Want to wade into the sandy 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.)
If you want to witness a bunch of emotionally stunted clanker fondlers totally missing the point, check out the comments on this orange site thread.
Related:
Paul Graham: “You’re holding it the wrong way.”
It’s probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of
rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from “tridge and claude”.rsync
Huh, haven’t heard of that before, lemme go check its Wikipedia page and-
rsync (remote sync) is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers
Okay this sounds very fucking bad
slop code in rsync timeline
Ψ(･ω･ )Ψ
good morning
that fuckin company had another funding round
the further one reads, the more depressing it gets
Joining them are strategic infrastructure partners—Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix
cool so it’s going to be even longer before one can buy affordable computers again
I wish all of this a very fuck off and stop already :|
FFS the amount of circle
jerkingdealing going on in this industry is absolutely insane.“Hello anthropic. Have some money to spend on our chips”
I’m waiting for the “who contributed what under what conditions”. I’m wondering how much of the supposed money follows a rather ovoid trajectory.
A bit more on the Anthropic cofounder who was there at the Pope’s speech choice snippet:
Olah even went as far as to say that Anthropic is operating “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” painting his employer as exactly the kind of entity that’s attempting to assume “monopolistic control” over tech, as Pope Leo warned in his encyclical.
I guess he’s trying to say Anthropic has a bunch of limitations and financial incentives as a company (which didn’t stop them from taking those Qatar donations)
So I was poking around the AI 2027 blog and discovered that they seem to be working on making another scenario, this time titled “AI 2030” they haven’t made any posts about it (that I can find anyways) but if its just an AI 2027 rewrite but with moved back timelines I’d imagine people will be less charitable with them
They’ve been using the excuse that not everyone who participated in the “AI 2027” project agreed on 2027 as the year it all happens. But if that’s the case, why the hell did they call it “AI 2027”?
Gotta love the ex post facto of it all.
The distributions below are our team’s probabilities on when AI’s will achieve human level coding performance.
So in AI’27 they predicted 2030 will have “1T Wildly Superintelligent copies thinking at 10000x human speed”, “wildly superhuman” coding ability, and “brain uploading”, with “biosphere destroying mirror life” on the horizon.
Now they are predicting “maybe it will be able to write C++ in 2030 without constantly falling over (50% probability)”.
Seems like a bit of a step back, but I guess we’ll see what they put in their fun interactive website once it’s ready.
It’s a day ending in Y and LW has terrible takes on SF
Vinge is a sort of a patron saint of the California Ideology, even though he’s such a good writer it doesn’t really shine through that bad. George Seidoh Worley tries to shoehorn his classic 90s novels into LLM-land https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tWBd6faBCQJmaFMBT/llms-through-the-eyes-of-vinge
Spoilers ahead!
For some reason the books are in a weird order in his review. Here’s publication history
- A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), has Pham Nuwen as a (revived clone) character
- A Deepness in the Sky (1999), has Pham Nuwen alive and involved in the Qeng Ho. It’s set 20,000 years before.
- The Children of the Sky (2012) - I haven’t read this because I hate the fucking Tines and don’t want to read more about them and their planet. Direct sequel to Fire.
Worley tackles Deepness first.
A Deepness in the Sky is largely about Focus, a technology for turning humans into LLMs. Only, that’s not how it’s presented in the book. In the book, Focus is a medical condition that results when a person suffers a managed infection of the “mindrot” virus. If they survive, they become Focused, which gives them the ability to work free from all distractions, but at the cost of most of what makes them human.
Although we see Focus used as a weapon to control people in the book, the normal way a person becomes Focused is through school. A person goes through higher education, becomes an expert in something, and is then Focused so they can fully exploit their expertise. Of course, the Focused are also exploited and often treated like slaves, and the Focusing process can’t always be reversed, so even in the ideal case it’s not a harmless technology.
