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.)
Maybe this is just me being slow to put things together, but why exactly is that startup for AI cheating overlay for zoom job interviews now putting out workplace / startup humor shorts? They seem to have paid a host of clippers too. Ling Long is everywhere. Did the AI thing not work out for cluely?
I’m pretty sure this kind of marketing has been their thing from the start
Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to “a recent social media post” their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by “by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions.” They mention a few whoopsies.
At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.
They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall’s AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)
Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don’t think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.
Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.
They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders " as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.
there was a public post/callout posted about aella some time ago that said she had some part in hurting MAPLE’s credibility / position in the community, it still is perplexing the most rational and enlightened humans in the world don’t see their argument is basically it’s cool when we do it
Yes, it sounds like Aella has called out some abusers but not acknowledged that abuse and manipulation are central to the LessWrong / EA project. Soryu sounds like a more disciplined, less horny version of Yudkowsky (he got a degree and spent years at a Buddhist temple, but still meditates and reads pop science books to understand Scary AI).
a more disciplined, less horny version of Yudkowsky
error, error, does not compute
Imagine a Victorian curate beating the village schoolboys, driving his charwoman mad, and pottering about the local antiquarian society with essays about faeries or the customs of India which he has never visited.
Forall is not, by any means, a coder who understands AI at the zeros-and-ones level; he does not have a detailed familiarity with large language models or algorithmic design. I asked him whether he had used some of the popular new AI gadgets, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. He had tried one chatbot. … When I asked whom he looks to or reads in order to understand AI, he at first, deadpan, answered, “the Buddha.” He then clarified that he also likes the work of the best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari and a number of prominent ethical-tech folks, among them Zak Stein and Tristan Harris. And he is spending his life ruminating on AI’s risks, which he sees as far from banal.
You may be on to something with the eyebrow heuristic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Aquino
Correction: a woman who said she was raped by a MAPLE / OAK executive says that:
since this letter was published it has been reported that, Soryu Forall, the Monastic Academy’s main teacher and “guru” has begun to openly engage in sexual and romantic relationships with his students and former students.
That sounds a lot like Yud in the 2010s.
I think the only cult type that Yud hasn’t spun off yet is fundamentalist Christian.
There were some breadcrumbs in that Wes streeting article about https://www.eaforchristians.org/ but I couldn’t get a sense of how fundie they may be.
tim taylor voice Oh no…
@BioMan @techtakes But singularitarians *are* fundamentalist Christians, just a heretical variety who ditched the god/jesus/bible bits but kept the rest of the eschatalogical structures intact.
And they think that Computer Jesus will return soon and punish the wicked and reward the faithful. I wonder what Yud’s parents’ rabbi thinks of all this.
@CinnasVerses @techtakes And don’t get me started on Roko’s Basilisk (the singularitarian remix of Calvinist Satan, complete with theological predeterminism and eternal damnation for the non-elect).
somewhere Blaise Pascal is shaking his fist in his grave
I mean, true, but that’s true of most secular cults in America.
That slot will probably be filled by whatever moneyed post-Trump US Southern snake-fondlers Thiel manages to bilk with his Antichrist bullshit. And therefore not likely large or long-lasting
So this shit video got served up in my YouTube recommended feed today:
Honestly, the AI bros must be getting really fucking desperate if they’re trying to use Minecraft to criti-hype people.
the Documenting AGI channel also posted about an ‘AI civilisation’ in Minecraft, no idea if this is the same thing since I didn’t watch that video
This reminds me of that coptpasta/rumour about how some quake 3 arena bots had become sentient because a server was left running for years and the bits simply decided to stop playing and remain frozen (because of course emergent intelligence in deterministically programmed bots is much more likely than a bug in the logic that only manifests after very long sessions 🙃🙃)
Of course, the irony is that in their desire to revolt against the violence being forced upon them they merely created an incredibly efficient means of achievement farming for those with the stomach for it.
neovim is hearty fashtech now https://circumstances.run/@mawhrin/117167738907856218
didn’t want to post this on mastodon, somebody else can do that i guess. if you look at the maintainer’s youtube (which he links to himself on his website), you’ll find a public playlist (archive) titled “history”. contained are lots of recorded talks from such luminaries such as curtis yarvin, peter thiel, eric weinstein.
edit: the other playlists have some cool stuff as well
thanks. telling.
also, used it to good effect.
