Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A Liberal Currents article talks about Steven Pinker, Dan Dennet, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and The Edge (a series of talks similar to Thiel’s Dialog).
A step up from last week’s uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I’ll take it, but they’ve still got a ways to go to convince me that they’re not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029
I think magazines like Liberal Currents, for a generally politically and culturally engaged white-collar audience, have been like this since they were printed on rag paper. The only difference between it and fandom drama is that the participants can rationalize it in fancier language.
The Edge from U2?!?!
“PED” (Program for Evolutionary Dynamics)
You can’t make this shit up.
A close friend of Epstein told me he was an integral part of a group called Edge, a strange organization involved in what my source called “the TED Talk community” that would serve as his primary gateway to the scientific world.
Edge, which has called itself “the world’s smartest website” and claims to “redefine who we what and are,” would hold TED Talk afterparties in Monterey Bay called “The Billionaire’s Dinner,” where people like Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt of Google, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Pinker, Richard Thaler, Joichi Ito, Margaret Levi, Frank Wilczek, Richard Dawkins, and many of the world’s high-profile scientists (including Nobel prize winners), business executives, and intellectuals would show up. Edge’s website calls itself the online version of “The Reality Club” which, the site claims, was an “informal gathering of intellectuals who met from 1981 to 1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms and elsewhere,” the hallmark of which was a “rigorous and sometimes impolite (but not ad hominem) discourse.”
Epstein had close ties with Edge’s founder, John Brockman, a self-described cultural impresario who on his bio page introduces himself with an uncredited quote that reads, “If the creation of contemporary culture had a global hero, his name would coincide with that of John Brockman.” He claims to have invented the term “intermedia” as well as “intermedia kinetic environments.” Epstein bankrolled Edge’s events and financed the majority of the organization—from 2001 to 2017 Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total $857,000 received by Edge. He was photographed at Edge’s premiere annual event, The Billionaire’s Dinner, several times between 1999 and 2011. Multiple photos of him have been scrubbed from the website, such as one with Brockman’s son in 2003.
Media coverage of the Epstein case has given considerable attention to his absurd scientific pursuits, like the New York Times story about how he wanted to seed the human race with his DNA, or how he wanted to have his penis frozen and resuscitated in the future, and I myself heard from people in the black book that Epstein had told them he had a cloning lab down in Mexico and that he was very into “transhumanism.” Followers of the Epstein story have debated whether these were signs of a true mad-genius supervillain or whether they were elitist hot air. I’m here to tell you that all of this bullshit, every bit of it, came from Edge and its assemblage of chinstrokers. The transhumanism, the cloning, the “What is up? What is down?”—all of it is perfectly at home on the deranged pages of Edge.org.
From “I Called Everyone In Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book” by Leland Nally, Mother Jones, October 2020
Whitehouse gives anthropic “just draw the rest of the fucking owl” energy over Fable:
Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the model’s guardrails can’t be circumvented. Security experts say that can’t be done.
With this and the OpenAI stories over the last few days I’ve been enjoying some top shelf schadenfreude
The AI safety company when they actually have to make their AIs safe instead of just making vague suggestions
Disgraced artist, TTRPG writer, and porn star Zak Sabbath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zak_Smith tweeted about Brent Dill. Do all the awful Internet celebrities from fifteen years ago know each other? (No links because I delete my xcancel history).
Edit / https://xcancel.com/Alex_A_Guerrero/status/2067067064750047321#m (reply by x dot com/@ZakSmithSabbath)
nasb some criticism of the human damage is tasting up eve in places like ieee spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/measuring-ai-societal-impact-khan
The AI hype wave is the Dancing Plague for people who can’t dance.
“It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests”
The preprint:
it’s nice to have a preprint about a phenomenon that has been weaponized years ago. it’s easy to say that in retrospect, but it was easy to say that in advance too. there are also bots that might try to do something similar on lemmy
This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.
The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don’t need to list them in this forum.
Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.
First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.
Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don’t keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don’t produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.
Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn’t be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We’re doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.
@samvines @techtakes It’s also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.
