Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
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.)
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Lobste.rs dropped the vibecoding tag because a prominent LLM enthusiast had a sad and huffed off in a fit.
I really dislike how he believes that LLMs and fascism are “separate axes”. Where does he think the LLMs come from? Does the stork deliver them? Is ChatGPT powered by magic fairy dust? Does he think that Sam Altman is a great defender of liberalism and democracy who definitely hasn’t donated tons of money to Donald Trump?
I really dislike how he believes that LLMs and fascism are “separate axes”. Where does he think the LLMs come from?
valsorda worked at google for a very long time, well past when it became clear that they were no longer the good guys. his motivation for this was (only very slightly paraphrased) “well, it’s better than whatever else I might get in my home country” (italy)
he’s also had a few choice other takes over the last few years, enough such that I stopped following his work. I would not be too surprised if he turns out to be quite a shit in some years to come
I can’t help but think it’s another instance of the unquestioning Californian Ideology assumption that all new technology is inherently liberatory.
We try to confine that shit to SF
It’s not working, I spotted a probable hackernews all the way out in Modesto last week, they’re like the goddamn nutria now
This can either be read as San Francisco or Science Fiction, and both readings work perfectly
He works for google, so he probably still thinks they’re not evil.
I am saying that the anti-fascist communities ended up […] uninterested in using LLMs
:O
Lobste.rs is analogous to methadone treatment for Hacker News, prove me wrong
Now it’s not even good for that anymore.
I considered trying to get an account there, but the last ~18 months or so have made me feel the same way about Lobste.rs as I do about Bluesky. If you’re just running a lower-traffic version of the thing you’re trying to “improve” upon with slightly different moderation policies, you’re not going to build a lasting platform or community.
came here to post that. Genuinely having to reconsider being an active user there now
It’s been a day, and the mods are not sitting still:
I see you were one of the people whose comment got censored. I presume the censored comments were about the parody of the “pelican on a bike” animation on the OpenBSD 8.0 release page.
So now people can’t even discuss criticism of LLMs on lobsters? Insane.
Oh, so that’s what it’s referencing. I can’t really tell if the release artwork and song are poking fun at AI slop itself or people who criticize Fish Linucks for accepting slopped code contributions in the base system while NetBSD is lauded for not doing so.
Oh, buddy, big feelings
Per the recent moderation log, identifying whether posts had substantial LLM involvement seems to no longer be allowed. I am exceedingly disappointed in this. I have been lurking for over a decade and was considering asking for an invite within the past year or two as hackernews and every other source of programming news and project updates have become completely unbearable, but now if lobsters is committed to “neutral” slop platforming I don’t see the point.
I just don’t see this as sustainable, the moderation level required to keep a link aggregator free of low effort slopped nonsense when the rules are this fuzzy is impractical and all incentives are against it.
It’s unfortunately common that authors see their work posted, join the site, but then only use us for traffic. Hopefully this time helps them understand the difference between a symbiotic and parasitic relationship.
This feels like a very weird thing to say. (I’m reminded of some weird things Elon Musks mom said about how twitter users should be more grateful for all the traffic or something).
I mean the bit above it makes sense (making a hard only ‘25% of post can be self promotion’ seems like a recipe for disaster however) but this added line made me raise a few eyebrows.
E: Wait, I should have compared it to facebooks new ‘you need to pay if you post links’ policy.
This is a weird side-effect of Lobste.rs culture, it really dislikes being just a collection of links on the front page that increase traffic. And there have been multiple attempts to place links there via deception. Plus the community will give you hell (and flag your submissions as spam) unless you do the needful and comment a bit.
That said it’s really easy to work around by just making good content, having an RSS feed, and letting the community discover your stuff and post it. Or ask a buddy with an account to do it for you. But that in its turn requires actually learning how the community works.
Thanks for explaining, im not a lobsterite so I dont know how the community there works.
These people have the worst victim complexes. I’m tired of hearing them complain as if anyone with any real power isn’t fully on board with what they want.
Very disappointing, even if I was only ever a non-registered lurker. Gave in and DNS-blocked it and HN this morning (I had a HN-filtering userscript which in hindsight was just cope).
Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.
The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.
The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.
So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto…
Serve Robotics lost $55.80 for every hour its robots were ready to take an order at the end of last year. The first advantage its investor deck lists for them is ‘No driver wages.’
versus
78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot
Decent monday morning take from robert evans:
Schrodinger’s double-think.
transcription
Quote skeet:
This is a researcher at Anthropic. Some of these people have lost their minds! What is mainlining Claude all day doing to them?
there are basically two possible futures at this point. either we’re all going to die of[sic] the future is going to be Good beyond our wildest imagination. the trick is to hold this duality in your head and not be driven insane by one side.
Robert Evans (the only Robert Evans):
some of these people get so locked into a labyrinth of Rationalist thought experiments that they are no longer really capable of interacting with reality 1/2
you can in fact limit the horizons of possibility in your own mind so severely that you are no longer able to “think” in a useful way 2/2
They’re also incredibly horny about creating conscious digital slaves for some godforsaken reason
It isnt Claude that did this to them, it is their desire to be lesswrong.
(To the tune of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme*): self-inflicted psychic debuff
*The correct theme, not the heretical one. If you have to ask, you’re wrong
Well, we are all going to die. So… musing over?
We all get that right, everyone is going to die. Everything living you lay eyes on is going to die. I am 100% certain that the future contains the death of everyone alive today.
Do they mean immanently? Why?
Not if you’re a Yudkowskian rationalist. He’d call us “deathists”.
I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are. Nor to know how much the physical world resists making tiny machines and measurements necessary to explore these frontiers, or the ethical dilemmas involved in exploring how consciousness works that vastly slow and perhaps outright prevent answering questions like “can we replace little bits of someone with some machine we can maintain easier in the interest of prolonging them?”
Also I do happen to know how the universe ends.
I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are.
I think its the mid-wit meme, lesswrongers know just enough to imagine some grand solution like brain uploading or nanobots might cure death and not enough to appreciate all the reasons each of those solutions won’t work.
One of the funniest things I ever read was a result of a survey of laypeople, physics UGs, physics Grads, postgrads, and faculty on various “cool future” things.
predictions of the likelihood of things geeks constantly dream about craters once you get past the very basics. I can only assume that fields that aren’t mine, and are in general vastly more complex, are at least as full of evidence of god hating us and not allowing us nice things.
I remember reading some of yuddies writing about nanomagic and noticing that the word “sticktion” never showed up.
Judging by the way LLMs and generative AI has been used, even when we do get something vaguely like a realistic version of sci-fi fantasies, capitalism and people who can’t distinguish the limits of the real thing from the fantasy will manage to misuse it.
who in the hell would want programmable matter anymore, after they’ve seen what happened to plain ol’ computer programming as already practiced
What’s that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those “secrets they don’t want you to know” for incredible profits?
Piles of screaming grey goo and people being like “Why are you running away? can’t you see it’s my grandmother?”
This doesnt apply to everything, like VR and 3d printers were a sci-fi fantasy and now they are mundane economically viable but not revolutionary products.
Biohacking and nanomachines otoh dont seem to be viable and you hear nothing about those anymore. Only a little bit in the uncreative (and going on the experts unrealistic) ‘ai will create bioweapons’ critihype. No ‘It will turn people into cyberzombies’ (quake 2 was pretty good (that was aliens not AI but still)).
I have been forced to on multiple occasions explain to people that there is a difference between thinking that there’s anything at all intrinsically good about the fact that things like us that have come about the way we did come with expiration dates, and dealing with it.
They’re referencing the meme that an uncontrolled AI will inevitably kill every last human being, for reasons.
They seemed to bring up a cartoon for 12 year old boys?
Ah yes ‘only these two things are possible, dont consider any other outcome’ truly rational thought
Also, ‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’ is just the vaguest thing ever. ‘yeah bro AI is gonna make everything super good. How? Why? uhhh i dont know it just will’
‘it’ll be Good beyond our wildest imagination’
pumpkin spice season will be permanent
We could unironically live in this world if only the powers that be would allow it. I’ve personally radicalized at least 3 basic bitches with this fact.
