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 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…)
I just made an unfortunate discovery so now y’all get to see it too
Why does Reachy 2 have a tank top? Are they shy about their bot nipples or something?
baking a Hear Me Out Cake for Reachy 2
I also quite like Themis V2! “$120k for the privilege of being sued by disney for looking too starwars” is just one hell of a pitch
What the hell
Why are there so many of them?
Why do they all look like shit?
Why do so many look suspiciously like a guy in a suit?
I found it really fun to drag the filter sliders around and cackle at the remaining details
roll up to 180k and you get one that can do 18kg load! amazing
Why? capitalism is the most effective system.
Why? Capitalism is the most effective system.
Why? Capitalism needs sla…
But yeah I think we might have ran out of ideas.
No wait I remember this one from Asimov. Humanoid Robots ack-chewally make the most logical sense because we can reuse all the tools and control designs we already have for human
slaveswage slavesworkers. Why make a new tractor when you can make a robot to work on the one you’ve been using since the 70s? That’s how this works, right?
>humanoid robot
They’re called “clankers”
Featuring:
Drunk Robot https://humanoid.guide/product/ambidex/
Obviously A Guy In Suit Robot https://humanoid.guide/product/clonealpha/
And not forgetting, Is That A Hat? What The Fuck Is Happening Here Robot https://humanoid.guide/product/kangaroo/
Warframe already did that last one.
If only Tombstone were here to help
The hero we need, but not the one we deserve.
In the late 2000s, rationalists were squarely in the middle of transhumanism. They were into the Singularity, but also the cryonics and a whole pile of stuff they got from the Extropians. It was very much the thing.
These days they’re most interested in Effective Altruism (loudly -the label at least) and race science (used to be quiet, now a bit louder). I hardly ever hear them even mention transhumanism as it was back then.
Did rationalists abandon transhumanism?
Is it just me? What happened?
One of the most popular and controversial ways in recent times to use technological means to improve human condition and overcome its natural limitations is gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy. Transhumanism is woke now — hell, “trans” is right there in the name!
Yeah this kind of stuff is why im not the biggest fan of the tescreal label.
still holds - it’s still a bunch that needs a label and that’s the label
even as TREACLES was right there
(i asked emile, they said it was TESCREAL is very searchable. i mean fine)
Tired: Sand Hill Road
Wired: Treacle Mine Road
As to cryonics… for both LLM doomers and accelerationists, they have no need for a frozen purgatory when the techno-rapture is just a few years around the corner.
As for the rest of the shiny futuristic dreams, they have give way to ugly practical realities:
-
no magic nootropics, just Scott telling people to take adderal and other rationalists telling people to micro dose on LSD
-
no low hanging fruit in terms of gene editing (as epistaxis pointed out over on reddit) so they’re left with eugenics and GeneSmith’s insanity
-
no drexler nanotech so they are left hoping (or fearing) the god-AI can figure it (which is also a problem for ever reviving cryonically frozen people)
-
no exocortex, just over priced google glasses and a hallucinating LLM “assistant”
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no neural jacks (or neural lace or whatever the cyberpunk term for them is), just Elon murdering a bunch of lab animals and trying out (temporary) hope on paralyzed people
The future is here, and it’s subpar compared to the early 2000s fantasies. But hey, you can rip off Ghibli’s style for your shitty fanfic projects, so there are a few upsides.
-
It’s possible that the most popular fora for discussions of the other topics were drowned out by AI doomerism and the people who are interested in them simply left.
Another thread worth pulling is that biotechnology and synthetic biology have turned out to be substantially harder to master than anticipated, and it didn’t seem like it was ever the primary area of expertise for a lot of these people anyway. I don’t have a copy of any of Kurzweil’s books at hand to look at his predicted timelines for that stuff, but they’re surely way off.
Faulty assumptions about the biological equivalence of digital neural network algorithms have done a lot of unexamined heavy lifting in driving the current AI bubble, and keeping the harder stuff on the fringes of the conversation. That said, I don’t doubt that a few refugees from the bubble-burst will attempt to inflate the next bubble on the back of speculative biotech, and I’ve seen a couple of signs of that already.
Yes, there was a big hype in the upcoming biotech revolution in popular transhumanist media a ~decade ago. Lot of it seems to have fizzled out or gone nootropics like stuff. (And even that is meh).
