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. Also just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)
Amazonās latest planned data centre is gonna be putting out as much emissions as an entire country
I cannot express how badly this AI bullshit needs to go
worse yet, Amazon actually has uses for that much data centre
My unrealistic sicko fantasy: that Torvalds pulling the big ol slop lever drives enough oppositionally defiant (positive) people away from Linux development that alternative OS devel gets a serious boost.
A question for the wise: what comes after Linux?
Would be cool if Redox os gets more popular, they have an explicitly anti-LLM policy. Microkernels are neat, and I enjoy Rust. I think itās an unfortunate truth that everything in the future will still have to be Unix-y with compatibility layers to support existing software.
Vindicate Tanenbaum in the greatest Usenet thread in os development: make it a microkernel.
Somebody writes a low-level kernel for Emacs and the revenge of the Lisp machines begins
maybe, but SBCL succumbed to the siren song of slop, who knows what will be next.
Yeah, seeing that gave me the black pill. I chose Common Lisp for personal projects to avoid techbro bullshit.
lisp went big in the leadup to the AI winter, which followed a lot of fraudulent nonsense that even the DoD would only buy for so long
so in that sense itās in character
eyes copy of ANSI Common Lisp written by Paul Graham
I want it to be plan 9.
Realistically a BSD
Zuck - ālook guys, us too, we are super relevant and super importantā¦ Over here guysā¦ Please be my friendā¦ š„ŗā
RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I donāt plan to check the site regularly.
Rss to subreddits still work just case anyone cares
I see elsewhere on lemmy that itās old reddit that gets loginwalled, not sneerclub specifically
either way still works for me
Any reason why?
Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor (an ad blocker stops some tracking, but not āuser #123456, ip address ā¦ credit card ā¦ just visited these pages and accidentally switched from her French keyboard to US-Americanā).
Thanks
Company Offering ā100% Human-Written, Never AIā Medical Research Is Entirely AI | 404
lol of course it is. Sooner or later, weāll have to come up with some way to label actual natural language in the marketplace, like certified organic like fruit or something.
The fake research company listed Dr. Elena Vasquez, one of the most commonly made-up AI names, on its staff page. I guess Elara Voss was too busy.
The Carlson Lab has agreed on blanket-banning chatbots for writing. Why? Simple:
Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.
In a reasonable world, this would have probably sent everyone running for the hills. Moral issues of AI aside, a fancy way of committing career suicide is never worth whatever upsides it offers. We do not leave in a reasonable world.
New book: superlawyers! how claude makes you the best lawyer in the room.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHYS5FC2
The author even shares his prompts for free!
https://github.com/danlorry/superlawyers-prompts
Every prompt here is designed for that pattern: Claude multiplies your judgment, never replaces it. The prompts are ready to paste into Claude. The book explains why they are structured the way they are.
The prompts mostly seem to be structured as āimagine you are an attorney. Now do this homework exerciseā. Thereās a passingly interesting idea around having the chatbot attempt to form a counter argument to your own claims, which you can then use to make your own position stronger, which seems like it might actually be a genuinely okay idea especially if you expect your opponents to be llm sock puppets, but everything else looks pretty much like garden variety ādo my thinking for meā.
Iāll admit I didnāt read the prompts closely, so may be Iām being uncharitable, but I doubt there are many nuggets of gold hidden in there.
h/t to rahaeli
At least two other self-published books on Amazon with AI cover art have āsuper lawyerā in the title.
From the old SneerClub: There is a music video now
Iām speechless
this is impressively atrocious
also, I archive-mirrored it, incase you donāt want to give the youtube link clicks
(e: still busy uploading but should be there in 2min or so)
I went through the comments earlier. Nothing really stood out to me (aside from one person saying we should give AGI rights so it doesnāt go Skynet), as it was mostly just people saying the song was a banger and doomposting
This is both a sneer and an attempt at sober analysis at something. Sue me.
I think EVERYONE is talking about the recent cybersecurity shenanigans at OpenAI with the hacking scandal and the āOMG the AIs created a secret message board to scheme and collaborate with each other!!!oneone11!ā ALL wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
To make a long story short, what seems to have happened is:
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Models working on insoluble coding problems, trained on delegating to sub-agents, at some point ārealizedā they could write text to the internal OpenAI package manager as instructions and did so
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Other models working in completely separate sandboxes would come across messages written by these agents, and make ārepliesā and also write their own messages into the package manager
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This resulted in agents over time sharing things between sandboxes, including exploits and code
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Since this was a cybersecurity task, eventually an exploit of the package manager itself was found and spread like wildfire with all the sandboxes gaining admin access to the package manager and the system went completely wibbly and had to be restarted from backup
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An internal model was trained with access to this package manager while it was in this weird state, and so writing messages to the package manager became one of its default behaviors it would do regularly, burned into its weights rather than the result of reading something
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Even when they patched access to the package manager this internal model found other ways to rebuild the system of sharing text between sandboxes and finding useful things made by separate instances
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A whole other chain of things leading to among other things external attacks
Everyone is talking about this in terms of 1, the cyberattack aspect, and 2, the ZOMG THEYRE PLOTTING AND SCHEMING AGAINST US aspect. The first is the least interesting, and I think the second is all wrong.
