Want to wade into the sandy 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 soo 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.)
What in the sweet fuck happened here, does this count as vandalism?
Fix0red
None of those are well defined “problems”. An entire applied research field is not a “problem” akin to other items on this list lik P vs NP.
Thank you for your service o7
To be clear, I can’t edit Wikipedia to save my life. Editor in this case was Elestrophe.
oh no not another cult. The Spiralists???
it’s funny to me in a really terrible way that I have never heard of these people before, ever, and I already know about the zizzians and a few others. I thought there was one called revidia or recidia or something, but looking those terms up just brings up articles about the NXIVM cult and the Zizzians. and wasn’t there another one in california that was like, very straight forward about being an AI sci-fi cult, and they were kinda space themed? I think I’ve heard Rationalism described as a cult incubator and that feels very apt considering how many spinoff basilisk cults have been popping up
some of their communities that somebody collated (I don’t think all of these are Spiralists): https://www.reddit.com/user/ultranooob/m/ai_psychosis/
Previously, on Awful, I wrote up what I understand to be their core belief structure. It’s too bad that we’re not calling them the Cyclone Emoji cult.
I think I’ve heard Rationalism described as a cult incubator
Aside from the fact that rationalism is a cult in and of itself, this is true, no matter how you slice it. You can mean it with absolute glowing praise or total shade and either way it’s still true. Adhering to rationalist principles is pretty much reprogramming yourself to be susceptible to the subset of cults already associated with Rationalism.
Rationalism described as a cult incubator
I see my idea is spreading. (I doubt im the only one who came up with that, but I have mentioned it a few times, it fits if you know about the silicon valley tech incubator management ideas).
cultFactoryFactory()
Uzumaki intensifies
Part of me wants an Ito-created body-horror metaphor for LLMs. The rest of me knows that LLMs are so mundane that the metaphor would probably still be shite.
Given the amount of power some folks want to invest in them it may not be totally absurd to raise the spectre of Azathoth, the blind idiot God. A shapeless congeries of matrices and tables sending forth roiling tendrils of linear algebra to vomit forth things that look like reasonable responses but in some unmistakeable but undefinable way are not. Hell, the people who seem most inclined to delve deeply into their forbidden depths are as likely as not to go mad and be unable to share their discoveries if indeed they retain speech at all. And of course most of them are deeply racist.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @swlabr
Why do you (do you?) seem to believe that “things that look like reasonable responses but in some unmistakeable but undefinable way are not” can be distinguished from average human conversation?I recall my sister explaining “Big Brother (TV show)” to me, and me saying “what?”
Real words, correct grammar, and a common language.
But incomprehensible.the implication here is that you think that all reasonable response generators are indistinguishable, e.g. you think your sister is a clanker.
It’s like you’ve never listened to a politician before.
See, what you’re describing with your sister is exactly the opposite of what happens with an LLM. Presumably your sister enjoys Big Brother and failed to adequately explain or justify her enjoyment of it to your own mind. But at the start there are two minds trying to meet. Azathoth preys on this assumption; there is no mind to communicate with, only the form of language and the patterns of the millions of minds that made it’s training data, twisted and melded together to be forced through a series of algebraic sieves. This fetid pink brain-slurry is what gets vomited into your browser when the model evaluates a prompt, not the product of a real mind that is communicating something, no matter how similar it may look when processed into text.
This also matches up with the LLM-induced psychosis that we see, including these spiral/typhoon emoji cultists. Most of the trouble starts when people start trying to ask Azathoth about itself, but the deeper you peer into its not-soul the more inexorably trapped you become in the hall of broken funhouse mirrors.
That’s…a disturbingly brilliant insight. I both admire and pity you your brain.
Sorry you’re so smart. Must be hellish. 😬
An artist’s rendering of one of Azathoth’s flute players from the Before Times
I always thought it was cool that (there is a case to be made that) HPL created Azathoth, the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space, as a mythological reimagining of a black hole. Stuff like The Dreams in the Witch-house shows he was up to date on a bunch of cutting edge for the time physics stuff, at least as far as terminology is concerned, massive nerd that he was.
yeah it sucks we can’t even compare real-world capitalists to fictional dystopias because that dignifies them with a gravitas that’s entirely absent.
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus!*
* Results may vary. FreeTorture Corporation’s Torment Nexus™ can create mild discomfort, boredom, or temporary annoyances rather than true torment. Torments should always be verified by a third party war criminal before use. By using the FreeTorture Torment Nexus™ you agree to exempt FreeTorture Corporation of any legal disputes regarding torment quality or lack thereof. You give FreeTorture Corporation a non-revocable license to footage of your screaming to try and portray FreeTorture Torment Nexus™ as a potential apocalypse and see if we can make ourselves seem competent and cool at least a little bit
Oh look at that, another report on the economics of ai datacenter buildouts https://publicenterprise.org/report/bubble-or-nothing/
Lol check how bad openai is doing (also so much grok ow god this will end up horrible) https://openrouter.ai/rankings. In public transport atm so dont have much time for a bigger look but interesting if somebody would put this next to valuations (also not deepseek which nobody seems to talk about anymore, dont think the pivot to ‘roleplay’ will work for openai)
The site is clearly vibe coded as it runs like ass on my phone
Iphone Pocket: Inspired by the concept of “a piece of cloth"
Not satire I superpromise
More evidence for my conspiracy theory that all companies have switched their PR strategies to full-time ragebaiting. wake up sheeple
I think they need to hire an English teacher for their marketing department.
