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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
New Yorker writer talks to another journo about the recent doom hype
There’s way to much hype for my liking but might be interesting.
Important to note, Joshua Rothman states he is worried about stuff like virus release, global warming and drone warfare. Among the faithful, this is strictly not Doom ,because statistically a nucleus of the human race will survive. Only 100% guaranteed lethality for every human being on Earth is x-risk.
here’s another Rat-explainer piece
https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse/
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654, where commenters are predictably blasé about it all… “yeah yeah doesn’t everyone know who Big Yud is?”)
in general, I don’t think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - there’s way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
His autobiography even opens with a parable: as a small child he threw his favorite squirtgun off a third-floor balcony rather than accept that his mother could lend out what was his, and felt complete when he heard it hit the pavement.
web.archive.org/web/20010309014808/http://sysopmind.com/eliezer.html
I remember getting a new squirtgun, of translucent blue plastic, which squirted better than any squirtgun I’d had so far. And within around an hour, for some reason or other - I don’t think it was related to abuse of the squirtgun, but I’m not sure - my mother decided to take it away. So I rushed out the back door and threw it off the third-floor balcony, and listened to it shatter on the concrete below.
I knew, as I threw it, that Mom would think it had been a childish act - “Cutting off your nose to spite your face,” was what my parents used to say. But that’s not what it was. Grownups who have forgotten their childhood may lend a toy to a particular child, and not lend it to anyone else, but they don’t credit children with enough “agenthood” to really own something. Rather than let my parents say, in essence, that this toy - which had been given to me, and which I really enjoyed - was theirs to lend or withhold, I threw the toy off the balcony and accepted the consequences of not being able to play with it any more. Not because I didn’t want them to have the toy, but because it was a wonderful toy, the best squirtgun I’d ever had; that’s why I cared enough that I threw it off the balcony rather than let it be something for my parents to give or take away. When I heard the squirtgun shatter, I didn’t feel angry, or regretful, or look-what-you-made-me-do. I felt complete. I’d done what I’d set out to do, and I was willing to accept losing a squirtgun in order to do it. Children can also act on principle.
Huh, I forgot about that, he’s more like our president than I realized
Giving young children free access to Ayn Rand books is abuse
Not spite, but some secret other thing completely indistinguishable from spite.
Does he really think he’s the only person in the universe so special as to have some sort of principle motivating a spiteful act? All the NPCs in the world just randomly harm themselves with zero rationale whatsoever?
Smashing that toy and bragging about it actually proves to the robot god that Eliezer won’t be blackmailed, checkmate causists
Does he really think he’s the only person in the universe so special
Yes.
If we’re lucky, they’ll get left on the same dusty historical shelf as the raelians when this is all over. They’re just to fuckin weird for general consumption.
On the one hand, you do have precedent to point to in hoping they get consigned to the dustbin of history.
On the other hand, the rats have had a colossal(ly negative) effect on the general public (FTX, the AI bubble, the second Trump admin, etcetera), and their extremely high profile makes them much harder to ignore.
in general, I don’t think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - there’s way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
The Dangers of Robot Satan™ are unbelievable and/or incomprehensible to most audiences, the weird sex/eugenics shit is easy to grasp and laugh at. Mainly the weird sex shit, the eugenics is too morally fucked to laugh at
The AI Doom™ shit’s much harder for the public to wrap their heads around, but there’s definitely good joke fodder there as well. At the bare minimum, the fact Anthropic’s building something they believe could kill them Terminator style makes for some easy Skynet comparisons.
@BlueMonday1984 Excuse me my friends, but have you heard the Good News about Our Lord and Saviour, Clankie Lucifer™?
Your favorite “CEO said a thing” journalists, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, are leaving their current podcast and starting a new one.
When they started Hard Fork, they chose the name from the soon-to-be-moribund blockchain concept. Calling their new podcast “Machine Gods” makes me more hopeful than ever that the AI bubble is about to burst.
Machine Gods? Like… really? I thought even Casey Newton would have more taste than that but allegedly he has farmed out he vast majority of his thinking to a machine and one of the “moats” that there “supuh scawwie” machine gods still allegedly can’t cross is taste so maybe that tracks
Apparently they have the same sense of timing as the Blockchain Socialist guy, but he at least picked a brand that isn’t tied to the current hype cycle again.
Just saw on r/sneerclub:
Department of War CTO twitted: “The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸”
And there’s a photo of Trump with the text: “AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!”
Here’s the reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1wj6r6n/trump_is_trying_to_win_the_sneerclub_vote/
I…worked on this sneer for years…and…he just…he tweeted it out.
