Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting thisā¦)
TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW
The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhereāin the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]
Yeah Iām sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a ādraconian censorship regimeā
[1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania
āLied during the pandemicā wait what? Did LW do a 180 on covid, or is this a āthey gave advice without knowing everything that was later shown wrong?ā Because that is quite a dumb thing to say, also calling that leftwing is nuts. And last, did they memoryhole that Scott lied about the pandemic? He said people should stop smoking because it helped with covid. Not because he had proof, just because he thought it would be good if less people smoked.
E: oops wrong person.
JZW link but meat is a 404 article, donāt wanna bypass their paywall
Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on ācollege protesters,ā āradicalizedā political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers [ā¦]
This shit os going to drive so many amateur pedo/etc hunters (who already are not the people who are good at being normal) into absolute crazy conspiracy theory land. Esp when they cant get the fake pimps (yeah pimps really, these cops seem to be like the military dude in the intro of ideocracy) arrested or banned.
E: on that note, saw somebody explain that their previous slightly hysterical, āfacebook is claiming searching for the concentration camps is a search for csamā was made in error as it was the word āmegaā (and another word) which seemed to trigger the warning. And below that people were still making up some crazy palantir is going to get everyone jailed for clicking a csam link conspiracy bullshit. I worry for the sanity of a lot of online people. People are so afraid they are blueanoning themselves
Posting this as a stub because of reasons
- I donāt want to do the research on this
- This was pulled from the front page of reddit
- Connecting these two things is largely tabloid speculation, but funny enough for a stub.
X Is Ditching DMs Hours After News of Musk Messaging Women About Impregnating Them Breaks
you will never guess which company hired oswald moselyās grandson
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/palantir-boss-interview-keir-starmer-gets-ai
If Palantir represents a veritable unknown for the public, so too could its UK chief, the grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of former F1 president Max Mosley.
Ah, yes, noted grandfather and nothing else, Oswald Mosley. Definitely not the founder of British Union of Fascists, please donāt look into that. His son was in the racecar business, isnāt that lovely?
And Max Mosley definitely didnāt share his fatherās views
Ok that is it, im changing my mind. All the rationalist genetics stuff is real and true as there is a fascism gene.
jesus christ:
transcript
Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a āCalifornian incelā to avoid deportation.
Eminently punchable face
āIn hindsight, CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC, āwe were creating conditions for a cult.āā, if only there had been people warning about this, sadly such a club didnāt exist. Anyway, im sure this will lead to them reflecting and changing things.
Source āTwo Vegan Lovers, an AI āCult,ā and a Trail of Dead Bodiesā, Archive
Yudkowsky had a gift for making hyperniche concepts accessible.
No, he didnāt. His āexplanationsā are turgid and useless even when theyāre not just mathematically wrong. They create the feeling of understanding for some readers ā those who want their self-image of smartness validated, who imagine that LessWrong is the cool kidsā table, and who arenāt actually tested on how much theyāve learned.
Over the course of thousands of pages, rationalist Harry uses logic and decision theory to save the world and defeat Voldemort.
No, he uses his fucking Time Turner.
Snyder seemed to be trying to break through to Yudkowsky with an appeal to his self-importance
OK, zero notes there.
With the collapse of the US empire and hegemony in progress wonder if they actually did something with this or if it is all another thought experiment.
E: wow that users posts history is something. Drops that article 3 years ago. Silence till some weird comment (directly addressing yud claiming they had some big breakthrough, about the mind state of the zizians of course. And it is all speculation and way too verbose).
hey āway too verboseā is a free space
Yes you are right and it wasnt even that bad, the footnote was only half the length of a āwho build this old roman wall?ā footnote.
I got it from a comment here, apparently some pie in the sky charity needs more money
Ah a food related charity that is important wonder what they did with the millions, ah release papers. That is ā¦
Planning for securing food in a nuclear winter? What a great wheeze. If your advice isnāt any good, nobody can tell until thereās a nuclear winter, and if there is a nuclear winter they wonāt exactly be able to ask for their money back because theyāll be too busy dying of radiation sickness.
Remember the apocalypse slop buckets the rightwing grifto sphere kept trying to sell?
I do indeed. A bucket always seemed like pretty poor.protection from the end of the world, even if it was full of purified water and high protein MREs and whatever else. I suppose you could put it on your head and make like Ned Kelly
ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now ā Tech products have a work/life balance problem
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Canāt Be Bothered
Itās a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you donāt have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didnāt think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, āan insult to life itselfā.
