Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 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 so 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 this.)
Some good news for once: Dublin punk bar the Thomas House have had enough of AI slop.
alt text
A picture of a āno AIā symbol next to the Thomas House logo.
"So for the future (literally) weāre not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub.
Weāre right next to Irelandās biggest Art College, lads. Itās not a good look.
We understand bands can be skint but relying on some earth killing app from some paedo Island billionaire is not the way. We got by without it and weāll get by again. If youāre stuck, weāll help.
Yes it has been used here before but consider this the start of the end of it. Thanks, humans."
IS NOTHING SACRED?!
I checked Wikipediaās history, its been fucked since last year
I checked the image which says December last year.
I havenāt bothered to examine the page history to see when the fucked content was actually introduced. Iām hoping that by posting about it, I can catch the attention of a particularly pedantic sex nerd who will be willing to fix it, for humanityās sake. Let us not let the Adult Bookstore of Alexandria burn; rather, let us chronicle our times with our free hands
This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.
The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I donāt need to list them in this forum.
Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.
First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.
Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely donāt keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they donāt produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.
Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldnāt be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. Weāre doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.
@samvines @techtakes Itās also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.
(If theyād led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)
It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.
I also question the degree to which āthe other 99% of readersā actually donāt care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of āI guess this is the world nowā rather than actual acceptance. And I know weāve talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isnāt a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I canāt tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the āmedian readerā statistic is misleading because the median reader isnāt particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and itās the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like theyāre not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.
the original GMO crops
The original GMO crops would be like, broccoli existing and bananas not sucking ass. Monsanto are villains but they didnāt invent genetics or selection.
iāll just quote it straight because i canāt make it any funnier:
maia arson crimew š“ āŖ> @crimew.gayā¬ SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thielās private society that doesnāt have a public website and no public list of members?
I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.
We are good on opsec
Of course Ezra Klein is hanging out with the worst people in the world. Heās always on the hunt for a new gutter to pick up some fetid idea and tart it up for liberals.
Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will beā¦
Wired has a story about Peter Thielās Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, āsitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the countryās largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).ā
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: āMoney (Does?) Buy Happiness,ā āBring Back Nuclear,ā āNavigating WWIII,ā āBattlefield Technologies,ā and āHowās Your Sex Life?ā Other talks include āBuild-a-Cult,ā moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and āBuild-a-Party,ā run by a former White House national security official.
ā¦
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are ālooking for loveā and offers to include āSingle Man,ā āSingle Woman,ā or āOtherā respondents in āfuture matchmaking.ā A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as āmeaningful connections for exceptional people.ā
So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.
Iām sorry are you telling me that there peopleās social circle includes the same like 50 oligarchs and apparatchiks and theyāre making a dating site for themselves? I know they lost Epstein but this is just pathetic.
According to a later post from them thereās a chance this is more of a list of attendees at a past or upcoming event, but tbh I donāt think thereās much of a difference between āmember of the nu-money illuminatiā and āaccepted an invite to hang out with the nu-money illuminati at their clubhouse.ā I can only assume it has the same statue of a hand clutching a globe as the Deus Ex opening cinematic.
Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):
I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me Iām autistic. When people say āautisticā in cases like this, they mean āintroverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.ā On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.
So he canāt be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who canāt have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:
But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.
As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.
A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. Itās also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they canāt coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.
Its like he wrote āmany of my friends identify as heterosexual, and they say I might be heterosexual too, but in my work as a forensic psychiatrist my heterosexual patients are accused rapists and sex pests and people who got arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine and a phone full of texts from a 'Brazilian model.ā and never tried to reconcile the two or thought through the Bayesian logic.
Youāre telling me that the Autism Spectrum is a spectrum and not just the quirky thing people have?