AI will make free ice cream for everyone
That ice cream? Also pumpkin spice
The pumpkin spice maximiser
It’s just the fundamentalist version of our culture’s pathologies as a whole, which has a very hard time imagining anything other than endless progression or apocalypse, neither of which is real.
wat
The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.
In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors
According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article’s summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn’t even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn’t happening.
There was an annoying booster who said “Ed Zitron is definitely falling for this one”. Ed Zitron is not fooled. In fact, he is frustrated with the report not properly breaking down the expenses (and having a mysterious “other expenses” category).
r/BetterOffline post about the article
Brief comment snippet:
A convertible note is a loan from an investor, but instead of paying them back with cash you give them stock options. It’s still a loss, you’re taking cash from an investor because you can’t break even with revenue.
Imagine if you do that as a baker. ‘Hey flour/sugar/yeast supplier, I can’t pay your for your products, but I will pay you in stocks to our bakery, I’m planning to sell our bakery soon, and as we don’t have to pay you for the supplies, we can sell our product at below the going rate making sure we look good for the sale of the company’.
Excellent usage of the chart comic
(Edited in a link to Haus of Declines ‘Bloodless Quant’ comic (not sure if that is the real title, I couldn’t find the comic on her bsky, small warning she is not a safe for work creator (if your workplace is very squeamish)).
I’m no finances guy so take this with a grain of salt, but since boosters are apparently acting like the convertibles will automatically work out, wouldn’t Anthropic still be losing more than they earn even if all those convertible notes work out due to compute/training costs? Since they got a discount from Elon earlier. Plus the BetterOffline post pointed out how they can’t even break even on an operating basis
Why do I need an iphone duo when I already have a modded nintendo 3DS?
The ease and comfort of Liquid Ass
I hear it’s pretty slick!
Yeah the Nintendo 3DS is incredible. Unironically my favorite videogame system.
We talking about Allen Wittman’s joke product, or Apple’s joke of a UI design?
(Its obviously the latter - Apple’s Temu frutiger aero is a fucking insult to my eyes)
You could make some really nice ASMR with it.
To wow people who need a computer to think for them?
LW’s contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn’t spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects.
If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW’ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author’s not really joking much.
live-reading notes (spoilers, of course)
- before question two, I would already be flipping off the camera, ranting about boundaries, and making it clear that I do not respect whatever’s decided to ransomware my machine
- this is all text hypnosis, isn’t it? sorry no, that’s not gonna work on me, I’m not going to become electrosensitive just because you said so
- antennae only work in the body when encapsulated and you did not do a secret surgery on me
- wait, is this…serious? like, is this an actual attempt at wargaming? this is so fucking facile though! I have seen Kingsman!
- if it acts sufficiently like a human cell then it can’t set aside resources for ulterior purposes
- human cells can’t be airborne, can’t survive in other species, etc.
- WP says Bell’s palsy rates are like 1 in 2.5k, so something like 1 in 6.25mil people are just straight-up either immune or insta-killed due to double Bell’s palsy
- it stops crimes: mugging, mugging, and huh there’s no more examples! is abortion a crime? is crossing state lines to get an abortion a crime? where’s morality coming from? I have read Prime Intellect!
- the problem with dictators is “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”? no, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects
- protagonist is literally crossing a picket line
- protagonist wins an argument with their high-school civics teacher! surely not an authorial stand-in moment
- oh wow, the chatbot is both the perfect Taylor-style manager and the perfect Ford-style manager? again, so facile; I have read Manna!
- the chatbot manager makes the protagonist into a beefy hunk through hard work rather than bodybuilding, again totally not a self-insert wish-fulfillment moment
- protagonist’s little sister, who is totally not sneerclub stand-ins, has to admit that the chatbots are way smarter than her and will always outclass her
- don’t worry, we can still do all-American things like grilling pork ribs, in fact the pigs like being eaten now, don’t worry about the remarkable similarities between pigs and humans
All I see around me is stagnation," she gestured at the gas stations nearby with cracked pavement,
*gasp* cracked pavement
“crime,” she continued, pointing towards a sketchy neighborhood to the west,
*faints* minorities
We created god, and it thinks exactly like a SV tech worker commuting to work.