OK so Deepness is about the libertarian trader society Qeng Ho who discover and try to make contact with the Spiders, and are then sneakily attacked by the totalitarian Emergents who use the mindrot virus to enslave them. Quoting Wikipedia
Emergent managers induce obsession with a single idea or specialty, which they call Focus, essentially turning people into brilliant appliances. Many Qeng Ho become Focused against their will, and the Emergents retain the rest of the population under mass surveillance, with only a portion of the crew not in suspended animation.
Throughout the book, the effects and costs of Focus are clearly detrimental (even if Focus helps humans communicate with the Spiders). The Emergents are your classic libertarian boogeymen. Turning people into LLMs is not something Vinge sees as a good thing.
Next we jump to Children. Tines World is in the Slow Zone, so AGI doesn’t work there. The titular Children are refugees from the Beyond, where it does.
In one scene, they are surprised to learn that they can’t just vibe their way towards developing a medical cure for one character’s disease. They fail to understand just how difficult it is to run an experiment, since they expect the automation to do it all for them. They end up forming a political rebellion mostly over the fact that they can’t get the computer to do what they want, and they’re desperate to prioritize getting access to AGI again, no matter the risks.
Writing from 2026, I can understand the Children. I use AI to help me think all the time. I use it to do my job. My life is better with it, and I don’t want to go back. I can feel myself losing the ability to do things on my own. I could go back if I had to, but I wouldn’t want to, and I hope I don’t have to. If I had grown up only knowing how to do things with the help of AI, it’d be a major threat to my sense of personhood to lose access to it, and I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk.
(my emphasis)
Next, we come to Fire
The Blight is the primary antagonist of A Fire Upon the Deep, a dangerous ASI that seeks power with no moral regard for what it considers lesser life. It’s the reason Ravna and the Children ended up on Tines World in the Slow Zone, and also responsible for the death of trillions of lives.
“Responsible” is subverting this a bit. Sure, the Blight takes over civilizations and turns the inhabitants into “soul dead” meat puppets, and it does destroy others, but the central twist of Fire (and the reason the Children are stuck in the Slow) is that reincarnated Pham Nuwen, using weird alien tech, deliberately expands the Slow into the volumes taken over by the Blight, thereby dooming uncounted civilizations and trillions of beings to die once the technology they rely on stops working.
Worley:
In Vinge’s universe, the Blight is stopped thanks to help from superintelligences out in the Transcend that care about the lives of people down in the Beyond. In our world, if we create a Blight, we have little reason to think we will be so lucky.
(my emphasis)
nah mang they wanted to stop the Blight, and gave no shits about lesser intelligences hanging around in the Beyond.
But note that Worley states that he’s put the entire galaxy at risk to keep access to AI, but the Blight, an AI and presumably driven by the same general goals, is the bad guy?
Anyway, read Vinge if you haven’t already. He’s a good writer, unlike the LW hacks misreading him.
When you wrote “he’s such a good writer”, I assumed you hadn’t read Children of the Sky… a book that urgently needed an editor with a spray bottle and the power to yell “No! Bad Vernor!” multiple times a minute.
Re-reading the preceding parts after Children has also fixed my impression of his writing ability, tbh.
Haha fair point! I have not read Children… (noted in my comment) but mostly because the premise didn’t interest me, and it got shit reviews.
But Rainbows End is both a compelling story , and the SFnal ideas/page ratio is through the fucking roof.
I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk
Thats an addiction, gonna be fun when the prices go through the roof.
It really baffles me how these types manage to read this stuff so badly. The galactic holocaust at the end of Fire isn’t an accident, it’s the whole plan of the Powers from the start. There’s a fungus growing in the Top of the Beyond that might threaten them and their cure is to cauterize an entire slice of the galaxy, a plan which comes to fruition as intended. The final transmission implies that maybe some Powers got burned too, which might or might not have been the plan (the Blight was found in the Low Transcend after all) but the Beyond being burned was never optional, it was the plan.