(sarcasm) Iām saying that just because I get sucked off by guys does not mean Iām one of those queers! I donāt go to pride parades or leather bars or have fashion sense and everyone knows that is what āgayā means. Iām as heterosexual as Ted Haggard. (end sarcasm)
well great now Iām thinking about this
Gay people I respect:
I can pretend theyāre straight
Gay people I donāt:
I canāt pretend they arenāt gay and Iāve decided this is a āthem problemā
You see this particular kind of bigotry quite a bit in relation to neurodivervence and disability. Itās an attempt to beat people advocating for equality and justice by claiming a moral high ground. Oh, you think disabled people can have meaningful and worthwhile lives and that differences should be celebrated?? You must be too ignorant to know just how awful life is for people who really have that disability!
and now realise that this motherfucker is a practising psychiatrist
This feels like yet another case of āwhat no postmodernism does to a mfā. Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but thatās entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors arenāt āabnormalā and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled.
But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but itās easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of āhow do I help people be happy and successfulā necessitates asking āhow do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person.ā Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively.
But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, canāt really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because heās a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Donāt listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.
It terrifies me that this man is a psychiatrist.
I think that backwards (like 1950s and earlier) views of autism are common in American psychiatry, but would love to hear more about his ideas from someone with relevant training. AFAIK no peer has ever commented on his biomedical blogging, like experts have commented on his eugenics promotion and cozy relationship with white supremacists and neoreactionaries. He never seems to have written for any professional venue either.
Three scenes and a comment:
-
Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.
-
I see another story: some AI bros posting about their āanxietyā about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.
-
Iām still sweating and scrolling from my gardenā¦ I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AIā¦
We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that donāt have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it
āWe have to pick between the climate or AIā
No we donāt??? One problem directly affects the other. Stopping AI data centre build-out helps with stopping climate change.
I choose to read this as āyou have to choose which to destroyā
Then hand me that hammer and letās get to smashing those data centres
This kind of humanity-affirming infrastructure work is illegal in most western jurisdictions
-
zitron got a scoop on openai: 8.8B loss in 2024, 60.3B loss in 2025, 1.17B from ms + softbank, promises more detailed analysis later https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
So when sama suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!
tbf i expected that ed got openaiās s1 at that point. anything more detailed would be nice to see. that also suggests that saltman knows that leak occurred, and maybe who leaker is
AGIās ETA: Delayed (again) due to technical difficulties
came across this one when doomscrolling, pretty good article with healthy doses of skepticism. out of three commenters, one appears to be a rationalist (based off the āempirical evidenceā and āinstrumental convergenceā they mention) who tries to argue that we donāt actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing, even though every single AI doom argument is about smart-as-a-human and better AIs. Just comes off as goalpost moving
The header image is gold.
The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldnāt really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still wonāt shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.
we donāt actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing
This bit is true though; capitalism is already doing a fine job of paperclip maxxing.
Person bets big on polymarket to profit from the continuation of the Iran war, gets screwed out of his blood money by site-wide oracle scam, complains on reddit.
Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol (used to be a thing with smart contracts), which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes, and currently like 9 people hold over half the voting power, so yeah.
The future of finance and the future of information aggregation keep overlapping in the funniest ways.
Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol
Amazing that on first glance it looks like a smart contract āall done by codeā thing, but then the reveals comes and it is just a few rich people again.
Well yeah. Just because they call their crypto scheme an Oracle doesnāt mean theyāve actually solved the oracle problem.
which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes,
Wait thatās even fucking dumber than I thought it was, good grief
Everything Iāve learnt about prediction casinos is against my will and all of it is somehow the dumbest shit imaginable. I went through crypto, NFTs, the metaverse, and 3 years of AI bullshit, and nothing reached this level of psychic damage before.
LB: Enormous fan of that chud griping in /r/CryptoCurrency of all places, and getting laughed at for falling victim to a scam.
Whitehouse gives anthropic ājust draw the rest of the fucking owlā energy over Fable:
Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the modelās guardrails canāt be circumvented. Security experts say that canāt be done.