Gumroad’s asshole CEO, Sahil Lavingia, NFT fanboy who occasionally used his customer database to track down and get into fights with people on twitter, has now gone professional fash and joined DOGE in order to hollow out the department of veterans affairs and replace the staff with chatbots.
https://tedium.co/2025/04/06/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama/
some more wild sneers, this time about MS ripping off Q2 for a time-limited shitty experience
Considering PC Gamer bought the AI hype hook, line and sinker a few months ago, I’d say this is a particularly notable sneer.
This is pure gut instinct, but it seems AI bros’ ability to bedazzle the press is fading fast.
Forced mass-adoption of this stuff by consumers is here, now, demanding our approval, attention, and precious time. A public tech demo exists to impress, and the Copilot Gaming Experience does not. Doom on a calculator, but we had to boil a lake or two to get it and are being told it’s the future of games. I reject this future. Not only do I find it philosophically and ethically repugnant, it also made my tummy hurt.
💯 no notes
This demo is powered by a “World and Human Action Model” (WHAM)
George Michael must be spinning in his grave
“Imagine a technology so useless you cannot run doom on it” https://bsky.app/profile/sosowski.bsky.social/post/3lm63a2srgc24
LW: “being a younger brother makes you gay, the Catholic hierarchy is full of younger brothers, ergo 80% of the Vatican is gay”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybwqL9HiXE8XeauPK/how-gay-is-the-vatican
The modern father of this literature is Ray Blanchard
🚨🚨🚨 Do not take Ray Blachard’s work seriously !
Ray “Asian cartoons cause trans people” Blachard.
Oh look, it’s a penis! I should put some sort of ring around it and see what gets it slightly erect! Repeatedly! For science!
You know, what I find most hilarious about the “fraternal birth order effect” is that they’re so obsessed with eugenics and biological essentialism that they’re ignoring that the very very obvious social fact of growing up with older brothers might have a lil bit more of an effect than “maternal antibodies to the neuroligin NLGN4Y protein”.
edit: Oh right, they pretend they’re accounting for that! Yeah no, I’ve heard all about your “twin studies” and things, I’m not joining your cult.
Reminds me of an SMBC comic that had a setup along the same lines, that if male birth order correlates with homosexuality and family size trends being what they are, the past must have been considerably gayer on average.
Obligatory Colm Tóibín: Among the Flutterers
Considering how rightwingers have tried to link gayness to pedophilia this is a subject I would avoid if I was them. E: and gwern just goes there.
The comments are … “a hoot”
I would bet pretty hard on option #3. The older the parents are at the time of conception, the lower the quality of their gametes, which can translate into various negative health and cognitive effects on the child.
combines ageism, ableism ,and homophobia into one neat package
Also that weird ‘breed early’ fetish common in a lot of rw spaces. And last I looked at it this whole ‘older people do worse’ thing while it mostly seems (it is complicated and lot of things can happen etc)to exist mostly affects the pregnancy less so the child, and even then the effects didnt seem to be big. Not big enough to be relevant here. (But iirc 99.99% of the research in this is only in about pregnancies, so wouldn’t put much stock in ‘older parents affect on IQ’ style research, due to the type of people interested in that).
But im not a researcher, just a person who looked at the stats a couple of years back and apart from pregnancy risk i wasnt that worried.
E: and look at that the op there agrees with me.
The kokotajlo/scoot thing apparently made it to the new york times.
So this is what that was about:
stubsack post from two months ago
On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trump’s term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.
Spooks as a service
when you say “made it”, i think FUCKING ROOSE
missed that at the time, but you’d think scoot would have an easy time finding a contact at a major publication like the NYT…
Check out the by-line. Big surprise!
Solid, high-quality sneer from Adactio - the end is a particular highlight:
The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.
If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers.
Utterly rancid linkedin post:
text inside image:
Why can planes “fly” but AI cannot “think”?
An airplane does not flap its wings. And an autopilot is not the same as a pilot. Still, everybody is ok with saying that a plane “flies” and an autopilot “pilots” a plane.
This is the difference between the same system and a system that performs the same function.
When it comes to flight, we focus on function, not mechanism. A plane achieves the same outcome as birds (staying airborne) through entirely different means, yet we comfortably use the word “fly” for both.
With Generative AI, something strange happens. We insist that only biological brains can “think” or “understand” language. In contrast to planes, we focus on the system, not the function. When AI strings together words (which it does, among other things), we try to create new terms to avoid admitting similarity of function.
When we use a verb to describe an AI function that resembles human cognition, we are immediately accused of “anthropomorphizing.” In some way, popular opinion dictates that no system other than the human brain can think.
I wonder: why?
Dijkstra did it first, but it is very ai-booster to steal work without credit or understanding, I guess.