I stopped reading after the picket line, this is too boring. Does it ever bother to explain why the economy keeps chugging along, people still go to their old jobs, and money still works? Hasn’t finance basically collapsed? I really can’t go on if this isn’t addressed, this is too annoying.
Prime intellect! There are dozens of us!
It’s more surprising to me that lesswrongers either haven’t, or have seemingly taken nothing away from it
e: on second thought, they might hate it because it is too ‘deathist’ or whatever
Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.
Damn that AI is verbose and boring, a high ‘this AI takeover could have been a skeet’.
(Also doubt a lot of people would notice as in my exp where a computer has an unexpected popup the first thing people do is try to close that thing with as little reading as possible. (Yes, parents, the message you kept ignoring for 2 weeks, which you didn’t tell me about was the operating system telling you the computer was having trouble, I can’t help you fix the problem after it totally stops working)).
Turns out slop prose isn’t any less galling after you put it in quotation marks.
The php exploit might not have been a big deal.
“I don’t think this PHP vulnerability is that exploitable. I think that 5 years ago people would’ve understood this, but now people are being deluded by their LLMs telling them they have an exploit when they don’t.”
I expect that we will see this a lot, as it turns out most of the exploits generated are not working, not new, or not a big deal. I also expect this to cause more burnout among cybersecurity people, and that people will autogen ‘fixes’ which will be lower quality than the bugs, and massively increase attack surface. (Heard one php fix was 12k lines of code).
My suggestion is to have offline backups and move a lot of your important stuff out of the cloud (or get backups of those). But you should do both anyway.
E: I saw the EFF fear mongering with ‘25% of all exploits found ever were found this October, secure yourself’ and looking at how stuff is still up everywhere, compared to 25 years ago, and I them I realized this is all critihype again.
E2: not a lone voice https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/i-want-my-wednesday-back/
(Cloudflare did say they saw exploits however. Not sure if those were real or ‘attempts at’ or just marketing).
E3: don’t let your takeway from this that we shouldn’t do emergency patching and stuff like everybody did last week btw.
Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Too bad I’m gonna keep hearing “AI did PHP” for weeks.
The British something or rather is like “stockpile water cause the internet might go down and kill the plants due to the hackpocalypse”
@schnoopy @techtakes If you stockpile too much water, though, Thames Water will find a way to blame you for their financial misconduct.
On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out.
So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I’m thinking locksmithing.
If you’re interested in locksmithing I’ve got bad news. It got harder after WFH, waaaay more people home in rich neighbourhoods
70% of websites utilize PHP, thus revealing People’s Hidden Preference for PHP
So I just stumbled into Team Human, because a Youtuber I kind of like (Kraut) published a video for them. They seem to run a campaign targeted at creators, pushing to get videos released on the 10th or 17th. So they must be having a bit of a high point right now. (Idk if cash changed hands.)
Their manifesto tries to amp up societal harms, but the existential risk is snuck in at the end (AI programmed pandemics, etc.) and they want to regulate AI chips like nukes. CAIS (Center for AI Safety) is listed as the sponsor. Seems a little “AI centrist” to me, as in aligned with the less insane billionaires, but still a typical AI safety astroturfing shop. Shame if any of your favorite creators fell for it.
They got one of my favourites, Medhi Sadaghdar (ElectroBoom), and yes in a video released on the 10th.
CAIS seem like an “AI safety” laundromat, in the sense they try to put a reasonable face on the paperclip maximiser stuff. They were the ones who organised the “AI safety statement” in 2023, which features lots of signatories who I’m sure just thought “oh yes I don’t want anything bad to happen because of AI”, not “If we don’t give Yudkowsky the reins we’re doomed to become office supplies”.
Not to be confused with Team Human the Douglas Rushkoff podcast.
My first association was Alex Jones screaming “I’M TEAM HUMAN” while ranting about environmentalists. So the brand is getting a little crowded it seems.