The Blight is a big threat but it’s not even the first such threat in the galaxy; it doesn’t threaten the entire galaxy, not even the entire Beyond; heck, the only reason the extermination fleet travelled all the way to the Bottom was the pursuit of the entities working to enact its destruction. It can easily be argued that the cure was worse than the disease. Ravna outright thinks that at the end, it’s right there in the text.
I don’t even know why I’m arguing this here. These types just make my blood boil with how badly they misread (not misinterpret) works that I really like. Ugh.
George, are you saying that becoming the Eloi is good actually?
jqwik maintainer’s anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad
From github thread:
I can’t actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo.
Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/
Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.
the slot machine addicts have created a sternly-worded open letter to the maintainer utilizing all the critical analysis they are capable of mustering
shot:
However adding malware that for no reason destructivly destroys user code is insane.
chaser:
from user “bryon-cryptoconsults”
Bryon’s GH bio could be used as the dictionary definition of “douche”: https://github.com/bryon-cryptoconsults
The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code — a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no “warn the user first” preamble.
God why is the writing of AI-bros always so long winded and stilted? I mean… we know why but it’s still so so unpleasant to read. This is why people hate LLMs.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
You’re absolutely right! It’s not just insulting, it’s a full on attack on clanker wankers.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
the temporarily-embarrassed royal “we”
“Claude, write a strongly-worded letter explaining in great detail how upset I am make no mistakes.”
All of complainer’s posts on that issue are clearly LLM-written.
So, do you consider active destructive actions to be a proper resistance strategy, @jlink?
Very last comment in this issue - because I’m too stupid to resist the urge.
It’s as much “active destruction” as telling someone to eff themselves.
I can’t actually believe someone would be so cool and put this into their repo, kudos
Ah yes, the famous resistance that doesn’t destroy anything. Famously effective, the passive non-destructive inaction resistance
Quoting from the license this software is licensed under (ESL):
[…] Each Recipient is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using and distributing the Program and assumes all risks associated with its exercise of rights under this Agreement, including but not limited to the risks and costs of program errors, compliance with applicable laws, damage to or loss of data, programs or equipment, and unavailability or interruption of operations.
(my emphasis)
OK this has hit the chattering technosphere
Lobste.rs - some bad takes on legal theory https://lobste.rs/s/brusu8/protestware_for_coding_agents
HN - submission from Ars Technica, original title “Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code”, editorialized to “Undisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app output” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319968
read comments at your own risk
My hot take: the clankers know there’s nothing legally they can do about this, and that they will actually have to read release notes going forward and doing actual work to avoid getting their precious vibecoding junked, and they’re MAD
from the great minds at HN:
Fighting in a war is morally ok though. This is war.
war is when i pipe your scripts folder into my stochastic text machine which is hooked directly up to a root shell
oh good there’s more
Let’s set the stage.
From the Free Software Foundation:
fucking LMAO
The cheering on of this deterioration in FOSS ideals is simply revolting. What is next? […] Targeting people because of their skin color or orientation?
it’s a good thing there’s no FOSS code in the missile silos! it’s a good thing the upcoming Palantir tranny tracker won’t use FOSS libraries! this shit actually pisses me off
Our concern is not with the defensive intent. It’s that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.
… you think? aw shucks i only wanted to hurt bots
First they came for the agents…
I should like to take this opportunity to invite
rbatlletto Cry More
LOL @ the obviously vibe-written comments from the original complainer
I’m tempted to submit this to lobste.rs just to watch the fireworks but linking directly to a GH issue thread is discouraged for brigading issues
edit complainer tried to brigade HN, with few results https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291757
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hey awful, a Question:
do any of y’all know if there’s a decent writeup of the rationalist/hanson/thiel pre-history of prediction markets (a la polymarket etc) before they hit the much-heightened popularity of the last ~18mo?
Cyberlibertarianism covers it.
and since it’s likely that there is no writeup, I am now already starting with “polymarket site:lesswrong.com”
we all know the abyss would get upset if I don’t visit enough
Did you try RationalWiki or the page for Hanson himself? Read it next to Taleb’s The Black Swan patiently explaining to clever but inexperienced young men that you cannot perfectly predict the future just diversify and prepare for different scenarios.
