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, and happy 4th July in advance.)
Some cool people anaylised the precise reasons slop all reads the same https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136
Findings are that llms emit stories that are linear, unsubtle, and textureless.
Also that if you graph it, it looks like a poo.
it looks like a poo.
Or, if you are brave enoughā¦
donāt get it
From the inimitable writers of AI2027, we now haveā¦
AI2040!
Typical nonsense. Among other things they are talking 6fold increase in GDP by 2032 in their scenario, MOSTLY driven by neural networks generating text (and one extra currrent GDP driven by robots) and median personal income being 1 million dollars (inflation adjusted) by 2035.
I am particularly amused that they have all the politicking happening in the next presidential administration rather than this year so they can pretend that all their governmental fantasies will happen because someone sane will naturally come to the conclusions they would.
My favorite part was the section where they worked out the logistics of China hiding a data center inside of a mountain.
2040, wasnāt that Kurzweils eventual prediction?
Oh damn, they originally said it was gonna be called AI 2030, so they pushed it back a bit
Itās not a rehash of AI 2027 with moved-back timelines like I thought it would be, instead its what they believe should happen in regards to AI development
Plan A is our positive vision for what should happen instead. In this scenario, humanity delays the development of superintelligence until 2040, makes all AI research public, allows dozens of companies globally to catch up to the frontier, and intentionally enters a regime of mutually assured compute destruction.
And in the first footnote:
So far reality is tracking closer to AI 2027 than even we expected. (2027 was our modal year at time of publication, not our median.)
According to them, preliminary analysis of the data as of July 2026 says that rate of progress is 75% of AI 2027. This says Daniel K only believes in a 25% chance of AGI by the end of 2027, their model also hasnāt changed so their medians are still shown as beyond 2027. Footnote 11 also flat-out says they have no idea how much things will keep progressing
Iām not gonna be able to go through the whole thing because busy today, but those are my observations based off a quick glance
So far reality is tracking closer to AI 2027 than even we expected. (2027 was our modal year at time of publication, not our median.)
They arenāt even trying to hide the fact that their predictions have already failed but instead claiming victory.
Shouldāve left in the full footnote:
āThe AI 2027 scenario is still roughly what we expect the future to look like: a mad scramble to superintelligence leading to either AI takeover or extreme concentration of power. So far reality is tracking closer to AI 2027 than even we expected. (2027 was our modal year at time of publication, not our median.) You can read more about our views on timelines here and here.ā
So yeah youāre bang on the money. Funny how they went on a press tour hyping up Kokotajlo as a forecaster and claiming that dismissing AI 2027 as hype was a āgrave mistakeā to āyeah we did not expect for it to follow our predictionsā and still being slower than what they predicted
Piggybacking off myself to say that the way they wrote the update on their 2025 review is weird. Iām assuming that they mean 2025 was 65% pace but 2026 crept up to 75%, but the way they wrote it makes me think that they actually meant to say āwe originally thought 2025 was 65%, but new data shows it was actually 75%ā which would be odd, Iām still assuming the former since it makes more sense to me.
I mean no matter which way you spin it weāre still going slower than AI 2027, so hooray
(turned this into a second comment so they first one wouldnāt be a wall of text)
Enjoyed Andrew Kelleyās rebuttal of the bun blog about moving from zig to rust
Some pretty good sneers in there like
Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
Another āAI fucked compsci gradsā post has hit my eyeballs - this time, it got recommended to me by LinkedInās algorithm) (because Iām still on that site for some fucking reason):
Full Text
study philosophy, not computer science
data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that philosophy students have a lower unemployment rate (about 5.1%) than computer science students (7%)
why?
unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning are becoming premium assets, and better tech means companies increasingly DONāT need to ask ācan we build this?ā, and increasingly DO need to ask āshould we build this, and what are the consequences?ā
If there has ever been a time to build those soft, truly human, skills, it is now.
p.s. what do you think is the BEST skill to have right now - my thoughts are in the comments
This oneās attributing the decline to āunique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning becoming premium assetsā, and her graph comes from The Economistās Instagram page AFAICT. That one of the Economistās sources is Anthropic is giving me some hope this is bullshit, but its not much.
On one hand, Anthropic sourcing suggests that this is probably at least partially nonsense. On the other hand, though, if thereās any accuracy at all Iām going to spend the rest of my life infuriated that I went down the technical degree route and actively avoided a liberal arts education in order to improve my career outlook and then this happened.
Like, I donāt think they were trying to mislead but I feel like every guidance counselor for kids ought to have a plaque in their office saying āplease note that the world is complicated, ever-changing, and scary and I might actually have no idea what the fuck Iām talking aboutā.
Founder @ Egoist Machines, Inc.
