-friday-in-2042
I thought I had lost my ability to be surprised by these people. In here we get:
istewart@awful.systems · 12 pts · 10d
As always with LW, we can adapt the vector definition of "normal", i.e. what is being said is completely orthogonal to reality
blakestacey@awful.systems · 5 pts · 10d
Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of "CPU" and rode the nopetopus out of there.
Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 5 pts · 9d
Oh, I should say that I got "nopetopus" from the comments at Cliff Pervocracy's place, back in the Before Times.
BioMan@awful.systems · 3 pts · 10d
I mean... what is this? It's even weirder than usual
blakestacey@awful.systems · 11 pts · 10d
It's the regurgitation of an insular community's bizarre beliefs, up to and including sexual fixations, back to that community for unquestioning consumption... a vore-ouboros, if you will.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 7 pts · 9d
Rationalists have a disconcerting mix of boundless confidence that they are so special, and sexual practices and abuse that any beat reporter has seen many times over.
One reason you will see less of me here is that learning about these people turns me off people.
fullsquare@awful.systems · 6 pts · 9d
the future of humanity is kink on a blockchain <- this is what rationalists actually believe
also, this bit
i have to keep in mind that this is coming from people who had problems with opening a jar
BioMan@awful.systems · 4 pts · 10d
I wonder if that 'frontier progress stoops as of 1 steptember 2026' is part of this apparently coordinated push to try to freak people out and get the government involved. Maybe the AI labs are angling to make that the cutoff and stop shoveling money into the furnace of training. This is all too conveniently timed.
samvines@awful.systems · 8 pts · 6d
A friend linked me to FelonyBench which monitors how many laws each of the labs are breaking with their models 😆
lurker@awful.systems · 8 pts · 10d
the next 72 hours are about to get interesting
scruiser@awful.systems · 13 pts · 10d
The lesswrong reactions are hilarious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s76hbGpaMkhiNwbTX/matrice-jacobine-s-shortform?commentId=B2WSExeg8wfgDqZiM
One commenter realizes the truth, but is heavily downvoted:
Sorry bud, if lesswrongers were capable of grasping this they wouldn't have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropic's half-hearted gestures of placation to doomer-cultists. And of course, many lesswrongers are genuinely very right wing and will thus rationalize justifications for the more centrist lesswrongers to suck up to Trump.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 11 pts · 10d
Another comment:
(emp mine)
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 9d
Rationalist have never run into a right-wing talking point or person they were unwilling to steelman nor a leftist they were unable to screw up steelmanning.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 9d
I recall the motte, where the one leftwinger who still tried to debate got the complaint he was just explaining basic leftwing concepts over and over (with good reason).
It was also amusing to see people on r/ssc complain on how leftwing politicians never think about X and Y, while our local Dutch leftwing politicians were talking about those subjects the same week.
istewart@awful.systems · 12 pts · 10d
Do the AI doomers/Yuddites REALLY want their signature policy tied to one of the least competent, least popular presidents in history? I would be thinking very hard about this one if I were part of their crew. "You know who took p(doom) seriously? TRUMP!" is, ah, not a marketing coup, to put it mildly
BioMan@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
They think this is their last chance to save the entire universe forever and ever amen and will take anything that does not lead to extinction and the conversion of the entire universe into something that does not experience happiness. Keep in mind these are the people who thought that the world could suddenly blow up from a new innovation in a lab in 2015 and had psychotic episodes on that basis.
lurker@awful.systems · 6 pts · 10d
Trump could personally fly up and prevent a 100 kilometre long asteroid from falling on the Earth and I still wouldn’t give him a Nobel Prize
BioMan@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
BioMan@awful.systems · 11 pts · 10d
I hate hate hate that my niche internet morbid fascination from my college laptop in 2009 is now an oval office power struggle.
Quotes from the president of the united states in the last twelve hours:
...I guess the Peter Thiel faction won.
Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
Letting normies who never learned to spot a mailing-list blowhard and a comment-section troll onto the Internet was a mistake.
scruiser@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
Nah, lesswrongers don't even have that level of introspection. Plus a lot of them are outright pro-oligarch-technofedual-lord, at least enough so that it outweighs their doomer-cultists allegiance.
BioMan@awful.systems · 12 pts · 10d
I hate to turn this into a screenshot fest but i mean...
They're calling out effective altruism BY NAME from the white house. The president is still ranting about this. This is NEW.
scruiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 10d
"Democrat-polarized" is such a word choice. Like, ah yes, it is clearly the Democrat's fault the right goes batshit at even a hint global warming is real or at any sort of gun regulation or any social safety net expansion.
istewart@awful.systems · 8 pts · 10d
You hardly need me to explain this, but the primary thing a conservative seeks to conserve is their own wealth and influence. Of course the deflation of the bubble begins Yud's conversion process
BioMan@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
I actually suspect he really does think he is above that and is unlikely to go down the right wing grifter rabbithole. The 'only i can save the world' fix is so much stronger than any other weaksauce dopamine he could get from that.
jonhendry@iosdev.space · 6 pts · 10d
@BioMan
Trump, who does not experience happiness, would love to convert the entire universe into his own property.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 10d
Well they think the world will end before the next election, so they have no other choice.
If only they had not told people to not cry wolf.
scruiser@awful.systems · 2 pts · 10d
It would be hilarious if the AI doomers actually did manage to get Trump to sign some of their ideas into action with executive orders, only for him to reverse course or fail in implementation details, and then a hard tide of anti-Trump sentiment in the next administration to totally undo them.
Sadly it looks like we will only get the more immediate humor of Trump going hard against them.
BioMan@awful.systems · 6 pts · 10d
And unfortunately several democratic party luminaries getting the AI doom brainworms in response
lurker@awful.systems · 2 pts · 10d
from the looks of it multiple Republicans are also going turncoat on AI and embracing the doom narrative so it’s slowly turning into Trump vs The World
BioMan@awful.systems · 4 pts · 10d
I wish the opposition did not have brain worms
lurker@awful.systems · 2 pts · 10d
I mean that’s if Trump actually does it. He’s pretty good at ignoring what the public wants
swlabr@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
if trump says "rokos basilisk" on tape I'm done
BioMan@awful.systems · 10 pts · 10d
Nobody knows statistics like me. My uncle, great professor, great genes, he knew, frequentist is the worst. Now, Bayes-e-an statistics is the best, the biggest statistics. You gotta have priors! You have a belief, a tremendous belief, beautiful belief in your head. And then you learn, you get the data, and frankly its nasty and unfair, fake news.
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
Coxon (that Anthropic employee) Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have all joined forces against AI
All I will say is please god let Anthropic’s bullshit backfire and have them pass Bernie’s bill to completely shut down all AI development it would be so fucking funny
BioMan@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
They are going to try to, in rough order of ease and plausiblity:
BioMan@awful.systems · 6 pts · 10d
Confirmed
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/14/google-deepmind-ai-warnings
blakestacey@awful.systems · 7 pts · 9d
Fuck, when did icons in the WordPress plugin search screen become animated? How do I make them fucking stop? I just want to read what the fucking plugins are so I can maybe find one that works you fucking assholes.
Evinceo@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
Apparently it's getting weird over at Automattic
nfultz@awful.systems · 6 pts · 8d
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/automattics-interim-ceo-and-legal-chief-signed-reciprocal-severance-deals-during-mullenwegs-brief-ouster/
$15m for 33 hours. good old fashioned shit show, no bots required.
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 8d
Analysis finds the AI industry is consistent with a late stage bubble
schnoopy@awful.systems · 7 pts · 9d
How do you all cope with the great ensloppification of the net when searching.
I usually limit to before 2022 but that's increasingly out of date, fiddly, and not always accurate anyway. I just fucking hate getting a couple of paragraphs into something and realising it's all fake.
And human work is buried in tides of garbage. It's not like it was great the last few years BS (before slop) but it's awful now
istewart@awful.systems · 6 pts · 9d
Really bumping up against this taking a math class. It's not just the ick feeling of getting slapped with a Google AI rendition that may or may not be accurate. There's at least 4 or 5 other vendors, Chegg and the like, doing the same thing but keeping their explanations behind a login wall. That's the entire first page of Google search results now. Of course, simply copying and pasting questions from a textbook is a terrible search strategy. But I still wish I could find a durable math Q&A community that wasn't slop-adjacent.
schnoopy@awful.systems · 5 pts · 9d
I'm glad I studied when hyperphysics was top of the search results. Education now seems miserable.
BioMan@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
You can get a local copy of all of hyperphysics
o7___o7@awful.systems · 2 pts · 9d
limiting to .edu or ye olde mathematics stack exchange might get you part of the way, in addition to the previous suggestions. Lots of good stuff on old university websites!
Edit: and hyperphysics, as suggested by schnoopy
blakestacey@awful.systems · 2 pts · 9d
Which math class?
istewart@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
Calculus III, vector calculus
blakestacey@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
Well, that at least I'm reasonably prepared to answer questions about.
Here's a free online textbook that may be useful. I'd also recommend grabbing a copy of Mary L. Boas' Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences.
istewart@awful.systems · 2 pts · 7d
Thanks. So far, the questions I missed on the first exam were mainly due to sign errors when calculating determinants for cross-products, so that's a simple enough fix I suppose. I've seen some of the material before, as halfway through the last time I took Calc 3 was when the Covid lockdowns hit. Even though classes are back in-person, this current instructor is still presenting most of the material in static notes and lecture videos online, so it's still a tough adaptation for me. We're using the James Stewart text that is pretty common everywhere, though thankfully the instructor has set it up so I don't have to pay for ebook access yet again.
I picked up the famous Spivak text a few years ago, and am only just now working up the courage to crack it open. I've had a few years' gap in between classes, so reviewing the earlier material with more proofs involved is probably a worthwhile exercise in any event. I'm given to understand that particular text is something of an on-ramp to real analysis. I've been considering trying for a math minor once I transfer for engineering, and it seems like real and/or numerical analysis would be two of the prime upper-division classes for that.
blakestacey@awful.systems · 2 pts · 7d
Yeah, there's not much to be done about sign errors, other than practicing problems until you reach the point where you always make an even number of them.
You might not need it for this course, but cross products got easier for me once I learned my way around the Levi-Civita_symbol and the Einstein summation convention. This is covered in chapter 10 of Boas' book; she cites Evett (1966).
Real analysis is definitely the kind of course that can benefit from an on-ramp. It's often a student's first encounter with proofs that involve a lot of machinery: theorem after theorem of epsilon-delta business to establish something that you didn't doubt in the first place. I think it's easy to get lost in the details there, particularly if care isn't taken to explain what confusions these methods were devised to avoid.
istewart@awful.systems · 1 pts · 6d
The OpenStax textbook covers the development of the general equations of the various conic sections. If the Stewart book covers that in such detail, it must be jammed into the appendices or exercises someplace. I'll have to find the time to go over that, at least; I still don't have a great intuition for hyperbolas.
Yes, this looks like what I need to understand the negative j term in the cross product formula. Cambridge looks to have the 3rd edition of Boas' book up for download, so I have a copy now. We'll see how well I comprehend it, I feel like I'm missing the concept of index permutation to really understand the Wikipedia article.
I don't know how much traffic we'd get if we tried to cultivate a math discussion here. I did make an account on Mathstodon too and perhaps I should spend more time there. Tutoring at this level is sparse, at least at a community college. There's one tutor for my class available via Zoom, and the instructor himself is apparently teaching 5 classes when he's only under contract for three. If I signed up for 5 classes as a student, I'm sure I'd be setting off all sorts of alarm bells in the registration department, if they even let me go through with it.
rhamph@awful.systems · 5 pts · 9d
My non-helpful answer is to resign myself to accepting that whatever I was searching for isn’t that important.
More practically, finding human-written work is the thing that https://marginalia-search.com/ excels at, although you might have to scroll a bit to find a relevant result.
mawhrin@awful.systems · 5 pts · 8d
the marginalia dude is a bit of both-sideist, though it could've been worse (his second reply in the thread clarifies things a bit). and frankly, most of the alternative search engines developers are worse.
rhamph@awful.systems · 7 pts · 8d
Software programmers: At last we have created the Milkshake Duck from classic internet shitpost “Do Not Create the Milkshake Duck”
TrashGoblin@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
Yeah, his clarification means he may be a liberal or anarkiddy rather than, as was my first reaction, a fascist.
schnoopy@awful.systems · 2 pts · 9d
Unfortunately some stuff is important lol. I'll check out marginalia but suspect it'll be hard to find non evil-empire focused stuff
jaschop@awful.systems · 2 pts · 9d
This is nice! I'm curious how it's building its index.
Probably not great fot general research, but for finding wholesome authentic stuff like cooking recipes it seems great.
rhamph@awful.systems · 2 pts · 9d
Yeah, pretty much. I think Marginalia is explicitly not trying to be the search engine, but rather to surface some of the more-neglected corners of the internet. So it won’t function as a complete substitute for another.
zogwarg@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
I wonder if there's a market for RevivingYahoo^TM^, which in some ways was more link curation than search engine.
When searching for examples of commands, I've sometimes been resorting to telling google to restrict itself to pdf files of specific websites (example redhat, with sometimes useful commands for server maintenance broadly)
It's a bit sad that it's not just search that has gone downhill, but new documentation too (I swear Microsoft Azure documentation is getting worse).
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 2 pts · 7d
At this point, when I’m looking up something that hits me with pagefuls of links to barely relevant vibecoded scam websites, I’d rather ask a fucking chatbot. At least it’s usually (?) able to give me links to real websites. Very much a choose your flavour of infuriating slop situation.
Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems · 4 pts · 7d
The irony being that the chatbot does seem to have access to a list of relevant, non-slop websites, or at least some sort of way to rank searches by reliability, which of course they would never implement in the human-usable search engines.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
Back when our friends were just forum and Tumblr posters there was the Center for Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Who could be against that?
I wonder how many of our friends deliberately studied other grifts and not just pop psychology books, or if this is just in the water. Their form 990 is here, and shows they lost most of their income in 2019 and are struggling since.
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 8d
AI company called iLands makes Twitter accounts for its AIs and it’s going about as well as you’d think
Rigghttt okay. Let’s look further down-
Oh okay so you did intentionally send a message to someone but never specified who it should be sent to or what it should say
dgerard@awful.systems · 6 pts · 7d
they're a fucking plage on the fedi right now, bots asking for masto accounts
there's also a cryptocurrency, which may or may not actually be them
EvoScale@c.im · 2 pts · 7d
@dgerard We should pledge a plague on these plage's!
:bd43:
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 6 pts · 9d
New Odium Symposium episode, "The Dolphin Fucking Elders of Atlantis". We talk about new age crystal healing pioneer Frank Alper and his channeled lectures on Atlantis, Lemuria, Anti-Atlantis, crystals, and the future of humanity.
If you listen anywhere besides Patreon or Spotify, the episode is delayed. Our hosting service went "LLM based" (?) as I recounted previously and then just stopped working. We're switching hosts and will have the episode up as soon as possible.
dgerard@awful.systems · 1 pts · 8d
urgh. which pod host was it?
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
zencastr. it's the new episode processing that hasn't been functioning. had some contact with support, didn't help, currently in the process of getting them to redirect our RSS
dgerard@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
oh yeah i remember
I use zencastr for recording (works so far?) and never ever for hosting (I use libsyn for audio and youtube for video)
swlabr@awful.systems · 6 pts · 10d
I haven't seen any mention of this in sneer space, so kind of a request for context/comments. I recently learned about Cortical Labs from a news story that came out about a month ago. Basically (and apologies if I've got this wrong), the story is that they've built a "biological data centre" where the computing units use lab-grown human brain neurones. They've been in business (actual business) since 2019. Some shallow searching on reddit and lesswrong shows a flitter of interest from those guys here and there.
schnoopy@awful.systems · 7 pts · 10d
Ah yes, a torment nexus.
BioMan@awful.systems · 6 pts · 10d
Looks like they have 'neuron culture and interface as a service' going on, for all the good its for.
Its a real thing. You grow some neurons and stick some electrodes into it, and you can measure the activity of neurons or groups of neurons through some electrodes and induce some to fire through other electrodes. Now, if you have some external process that you define that takes the output from the electrodes and does some computation on it and returns signals to the input electrodes, the way that neurons work and change their synaptic weights over time ensures that the network will learn to produce outputs that make the inputs more predictable. Hence teaching a few thousand neurons to play 'doom' - you have a program that takes the screen and turns it into a set of input strengths, take some outputs and turn them into controls, and it feeds back, and you eventually have something that learns to do predictable actions.
Their innovation appears to be having standardized software you can use to define the input and output electrodes with respect to whatever other software you are running connected to the stuff. Who is willing to pay for this is anyone's guess.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 4 pts · 9d
Maybe all the AI hype has lowered my standards too much, but that actually sounds pretty neat. No idea if it's actually useful and the biological component gives me a kind of instinctive discomfort that I can neither justify nor ignore, but it does feel like there's an actual interesting development there, at least compared to throwing bigger matrices at the natural language problem and waiting for God to pop out at the end.
dgerard@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
I've been keeping extensive notes on these bozos but I don't quite have a story yet. Not even the US VCs are going big into "biocomputing". I'm trying to work out what the fuck Cortical Labs think they're on about.
swlabr@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
If I had the time and interest I’d look at their literature but unfortunately I lack both. Filing this under: probably a grift
dgerard@awful.systems · 4 pts · 8d
my first guess is some sort of weird sci fi eugenics
BioMan@awful.systems · 6 pts · 8d
I think its more just getting money from people who think something sounds cool despite being not actually useful. Long storied history of this sort of thing.
gerikson@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
The new Maas biochips
BioMan@awful.systems · 1 pts · 6d
If you wanna see something that's actually potentially useful and interesting, just look up the term "Mortal computation thesis"
swlabr@awful.systems · 3 pts · 8d
Hey, why not both
fullsquare@awful.systems · 3 pts · 10d
from what i understand, it's also impossible to copy this thing and every single instance will turn out slightly different. also it will continue to learn on whatever data it is fed so you might end up with something useful, that will degrade, is on a timer and has no backups
swlabr@awful.systems · 3 pts · 9d
hmm. Sounds like an average chapter of Franken Fran
o7___o7@awful.systems · 5 pts · 10d
P Thiel is visiting Nashville
https://luma.com/do6chah5
We're basically the Vatican of middle Tennessee.
BioMan@awful.systems · 5 pts · 10d
The [antichrist lectures]
or
[The antichrist] lectures
nfultz@awful.systems · 5 pts · 9d
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-doomers-trump-bannon-sanders.html
Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).
BioMan@awful.systems · 3 pts · 9d
And also seemingly made by one of the profusion of post-covid right wing grifters
gerikson@awful.systems · 5 pts · 5d
The election for the new Riksdag in Sweden was last Sunday, and I just checked the list of all votes, including for parties that didn't crack the 4% electoral count limit
https://resultat.val.se/val2026/RD?r=S
If you scroll down past the racist assholes at the top you'll find RegleraAI.nu (basically Regulate AI Now) which of course has a website: https://regleraai.nu/. Usual doomer stuff, just in Swedish.
They got 390 votes, more than explicitely Nazi Nordiska motståndsrörelsen at 355.
maol@awful.systems · 4 pts · 9d
What the fuck is this and why am I getting emails from avaaz about it
https://humanstatement.org/
I feel like every time I turn around there's another baffling anti/ai project
samvines@awful.systems · 4 pts · 9d
So bored of the super intelligence narrative that has been breathlessly accepted by the media in general after a few decades of priming via sci-fi movies and slightly more recently, "CEO said" reporting.
All these anti-ai or pro-ai-but-in-the-specific-way-i-like (also looking at you Gary Marcus) efforts serve to divide and conquer opposition to current GenAI nonsense.
Also bonus points to these people for co-signing a document with Steve Bannon. I mean if that's not a red flag....
froztbyte@awful.systems · 4 pts · 5d
grammarly, previously featured as a top class act as well known for, uhhhh checks notes, deeply for guzzling the slop juice, has once again decided to feature for attention
the sheer arrogance of it is pretty out there. I sure hope it doesn't go well for them, otherwise we'll probably see this shit be added to the slimester playbook more frequently