The question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
Yes the 2 rs in strawberry machine thinks. In the same way that an airplane flies. /s
I can use bad analogies also!
- If airplanes can fly, why can’t they fly to the moon? It is a straightforward extension of existing flight technology, and plotting airplane max altitude from 1900-1920 shows exponential improvement in max altitude. People who are denying moon-plane potential just aren’t looking at the hard quantitative numbers in the industry. In fact, with no atmosphere in the way, past a certain threshold airplanes should be able to get higher and higher and faster and faster without anything to slow them down.
I think Eliezer might have started the bad airplane analogies… let me see if I can find a link… and I found an analogy from the same author as the 2027 fanfic forecast: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HhWhaSzQr6xmBki8F/birds-brains-planes-and-ai-against-appeals-to-the-complexity
Eliezer used a tortured metaphor about rockets, so I still blame him for the tortured airplane metaphor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gg9a4y8reWKtLe3Tn/the-rocket-alignment-problem
JFC I click on the rocket alignment link, it’s a yud dialogue between “alfonso” and “beth”. I am not dexy’ed up enough to read this shit.
This is too fucking dumb to even be called sophistry.
slophistry
Its almost like flapping part isn’t a requirement for something to fly.
of course MBA came up with this
an airplane doesn’t flap its wings
You ever see a random shitpost video, like the backgroud music, look it up and realize you already have the vinyl record? That just happened to me.
additional layer is that according to comments first track is also used in chinese nature documentaries
And as the same channel demonstrates, there are ways to fly without any wings at all
spoiler
…as well as with them!
Man, it’s really true what they say: the West can’t meme.
tesla: “your car is not your car and we have deep, varied firmware and systems access to it on a permanent basis. we can see you and control you at all times. piss us off and we’ll turn off the car that we own.”
also tesla: “sorry no you can’t return it”
I wonder how often Musk fires employees who explain to him that, no using tesla cars for distributed computing is a bad idea and we should stop working on this.
Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Don’t have a source more concrete than this yet:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365
(and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)
It’s a lot like this:
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)… ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I’ve had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).
Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.
But “AI”… it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn’t. There’s nothing to learn from resulting failure, except “don’t use AI”.
In this case, given shopify’s general behaviour, I won’t be sad at all though if they crash and fail.
I also thought ‘guess LLMs dont work as an editor’.
And blockchains did massive damage, all the ransomware crime would be impossible if the tech world had not jumped into blockchain as much as they did and created and kept maintaining the ecosystem. (It also caused the techbro people who now pivot to AI rise, so it is connected). Note that the damage done by BEC is still greater than ransomware, so not cybersecurity advice.
But I get your point, I think a real example would be facebooks pivot to video. Which destroyed companies.
Yes, that’s true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldn’t be sad anyway if they went away…).
What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didn’t willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didn’t put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.
blockchain targeted libertarian post-goldbug pro-cyberpunk-dystopia fuckheads, llms target management types (you will replace workers with machines!), maybe that’s why
yeah, no I agree that blockchain is a bad example, just think we shouldn’t understate the massive damage that has done. Not just in actually damaged systems but also just in additional cost that now everybody has to worry about this. Same as how AI is not just causing climate change problems by running it, but the scraping as well has increased the cost of running a webserver by 50% in load alone. (which on a global scale is just horrid). And then there is the forcing of it in everything, the burning of the boats.
Extreme sent at 4am energy.
:( looked in my old CS dept’s discord, recruitment posts for the “Existential Risk Laboratory” running an intro fellowship for AI Safety.
Looks inside at materials, fkn Bostrom and Kelsey Piper and whole slew of BS about alignment faking. Ofc the founder is an effective altruist getting a graduate degree in public policy.
that’s CFAR cult jargon right?
Mesa-optimization? I’m not sure who in the lesswrong sphere coined it… but yeah, it’s one of their “technical” terms that don’t actually have academic publishing behind it, so jargon.
Instrumental convergence… I think Bostrom coined that one?
The AI alignment forum has a claimed origin here is anyone on the article here from CFAR?
Mesa-optimization… that must be when you rail some crushed-up Adderall XRs, boof some modafinil for good measure, and spend the night making sure your kitchen table surface is perfectly flat with no defects abrasions deviations contusions…
and you wrap it off with some linux 3d graphics lib hacking
I’m thinking they hired Jar-Jar Binks to the team.
Mesa-optimization
Why use the perfectly fine ‘inner optimizer’ mentioned in the references when you can just ask google translate to give you the clunkiest, most pedestrian and also wrong part of speech Greek term to use in place of ‘in’ instead?