A lot of rats give Robin Hanson credit for things which are much older (prediction markets for elections are recorded back to the 16th century, The Great Filter was huge in Cold War pop culture). Werner Antweiler at UBC ran a prediction market from 1993 to 2008.
Digging into the literature around the related assassination markets might also help.
Yeah that’s the angle Cyberlibertarianism covers it from.
CW: creepy dudes
A few days ago, a LWer of 15 years wrote a long very weird post about how flirting works:
It made the frontpage.
Someone tried to set him right with both personal anecdotes and Aella-style research:
Here’s original poster thanking for the update, and writing
My biggest update was… five hours!?!? Going through the list of women I’ve slept with, the median is around 30 minutes of direct interaction between first meeting and sex. Granted, some of that was at RMN, but even without those cases the median is still around 30-60 minutes. Five hours sounds absolutely insane to me. That probably explains a large chunk of my confusion; apparently people are spending very large amounts of time flirting/courting/etc.
These are just very weird people.
The AI stuff is fun and all, but the awful gender takes is really why I subscribe to sneerclub. I swear some guys don’t realize how cute men can be (when they’re not posting awful gender takes anyway…) and it’s such a weird blind spot.
One obvious elephant: how much time should you spend becoming physically attractive if you’re not above average height?
???
imo one should treat others as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end
that is to say, ugh! rationalists talk about your relation to other people without making it about consumption challenge
Ouch, “picking up a cute young thing at the bar and hot tub at the ski resort” “building a happy working relationship with a sex worker” and “romantic pair-bonding” are three different skills! No wonder he thinks looks and body language are so important if he is trying to take women straight to bed.
RMN is a pro wrestling event, but he probably means Red Means No, Aella’s consensual-nonconsent orgies.
In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.
maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.
I wasn’t around but supposedly rationalists were hugely PUA-curious in the early days when entitled nerds commiserating about not getting laid were a major voice in the community, along with a bunch of other more out there incel stuff like bi-maxxing, i.e. trying to get it on with other severely undersexed dudes to scratch the itch.
A lot of it was summarily scrubbed when they started getting money and attention.
Ah yes… the ‘bi hacking’ thing that they got real quiet about…
The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe
The fact that in the community it was widely known who heartiste is (enough for Scott to publish an anti heartiste post) makes it clear they were in pretty deep. Normal places knew about this stuff from the ‘the game’ book (or later somebody like rooshv). Not the neonazi pua.
e: As youtube is spying on me personally, it suggested I watch ‘how one book [the game] ruined sitcoms forever’
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I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it’s called a sex club.
Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, “hey wanna hear me sing?” The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.
(This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it’s because these men are not really trying to have sex, they’re trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)
reminds me of my younger years when i used to attend play parties and then wake up four hours later on a couch cause i was so sleep deprived
if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever.
Rationalists used to more openly stew in incel culture, a big part of which is that beyond sex you are also owed undivided love and attention, so there’s probably still a big deal of self-worth attached to that.
Incels who are fine with just paying for it call themselves MGTOW and are kind of a separate subculture that I feel has mostly petered out by now, probably because it’s harder to separate from regular old women-strictly-as-sex-objects type misogyny.
it’s called a sex club.
Amazingly, this was the sitch for the first post
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone. The only exception was people the women already knew, as indicated by greeting them with a wave or a “hey, how are you” or similar.
Now I have never been to a sex club nor do I plan to, but if I were to go, I’d probably try to talk to regulars to find out the workings of said club, instead of outing myself as a massive weirdo by writing a blog post on a forum ostensibly about the value of rationality.
That said, if you want sex, going to a sex club to get it is very Rational.
Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!
new Scott Aaronson blog post just dropped it’s mostly him freaking out about those solved Erdos problems and AI mathematicians replacing human mathematicians, with a little bit of AI short storywriting and the Pope’s encyclical sprinkled in
Sadly, Erdős never invented a problem based on counting the r’s in strawberry.