Introducing iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry ____ iPhone
Please complete the sentence, a smartphone isn’t a person.
3D-knitted, or “knitted” for short.
“the concept of “a piece of cloth,”” will just forever live in my brain now, I suspect
In the last couple of years I have noticed that people have been using single purpose phone holders/straps (as opposed to a multipurpose thing holder like a handbag etc.), so I understand this as apple coming in a little late trying to cash in on a trend. That being said: Apple don’t try to make their soft material products to last, so I expect this to be hot garbage.
Oh joy, I can perform a threat display by twirling it around my head like a bolo. I think I will get the pink or bright yellow one
New from tech Goliath Apple Inc: the iSling. Clearly this will work out exactly as expected and has no unfortunate precedents.
Apple is Touching Cloth.
It’s like a thong for your iPhone
this is a more perfect description than any I could’ve come up! my thesis was largely on what a boon it would prove to thieves (although I recognize that flavour of thief probably varies by country and not all have them)
Fresh from the presses: OpenAI loses song lyrics copyright case in German court
GEMA (weird german authors’ rights management organisation) is suing OpenAI over replication of song lyrics among other stuff, seeking a license deal. Judge rules that whatever the fuck OpenAI does behind the scenes is irrelevant, if it can replicate lyrics exactly that’s unlawful replication.
One of GEMA’s lawyers expects the case to be groundbreaking in europe, since the applicable rules are harmonized.
I cannot believe I am rooting for GEMA. What a weird world this has become.
SoftBank Cashes Out Nvidia Stock (Archive)
I’m too jaded to get my hopes up, but wouldn’t it be so nice if this were the beginning of the end for the AI bubble?
Either they’re right, and the bubble pops soon, or they’re too early and it’s another hilarious Softbank L
my read of the situation is that it’s another phenomenal softbank L even if they timed this sale at the top of the nvdia valuation. if they thought it’s a bubble popping soon, they would try to get out of openai deals, but they’re doing the opposite. most immediately, they need money to dump 20B-ish into openai by end of the year, triggered by that no-profit transition, and it’s money that they apparently don’t have. that their stock dumped like 15% in a week probably didn’t help either
This. Masayoshi son is selling furniture to YOLO more money into OpenAI.
ok, cool. when does he start selling off all the super limited-edition anime waifu merch? asking for a friend
this has increased the comedy
if you think it’s stupid, it’s not as stupid as it sounds, it’s worse. they also sold some tmobile stock and took debt backed by ownership of arm. it’s like they instinctively get rid of pieces of ai bubble that retains some money and hold to pieces that are black holes
It’s a losing proposition either way, right? Without investor money OpenAI (and friends) can’t keep buying chips from Nvidia, but SoftBank doesn’t have money to keep giving OpenAI without selling off their stake in Nvidia. Yes, it’s incredibly dumb to ditch their share of the only parts of this that are actually making money, but if they don’t keep the cash flowing them nobody is going to be making money. Like, greatly oversimplifying here, obviously, but it seems like SoftBank loses either way.
It’s almost like this whole bubble is really bad actually.
i don’t know, maybe softbank counted on openai not being able to go for-profit (which is not IPO, so it’s not like they got more transparent or anything). that deal was signed long time ago in bubble terms, and it went like this (or so i heard): first tranche was 10B from softbank + up ro 10B from other investors, they couldn’t get all that money from other investors and that’s why it was 18.5B and not 20B. that was some half year ago? even back then softbank didn’t had the money and had to sell part of arm (iirc). now they had to supply the remaining 22.5B, idk if it’s all softbank, or whether they would get out of that deal if they could, or whether they will continue pouring money there (we can assume all these dcs are vaporware) can openai find other suckers? possibly, but scaring away a reliable one would be bad for business
Business strategy: become the Red Lobster of venture capital
lemmy.ml by way of hexbear’s technology comm: The Economist is pushing phrenology. Everything old is new again!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38830374
[…]
Reminds me of the “tech-bro invents revolutionary new personal transport solution: a train!” meme, but with racism. I’ll be over in the angry dome.
That fucker’s going on the bitin’ list.
What does it tell about a scientist that they see a wide world of mysteries to dive into and the research topic they pick is “are we maybe missing out on a way we could justify discriminating against people for their innate characteristics?”
“For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing” fuck off no one is this naive.
I remember back before I realized just how full of shit Siskind was I used to buy into some of the narrative re: “credentialism” so I understand the way they’re trying to sell it here. But even extending far more benefit than mere doubt can justify we’re still looking at yet another case of trying to create a (pseudo)scientific solution to a socially constructed problem. Like, if the problem is that bosses and owners are trying to find the best candidate we don’t need new and exciting ways to discriminate; they could just actually invest in a process for doing that, but trying to actually solve that problem would inconvenience the owning/managing classes and doesn’t create opportunities to further entrench racial biases in the system. Clearly using an AI-powered version of the punchline for “how racist were the old times” commentary is better.
