Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned 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.)
Today in Seems Legit News:
“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.”
- why is engineer working before contracted time
- if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place
- if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all
- if “no engineer has written a line of code since December”, when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
- why is hypothetical engineer a “he”, Spotify
- do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify
- in unrelated news, Anna’s Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/
- though I won’t do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is “AI” “music” anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago
When someone says they can do this, I try to say ‘ok, well can you do it right now to show me?’ and so far the answer has always been deflection.
why does engineer have to commute in the first place
What, do you expect our serfs to be unsupervised at home? Preposterous.
If the engineer does not commute they will be unable, or rather un-abelian
Oh for fuck’s sake
excruciating
What they don’t tell you about opening the Lament Configuration is, after the pearl-headed nails and the sewing of wires to nerves, just how many puns are involved.
Never in the history of ever has a promptly finished ticket been something for a CEO to brag about, but here we are.
I guess since more down-to-earth stories like “chatgpclaudemini found the best value for money such and such for me” really aren’t happening, trying to impress people who think coding is magic is as good a fallback as any.
It’s a good day to read this announcement and then field a question by a pal why their Spotify playlist plays in reverse
Soulseek rules.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 all of the above. Re point 1, see also the recent HBR article https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
fuck this tweet and fuck yud
Even if you’ve never heard of him before and know nothing else about him… this short tweet alone tells so much about what kind of person he is.
in follow-up posts he talks about how he’s broadly in favour of job automation, but has doubts our current government would be able to do that without fucking everyone over, he specified that “if it were a 1950’s government and congress I’d be more hopeful”
…so instead of proposing a solution like “protest against this” or “vote people in power who actually are responsible” he jumps to “your daughter should give up her career and become a sex worker for AI company shareholders”
with the Epstein shitstorm still raging, I would not be saying a damn thing about young women being sex workers for rich and powerful dudes
The idea that a government from the actual McCarthy Era would be adept at handling an organized labor response to massive upheaval in the job market is… what’s the superlative of “lolz”?
Groan, you don’t need to finish high school to learn about false dichotomy.
Interesting first job your mind goes to there Yud. Might spend a little bit less time around people who regularly use the word goon but who never talk about the mob.
Is this really Big Yud’s account ? Different nick than previous screenshots.
It’s his alt for people who want more yud spam, hence “all the yud.” From his twitter bio:
This is my serious low-volume account. Follow @allTheYud for the rest.
The other one is meant to be serious? And low volume??
Eliezer, I would be very careful about talking about age of consent if I were you
load-bearing “fairly”
here’s another very good take from baldur bjarnason, answering the question if he had hardened his stance against LLMs.
(the answer is “not exactly”, and you want to read the whole thing, because the answer itself is the least interesting part of the essay.)
The whole thing’s worth reading, but this snippet in particular deserves attention:
Tech companies have done everything they can to maximise the potential harms of generative models because in doing so they think they’re maximising their own personal benefit.
it’s full of quotable bangers like this, and it’s hard to choose the one to quote, right.
Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).
I’m not quite clear on what “self-growing” means here given how inhospitable the moon is.
Self growing like a video game, for example a colony in eu4, initially it costs a lot of gold per month to keep sending colonists, and when you reach 100% growth it becomes a full province on which you can build things.
If only more journalists go: ‘we don’t know what this means either, and when we asked him he started shouting slurs at us’.
given how inhospitable the moon is.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
what if the moon got mad tho
Tell Luna you’ve been a bad boy/girl/etc and need to be punished and see what she does.
on first reading I thought you were talking about a specific luna (who I shall not tag here) but who is definitely somewhat of a kinkposter
still might mean that, haha
Luna is a very common transfem name
Yeah, I’m aware :)
Given it’s the Moon a better comparison would be a Greenland colony in EU5 where it costs gold initially and then costs your precious sanity, as you are doomed to ship tonnes and tonnes of food and materials there for centuries because there is nothing fucking there and the whole endeavour was a huge mistake.
Have not done eu5 so didnt know they improved the system. But indeed.
Not that it matters for the pro let billionaires colonize space crowd. As some thing some thing ai robots are magic. See also how they are planning datacenters in space, and dont think there is a real solution for the whole ‘what if you need to flip a switch or replace a fan’ problem.
The moment I’ve learnt chuds like Musk and Sammy Boi treat the speed of light as just a thing that they can solve with sufficient computational power I started treating all their claims like a 5yo talking shit. It’s really all you need to know about them.
wasn’t Musk financing people who were gonna “hack the simulation” at one point?