With this and the OpenAI stories over the last few days Iāve been enjoying some top shelf schadenfreude
The AI safety company when they actually have to make their AIs safe instead of just making vague suggestions
zitronās last podcast calls anthropic/openai top brass weirdos and cultists they are, describes their beliefs about building the machine god as bad philosophy and something that must go hard when youāre 12 https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-ai-industry-must-stop-doom-trolling-w-cal-newport
The op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html
Newport I mostly know for pretty mid lifehack / business books for the Tim Ferris crowd, pre-pandemic. āDoom trollingā does have a better ring to it than ācritihype.ā Maybe he was holding his tongue until he got tenure or something.
idk i think itās new that someone in mainstream sort of calls them cultists, namedrops EY as cult leader and fanfic writer and everything that you could hear about in our circlejerk, but also shortly before EZ said that heās been called doomer and a crank but now heās vindicated to a degree not thought possible. this all happens after drop of that openai financial info, so EZ also held off, and EZ is PR guy so i guess he knows what heās doing, and maybe he thinks this might be it, or maybe he doesnāt have anything better and plays his hand in best way he can. i wonder what comes next
āIt Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggestsā
The preprint:
itās nice to have a preprint about a phenomenon that has been weaponized years ago. itās easy to say that in retrospect, but it was easy to say that in advance too. there are also bots that might try to do something similar on lemmy
SpaceX is reportedly buying Cursor for 60 billion
not even sure what to even say to this tbh
edit: at first i thought the headline was a parody, or at least they meant to write million. but no, 60 BILLION. numbers donāt mean anything anymore.
As I recall the impetus for this was that the team working on grokās code generation ability was preferring to use cursor. Imagine making a model so shitty that even the kind of ai-brained buffoons who want to work on fucking grok donāt want to use it. Now consider that apparently that model is grok itself.
A nice person develops a digital version of the Little Free Library for banned books. Hackernews spends a hundred (edit: three hundred) comments arguing over whether it would be better to share Nazi shit instead.
CW: barely disguised transphobia
āā asks why bans on āconversion therapyā for trans folks are being enacted without looking at the science, which theyāre surprised is non-existent
āHey listen, Iāve been listening to these gender critical feminists and I think they might have a point. Check this out, what if we used psychiatry and hormone therapy to enforce traditional gender roles and normatively gendered bodies, but without creating trans people?ā
The poster deftly doesnāt address the real moral question: what if conversion therapy (either for homosexuality or trans identification) worked ? Would it be ethical to allow it?
This is the difference between politics/ethics and science. As the old saying goes, just because you can do something doesnāt mean you should.
Gender-affirming care? Why of course! I am all for forcefully affirming your assigned gender!
Why do these people always want to give trans people the wrong hormones? It keeps coming up.
I think this is particularly important for the hormonal treatment of dysphoria in adolescents, where the evidence for gender-affirming care seems mixed. [ā¦] Given all this, I was shocked that when I ran GPT Deep Research I wasnāt able to find a single study that would evaluate the use of birth-sex-affirming hormones to decrease dysphoria.
The āevidenceā he has provided up to this point:
- A snippet from a Chat-GPT transcript. We canāt see the prompt, but the output starts with āYouāre right.ā
- Two reddit comments about doubling down on (cis) gender roles. One of which uses the cursed words ānofapā and āautogynophilicā
- A case study from Poland about someone who (possibly?) wasnāt transgender but had schizophrenic symptoms that mimicked it. The case study ends by saying WPATH guidelines would have handled things appropriately.
- A tweet from a woman who mentions getting mild dysphoria after taking hormonal birth control.
Quite the nerve holding actual science to an impossible standard while his position is just vibes. None of his(?) evidence even mentions taking cross-gender hormones. If anything the tweet is weak evidence against his position.
Iād expect to find these sort of studies in the UN or UK reports that recommend banning āconversion therapyā for gender identity.
Imagine writing so many words about transgender healthcare while being this oblivious to how politicized the UK policy documents are.
Anyway after making it to the end that was a lot of words to say he couldnāt find any evidence for the position he wanted to be true holy smokes. His weird hang up on ācrystallizedā gender identity is bizarre. He seems to be hoping that there are people toying with changing gender and itās not too late to āsaveā them via conversion therapy before itās too late. We