It really sucks so much how many coders embrace it. At my work, there is the looming introduction of code LLMs very soon, and Iām anxious to learn how many of my colleagues will happily use it, and the consequences it will have for me to deal with the results (and generally, how it will make me feel to work in an environment where these tools are embraced). I was hoping that the corporate bureaucracy would be slow enough that the AI bubble collapses before itās allowed to use the tools, but unfortunately management put a lot of pressure behind it and it all went faster than expected :(
not every programmer posts to social mediaā¦
Id say a lot of the better ones dont at least not regularly (in my exp), did hear from one of those that they had a problem with new hires, some lf them have very random output quality wise, until they get fired for using llms for everything.
Our company is currently looking for a new programmer and weāve interviewed a few so far. I donāt want to generalize but it really seems that a non-negligible part of the younger ones at least tries to use LLMs to make up for a lack or experience, and that really shows.
I normally donāt like doing programming challenges during an interview because they have little to no real-world connections, but Iāve been throwing small questions around lately just to see what people do, and how they approach them, and thereās a subset of people who will say, āI would ask ChatGPT nowā in those scenarios.
I havenāt met a vibe-coder in real life yet, but Iām afraid itās only a matter of time.
I havenāt worked in industry for a while now but from your accounts it seems likeā¦ nothingās changed?
Sturgeonās law very much applies to software engineers. Iām sorry but the vast majority of people in my junior cohort I wouldnāt hire to replace my lightbulb. Of course theyāre all in on LLMs. Theyāll be doing what they were doing best, generating tons of awful code they copied from somewhere else that the adults in the room will have to clean up later, just the generation and copying is now paid at a $100 monthly subscription.
Like seriously, it doesnāt matter even a tiny bit the code got generated by a bullshit machine when the code is Node.JS anyway. If youāre building a giant penis out of cow dung it doesnāt matter who your construction crew is and how good they are. And the industry is like 90% building giant penises than never come to fruition anyway.
Fair points, but I still take cleaning up someoneās own bad Node.JS code over cleaning up LLM Node.JS slop because the optimist in me hopes that the human who wrote bad code can at least learn something and become better over time. After all we all have started with writing garbage, I know that I have.
On the other hand, I guess I should find a job where I donāt have to touch web development with a ten-foot pole because itās probably not getting better.
New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:
This is really weird because every single person in academia I talked to about non-CS stuff is either a perfectly median centrist social-democrat or literally a member of the local communist party, with zero variation in between those two.
Like itās either youāre a young idealist that still believes the world can be better, or youāre 40 with three kids and a mortgage that just wants the government to be relatively stable and not fuck shit up for you.
I know zero Americans though, so maybe thereās a skew there.
Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can āsave usā. Itās just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.
No, Iām sure this time we can identify the person or people who are divinely anointed to exercise absolute power over everyone.
His name is Scott.
article about the tactics that felon employs against the women bearing his children
features some notable sentences from his fixer, too. the sort of shit that just barely doesnāt qualify as him threatening to top off your kneecaps
Do note how this legion of kid slaves shit shows how he both doesnt believe will go to mars nor that ai/robots can automate things.
You dont make new children to save civilization in 18+ years if you think in 2 years you will go to mars/build robots that automate everything/build the robotgod.
oh yeah heās way too much of a coward to go to mars. besides, no-one there he could dominate or hurt
Eurgh!
Musk seems like heās 1cm away from Jeffrey Epstein.
idk when iāll have better opportunity to post this
Isnāt it more grammatically correct to say āJeffreys Epsteinā?
I thought we all knew the proper collective noun was a creepful of epsteins
previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions
Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,youād be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden youāre forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.
Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.
So they asked support.
And hereās where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was āexpected behaviorā under their new login policy
One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to āmimic human responsesā
havenāt gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some
Cursorās cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.
That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.
Editā¦ looking at the orange site commentsā¦ some unironically cited Anthropic
researchmarketing hype, which (correctly) shows āChain-of-Thoughtā is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but itās Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).
this URL is the PDF of the NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor for Q1 2025
the Q3 2024 report was comedy gold, using word mangling to present bad news as okay news
i expect this one to be more of the same
Quick post: bad news here in Europe, Meta allowed to scrape facebook/instagram. bad source (just a screenshot isnāt great as a source)
The article from the screenshot: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/meta-grabs-eu-approval-to-train-ai-with-social-media-posts-1034586675
Meta claims they have approval. No comments from regulators in sight, no actual decision quoted.
Itās not necessarily false, but it does come from the lie and break laws industry, so I wouldnāt be surprised if it is a lie.
When
ā¦I do not give Instagram or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Instagram it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents.
Goes wrong