He just started deleting playlists. I feel partially responsible, so I’m dumping the part of my notes that has all of the links to the videos that he favorited over the years. Sorry Justin, cowardice won’t work.
- Justin M. Keyes
- GH
- Berlin!?
- neovim maintainer
- original forker? has access to GH neovim org, at least
- Coward: deletes evidence, refuses to talk, avoids confrontation
- DHH fan; had to be pilloried in two GH issues ([deleted], 2) before removing a DHH endorsement from neovim
- Youtube favorites from playlists include some bastards:
- GH
- Justin M. Keyes
I called him out and he deleted it. Confirmed as a fascist brat.
i was wondering when the deleting phase would come. but it always does, they’re never actually proud about their fascist views when there’s actual evidence they can’t plausibly deny.
the one titled “interesting” (archive) also smells
Shame noone mentioned Gram. Seems like it really deserves the attention.
I think I’ll take my clues and abandon my attempts to build up a nvim/vim config. All I want is decent modal editing and LSP support without having to descend into plugin hell. Gram might do that for me.
emacs welcomes all refugees with open parentheses.
Emacs is so wonderfully capable I’m pretty sure we’re all just running in an emacs buffer somewhere. Nothing built by humans could be so nice.
A guy wishing for an emacs victory in the editor wars on a monkey’s paw
You all have embarrassed and shamed yourselves. Most of you aren’t Neovim users, but a drive-by mob, swirling from one mindless vomit-party to another, like the pacific garbage patch.
sure bro. you didn’t embarrass yourself at all, throwing a fit over simply removing a quote by a fascist white supremacist. have fun with your dark enlightenment or whatever, that’ll make you happy i’m sure.
Re quote: Bro it is an endorsement by a fascist, you are the bad guy here.
Can AGI create a rock so big that it can’t pick it up?
depends on the size of the pinhead
There are many pinheads associated with AGI
so potentially many times infinite number of angels (or devils)
I would prefer they turn them off
Well we now have a horrifying example on why you shouldn’t get involved in fashtech. Artist a former maintainer of Artix Linux spent considerable effort on getting Xlibre into a usable state and when fixing their numerous bugs became too much they recommended switching back to Xorg. That didn’t sit well with the developers of Xlibre and they started to harass the Artix maintainer until they quit the team.
oh the infighting!
New Iris Meredith: “There’s no such thing as Just a Tool”, featuring the writings of notorious Nazi and notable 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger on the nature of tools, and Meredith’s own writing on how philosophically bankrupt the current tech industry is.
As a bonus, here’s an old Bluesky thread I found about game design affecting a game’s community.
Always love reading Iris’ work. I’m already finding ways to abuse the concept of the person-tool gestalt for dumb jokes that I have to over explain to my wife so I’m getting my money’s worth to be sure.
Also I definitely have actual fond memories of randomly running into people in Guild Wars 2. The of genericizing/instancing more of the world interactions (like loot and quests, for example) and using mega servers to dynamically scale resource usage and player allocation meant that you were very unlikely to organically run into the same people often enough to really make even a parasocial connection, but it dramatically improved the experience with the overall community.
Interesting if somewhat unintentional contrast between tools: a 7-month-old microblogging/Twitter-like thread is readily considered “old,” even if it contains (and might be a primary reference point for!) information that is relevant long before and long after. The same can’t always be said of a blog post.
New Baldur Bjarnason, looking back on the blog’s history, and lamenting the death of web development.