Or is that something more quirky, āEqoist?ā Sorry, if youāre making it that easy to misread while Iām having my morning caffeine, Iām not going to do you any favors
Unfortunately for everybody, itās managed to outperform even the most cynical doomsday forecasts, to the degree that the US economy is now in even worse shape than it was right before an infamous downturn in the late 1920s. Thatās according to the Telegraphās economics columnist Russ Mould, who notes that the overvaluation of US stocks has passed the level that brought the stock market to its knees to kick off the Great Depression.
The US Treasury has also admitted that the AI bubble poses systemic risks
get ready for it to get bloody
I want to piggyback off this to talk about the inevitable Uber comparisons, because not only is the mismatch between investment and returns several orders of magnitude greater, but thereās also a difference in kind. Uberās model was to undercut the taxi industry and establish a dependence within their niche before increasing revenues. Itās the classic enshitttification cycle. But the AI plan, at least as advertised, isnāt to undercut a specific industry as much as it is to undercut literally the entire white-collar labor force. There are several problems with this, starting with the fact that the technology isnāt actually able to replace the target in the way it would need to. More significantly, however, is that labor doesnāt work like taxis. If labor canāt get work it shuts down the entire economy because they lose their income and canāt actually consume any of the things the market offers. Also labor tends to get mad and break out the pitchforks and molotovs if things get too bad, and ārestructuring the economy to no longer provide you the means to sustain your familyā seems like the kind of situation that definitionally makes things too bad. In either event the point is that even if this tech is somehow as revolutionary as advertised then thereās not really any winning for the company.
What will EA (and, more specifically, Lighthaven) do with all the money they expect to receive once the Anthropic IPO mints a bunch of hundred-millionaires? Iām not granting all of the articleās premises, but the interviews with rationalists might be of interest.
The author characterizes EA as being more ābusinesslike and professionalā than LW, then spends the article talking about how their plans all hinge on getting a rich patron.
The image of the beautiful gardens floored with Astroturf is sad.
cruise ship, duh
brave new frontiers in mass food poisoning to be explored
The future is so strange (I got this in my youtube suggestions)
like, try explaining this to someone from 20 years ago and theyād look at you like you were off your rocker
151 thousand views
one hundred. and. fifty one. thousand. views.
brb ordering a tasty cocktail with which to distract myself
I went with the whiskey glass-sized gin/campari/martini rosso/cherry thing. a less regrettable decision
āOkay, so it starts with a doomsday cult which formed around GameStopā¦ā
Not sure GameStop would have been a thing without shitcoins showing that this sort of mass media pushing could drive up value. So to properly explain it, start at 13th century bruge. So again you can blame the Dutch for everything. (I know it was actually French at the time).
New Odium Symposium episode. We talk about /r/fuckingfascists, a fascist domination roleplay subreddit intended for good liberals, which instead ended up getting eaten alive by nazis.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/20-death-of-162994026
Via (she also predicted it): Bryan Johnson gave himself a incurable disease.
Welcome to the age of Oceangatelikes.
E: He blames it on eating sugar as a kid. AI will fix it.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 aah yes years of sketchy medical interventions, no couldnāt be that, it was that time he ate froot loops
BRYAN JOHNSON: transhumanist body hacker, fucks self up and dies by 50
HUNTER BIDEN: subsists on crack and hookers, will live to 100
@dgerard all due respect Hunter has said heās something like 7 years clean so power to him.
And his social media posts are fantastic.
*The PR firmās tweets
@schnoopy hell of a PR firm to tweet crack smokin
Look up the history of snarky millenial advertising. Everything online is constructed as hell lol
If it is a firm I hope theyāre getting some good word of mouth on the back-end because theyāre on point.
move fast and break yourself!
The right to bodily autonomy includes doing incredibly dangerous/untested shit to your body that will hurt you until you die; but it does not include posting through it (that is that secondary right to free expression, which also allows us to point and laugh).
Anyway, gg Johnson, maybe one day youāll realize we are all tiny sparks trapped in decaying bags of flesh and the only thing that matters is what we do with that.
iām sure this guy will have a sane, healthy and self-compassionate attitude to disability and long-term illness.
that could be any of who knows how many untested things he tried over years
ādonāt dieā - famous last words
e: this is also sorta why clinical trials are a thing, and why so often thereās recommendation to not treat disease at all, and why you leave that call to a professional, not decide on your own. especially when your own education is MBA from BYU
update 2: bluesky people say he also ate rapamycin then stopped; also dried cow thyroid; got some unapproved āanti-aging gene therapyā in honduras; probably among many other unusual things. he wonāt be even useful as a case study because deconvoluting all this nonsense would be impossible. maybe as an example
man they really do like reinventing alchemy, did anyone suggested cinnabar yet? i guess him blaming sugar for it might be beginning of new grift
I guess the silver lining here is that āhis teamā might accidentally discover some actual way to help sufferers of this disease? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
Between this and Elonās sad AI birthday party pics, I came to the conclusion that the default consensus for anything someone whoās wealth exceeds a certain amount should be ruled horseshit with no further verification needed. Yeah, occasionally there will be a pony under all that shit but it aināt worth digging for when itās there.