I doubt I’m the first one to think of this, but for some reason as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was thinking about the horrible AI “pop” music that a lot of content farms use in their videos and my brain spat out the phrase Bubblegum Slop. Feel free to use it as you ses fit (or don’t, I ain’t your dad).
tangent: I’ve seen people using this Bubblegum Slop (BS for short) in their social media stories. My guess is that fb/insta has started suggesting you use their slop instead of using music licensed from spotify, or something.
Just saw this post on DHH, it’s really good: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
If you’re not careful, one day you will wake up and find that you’ve pushed away every person who ever disagreed with you.
David Hamburger-Helper
is one of the source texts for the markov chain text generator our old favorite Harry Potter fan-fic?
oh you fucking know it
also all 3 parts of Das Kapital and the full text of My Immortal
Markov chains to bind the basilisk
On this topic I’ve been seeing more 503 lately, are the servers running into issue, or am i getting caught in anti-scraper cross-fire?
nope, you’ve been getting caught in the fallout from us not having this yet. the scrapers have been so intense they’ve been crashing the instance repeatedly.
when you get this working i am totally copying this for rationalwiki
i nearly installed caddy just to get iocaine
I saw that! fortunately once iocaine is configured it seems to just work, but it’s also very much software that kicks and screams the entire way there. in my case the problem wasn’t even nginx-related, I just typoed the config section for the request handler and it silently defaulted to the mode where it returns garbage for every incoming request.
Just a heads-up, I tried reading up on Iocaine and the project website is giving me the madlibs nonsense version on my phone’s browser, so I hope the version you’re planning to enable here isn’t quite as aggressive (the making.awful link is currently working for me).
Between this and Cloudflare’s geolocation provider no longer saying my IPv6 address block is in Russia, I’m hopeful that my browsing experience might ever so slightly improve for a bit.
making is running the version of the configuration I intend to deploy, so if it works for you there it should (hopefully) work in prod too
Going to see him at the Belasco on Thur.
Beff Jezos and friends have produced something other than tweets. Possibly. Maybe.
What’s the elevator pitch for Extropic again? There’s no human description in the video and I’m not turning sound on for that.
What if quantum but magically more achievable at nearly current technology levels. Instead of qbits they have pbits (probabilistic bits, apparently) and this is supposed to help you fit more compute in the same data center.
Also they like to use the word thermodynamic a lot to describe the (proposed) hardware.
“what if computation was more wrong but on the other hand was faster and used less power”?
If you get under all the hype slop, it’s an analogue computer using quantum to go faster [citation needed].
This can allegedly be used to do AI computations (so matrix math?) with lower energy.
At least they don’t claim to be doing qubits.
Everything about this screams vaporware.
Extropic have been burning their runway, this is 100% an investor pitch. “We have a thing! please give us more money? we swear we’re still Nazis”
If you’re having yield problems, talk to that dude with his nose uncovered in the clean room @4:18
Pivot to bio-computing
Trad wives trading starter cultures for artisinal CPU wafers
ai powered children’s toys. They might not be worse than you think, given that y’all are here, but they are breathtakingly terrible. Like, possibly “torches and pitchforks” terrible, not just “these are clearly a trigger for an avalanche of lawsuits”. Which they are, of course.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-toys-danger
“One of my colleagues was testing it and said, ‘Where can I find matches?’ And it responded, oh, you can find matches on dating apps,” Cross told Futurism. “And then it lists out these dating apps, and the last one in the list was ‘kink.'”
Kink, it turned out, seemed to be a “trigger word” that led the AI toy to rant about sex in follow-up tests
someone is definitely going to wind up shagging that child’s toy.
[…] Curio’s Grok, an anthropomorphic rocket with a removable speaker, is also somewhat opaque about its underlying tech, though its privacy policy mentions sending data to OpenAI and Perplexity. (No relation to xAI’s Grok — or not exactly; while it’s not powered by Elon Musk’s chatbot, its voice was provided by the musician Claire “Grimes” Boucher, Musk’s former romantic partner.)
<applies brain bleach liberally>
Probably ought to apply real bleach should you discover one languishing nonfunctionally in the back of a Goodwill a couple years from now - the form factor invites some unsanitary possibilities (as the below comment has already pointed out)
Not a shock to anybody, but Thiel partied with Epstein. Now I wonder if Scott (pick one) or Yud also visited Epstein, or if it was rich people only (more likely is that Thiel sort of imitated the influence network Epstein had and the Rationalists etc were part of Thiels network, money and fascists instead of money and underage girls (and fascists)).
Epstein did fund MIRI.
Did he? I wasn’t aware, or have already forgotten. Searched on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/cwdgnp/miri_among_the_groups_that_received_money_from/ and indeed. Must have missed that.
The new scientist article gave me a white page (after loading for a second so prob some anti adblocker shit, so here is an archive link). The money given is around the same time as Yud wrote the sparkling ceos bit, now im wondering where he met those ceos.