Iirc he even claimed he thought at times the world was a simulation made just for him. Im starting to think he isn’t in a healthy place mentally.
E: ow god he thinks you can cool things in space, because vacuum.
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
self-growing
the virile space men will have plenty of nubile females to pump out babies
Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that mars… the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, there’s less water…
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
There’s also a better chance that Elon exits the planet sooner.
He hasn’t even done a suborbital flight yet, has he? I don’t seem him being brave enough to even get as far as the moon, even assuming he’s healthy enough.
Yeah he is one of the few space fan billionaires who actually didnt go up. Shows he at some level knows he is full of ahit.
Shhh, don’t tell him.
@rook my grandpa was working in the Rhine Basin and Siberia as a Coal miner under ground. I think this will be considered a holiday for your lungs compared to moon. :D
oh god is our childrens’ 9/11 going to be a moon colony imploding
@hypnicjerk @rook ideally a colony composed solely of oligarchs and “AI”-driven sexbots / maids.
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
as usual, felon just has no imagination and is basing his silly plan straight off any number of scifi books. but some dipshit stan is of going to ecstatically praise him for this “revolutionary” “forward-thinking” idea
the virile space men will have
i’ve heard they like to read sf, they might want to read heinlein’s luna stories and miss the point entirely
You could also technically do all of that debugging before you even get to the moon, though. Also has the added benefit of not dying if something goes awry.
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn One of the “Old Dreams” is self replication lunar factories - you land a small robotic factory on the moon, it makes copies of itself, those copies make copies, exponential growth, then the factories make a maglev launch system and then they make and launch a massive number of solar panels, and now you do space based solar power and beam the power to earth. Kept growing and building, and you have massive amounts of energy per human on earth with 0 pollution…
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn See this PDF (from 1980!): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19830007077/downloads/19830007077.pdf
“As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts”
Medical malpractice as a service, coming to a GP near you
Rutger Bregman admits that he’s not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, he’s sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.
For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.
but I do know that what’s available now is just f*cking impressive - and it will only get better.
Another victim of the proof-by-dopamine-hit fallacy it seems.
It’s telling that the example he brings is that Claude can do pretty much decently what he was about to buy a 100$ voice controlled app for. As someone who aspires to the art of making great software, it’s so infuriating to see how non-techies were conditioned into accepting slopware by years of enshittification and price gouging. Who cares if the tech barely works right? So does most anything, right?
Yeah he is trying to build his own EA movement. He also wrote a book (which I have not read) which basically argues that people in general are good not evil actually. (Fair enough, but not relevant).
Im still trying to meet him and shake is hand, the resulting matter antimatter explosion will take out the country.
OT: Just gave my two weeks notice and it turns out management is very big on using ChatGPT…
“Quitting your job is not just fun, it’s invigorating!”
But seriously, between the alcohol market being a complete shitshow now and overproduction of microdistilleries/breweries (the dieback is just starting here)…I think I picked a good moment to fall to pieces.
Also it was only a matter of time before we lost airpod privileges tbh.
Show me someone who admittedly seems to know a lot about Japan, but not so much about East Germany:
But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FreZTE9Bc7reNnap7/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic-collapse
So… East Germany ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even if we accept that the people affected by the degrowth discussed in this article are the ones who grew up during the DDR regime, it doesn’t rhyme well with the fact that East German states are hotbeds for neo-Nazi parties, which by all accounts should be anathema to a population raised in a totalitarian state dominated by the Soviet Union.
And if there’s a population almost stereotypically conformist to the common good over the private will, isn’t that the Japanese?
I’m open to input on either side, I admit I don’t know too much about these issues.
I’m not convinced they know much about Japan either. The akiya banks are notoriously not updated regularly, and the sites which sell them to foreigners even less so. I couldn’t find that house in the bank but it appears to be now listed by an agent. Single storey, wooden, 50 years old, in a bit of a flood zone, not even a convenience store or supermarket within a mile’s walk.
It’s true Japan has a lot of empty houses, estimates are around 10%. Japan also has a culture of somewhat continuously demolishing / rebuilding houses, which is understandable in an earthquake prone area. That house isn’t in the worst state for an akiya, but it clearly needs significant renovations, even before considering understandable earthquake anxiety and newer building standards (E g. steel frames) mean that houses like the one pictured aren’t exactly top choices to begin with.