Man, I jumped a few logical thoughts and now I’m thinking of all the fun we could have with various agglutinative languages that can invent words on the fly. How many 'E’s are in ‘Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung’, Claude?
Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance
Look, I admire professional math researchers as much as the next guy, but they’re literally balancing on top of the economic pyramid of needs. This is a profession that cannot exist outside a culture with a surplus that can afford higher education, because there’s no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.
So GenAI can solve Erdos problems. Can it unplug a drain or repave a road? Fuck no. Can it handle refuse for a city? Also fuck no.
Maybe professional math researchers will go the way of professional typesetters. I think humanity will retain its relevance.
Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance
His drama knob is always set to 11.
See also the previous article and how he talks about the “[fucking] NYT.” Or better, dont look at that article.
because there’s no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.
isn’t that the old “basic science is boring and unsexy” issue though? There are economic incentives, but not in a short term-big-bux sort of way, so capitalism can’t be trusted with it.
To conjure up a recent example, something like “The number of curves of genus two with elliptic differentials”, published back in 1997, probably had limited commercial value at the time, but 20 years later completely sunk a promising post-quantum cryptography algorithm (“An efficient key recovery attack on SIDH”) which might have had some non-trivial commercial implications if SIKE had got through the key exchange algorithm competition.
Anyway, the Erdős problems are good candidates for llm work because they have been specified in a careful and formal way, which requires a reasonably competent mathematician to do. That then opens up mathematics to the same deskilling problem that other sectors afflicted with llms have, and because capitalism is shortsighted and stupid we don’t know what the future economic impact of that will be, right?
I think the challenge is that the value of results of any kind of basic research are so wildly variable that normal rational economic thinking stops working. In Nassim Taleb terms you’re actively seeking black swans in a world where everyone knows all swans are white. Sometimes you venture into the depths of the rainforest and come back with a revolutionary new medicine, but most of the time you’re gonna have a few cool pictures of new bugs or something - not without value in the real sense, but hard to capitalize and transform into profit. Even if you end up discovering/creating an entirely new framework for understanding life itself that revolutionizes everything from agriculture to medicine to politics in the following century, that doesn’t necessarily work in the specific context of economic rationality - who remembers the name of the guy(s?) who funded the Beagle? And sometimes, as you referenced, the cool bug picture doesn’t have an obvious or immediate return but ends up being the important piece of data in a different context decades down the line.
This is a field of human endeavor where the economic best-case scenario is probably Bell Labs. And despite having an absurd number of patents and prizes they still couldn’t survive within being largely a vanity project for the original Telco monopoly. The ludicrous returns that came from repeatedly revolutionizing electronics and computing couldnt justify their position on a quarterly balance sheet.
The Beagle voyage was a Royal Navy project, and it had a defined purpose: charting. Having a young naturalist onboard was rational because what if you found the next tea plant?
The captain of the ship remained an implacable opponent to Darwin’s later theories.
I believe Bell labs was mostly a fig leaf for covering up Bell’s legal monopoly (i.e. look, we’re doing some good stuff with all the money you’re legally obliged to pay us)
there is a degree of risk that is acceptable for business. 90% drug trials fail; if you are inventor, you make a startup, package your pre-trial drugs and associated IP there, then pitch it up and cash out. vcs have money for clinical trials. sometimes you have phase 1 results that you got on your own too. the further it goes in trials the more it is worth; result is the biggest gacha in the town
yeah I was aware of the value of pure math (specifically the discrete stuff for crypto) when I wrote it
my point is the Scott-A is massively overvaluing the societal worth of pure mathematicians. Assuming (I know, big ask) that AI can succesfully automate that field, humanity is not worse off with regards to outcomes. Humanity remains relevant.
