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. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)
In 2016, Scott Alexander reviewed the autobiography of pharmaceutical pioneers Alexander aand Ann Shulgin:
Shulgin and his friends seem like good people. But not, crucially, like the best people. Shulgin himself – by his own admission, based on facts that he himself presents in his own autobiography – is consistently kind of a jerk to his wife (and his wife kind of agrees). He gets depressed and ornery a lot, sometimes to the point where it seriously interferes with his work and relationships. His circle of friends seems to have some problems with marital infidelity and random drama, and he tells one story about a distant friend-of-a-friend obsessed with LSD who seems to be an outright con man. I’m not saying they’re bad people; quite the opposite, the book makes them seem very human and if I lived in the same time and place as them I would be delighted to have the opportunity to know them.
…
The Shulgins met through a group that had branched off of Mensa. Their social circle consisted of a mishmash of scientists, underachieving geniuses, mental health professionals, hippies, and people convinced that their new projects were going to save the world – all in the context of Berkeley and the Bay Area. This is also my social circle, thirty years later, so it’s interesting to see how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same.
Its a very common tic in American culture to state that white dudes who did something wrong or hurt people were good at heart, and to skip “how can we prevent this from happening again with rules and policies?” or “how can we make good with the victims?”
Posting scurrilous and unverifiable gossip.
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr, who posted the conversation. Open AI offered him money to take it down.
He made a song instead.
https://bsky.app/profile/valarmordollars.bsky.social/post/3msgqy34gvc2d
Personal highlight for me was the chat screenshot:
Altman: “I’m lonely and horny” Frostedjake: “as u should be”
💀
May working in the ai sector do for your lovelife what being openly republican does.
thiel’s lawyers are gonna merc him
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr
sentences that feel like being shot 50 times
I found the song - was a fun listen all around.
jfc even my old company has full pivoted to ai - https://platform.mapquest.com/mcp
sorry guys too little too late
which stage of bubble is The Men Who Stare at Goats
Look, the goat said I was having great ideas ok
The google maps now lets you use ai to imagine sat images feature already has the remote viewing part.
That’s probably the most “interesting” thing ive seen someone whos left OpenAI do
an EA racist is offered a job, gets duck-milk-shaked, and worries that future AI models won’t be aligned correctly (i.e. be racist):
Out of 22 replies, only one commenter actually noted the content of what Richard Ngo got rejected for:
I looked at the 20 most recent tweets/RTs on Richard’s timeline and they include a RT about the Great Replacement, a RT of the “Department of Deportation” about non-white sex criminals and a RT endorsing race realism.
we’re up to 51 replies to the post, which has 198 karma points. I guess it’s hard to distinguish between those that are in support of the racist, in support of a fellow rationalist, or some other reason.
And nowhere does anyone actually say (even in an overly cautious carefully qualified way) “Have you considered not being a racist?”. I did see a few more comments very gently suggesting that it might be bad for an organization’s reputation to be associated with Richard, but even those were in the typical lesswrong style of coddling racists.
habryka did get -53 agreement karma (but still +13 overall karma) for suggesting that Resolution obviously didn’t really find Richard’s views “actually reprehensible” (and was instead engaging in image management or shallow tribal politics or something like that). So at least lesswrongers are theoretically capable of recognizing that people that find racism reprehensible exist and aren’t purely faking it out of political alignment. But that is the best I can say about them.
I was not hired for my tweets, my succulent tweets!
(To meta milkshake duck, the succulent meal guy also was a nazi fan).
relevant part quoted.
The book also revealed that Karlson was an admirer of Adolf Hitler and Nazism who would “indulge his Nazi fetish”, use the expression “Two Heil Hitlers” instead of “three cheers” and had a car decorated with a swastika on his lawn. On at least one occasion he threw a party at his home to celebrate Hitler’s birthday
“Given the points above, I can’t in good conscience recommend that people work at Resolution.”
Lol, saying you don’t recommend people work for the place that told you to fuck off is great.
Spread that around the recruiters and make sure they can tell candidates that a noted racist shit heel was appalled by how not racist they were.
Though note that it’s a weird curriculum in a few different directions, rather than being uniformly right-wing—e.g. it has some Lacan-inspired stuff, some hippie-inspired stuff on beliefs as emotional strategies, a bunch of rationalist writing, etc.