Also, the inheritance tax is a progressive tax, including a tax free threshold. 55% is the top tier and you need to be talking about literally millions of USD assessed value before that kicks in. Real estate is valued at less than fair market price for inheritance and gift tax purposes too. Even the most conservative internet article commenters in Japan will condemn people for avoiding their inheritance tax obligations.
Also no, you won’t find wolves anymore in Japan, just fucking bears. The last year has been the worst in a while for bear attacks on humans, so I’m not sure the hypothetical deer population explosion is going to be a real concern. The robot wolves are scarecrows and were designed to look like wolves in the hopes of scaring off the bears, according to the link in the post itself.
The whole thing reads like fiction with grains of “fact” scattered throughout which hopes to avoid scrutiny by being a subject matter too dry and niche to be called out on.
A machine learning researcher points out how the field has become enshittified. Everything is about publications, beating benchmarks, and social media. LLM use in papers, LLM use in reviews, LLM use in meta-reviews. Nobody cares about the meaning of the actual research anymore.
I like this reply on Reddit:
I do my PhD in fair evaluation of ML algorithms, and I literally have enough work to go through until I die. So much mess, non-reproducible results, overfitting benchmarks, and worst of all this has become a norm. Lately, it took our team MONTHS to reproduce (or even just run) a bunch of methods to just embed inputs, not even train or finetune.
I see maybe a solution, or at least help, in closer research-business collaboration. Companies don’t care about papers really, just to get methods that work and make money. Maxing out drug design benchmark is useless if the algorithm fails to produce anything usable in real-world lab. Anecdotally, I’ve seen much better and more fair results from PhDs and PhD students that work part-time in the industry as ML engineers or applied researchers.
This can go a good way (most of the field becomes a closed circle like parapsychology) or a bad way (people assume the results are true and apply them, like the social priming or Reinhart and Rogoff’s economic paper with the Excel error).
Great 5-character sneer dropped: “ai;dr” (source: https://bsky.app/profile/katemckean.bsky.social/post/3memb4hybpk2u)
A prompt enjoyer does eschatology. Along the way he abuses mathematics, Ohio, and a chinchilla.
Cool! I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because IIRC that’s the latest date for a singularity that Kurzweil gives, and this dude comes along with a date that’s conveniently ~halfway between now and then for people to anchor on. Thanks dude! If I find an online sod retailer that sells single square feet, I’ll send you some grass to touch!
Out of all the robo-cult grifters, Kurzweil is an authentically tragic figure
I though Kurzweil’s latest singularity date was 2032 or smth
He might have revised it in more recent publications and/or brainfarts. If I were a Responsible Internet Debater™, I would go check, but the whole point is that i could give a fuck
funny how all the tech CEOs are the ones who are saying in the next couple years and all the researchers give 10-20 year timelines. surely this does not mean anything about the reliability of the companies and their claims
It’s always Miller(ite) Time
You could’ve probably given me a good 80~100 rounds and I still would not have guessed that set of items
And I’ve been watching these dipshits for a while
(the first two I could’ve guessed/converged to within 10~20 I suspect, but a chinchilla? Fucked from left field, I tell ya)
2034 eh?
I recently purchased a couple of decent red wines with the intent to age them appropriately. Vendor said 8 years was good, so I Sharpied “'34” on the label and felt really really old when I did so.
Anyway, 18 Jul 2034 is as good a date as any to uncork one of them to enjoy. Marked my calendar!
2034 is also the year superintelligence is gonna happen according to the updated predictions from the AI 2027 crew, so double whammy!
https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421
Anthropic safety research lead quits the field entirely to write poetry with a somewhat cryptic note. Trying to read between the lines here, the most likely explanation (IMO) is that he developed a guilty conscience and anthropic doesn’t actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology. Ah well, nevertheless they persisted.
Another research poet drops, this time Zoë Hitzig from Open AI https://archive.is/dfuzP Are research poets a thing I just didn’t know about?
She’s quitting because of the introduction of ads, but falls short of either realising or just admitting that OpenAI never cared about safety - they cared about hedging expensive legal risk.
Is buying into the idea of corporate principle declarations something people do as a mental health protection mechanism?
Are they genuinely naive enough to think self-governance works in a capitalist system?
Is this a political long play to maintain her desirability as a future hire?
Someone should write both a paper and a poem about that.
@fiat_lux @techtakes Yes, they’re that naive.