Anyways, calling horseshit on this because even if parts of it arenāt, they arenāt important compared to the greater horseshit coming from a guy who has an autoimmune disease like Bryan Johnson, that disease being āeverything out of Bryan Johnsonās mouth is horseshitā
I missed those pics.
Me too. Saved future readers a search
Thanks, I am however one of those annoying people who doesnāt think he runs his moms account. (We knew his alts due to a lawsuit and how posting screenshots of his setup, and his mom (and that random dude he was accused of being) are not on them, and both have always been weird posters).
Soesnt change the sadcringe.
Itās both less sad because heās probably not completely LARPing as his entire family on twitter, but also more sad because thatās his actual mother who couldnāt be arsed to actually be present and decided to slop it up for social media clout instead.
Elonās sad birthday pics he posted using his sock puppet account where he pretends to be his mom should be a top level comment here, also is hilarious but sad.
thank you for saving me a search
and even then I regret looking
More ai stuff, this time from flathub: Democratizing Abandonware.
Flathub has a fairly relaxed ai policy that both ai bros and strongly anti ai people are unhappy with. It was brought in to try and deal with the review burden of slop submissions where no human is involved, and a chatbot fields review comments.
Turns out that ~75% of submissions that got a slop tag were abandonedā¦ not just the submission, but the entire git repo behind it, too. The author is quick to point out that this is far from a representative study, but I can certainly believe that a) people who have invested little time or effort into their slopware will abandon it without much concern, and b) things like openclaw could definitely submit bullshit packages that are immediately forgotten as its internal state moves on. Thereās no malice in the same way thereās no intent, just shitty tools being left running and polluting everything around them.
AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism.
hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk.
The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network.
If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations.
This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things.
So half-right that itās almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.
A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down ā¦
Framing this as a skill issue and not a power issue is a weird choice.
I hadnāt thought of Ribbon Farm in like 5 years, but when I googled it today I found this:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ribbonfarm-resurrected
For long time readers who are still here with me on Contraptions (or who thought I was dead and got this post forwarded to them): If you just visit the site through a search hit or a bookmarked post, you probably wonāt notice anything different besides a cleaned up visual feel, and subtle signs that suggest itās no longer a standard WordPress blog.
It is not. It is now a bespoke static site, ridiculously over-scaffolded with AI affordances lurking in the margins and menus. It took less than a couple of hundred dollars in tokens to build, and provided me with a lot of fun over several months.
It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.
The decision to keep the basic surface appearance the same was partly pragmatic (obviously, old link structures had to be preserved) and partly aesthetic. Itās fun to engineer an uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.
?O kay?
wget -rwasnāt good enough for a static copy?Not to bury the lede, the most alien piece of all is the curator of this museum-grade mummy blog, a digital ghost of myself, an archival self called vgr_zirp.
This is a chatbot backed by a fully digested set of source corpora ā ribbonfarm itself, my full twitter archives (@vgr), my non ribbonfarm books from the era (Tempo, Be Slightly Evil, Art of Gig), and a complete bibliography of every book or essay ever mentioned on the blog, either by me, guest authors, or commenters.
wat
I suspect Iām going to be using the vgr_zirp bot and MCP regularly from now on, to consult my archival self about ongoing projects for my current live self.
why canāt you just make a tulpa like a normal person.
well whatever, Iāll ask about the harari.
Harariās framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that itās the suit itself ā and the person wearing it has already left the building.
what even the fuck is this word salad saying. at least upgrade to the one that isnāt em dash trigger happy.
now Iām afraid to google farnam street.
It has already more than paid for itself, since it is essentially free to host in its current form, and I was paying ~$1500/year in hosting fees to host it as a live WPEngine WordPress site (even post-retirement, it remained high-traffic enough it needed high-end hosting to be hassle free). Big debt of gratitude to the WordPress ecosystem for serving me so well for so long though.