(If they’d led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)
It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.
the original GMO crops
The original GMO crops would be like, broccoli existing and bananas not sucking ass. Monsanto are villains but they didn’t invent genetics or selection.
I also question the degree to which “the other 99% of readers” actually don’t care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of “I guess this is the world now” rather than actual acceptance. And I know we’ve talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn’t a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can’t tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the “median reader” statistic is misleading because the median reader isn’t particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it’s the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they’re not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.
A migrant from the San Francisco Bay Area returned for a software conference and was creeped out by the ads on billboards and public transit. “VIDEO CREATES SHAREHOLDER VALUE” “YOU DO NOT EXIST WITHOUT VIDEO” https://www.simplermachines.com/something-is-very-wrong-in-san-francisco/
Of course, the “AI Control” in Firefox for Android conveniently doesn’t include the “make a wanking motion-to-llm-summarize a-page” “feature” Mozilla has added.
Bwahaha I didn’t believe you but it’s there. Gotta find the option in about:config to kill it.
Who is that for? “Ahh I’m so angry, why are you showing me big words and multiple paragraphs phone? where are the emoji bullet points? Ahhh — oh hey it got replaced with something vaguely related and unchallenging. Thanks firefox”
I am out of the loop, what settings do I gotta change?
I believe in about:config it’s mostly under
browser.ml.browser.ml.chat.enabled => False, browser.ml.enable => False and extensions.ml.enabled => FalseI think are the minimum changes?options, summary, off
Anthropic: Oh no! Our new model is too powerful! It’s dangerously good!
US Government: okay then you can’t export it or allow foreign nationals to access it
Anthropic: Wait not like that
We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Of course this has less to do with the actual capabilities of any model and more to do with Anthropic openly telling the Trump administration “no” on exactly one occasion, but we can still roast some marshmallows over this dumpster fire, right?
that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)
please god let them block ChatGPT access like they did with Fable. it would be so fucking funny
but that would cut down openai costs
Wait anthropic are admitting that their model is basically the same as gpt 5.5 and the hype was undeserved?
Appears so. Their doomposting shot them in the foot so they have to backpeddle
A nice person develops a digital version of the Little Free Library for banned books. Hackernews spends a hundred comments arguing over whether it would be better to share Nazi shit instead.
zitron got a scoop on openai: 8.8B loss in 2024, 60.3B loss in 2025, 1.17B from ms + softbank, promises more detailed analysis later https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
So when sama said he suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!
tbf i expected that ed got openai’s s1 at that point. anything more detailed would be nice to see. that also suggests that saltman knows that leak occurred, and maybe who leaker is
i’ll just quote it straight because i can’t make it any funnier:
maia arson crimew 🏴 > @crimew.gay SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel’s private society that doesn’t have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.
According to a later post from them there’s a chance this is more of a list of attendees at a past or upcoming event, but tbh I don’t think there’s much of a difference between “member of the nu-money illuminati” and “accepted an invite to hang out with the nu-money illuminati at their clubhouse.” I can only assume it has the same statue of a hand clutching a globe as the Deus Ex opening cinematic.
Of course Ezra Klein is hanging out with the worst people in the world. He’s always on the hunt for a new gutter to pick up some fetid idea and tart it up for liberals.
Wired has a story about Peter Thiel’s Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, “sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).”
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.
…
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”
So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.
I’m sorry are you telling me that there people’s social circle includes the same like 50 oligarchs and apparatchiks and they’re making a dating site for themselves? I know they lost Epstein but this is just pathetic.
Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will be…
We are good on opsec
Somewhat buried by EdZ’s exposé… Nvidia trying to raise $21Bn with bonds this after Google raising money too…
Seems that even the mag 7 know the jig is nearly up and are trying to liquidate and get as much cold hard $$$ as they can now
NVIDIA bonds
Turns out your best
customerdebtor being one Cyprus GDP in the hole might actually lead to cashflow problems.
If LW is a cult, they’re doing a terrible job at recruiting:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yhrrhTzTeiZ8PzQZn/where-do-young-rationalists-go