Ah, got it. It’s not all right wing, there’s also stupid cryptofascist shitheadery.
Lacan by way of Land.
A new way to fuck with AI scrapers just dropped!
Aaaaaand its fucking with screen readers, making protected text inaccessible to blind readers. File this next to the alt-text drama in the “AI bros set back accessibility” bucket.
It’s also vibe coded.
The website looks too slick and the solution (though fucking around with fonts is fun) is overcomplicated.
Maybe some old media orgs or publishers will take this up, to protect their valuable IP while still having a slick web appearance.
I read through the white paper and I have further concerns even for any readers who are comfortable fucking over blind people (for the record: fuck you if you’re reading this). It looks like this works off of the same kind of technique that allows fonts to render digraphs, positional forms, and emoji, leveraging the font rendering to allow it to jumble up the actual HTML that machines interact with. It’s clever, but the fucking with screen readers, form autofill, and basically anything other than direct text rendering is really obvious.
I’m also not sure when it runs to generate the dictionary of mappings. The6biggest harm of the content scrapers isn’t that it’s ingesting the content it’s that the repeated requests spam servers and basically DOS smaller sites out of existence. This is why iocaine is so brilliant and imo remains the gold standard. If the dictionary is generated when the files ar uploaded to the server or set to be displayed then this merely fails to address the real problem, but if the expectation is that this mapping gets created and distributed at request time then that just makes scraping even more expensive for hosts. Given that it works on dynamic text in their example it looks like at least part of the mapping runs on the client, so it’s increasing the size of the package if nothing else. Bandwidth may be pretty cheap these days, but that’s no reason to be wasteful.
Nobody Knows if OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI Hacking Sprees Are Illegal | Wired via naked capitalism
Are you liable when your random sentence generator does something random to someone else? Nobody knows!
Would I be liable for damages if I made a viral worm on my air gapped pc and then accidentally connect it to the internet and it escapes? Cause I think I would and dont see how this is different if it an ai agent.
If you actually air gapped it, you would be more disciplined in your approach than OpenAI, Anthropic (and apparently Meta also)!
nobody knows
Manufactured consent. Yes it’s fucking illegal. If I “accidentally” hacked into HF I would be in the back of a police car before I could finish saying “it wasn’t me guv it was Claude.” Fuck wired so hard for laying down cover for this.
I mean even fucking chatjippity answers this straight up without hedging
It’s only questionably legal because they’re tech companies running a marketing scheme. If anyone else did this they’d be locked up
Glorious hometown W
Clammy Sammy acknowledges Ed Zitron for the first time! https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2084663673570971990
His response is the Live Laugh Love of 2015 Silicon Valley platitudes:
i would rather be an optimist and work hard than a pessimist posting about why things won’t work.
it’s much more difficult and the most likely path is failure, but society fails if people don’t try.
no amount of “it will never work” essays will drive society forward.
Of course, building data centers that use untold amounts of rare earth metals, electricity, and water while spewing out tons of pollution and scraping every last bit of human content in order to remove people from their jobs by doing them badly is what drives society forward. Profits fail if oligarchs don’t try. Actually, the AI companies don’t even need profits.
What a twat. “It’s much harder to bullshit people than to be rigorous and skeptical guys. Not only is everything fine, I’m actually a better person than ALL my critics”
i still can’t find the shift key on my keyboard.* i think it may just be a greybeard myth. no big deal, posting messages like this really bolsters my public image by making me seem relaxed and approachable.
*Unless I am publicly accused of fraud, trade secret theft, mass copyright infringement, etc. in which case my PR team tells me I need to temporarily drop the act.
why you little
“Everything’s going great actually. We’re doing really important work that’s really hard. I’m a really happy, optimistic guy and I’m very trustworthy. Disregard the smog coming from that data centre over there. Also disregard all those angry looking bankers staring at me.”
You know, basically all of the bullshit we see from the silicon valley set makes a lot more sense if they’re legitimately unable to recognize a difference between society as a whole doing well and their particular project or vision succeeding. Like, it also fits with their assumption that the world is falling apart because people are being mean to them online.
The Silicon Valley set’s also shown a complete inability to tell good work from slop, as their relentless glazing of AI slop has demonstrated, so I can easily believe that.
Need ideas for ways to spend philanthropy money without helping absolutely anyone? Check out AI safety influencer bootcamp at Lighthaven!
Basically Aella gathered like 60 people with a seminotable online presence to stay for free at Lighthaven for a month as long as they managed to publish at least one relevant video (15 sec minimum) each day.
Rationalism ensued:
“It’s really hard to run a fellowship that’s not an indoctrination camp,” [cofounder with aella] Fernandez said. “If you don’t try really hard to not make an indoctrination camp, you will on accident.”
Uh oh
A fellow recognized me and asked whether I was there for the “torture potluck.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
It was exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-tolerate buffet of unpleasant experiences, for the sake of Fucking Around and Finding Out. […] Just before midnight, a small crowd gathered around someone laid down on an AstroTurf-lined wheelchair ramp. He was the first of shockingly many in line to get waterboarded — one of the most in-demand items on the torture menu.
So silly omg
After a string of expected questions such as “What’s your take on AI?” and “What kind of content would you want to make?”, the form asked, “If you had to have sex with a cow would you rather it be dead or alive? Why?” All Comic Sans, with animated rainbow dots floating alongside the form field. […] [Fernandez said] “We added it in to make it pretty clear that we don’t have a PR department or an HR department,” he said.
“Even the icebreakers, like everything, they want you to know that they’re part of the weird community,” one fellow told me. “‘Stand over here if you’re super sexually active, and over here if not,’ or like, ‘rate yourself based off of like, the last time you masturbated.’”
The unifying thread, despite the fellows’ ideological diversity, is something like “openness.” Everyone at PDKU was willing to drop everything, move to Berkeley for a month, live in close quarters with strangers, and be perceived doing silly things on the internet.
It’s really unclear what sort of ideological diversity is referenced unless it’s about having both blue haired and green goatee’d people. Maybe we’ve reached the point where everyone is expected to assume race science enthusiasts will be at a rationalist event at some capacity.
Also the whole thing sounds like having tryouts for a cult.
[Fernandez] says PDKU has a conduct policy, authored by him, that discourages relationships across power differentials. When I asked him how that gets enforced, in the absence of an HR department, he mentioned an unnamed community health lead.
Same with the diversity thing, they are preemptively saying that there for sure weren’t no sexual harassment shenanigans this time.
The third methinks thou dost protest too much comes as an extened NO U jab at other shady thinktankers trying to astroturf support for their thing.
Amid the science communication, shitposting, and heartwarming summer camp energy, there’s a giant elephant in the room. “It’s another multi-million-dollar thing happening on a compound in California,” CJ said. “Does everyone think you’re just an annoying cunty psyop?”
Don’t believe your lying eyes is apparently the note on which they chose to end this.
“If you had to have sex with a cow would you rather it be dead or alive? Why?” All Comic Sans, with animated rainbow dots floating alongside the form field. […] [Fernandez said] “We added it in to make it pretty clear that we don’t have a PR department or an HR department,” he said.
Weird flex but ok
Anyone who doubts that authenticity is dead should reference this paragraph.
Fascism is all about surface-kevel appearences and vibes. I didn’t expect them to appropriate the mantle of “spork-wielding penguin of d00m,” though.
We added it to make it clear that if you get harassed by the people who control whether you get your stipend you are on your own, so please don’t make it a big deal when it happens, ok? That just how it goes in these quirky and fun safe spaces that require you to move into a compound in a different city for extended lengths of time.
“Cult tryouts” is a keeper
the weird community,
Are you part of the ‘regularly needs to answer questions about rape/pedophilia/bestiality’ weird community or the ‘knows too much about warhammer’ weird community?
Previous thread on plzdontkillus https://awful.systems/post/8359862 I wonder whether it is Aella or Duleba who is forcing some basic harm-reduction policies (but no enforcement, whereas you can be kicked out if you don’t post fast enough).
Ziz reported being asked similar icebreaker questions.
Ziz reported being asked similar icebreaker questions.
The reddit post from /r/Grimes you linked there has its issues but it does a great job putting into words the parts that bother me with both the cow-fucking questions and the forced “openness” that requires people to always be ready to answer for the normally intimate parts of their personalities and how it’s comparable to grooming.