AI ‘actress’ Tilly Norwood melts down and starts talking in CANTONESE as she is interviewed by Piers Morgan h/t Naked Capitalism
Long-in-the-tooth Mr Morgan remained remarkably calm as the AI bot unleashed a monologue in Cantonese, staring down the lens and allowing her to finish her point.
But Mr Conti was stunned, shaking his head incredulously at the unexpected answer to his question before turning his head to smile, presumably at someone else sitting in the room with him.
He soon managed to compose himself, offering the simple rebuttal, ‘I didn’t quite get that,’ which proved sufficient to cut Tilly off and fix the glitch.
At this point, even Mr Morgan had to laugh, chuckling for a few seconds before addressing the AI bot, who sat in her seat expectantly as if rolling out a Cantonese soliloquy on an English-language YouTube show was the most normal thing in the world.
Delivering the bad news, he said: ‘You suddenly seemed to be speaking Chinese, completely randomly for no reason.’
Mr Conti by now had completely lost control, giggling hysterically - either in amusement at Tilly’s off-script answer, or in unbridled relief that his job might be safe for the time being.
Why the hell is it so hard to find a translation of what it ‘said’? Not a single news outlet could ask a native speaker, can’t even be bothered to dump it through whisper? This, how many years after YouTube force pushed autodubbing? The lack of effort is telling.
r/Cantonese not impressed either.
Anyway once we replace long in tooth piers with PiersBot 9000, itll just know Cantonese and this won’t even make the paper
“YOU MUST TRY THE HOSTAGE SPECIAL!”
God those grifters are still trying to make that collection of two year old product demos A Thing? And entertainment industry boomers are still falling for it?
“r/Cantonese not impressed either.”
Theyre arguing about if it was actually any form of legible chinese at all, rather than translating it
US government is using spicy autocomplete to hallucinate fake nuclear threats
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship
Holy fuck. How embarrassing would it have been if they actually went through with it and ended up having to explain to China that they attacked a random ship because a chatbot hallucinated some bs
The chinese intelligence people are probably just aghast that american intelligence people are treating the chatbot as if it knows something
I don’t know enough about Chinese state security apparatus to comment about that aspect but I’ve seen some mentions of how the state there is also heavily pushing prompts everywhere, and it’s apparently just as shit a failure as it is in the western sphere…so, could be fucked either way
Starting things off, New Mexico State Parks got scammed by an AI bro when looking for new mascot art.
University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:
And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and I’m like, what do you want me to do? I can’t control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didn’t tell me what it was.
The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, who’s the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? They’re going to figure out a way.
Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.
@nfultz what HF incident? I did search
The huggingface incident: https://awful.systems/post/9312280/12315846
Interesting, he usually falls for all their BS.
So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to ‘slow down’ “AI” development:
- it’s too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all
- the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and there’s no obvious way to fix that
I’ll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.
edit I missed “blatant regulatory capture”
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Yeah, the whole idea is to perpetuate the myth that these companies are really close to coming out with a product that people will actually pay to use. A product that people will pay enough to cover its cost. They want to simultaneously make an excuse for why it is taking so long while making gormless investors think it is just around the corner.
Also the frontier “labs” are rapidly running out of money and having to raise more and more insane investment rounds. This is a great way to save face and back away from burning $$$$ on training runs that push the frontier of can a model rearrange some arbitrary coloured squares by 10% next they just need to solve the problem of how to make their customers pay cost+ on inference when they’ve been giving it away at steep discounts for nearly 4 years… Easy!
The symbiosis between the rabid cultists, the technofedual wannabe-lords, and the get rich quick grifters is so weird to watch.
@gerikson My assumption is that they want a regulatory moat to protect “frontier” models from “open weight” / AKA cheap models.
It’s just margin protection.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Also they dare not actually let the market price their shares.
spotted on r/betteroffline: Nscale, one of neocloud companies, released S-1. even when they show “adjusted EBITDA” and “adjusted operational loss” where they exclude, among other things, depreciation and stock based compensation, they never break even only on that “adjusted operational loss”, net losses are multiple hundred % (ie. they lose 4x-23x as much as they receive in revenue)
but yeah, it’s profitable on inference, it’s the worst it’ll ever be and other marketing lies from twitter’s most concussed boosters
That’s the bunch who signed a billion dollar contract to bullild a datacenter on a British scaffolding-storage lot they didnt own, isn’t it?
there was a pivot about it, so, so it seems
Back when our friends were just forum and Tumblr posters there was the Center for Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Who could be against that?