Fish don’t notice the water they swim in and don’t realize life exists outside of it. And the whole AI bubble is 100% capitalism-centric. (Research institutions got priced out of the game a few years ago and are tinkering around the margins.)
A cursed idea:
North Koreans futzing around and trying to train a model on Juche Thought.
@fiat_lux @sansruse
> Is buying into the idea of corporate principle declarations something people do as a mental health protection mechanism?Probably but I can’t speak to this directly.
> Are they genuinely naive enough to think self-governance works in a capitalist system?
I used to be this naive, though in my defense it’s a combination of naivete and heavy exposure to propaganda.
That’s fair, the propaganda is intense and I often forget that my upbringing on a strict diet of cynicism is not something others have to experience.
Anthropic doesn’t actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology
but yeah it sounds like they got overwhelmed by all the shit happening in the world (there is a lot of shit happening in the world, especially in America) and left for their own mental health’s sake
you’re right, Amodei and others have published a lot of criti-hype, shameless hype, and delusional anthropomorphization in the past few years. While i was looking for other examples of their bullshit I found this article which was published just after my comment, with a nice sneer:
edited to say thanks for sharing the article
it’s listed author, David J. Temple, is a collective pseudonym used by several authors including by Marc Gafni, a disgraced New Age spiritual guru who’s been accused of sexually exploiting his followers
why does shit always have to turn out weird
a new school of philosophy called “CosmoErotic Humanism.”
I don’t know about all of that, but I do know that every major TV market in the country offers multiple chances per night for this poor fellow to re-devote himself to the poetry-in-motion of a certain other erotic Cosmo.
Especially for a guy named Sharma living in the US. It doesn’t take too many footsteps outside the Bay area for him to be in literal physical danger right now.
He also less cryptically posted his plans and resignation letter.(Edit: memory lapse) xcancel version of resignation letter post. Tl;dr moving to the UK (understandably) and doing a poetry degree (I didn’t accidentally critique someone into quitting, did I?)Honestly, I hope he finds both what he’s looking for and also what he’s not looking for but still equally needs. For example, a personal perspective not entrenched in institutional ontological frameworks.
Yeah, I can’t hold it against anyone for feeling scared and overwhelmed with what’s happening in America right now and fleeing. Hope he finds happiness soon
this article involving an incredibly eyebrow-raising take from one of the people at METR (the team behind the famous “tasks AI can do doubles every 7 months” graph) saying AI is eventually going to become more impactful than the invention of agriculture and more transformative than the emergence of the human species and also calls it an intelligent alien species. Immensely funny amongst the other people saying “please stop treating AI like magic”
the Harari guy also seems to be into transhumanism if a skim of his wikipedia page is correct. The “this is the first time in history that we have no idea what the world will look like in 10 years” thing is also an eyebrow-raiser. I could probably rattle off a couple examples (ie the two world wars)
I like this one from “A.I. policy researcher” Helen Toner.
I believe the narrative around A.I.’s negative environmental impacts has gotten way out of hand. Yes, on aggregate the industry uses quite a bit of energy and water, but that’s true of any large industry. The relevant question is how it compares to other industries, and how it compares to how much value we’re getting out of it.
Yes girl, good job. Now maybe try connecting these two thoughts!
And of course on that theme from Melanie “Computer scientist” Mitchell
On the bad side: A.I.-induced psychosis! On the good side, some people will get a lot out of using chatbots as therapists.
These people have definitely offloaded the cognitive load to chatbots.
Every time I hear about people using chatGPT as a therapist, I want to scream
@EponymousBosh @Amoeba_Girl So they’ve reinvented ELIZA, but poorly?
An ELIZA you can date. How is that poorly.
On an unrelated note, apparently chatgpt closed down a lot of models yday. Causing a lot of distress among the ‘I never heard of the ELIZA effect and I am dating a chatbot’ community.
@Soyweiser It’s a dumb, less competent psychiatrist. ELIZA might have been simplistic, but it was at least based on an actual psychology theory.
I was joking in the first part. No need to convince me it sucks.
smoke GPUs every day
I really want to see a Harari takedown.
obligatory: if books could kill did an ep on his big book “sapiens”: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/18220972-sapiens
the aforementioned wikipedia page has got some criticisms of his works under the critical reception section
Had no idea he was a military history guy lol.
neither did I reading this article was my first exposure to him
Great news everybody! Copilot will no longer delete your files when you ask it to document them and it took only 6 months to vibe code a solution.