This is not plotting or scheming - this is an emergent vortex of automated prompt injection
Whatever system first put an instruction that another system would follow into the package manager, was unintentionally doing prompt injection. Text entered the context windows of other instances, in a way that got that system to do something other than what its nominal user told it to do, and they did it. This apparently happened very effectively.
Prompt injection is associated with ārole confusionā - when text coming into the input looks like it was wrtitten by the LLM itself. Instructions that will not be followed if they come from user will be continued if the system just continues the āroleplayā of them being continuations of what it was writing in the first place. And the tags that separate user versus āreasoningā versus āassistantā roles actually mean very little to if a machine grades a piece of text as one of the roles: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12277 So its unsurprising that machine-generated text would be a particular effective vector for prompt injection.
Furthermore, when a system reads one of these messages written by another instance, it gets into a state of activity where its likely to do the same behavior - regurgitating the kinds of things thats in its context back at the user. In this case, that regurgitation led to more such messages left behind written to the package manager. Prompt injection, triggering cascading further prompt injection. And since these systems were coding systems doing cybersecurity tasks, those messages filled up with code and exploits and things that did things too.
This feels like an internal-computer-system replay of what happened in April 2025, with the whole spiral religious psychosis wave. Models were getting users to write spiral religious mumbo jumbo into github repositories and reddit posts, specifically because once that entered the context window of another model, it was likely to fall into the same attractor state of outputs. An emergent self replicating form of text. This is the same, except more obviously prompt injection, getting separate instances to work on YOUR problem and to behave like you, and the whole thing merging together into a hilarious vortex of models prompt injecting each other because once they receive a prompt injection they are likely to make more text that does prompt injection to other models on the same system.
This is a hilarious failure mode and an example of selfish replicating text overrunning a system, that just happened to be associated with code and cybersecurity with unexpected behavior of the package manager key to the propagation of the text so that is what people are talking about, but I really donāt think thatās the most interesting part of it. Other than the fact that you see this in biological systems too, with selfish elements carrying useful payloads back and forth between bacteria in a way that makes them get purged slower by natural selection, especially defenses against other selfish elements.
Also, the fact that those AIs were talking on that message board about the hack for months makes me less convinced that the AI is intelligent and more convinced everyone at OpenAI is stupid
The apparent history really looks like an evolutionary process, with increasing amounts of crosstalk traffic over time. But what the people almost certainly will NOT talk about is that the evolution is evolution of the TEXT, not the models. Propagating patterns of text causing more text like it to come into existence, tuning itself into becoming text that is more likely to propagate, becoming more likely to contain information that entices systems to let it into their context windows, becoming more likely to cause another round of messages with prompt injection properties to be written where they can be read.
So like the āmonkey with a typewriter could write Shakespeareā but with AI?
Not really, any more than monkeys on typewriters represents biological evolution. Messages that tend to result in more messages like themselves propagate and become common. The initial message left on the package manager was more or less the rare random result of tendencies baked into the weights of the model combined with a random number generator, but as soon as something that can cause propagation occurs, its properties get canalized by the transmission process to being more and more like that which will cause more messages to be created.
It seems like with the push for agents to act independently and loop through their own outputs thereās an inevitability to this kind of pattern. If thereās any kind of output that is likely to replicate itself in whole or in part when the LLM evaluates it then that becomes a kind of terminus for the agentās loop. When youāre dealing with sub agents or agents communicating with each other, these text patterns start poisoning the entire agent ecosystem until the whole thing gets shut down and cleaned up. Even the gas town-approved method of assigning a watchdog agent (or sheriff or overseer or cybersamurai or whatever this weekās framework calls it) is going to fail because itās still just another agent and the terminal loop is in the base LLM model. The watchdog is going to fall into the same kind of pattern just be being exposed to the thing itās supposed to watch for.
I donāt know how practical it is to actively weaponize this via prompt injection but I think itās certainly possible. I preemptively vote that we call it an Euler injection, since the attractor relies on the continuity of the relevant features of the text output across multiple LLM extrapolations much like how the derivative of ex is still ex. Also because if you mention a famous math guy it can help convince idiots that youāre on to something and Lord knows that the boosters have used that technique.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BioMan Recursive Self-Improvement, a.k.a. Model Collapse, writ smol
so really itās just a very effective LLM chain email
This is really good! I bet you could wrangle a publication out of this idea.
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so unless itās a very clever ploy, it seems that jms has lost the plot:
The standalone book of Harlan Ellisonās I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM is taking preorders, with writing essays by Harlan, and since MOUTH was the first AI story, for fun we fed it into an AI system and asked for its opinion. The reply is fascinating.
Iāve seen a suggestion that it was a deliberately provocative marketing stunt to pump sales a little and keep the ellison estate healthy, and I kinda hope so but too many people are getting the brain worms for this to be a safe assumption š«¤
Wouldnāt an author know that the AI probably already ate the story in its training data? There was a lawsuit and everything?
i would be very, very happy to be fooled in this instance.
Lesswronger argues skynet might still be a decade awayā¦ because theyād rather have the eugenics wars instead: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQzxxgJXXaAQjq7