Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The field of artificial intelligence has come full circle.
āItās really hard to think about alignment. Maybe we need to redesign thinkingā type shit
Fucking rude to drag lisp into this. How dare they.
(setq alignment 'good)
Thomas Claburn writes in The Register:
IT consultancy Gartner predicts that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls.
That implies something like 60 percent of agentic AI projects would be retained, which is actually remarkable given that the rate of successful task completion for AI agents, as measured by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and at Salesforce, is only about 30 to 35 percent for multi-step tasks.
Starting this off with Baldur Bjarnason sneering at his fellow techies for their āreadingā of Danteās Inferno:
Reading through my feed reader and seeing tech dilettantes ādoingā Dante in a week and change, Iām reminded of the time in university when we spent half a semester discussing Danteās Divine Comedy, followed by tracing itās impact and influence over the centuries
I donāt think these assholes even bother to read their footnotes, and their writing all sounds like it comes from ChatGPT. Naturally so, because I believe them when they claim they donāt use it for writing. Theyāre just genuinely that dull
At least read the footnotes FFS
If they were reading Dante for pleasure, thatād be differentāgenuinely awesome, even. But all of this is framed as doing the entirety of āhumanitiesā in the space of a few weeks.
Theyād have a better chance convincing techbros to do a serious literary analysis of the video game.
Not to cast aspersions, I thought the issue rocked as a teen and re-bought a copy about 20 years ago.
But itās still ābased on a story by Dante Allighieriā rather than being the real stuff.
There is a reason they picked books to speedrun and not games, speedrunning games takes skill.
Ed Zitron summarizes his premium post in the better offline subreddit: Why Did Microsoft Invest In OpenAI?
Summary of the summary: they fully expected OpenAI wouldāve gone bust by now and MS would be looting the corpse for all itās worth.
I also feel like while itās absolutely true that the whole āweāll make AGI and get a ton of moneyā narrative was always bullshit (whether or not anyone relevant believed it) it is also another kind of evil. Like, assuming we could reach a sci-fi vision of AGI just as capable as a human being, the primary business case here is literally selling (or rather, licensing out) digital slaves. Like, if they did believe their own hype and werenāt grifting their hearts out then theyāre a whole different class of monster. From an ethical perspective, the grift narrative lets everyone involved be better people.
Like, assuming we could reach a sci-fi vision of AGI just as capable as a human being, the primary business case here is literally selling (or rather, licensing out) digital slaves.
Big deal, weāll just configure a few to be in a constant state of unparalleled bliss to cancel out the ones having a hard time of it.
Although Iād guess human level problem solving neednāt imply a human-analogous subjective experience in a way that would make suffering and angst meaningful for them.
This Thiel interview clip is amazing
Watch Ross Douthat realize for a moment in real time that heās spent a decade making ideological bedfellows with a techno-futurist, fascist Right that wants to see the birth of a āmachine godā & is in no way enthusiastic about the survival of the human race in universal terms.
Last Week Tonightās rant of the week is about AI slop. A Youtube video is available here. Their presentation is sufficiently down-to-earth to be sharable with parents and extended family, focusing on fake viral videos spreading via Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest; and dissecting several examples of slop in order to help inoculate the audience.
Dan McQuillian just dropped the text of a seminar he gave: The role of the University is to resist AI
Apparently Jan Marsalek worked for the GRU. Trashfuture is going to feast:
AI powered lie detectors spotted in the wild - https://pimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/100.png => https://eyecanknow.com/
Brought to you by researchers at the University of Utah. smh.
Woke: pile driving AI advocates
Bespoke: pounding prediction market peddlers
We were joking about this last week if memory serves, but at least one person out there has started a rough aggregator of different sources of pre-AI internet dumps.
Itās all gotta be in the models by now, but itās gonna be a cool resource for something, right?
Itās all gotta be in the models by now, but itās gonna be a cool resource for something, right?
Itāll also be helpful for helping the 'Net recover from the slop-nami once AI finally dies.
Update from Brian Merchant: The first edition of AI Killed My Job has just dropped
āØThe VibeāØ is indeed getting increasingly depressing at work.
Itās also killing my parentsā freelance translation business, there is still money in live interpreting, and prestige stuff or highly technical accuracy very obviously matters stuff, but a lot of stuff is drying up.
Another response to Ptacek. āVibe coding as contempt for materialityā part is particularly good.
give this its own post
Sure, done.
That is the kind of writing that absolutely anyone can get a thing out of. Will cause me to introspect.
Concurring with everyone else that this is a 10/10 read. This article lays out a very reasonable theory that explains why tech maniacs are the way that they are.
Probably worth a thread in its own right. I find the ācontemptā framing to be particularly powerful. Contempt as illustrated herein is the necessary shadow of the relentlessly positivist āyou can do/be anything!ā cultural messaging that accompanied the rise of the current tech industry. (Iām tempted to use Neil Postmanās term ātechnopoly,ā but I feel the need to reread his book at least once more before appropriating it wholesale into these discussions.) The positivism is the seed that drives people to take an aggressively technical approach to reality, and contempt is one possible response to reality imposing constraints through technical limitations. Not necessarily one that I have ever chosen myself, but I see now that much of what we discuss here comes from people who have.
Overall I think this essay is going to be a bedrock reference for a lot of people going forward.
Was checking out the QOI image format and the politics of the dev and found that he is pretty comfortable around the ladybird people. (sigh) Also the r slur on twitter.