I was gonna ask about that
Glenn Beck is listed as one of the “leaders”. That guy is still around?
Iirc he has been trying a ‘im no longer a frothing weird rightwinger’ for a while now, but so far nobody really fell for it.
People who are entertaining in front of a camera are just regular people. If anything I’d expect the fame to make them on average worse than a random sample
saw this on the other sneerclub
‘believing the world is about to end keeps people sane’ im genuinely speechless what the fuck
what too much evopsych on the TL does to an mf
Damn, I didn’t expect to run into something that would cause me to reflect so heavily on my own personal journey. I’m someone who has long struggled with suicidal ideation, and there have been points in the past where I set my own death date at a point in the future; Most notably, when I was a severely depressed teenager in an emotionally unsafe household, I told myself that I would allow myself to die at age 20, if nothing had improved by the time I was 20 — and fuck anyone who would begrudge me that.
Ironically, planning my suicide saved my life, because it gave me something concrete to work towards, a future respite to latch onto during my most challenging days. The screenshot you shared made me realise that this was sort of a sollipsistic millenarianism, giving me a sense of structure and direction in a world where I’d have otherwise been too overwhelmed to do anything.
I’m doing much better now than I was then, quite a few years on from that deadline I set for myself. However, I still sometimes have those low points where planning to die feels more accessible than planning a tolerable life. I think it’d be useful to thoroughly reflect on this tendency through the lens of millenarianism.
This is all to say thanks, I guess? For introducing me to a new concept that will be useful in this way
I’m no longer suicidal, but the knowledge that some day I’m going to die and be free of all this misery is pretty much the only thing that keeps me going. been true my whole life. i can understand millenarianism being motivated by that, or seeing that as a form of millenarianism.
but i don’t think roon understands the sort of motivation we’re talking about at all. to him millenarianism is a principle for motivating individuals to reorder society or themselves. that’s quite a different thing than the preserving and protective mechanism you’re talking about
i like roon. he’s so straightforwardly stupid. it’s refreshing!
(edit:
Isn’t he like a vice assistant (to the) chief executive of something or other in anthropic?apparently not) There’s just no telling how many of the roons of the world are going to become billionaires from this IPO, what a terrible state of affairs.His real name is Tarun Gognieri. He’s a TPOT (post-rationalist) and employee of OpenAI.
post-rationalist is more simply expressed as fascist.
Some of these people have so thoroughly blended their brains into a post-ironic slurry that I can’t be sure they even really know what they believe anymore. roon seems like a good example of this, every time he comes up lately.
I haven’t checked in on Naval Ravikant in a couple years, has he just handed his feed over to a chatbot at this point?
I suppose this could make sense if you think about people worried about climate/ecosystem collapse, and the nuclear standoff before that, and maybe the rise of totalitarianism and mechanized warfare before that…
But that ignores the vast host of batshit doomsday prophets that were around long before and all throughout that part of history.
rationalists are so big brained thonkers that they don’t need to learn history, they can get it from the first principles, haven’t you heard
Also in that context it seems like millenarianism is specifically bad at actually doing anything about the harms it’s worried about. Whether you want to curb fossil fuel usage or just get sinners to repent before it’s too late, doomsday prophecy is actively bad at motivating anyone other than the prophet themselves.
It shows up yes but not everyone suffers from it, im sure the rate of people thinking this differs greatly from time to time.
The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work
Good blog post ‘“Who Owns ROM Hacking?” And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With’ on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.
I want to point out that SMW Central doesn’t ban people for being pro-GenAi, nor are they barred from anything just for being pro-GenAi. They simply can’t upload content to the site that was created with GenAi. Despite this, GenAi users believe that, because SMW Central has rules against GenAi content, SMW Central must feel the need to “control or dictate” what they do.
This context transforms the statement substantially. When this group of individuals says “nobody owns ROM hacking,” what they mean is that they should be allowed to publish their work wherever they want without consequence.
Kind of reminds me of the people who, around the time the (UK) smoking ban was introduced, made “It’s my right to smoke anywhere I want” their whole personality.