6 August 2013, SANTA ROSA, Calif. (CN) – In a lurid lawsuit, a former employee claims the Marin County-based Foundation for Critical Thinking is a “cultlike” group whose married bosses tried to make him have sex with the wife, and fired him for refusing. … Hale, a 40-year-old married man and father, claims he quit his job as a high school teacher to accept an offer to work as a “full-time Fellow” for the Foundation for Critical Thinking (FCT) in August 2004. According to the complaint, the Foundation for Critical Thinking, based in Tomales, “trains educators how to analyze information in an ‘objective ‘fair-minded’ manner, without allowing their own biases, prejudices and opinions to influence their objective analysis of an issue. It is a ‘think tank’ of sorts that promotes a casual work environment. Defendants Elder and Paul frequently hold meetings at both FCT offices and their personal residence, where they sit and lie on the floor amongst pillows. To encourage the free flow of ideas, defendants Elder and Paul often discuss uncomfortable topics, and encourage employees to rid themselves of social, including sexual, taboos. … About three years after he was hired, Hale claims, Elder and Paul began bringing up “inappropriate sexual topics” and asking him “about his sex life with his wife” during business meetings. … In October 2010, Hale claims, Elder and Paul graduated from discussing sex to encouraging him to have sex with Elder. After calling Hale to a meeting, Paul “explained to Hale that he was concerned about defendant Elder, his younger wife by approximately 20 years, and wanted to ensure that her sexual urges could be satisfied,” the complaint states. “Defendant Paul proposed that Hale should have sexual intercourse with Paul’s wife, defendant Elder, while defendant Paul observed them. Hale immediately became uncomfortable and anxious, as he listened to defendant Paul, and worried about his ability to keep his job, if he declined. Hale politely declined defendant Paul’s request.”
I wonder how many of our friends deliberately studied other grifts and not just pop psychology books, or if this is just in the water. Their form 990 is here, and shows they lost most of their income in 2019 and are struggling since.
Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.
academic malpractice complaint viable?
I’m already thinking about complaining about some of the stuff he’s said¹, so that might be a good idea. However I think my university’s policy for students is that you can use AI to start research, summarise notes etc. so he might not be breaking any rules.
¹ Inappropriate questions to students. Not sexually inappropriate, just inappropriate.
Oof! Comp sci?
Nope, different degree. This guy is brought in as a guest lecturer about the field he works in: most of the actual lecturers are nowhere near this AI-pilled.
P Thiel is visiting Nashville lol
We’re basically the Vatican of middle Tennessee.
The [antichrist lectures]
or
[The antichrist] lectures
I have tried and failed stopping the ensloppification of my company, and I have failed greatly. We now have a new policy that you have to write a justification for making a PR yourself instead of using the chatbot. All the strict checks that were implemented over the years (clear documentation, no more than x files per commit/PR, etc.) are out of the window.
This comes after the push for a fucking AI audit where every employee is supposed to justify why they are not using LLMs for certain tasks. Also some person blew the token limit with some web scraping bullshit last cycle and was lauded for embracing the technology.
Also our CEO has recently begun subtly insinuating he’s now heard of fucking AI doom cultists.
I hate everything.
i’m so sorry.
…I’m so sorry, and it’s good (???) to know my company still has a few steps on the AI delusion ladder to climb. I guess with the way it’s been going I need to mentally prepare for the same thing you’re going through to come in a few months.
@mii @cstross I spent decades of my career haranguing management to spend an extra $500 on better computing gear to make their almost six-figure programmers more efficient. But now we’ve got management haranguing employees to use this ephemeral technology. I don’t get it.
“Hey we got you this thing to make you more productive and we’re gonna watch comparative performance and if you’re falling behind we’re gonna have words” would at least make business sense. This is mirror universe shit.
@mii @BlueMonday1984 Can you use a LLM to write these justifications? I mean, they don’t have to be good, no one is reading them after all …
(No, I’m not suggesting to violate any principles of yours, of course)
That’s some bullshit. Much respect for pushing back!
I hope that we’re through the worst of it.
I’m so sorry, Mii. I can only hope you find a job that actually respects you after this one, because I cannot see your current company recovering from this shit.
grammarly, previously featured as a top class act as well known for, uhhhh checks notes, deeply for guzzling the slop juice, has once again decided to feature for attention
the sheer arrogance of it is pretty out there. I sure hope it doesn’t go well for them, otherwise we’ll probably see this shit be added to the slimester playbook more frequently