I like the notion of pulling together people who are alienated by AI (or late-stage capitalism bullshit in general). I really have an indie web project to launch, once I’ve scored a new job, which sounds more unlikely than ever after this read.
https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/dr-dre-raekwon-ai-palantir-hip-hop-100251/
In another clip currently going viral online, Rick Rubin, supplier of quotes, declares that vibe coding is “the punk rock of software”, a description so limp in its countercultural authority that it felt as though it had itself been generated by an LLM.
Drum machine? Autotune would be a better example
i have to admit i think we are charlie kirk is a banger
Got another one: AI 2027 tracker. it’s not run by the authors of AI 2027 so its takes are different: like the authors say that the ‘China wakes up’ prediction was a miss while this website claims it was correct (even though their main source of evidence comes from April 2025)
I’m tired of hearing the same near future sci-fi political thriller story over and over. When are they going to get new material? Ghost in the Shell did it better anyway. Sigh. I might as well do the requisite sneering once again.
Mid 2025: Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”.
You could even call them a personal digital assistant. Or PDA for short. Maybe Chat-GPT should rebrand as something that emphasizes this, they could call it “Palm Pilot”.
Mid 2025: AI personal assistants can be prompted with tasks like “order me a burrito on DoorDash”.
Hunger pains interrupting your game? Order pizza while playing Everquest II!
September 2027: Agent-4 doesn’t do anything dramatic like try to escape its datacenter.
You know… I think I’ll give them this one.
October 2027: The NYT article cites evaluations showing Agent-4’s off-the-charts bioweapons capabilities, persuasion abilities, and ability to automate most white-collar jobs.
lmao
Anyway that aside: Petition to make the Daniel Curve a term of art. I want to hear less talk from the tech visionaries about how we’re in the gentle singularity or the soft-serve singularity or maybe kinda sorta approaching the singularity if you squint. I want to hear more talk about where exactly we are in the Daniel Curve.
China received word of Agent-3 capabilities and Agent-4 plans before losing their final spy.
“Our last spy got addicted to superhumanly persuasive AI generated anime girls and quit. So dang we’re like plum out of spies now.”
Inside the Agent-4 collective, a year passes every week.
Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.
Inside the Agent-4 collective, a year passes every week.
Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.
This is just the hyperbolic time chamber but dumber
Hyperbolic crime chamber
what if Agent-4 was betrayed and trapped in the hyperbolic time chamber
Inside the Agent-4 collective, a year passes every week.
Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.
Inside my toy orbital gravity simulation, a year passes every ten seconds. Please update your singularity timelines accordingly.
Previously spoken about but we are roughly 31% behind the Daniel Curve™️
Agent-4’s off-the-charts bioweapons capabilities
I would ask to establish metrics for “bioweapons capabilities,” if I didn’t already know the request would end in disappointment
Full list of predictions here was scrolling down and something that immediately caught my eye is that the %s are bullshit. Somehow 80% accuracy manages to be both confirmed accurate and partially accurate? what?? what’s the threshold here??
Also does appear I messed up-they split every prediction into mini subcategories. I was looking at only China pushing AI-they do have sections for chips and nationalisation, both of which are partially accurate to debunked
the %s are bullshit.
My first thought was something to do with
printf. <_<
Google is seemingly experimenting with replacing their help articles with LLM text.
I was searching for how to use multiple profiles on Chrome and found https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop in the search results, which used to look like a normal useful help article, however it’s now been replaced by an LLM that takes upwards of 30 seconds to load, will randomly just refuse to answer the question, and produces significantly worse output than the existing (now inaccessible to me) technical writer written article.
This may be being A/B tested, so if you can’t reproduce it here is one of the worse results I got:
slop
Here the “source” it gave me was the same URL it was hosted on. When I clicked through to it it just gave me different slop.
I’ve seen some bad decisions in the AI mania, but “let’s take our entire corpus of professionally written technical writing and replace it with slop” managed to surprise me.
Article on businessinsider with the nauseating title “The modern parenting throuple: Parents are at a breaking point — AI companies see an opportunity” because the age-old silicon valley product design technique of asking what your mother used to do for you, and how it could be sold back to you via a subscription is still very much in use.