Iāve got wordpress sites in production that each do multiple million hits a day. theyāre full of some of the worst plugins ever (because wordpress sites living more than a few years seem destined to become hellish katamaris), and still itās barely at āperformance engineeringā levels of problem
so when I see $1500/y of hosting? what the fuck are these clowns doing
Paying to run it on someone elseās computer. WPEngine charge $130/month for the level of their Essential plan thatās supposed to handle 100,000 visits/month. Thatās $1560/year, which is near enough to his claim that itās probably what he was on.
the first part wasnāt really a surprise (I am the someone elseās computer in a number of areas), but those numbersā¦ 100k/mo hit cap/target? holy shit. no wonder such fucked fortunes have been made off wordpress
for comparison: you can get two boxes of tin (together in the ballpark of 32ā¦48 cores, 128GB of RAM, approx 1TB of NVME or 4ā¦8TB of spinnies) at someone like hetzner, with extra IPv4 allocations, for ~$1355/y
Iāve seen media agencies billing in the millions host on less. and venkatesh posts about his blog needing āhigh end hostingā? the same blog that barely had css or images? absolute clown shit
I could just bundle everything Iāve ever written into a ZIP file, and then it would be losslessly compressed. Just saying.
Harariās framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that itās the suit itself ā and the person wearing it has already left the building.
I donāt necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systemsā lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what itās going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesnāt do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.
Ed: hadnāt realized that the guy we were taking seriously was the author of Sapiens. Gonna have to assume I was extending entirely too much charity in my assessment.
I believe that ML training is basically an evolutionary process. What does evolution produce most reliably?
Parasites.
You have created things that simulate the social signals of humans, getting us to care about things all out of proportion to what it actually does. Itās like those beetles that live in ant colonies, hacking the smell and social signals of ants so they get babied while providing nothing.
Harari is an open transhumanist from when I did some research into him when I found him on this interview so this seems in character
A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasnāt come across them already:
Bosses Horrified as āAI Nativeā College Graduates Hit the Workplace
new hires who were seen as āAI nativesā are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
āWe want critical thinking, not just AI,ā the financier told the FT.
I canāt help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. Theyāre not all going to be grifters, after all.
Metaās Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected
This is brilliant. Theyāre making so many mistakes theyāre actually having to admit it. Itās amazing how incompetent zuckerberg isā¦ late to every fad heās tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
In retrospect, he said, the ātrajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasnāt really accelerated in the way that we expected,ā and āthat the companyās bets on the new structure āhavenāt come to fruition yet.ā Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can āexecute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having āwith our top peopleā when they started planning the restructuring in January and February āwere that they āwere ā worried that we werenāt going to move fast enough to adapt,ā Zuckerberg said.
Iām sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I canāt remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.
new hires who were seen as āAI nativesā are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
So not only are STEM graduates (mainly compsci grads) struggling to get jobs as it is, employers are explicitly passing them over for āāāuselessāāā humanities degrees instead. Iām not sure whether to laugh at the irony of the situation, or crash out at the fact my own compsci/cybersec degrees may have become a liability.
Iām hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that Iād be safe from that particular filter, so Iāll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.
Your qualifications predate the LLM rot by fucking ages, and your position against them is crystal clear. Given both of those, bypassing that filter should be easy enough.
Iām thinking about going back to school and seeking a manufacturing job because even though I have been doing software professionally for 22 years, the entire industry is fucked by short term thinking and ignoring consequences.
Itās amazing how incompetent zuckerberg isā¦ late to every fad heās tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
He is the voxday of the billionaire tech bros.
(Voxday is a whitenat far right alt right figure who also does that with every alt right culture war topic. He makes the plausible deniable, undeniable. For example he claimed he was big in the alt right movement and just went out and said āwe want the 14 wordsā).
Iām more familiar with vox day than Iād really like. He hasnāt pivoted from the culture war stuff that heās known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.
The main thing I knew him for is his failed attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards back in 2015.
(Thereās a r/HobbyDrama post about the whole debacle, which I recommend checking out)
That is actually an example of what im talking about, he didnt create the sad puppies, he latched on to it and created the rabid puppies. See the weird latching on behavior.
@rook I am immensely proud that some years ago I made a list VD blogged of āten SF publishing people whose chromed skulls I want as desk ornamentsā.
Itās good to be hated by the *worst* people. And itās totes on brand for him to be filling his empty mind with AI slop.
Not sure if you are aware of the work of the youtuber hbomberguy, but he had a video on some manosphere guys where said āwhat is it with these people and skullsā when he noticed that david auroni always had his pet skull in each shot.
Top-tier resume material
deleted by creator
HA, and people thought the whole āAI generation is the tool of fascismā was a joke.
Vox Day, the living embodiment of Dashiell Hammettās line, āThe cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patterā.
Whilst I try and remember, thereās this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning childrenās schoolwork.
Which was then followed by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall). I canāt find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.
because satire is impossible now
It is because they have basically run out of ideas to try, or the ability to see the difference between good and bad ideas in the gold rush. You saw the same with cryptocurrencies, where every joke you made was already a shitcoin somewhere.
Move fast and break things taken as a religious decree.