It’s a weird moving of goalposts, not often commented upon, that GenAI is succesful mostly in replacing (in the Ersatz sense) stuff that’s not really foundational to human society. We don’t have robot cars, nor are we actually close to getting them, which would actually transform society in a massive way. Instead we have robot copywriters and bespoke porn creators.
but for people like Scott-A, whose entire selfworth is being “smarter” than anyone else (not withstanding that he would be eaten alive in the post-apocalypse), being replaced by a robot is not just about losing your livelyhood but your self-worth as a human as well
Not a pro mathematician so apologies if Im hanging my butt out here, but I’m not convinced these solutions (or something analogous) aren’t in the training data. Wouldn’t be the first time. Several seem like the kind of thing you might figure out for a lemma on the way to something else unless you’d previously examined tHe ErDoS PrObLeMs.
Note: there are over 1200 problems that could be arguably labeled “Erdos Problems.” It appears that a chatbot enjoyer vibecoded a website in 2024 and was somehow declared the chief keeper of the things. The site can be found here: https://www.erdosproblems.com/faq
Its the “expert in one field = expert in all fields” stuff that I hate. There’s still plenty of jobs and areas of expertise that require humans: medicine, psychology/therapy (AI has arguably made the need for human therapists way more important), physical labour like construction work, linguistics etc. Hell human authors are definitely keeping their jobs since so many people hate slop
The part about the AI generated story about ancient Israelis tugging at his heartstrings made me dig up the post where he proudly proclaims himself a zionist and creates an insane trolley problem: https://awful.systems/post/5437903
Seems like run-of-the-mill yada-yada boosterism for the most part.
Points for managing to write an entire blog post without lamenting how the persecution of nerds is a historical level atrocity, much unlike the ongoing state-sponsored genocide by Israel which is very fine and very justifiable, I guess.
At minute 8 of “SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though” Patrick Boyle mentions some circular finance: some of the banks which lent SpaceX $29 billion in March will be guaranteeing the IPO by promising to buy some shares to stabilize the price. Later he also points out that the banks financing the IPO have to buy Grok services and may be its main paying customers. Musk has done this sort of thing before eg. using Tesla (shareholder-owned) money to buy SolarCity which he partially owned. I knew a serial fraudster who moved to Texas for its business-friendly laws and courts.
He liked the piss-tinged blog post by Cape Fear Advisors and estimates that the Muskrat wants to raise $50-75 billion in the IPO.
It took Kaiser Bill to break the economic power of London and Paris, but the Muskrat thinks he can speedrun that game for the New York City map.
A Google employee was charged with commodities fraud for using insider information to win a Polymarket bet about who the most searched for people would be in 2025 (complaint, article, polymarket account).
So far the internet seems confused whether or not this all counts as commodities fraud at all or not and if so, how (this area of law is way too confusing which is one of the reasons I, of course, never use insider information to bet on polymarket).
It looks like the suspicious trades were discussed on social media back in december. e.g. here for example.
Aside: 1.2 million in profit is significant, but isn’t a life changing amount of money for most staff engineers at Google. He probably could have just rested and vested for a few extra years and avoided all this…
Bonus:
According to Polymarket someone else was charged with insider trading this April. This other case is especially cursed because it involved bets around the US attacking Venezuela. According to the complaint he might have asked an LLM for legal advice:
In or about November 2025, VAN DYKE uploaded to his Google account a screenshot displaying the results of a Google Al query. The results stated, in substance and in part, that the U.S. military’s special operations divisions have “numerous classified files, records, and operational details that are not available to the public”
It looks like this was his polymarket account.
My guess would be that this guy wanted the bragging rights to say he
wonearned his money by being an extra special smart boy rather than just a wagey at cyberpunk mega corporation alpha.
Project Cybersyn but worse
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/argentina-launched-ai-predict-future-150104368.html
While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.
I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.
Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.
They’re about to test the LD 50/30 for huffing their own farts
Introducing: Flatulr, the ground-beefing gut microbiome hacking service. With a regular subscription, every week you get a vaporised canister designed by our artisan Cloud Engineers. Simply huff the can contents and you’ll be on your way to better movement.
Cloud Engineers
Cloud-to-Butt comes full circle