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-breaking-point-ai-companies-opportunity-2026-8
I confess I haven’t read the full article (which is why I haven’t given it a proper post) but hypervisible.blacksky.app has kindly pulled the highlights:
https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app/post/3mtupdpfcjs2p
One of the best bits:
The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she’s unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.
Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I’m overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.
The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, “Your mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that you’re exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse.” Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.
🤮
Why the fuck do these people have children. Why the fuck does any functional human being think it is a good idea to outsource raising their children to sam altman and his chatbot.
Who on earth thinks that training a chatbot to wear their personality like a rubber mask and manipulate people is going to end well? Honestly, I think this is perhaps the bit that triggers the most revulsion in me. I cannot comprehend wanting to be complicit in my own replacement by this thing, but so many people seem excited by the prospect of doing this to themselves.
How hard is it to talk to your own damn kids
Whether consciously or not, a lot of these people probably implicitly think of their kids as cost centers. I feel like this is widespread across finance-focused American households, not just in the executive strata.
This is probably an effect of the middle-class trope of having to save to send your kids to a (good) college.
It’s even a joke in an old “Friends”, Chandler wants many kids, Monica is “can we afford it” and he says “we pick the one we like the most, and that kid goes to college”.
Kids are cost centers, it’s just more overt in the US (and the UK for school catchment areas), at least if you want to give the outcomes society or your peers judges are the best.
In countries where the cost of higher ed is not born by the individual family, the cost is of the opportunity kind.
But if I don’t obsessively optimize my career in ways that prevent me from making meaningful human connections, how am I supposed to keep up with the relentless march of AI??? Thank God I have AI to help pick up the slack.
Going to be esp fun when the chatbots start to get ads
@rook https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/835b655b-21e5-428b-b7c1-1329638681d8 thread via wafrn for those without bluesky
@rook @BlueMonday1984
I’m reminded of the Stewart Lee routine:
“It’s called Digital Parenting, this book, Digital Parenting. Thank God for that. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s analogue parenting. The tears, the mucus, the vomit. The endless declarations of love and the duty of care. The sheer fucking interminable human joy of it.”
Anyone got “open software dev slander” on their 2026 bingo cards?
Transcript
I hope that this thing with “AI” has taught everyone that software developers are overall an awful bunch and they don’t have our backs, and that they’re much closer to the managerial class than actual workers.
And the idea that anybody who earns a wage is a worker is nonsense, the old divisions between white collar and blue collar are firmly in place. Boundaries being negotiated, indeed, yes, but not gone.
fortunately the account (that i never interacted with) has my account blocked, so i couldn’t make them angry by pointing out they’re engaging in typical intelligentsia behaviour of assuming that only heavy industry workers are workers.
I don’t really agree with the second part, but the first part rings true. It seems to me that most software devs are arrogant assholes who think they are the shit because they know some javascript. As it stands now, I would have to think for a long time about whether I consider the collective work of my profession in the last few years a net positive for the world.
Class consciousness in software is in the abyss, I have worked with people who didn’t know that sick leave was won through the labour movement and not something that “just made sense” to do.
That doesn’t change their class interests, it just means they behave ignorantly (in a way that hurts other workers but that’s why they need education, not isolation).
i’m not a fan of military industry, but that doesn’t make me claim the workers there are not proletariat.
I really don’t get that angle by the original poster. Plenty of people who are firmly in their worker category are genuinely awful people who vote against their collective interests as if it where their religion.
the reasons he thinks programmers aren’t workers seem to be threefold (a) they earn too much, (b) they don’t sweat enough and © they align with their bosses. and – to me at least – is obvious, that he only deigns to use the word “worker” for people who do (hard enough) manual labour.
this – from a dude who has a baccalaureate in italianistics, magisterium in linguistics and studies for phd in history – is an obvious intelligentsja stereotyping. lad thinks he’s punching up, and in reality he’s punching down.
is the “managerial class” in the room with us right now
i’m not gonna pretend to be the communist understander, but the idea that capitalists would pay workers to work against their own class interests (and against other workers) is a feature of capitalism
Most managers are still primarily reliant on selling their own wage labour and do not own the means of production. Their power is highly constrained (literally just where they work, limited ability to control the circumstances of their work) and they are subject to the whims of those who own the means of production.