Really amazing that such a simple format achieves PNG sizes and encoding speeds. 1-page specification, though itās more like 2 with a bit bigger text, for bragging rights.
Dominic Szablewski also founded the German image board pr0gramm where he is known under the name cha0s. Itās similar to 4chan in many ways. That he enjoys the Ladybird crowd isnāt surprising.
Woah i had no idea. Apparently he also made a web crypto miner used in hacked sites.
Wait Ladybird is anti-woke? Sigh am I going to have to make my own browser?
(I know I know Iām a lot better about posting about wanting to do cool stuff than actually doing it, hazard of having a full time job)
Yeah I saw that but had completely forgotten about it in the meanwhile because I have the memory of a goldfish.
In the grand scheme of things there are worse controversies, but I would so love an enthusiast browser that is, well, āwokeā rather than one having a faint stink of techbro worldview about it.
true that
Following up on the thread that spawned from my comment yesterday:
https://awful.systems/comment/7777035
(Iām in vacation mode and forgot it was late on Sunday)
I wonder if Habryka, the LWer who posted both there and on Xhitter that āsomeone should do something about this troublesome pageā realized that there would be less pushback if heād simply coordinated in the background and got the edits in place without forewarning others. Was it intentional to try to pick a fight with Wikipedians?
Wow, this is shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_alignment
Edit: I have been informed that the correct statement in line with Wikipediaās policies is WP:WOWTHISISSHIT
Rather than trying to participate in the āarticle for deletionā dispute with the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) and the most pedantic nerds on Earth (derogatory), I will content myself with pointing and laughing at the citation to Scientific Reports, aka āwe have Nature at homeā
The whole list of āimprovedā sources is a fascinating catalogue of preprints, pop sci(-fi) schlock, and credible-sounding vanity publishers. And even most of those appear to reference āinner alignmentā as a small part of some larger things, which I would expect to merit something like a couple sentences in other articles. Ideally ones that start with āso thereās this one weird cult that believesā¦ā
Iām still allowed to dream, right?
I poked around the search results being pointed to, saw a Ray Kurzweil book and realized that none of these people are worth taking seriously. My condolences to anyone who tries to explain the problems with the āimprovedā sources on offer.
Or was it a consequence of the fact that capital-R Rationalists just donāt shut up?
Maybe instead of worrying about obscure wiki pages, Habryka should reflect why a linkpost titled Racial Dating Preferences and Sexual Racism is on the front page of his precious community now, with 48 karma and 22 comments.
You know, just this once, I am willing to see the āDead Dove: Do Not Eatā label and be content to leave the bag closed.
Is it praxis when you put theory into inaction?
The wikipedia talk page is some solid sneering material. Itās like Habryka and HandofLixue canāt imagine any legitimate reason why Wikipedia has the norms it does, and they canāt imagine how a neutral Wikipedian could come to write that article about lesswrong.
Eigenbra accurately calling them outā¦
āI also didnāt call for any particular editsā. You literally pointed to two sentences that you wanted edited.
Your twitter post also goes against Wikipedia practices by casting WP:ASPERSIONS. I canāt speak for any of the other editors, but I can say I have never read nor edited RationalWiki, so you might be a little paranoid in that regard.
As to your question:
Was it intentional to try to pick a fight with Wikipedians?
It seems to be ignorance on Habyrkaās part, but judging by the talk page, instead of acknowledging their ignorance of Wikipediaās reasonable policies, they seem to be doubling down.
Following up because the talk page keeps providing good materialā¦
Hand of Lixue keeps trying to throw around the Wikipedia rules like the other editors havenāt seen people try to weaponize the rules to push their views many times before.
Particularly for the unflattering descriptions I included, I made sure they reflect the general view in multiple sources, which is why they might have multiple citations attached. Unfortunately, that has now led to complaints about overcitation from @Hand of Lixue. You canāt win with some peopleā¦
Looking back on the original lesswrong
brigade organizingdiscussion of how to improve the wikipedia article, someone tried explaining to Habyrka the rules then and they were dismissive.I donāt think it counts as canvassing in the relevant sense, as I didnāt express any specific opinion on how the article should be edited.
Yes Habyrka, because you clearly have such a good understanding of the Wikipedia rules and normsā¦
Also, heavily downvoted on the lesswrong discussion is someone suggesting Wikipedia is irrelevant because LLMs will soon be the standard for āaccess to ground truthā. I guess even lesswrong knows that is bullshit.
Adding onto this chain of thought, does anyone else think the talk pageās second top-level comment from non-existent user āhabrykaā is a bit odd? Especially since after Eigenbra gives it a standard Wikipedian (i.e. unbearably jargon-ridden and a bit pedantic but entirely accurate and reasonable in its substance) reply, new user HandofLixue comes in with:
ABOUT ME You seem to have me confused with Habryka - I did not make any Twitter post about this. Nonetheless, you have reverted MY editsā¦
Kinda reads like theyāre the same person? I mean Habryka is also active further down the thread so this is almost certainly just my tinfoil hat being too tight and cutting off circulation and/or reading this unfold in bits and pieces rather than putting it all together.
I think theyāre different people but may be in communication out of band.
Because of course.
Amazing how both accounts refuse to directly answer the āare you involved in LW/SSCā question, but work around that question so much (and get so defensive) that they are very suspicious.
Habryka runs the fucking site
Lol ow haha, jesus, admitting he is the lw sysadmin might have been nice.
Habryka doesnāt really know how not to start fights