Also natural selection is totally like gradient descent brah, even though evolutionary algorithms actually modeled after natural selection used to be their own subcategory of AI before the term just came to mean lying chatbot.
Not sure! What is CFAR?
Center For Applied Rationality. They hosted “workshops” were people could learn to be more rational. Except there methods weren’t really tested. And pretty culty. And reaching the correct conclusions (on topics such as AI doom) were treated as proof of rationality.
Edit: still host, present tense. I had misremembered some news of some other rationality adjacent institution as them shutting down, nope, they are still going strong, offering regular 4 day
brainwashing sessionsworkshops.
I feel like some of the doomers are already setting things up to pivot when their most major recent prophecy (AI 2027) fails:
From here:
(My modal timeline has loss of control of Earth mostly happening in 2028, rather than late 2027, but nitpicking at that scale hardly matters.)
It starts with some rationalist jargon to say the author agrees but one year later…
AI 2027 knows this. Their scenario is unrealistically smooth. If they added a couple weird, impactful events, it would be more realistic in its weirdness, but of course it would be simultaneously less realistic in that those particular events are unlikely to occur. This is why the modal narrative, which is more likely than any other particular story, centers around loss of human control the end of 2027, but the median narrative is probably around 2030 or 2031.
Further walking the timeline back, adding qualifiers and exceptions that the authors of AI 2027 somehow didn’t explain before. Also, the reason AI 2027 didn’t have any mention of Trump blowing up the timeline doing insane shit is because Scott (and maybe some of the other authors, idk) like glazing Trump.
I expect the bottlenecks to pinch harder, and for 4x algorithmic progress to be an overestimate…
No shit, that is what every software engineering blogging about LLMs (even the credulous ones) say, even allowing LLMs get better at raw code writing! Maybe this author is better in touch with reality than most lesswrongers…
…but not by much.
Nope, they still have insane expectations.
Most of my disagreements are quibbles
Then why did you bother writing this? Anyway, I feel like this author has set themselves up to claim credit when it’s December 2027 and none of AI 2027’s predictions are true. They’ll exaggerate their “quibbles” into successful predictions of problems in the AI 2027 timeline, while overlooking the extent to which they agreed.
I’ll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff, and -100 for not realizing the real reason why Scott didn’t include any call out of that in AI 2027.
I’ll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff
+10 bayes points
Has someone on LW already proposed a BayesCoin or have I just figured out how to steal lunch money from all rationalists at once
With a name like that and lesswrong to springboard it’s popularity, BayesCoin should be good for at least one cycle of pump and dump/rug-pull.
Do some actual programming work (or at least write a “white paper”) on tying it into a prediction market on the blockchain and you’ve got rationalist catnip, they should be all over it, you could do a few cycles of pumping and dumping before the final rug pull.
it’s a fucking harry potter reference
HP fanfic but house points are crypto and the chocolate frog cards are NFTs tracked on a magical blockchain
Non Fungible Toads
Edit: this is a nonsequitur, but my wife just shared this with me and it is delightful
Without looking it up i can tell you that coin already exists and the value has crashed already
Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic. Unfortunately it also looks like the distinctive AI art style was pretty key to preventing the usual set of AI generated image “tells”. Mirrors, hands, teeth, etc are all very visibly wrong.
Apparently including a camera-esque filename in prompts for the latest mid journey release can make it more photorealistic.
This entire enterprise is just shamanry, we are like two steps away from “throwing a goat into a volcano makes your next prompt more realistic”
apparently a complete archive of scott siskind’s old livejournal. found on the EA forum no less. https://archive.fo/fCFQx
I clicked on one from 2012 and it implies that if you lived in nazi germany you should have had polite debates with nazis. Thanks Scott, never change.
I’m not going to click more but it goes back to 2006 so if anyone finds any sad incel whining please bring it up!
Thanks Scott, never change.
Not to worry, he never will!
Some idiot on LW still thinks the same way:
I selected and worded these suspicions to sound more like things a Democrat might say, because I’m trying to persuade Democrats that conservative misinformation draws from reasonable attitudes.
Wow, that sure is a longwinded way to announce to the world that you are a dupe
couldn’t help myself, there are seldom more perfect opportunities to use this one
I did a quick scan of the titles just for old time’s sake and ran into a very aggressive “oh my God shut up” directed at my younger self as much as at Scooter himself.
That is odd in a way, you would expect them to honour is wishes of that data no longer being available, but nope.