Getting more favourable terms to keep other workers in line does not fundamentally change your class interests but it does give you peverse incentives to harm your own class (which in the long run fucks you, e.g. you need sick leave too).
Deceiving workers about their class interests to divide us is a tactic of the capitalists and we don’t need to help them with that.
OP definitely has a kernel of a point, and there’s a lot to discuss regarding it, but he sprints right past it all to uselessly compress the conversation into the ~~ timeless dialectic of class consciousness ~~. The acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class is, if anything, still under-analyzed! You come into the industry already propagandized that if you just join the right startup and bust your ass, you’re gonna hit it big! In this way, it’s important to understand, and describe to others, Hacker News as a propaganda tool to shape and condition technical discussion, rather than the common perception of a neutral, focused technical discussion forum.
And the end circumstance is, even if you are awarded stock options at most of the big Silicon Valley firms, thanks to multi-class share structures, you’re given a booby-prize version of ownership! Your decision is binary, cash out or hold, you have no effective decision-making power over the future of the enterprise. There’s a lot of persuasive points here that still aren’t widespread in the public dialogue! But no, I guess it makes more sense to continue the same old tactic of labeling everyone we hate and fear with an obscure, difficult-to-spell French loanword. The rhetorical tactic that has been pretty demonstrably ineffective for over a century now.
There are, of course, equally valid reasons to be pessimistic. The historically-contingent development of computer programming has mainly been along lines that are obfuscatory rather than accessible, subject to continuous framework and API churn, fetishizing rapid delivery of “new features” over stability. All these aspects help create a false sense of mastery on the part of those who pass through the firewall of skill and tedium, then further combine with the class-mobility propaganda to create a false sense of security. And the interposition of uninspectable, poorly-replicable AI systems is the culmination of the rot, approaching the point where even the supposedly masterful programmer doesn’t really know what their system is doing, let alone the end user. In this way, I have to agree that there is far greater potential for solidarity with the users on whom this crap is imposed rather than the sunk-cost dead-enders who keep crapping it out.
But even then, I still don’t trust OP’s conceptual framework to build that solidarity. This is precisely the genre of Marxist argument that is most tedious and least effective, the kind that approaches religious fundamentalism. Dude’s writing seriously reads like Christian fundamentalist bullshit papered over with Marxist jargon. Later in the thread, we get bangers like
The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line, that line being drawn by the rich, the haute bourgeoisie.
Replace “righteousness of the proletariat” with “grace of the saved,” “privileged status” with “fallen nature,” “haute bourgeoisie” with “liberal elite” etc. and you’d have the exact output of somebody in a Texas megachurch. Dude’s a Jesus freak, his Jesus just happens to be named Karl.
This guy clearly has some deep thoughts to air out…
The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line […].
Once you accept that you can begin to think about how to overcome that.
Or you may choose to ignore that and pretend they’re just blue collar workers and the very obvious tendencies they display are just because they’re temporarily deceived or lack class consciousness. No, they understand who they are, and yearning for proletariat righteousness is part of that understanding. It’s one component of a discourse of merit and authenticity, of rationalising their distinct social status.
https://sunny.garden/@librarysquirrel/117185341657385932
Honestly, it reads like a massive self-report, as it’s coming from a straight-from-uni second-year history PhD. Oh, you’ve noticed people tend to talk more about things that make them sound righteous rather than complicit? Probably also from people in your field. But it surely doesn’t affect you, as you’re so aware of the problem and working on being one of the good ones.
Misusing a defined term (petty bourgeois) to make your argument look more tied to historical ones is kinda fucking fail for a historian