The reddit post is incredibly long winded so if anyone is interested in this part specifically ctrl+f for compliance filter.
Also super yikes on the Aella tweet advertising her alleged "cam sister"s onlyfans that’s opening in a few weeks when she turns 18, which sounds exactly like if she had actually groomed a minor into sex work.
It would be good if someone could take the r/Grimes post, boil out the chatbot overwriting, verbosity, and hallucinations, and give a concise version. An environment where you are pushed to make intimate sexual confessions in front of people who decide whether to give you resources, especially if those statements are recorded like anything you post on the Internet is recorded, is a red flag.
A lot of people in the sex trade discourage people who are barely legal from face-out work because young people don’t know themselves or the world of work very well and a porn video can follow you around for life.
I can’t stand the idea that the Anthropic IPO could end up funding these people to the tune of millions of dollars.
Please, AI bubble, pop sooner.
The waterboarding thing was introduced by Vibecamp’s head of safety at other events, and a lot of the pdku programming seems to be in the area of light bdsm / boundary pushing. imo they work from some base general formula and try and differentiate / create intake funnels for other events.
It all comes across as Synanon-lite, doesn’t it?
Introduced by the head of safety (!)
At least they accept the principle that “relationships across a power differential” can put the weaker party in a difficult position. They don’t have a rule against this, or a requirement to disclose, but they accept the principle.
The fact that it’s referred to as a potluck is also interesting because it suggests that participants also had to come up with their own torture method to inflict. I imagine “spend twenty minutes with the sort of person who participates in a torture potluck” was the equivalent of potato salad.
Vice has a writeup - https://archive.is/ooVju - more of a bring-your-own-taser kind of thing I guess
The tortures varied wildly in nature, and were too numerous to list in full, but several stuck out for me: There was someone pinning clothespins to partygoers’ cheeks; a man called SirLemmings used some herbal powder to strip you of your sense of sweetness, then made you eat an Oreo to test the result; Avalon Warren, an actress resembling Lola Bunny sprung to life, made partygoers make the ahegao hentai face, and carried a fly zapper; other electric torments were also popular—several people carried tasers, and someone had an electric baton that transferred shocks between participants; someone else’s bit was asking you to yell compliments for Donald Trump, which was perhaps the most polarizing (SirLemmings told me that when he declared the president was an excellent comedian, he drew glares); yet another was writing unknown directives onto others’ foreheads. My friend Jahnik had “pls give me a smooch <3” penned on his, and afterward, received kisses throughout the night. Meanwhile all I got was “CTRL-ALT-Z,” making me wonder if they wanted to undo me from reality.
As for my torture? I was merely a journalist. A lazy choice, I felt, but for some it was the most terrifying of the bunch. One girl even walked away when I told her; before, she’d been nothing but smiles.
Another resident teacher was political satirist YouTuber JREG, real name Greg Guevara, who recently published a polemical video calling for Total Clanker Death, or the eradication of all would-be sentient machines.
youtube faves are implicated!?
Grokipedia hasn’t been updated for months: is it because
- it has been vibe coded into unmaintainability
- the people responsible for it no longer care
- the people responsible for it are utterly incompetent
- all of the above?
I’m assuming that it isn’t “the llm bills were too high” just yet, but maybe it could be that, too.
https://futurism.com/future-society/grokipedia-broken-nobody-noticed
I think you’re discounting the most likely explanation: that it discovered and communicated the purest transcendent truth and therefore there is no need for further updates.
Or maybe nobody was actually checking it for anything and the bot running it has been patiently waiting for more prompts that haven’t come because nobody gave a shit.
Gamers Nexus has announced plans to poison the LLMs scraping them, alongside updates to the megacharts on their website.
Noted Apple blowhard John Gruber makes a mistake, is naturally a performative dick about apologizing for it
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_rejection_of_the_week
(nothing to do with AI or crypto, I just think Gruber is a dick. And the subject of the story - an app developer who apparently felt so secure in his indie rep he could do some light fraud for clicks - is a recognizable figure)
it gets better. Godier (the guy who misled Gruber) admits to using genAI to create a website that just to happened to almost exactly duplicate an existing website:
https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html
no mention of the submission of an astrology app to the App store and getting rejected
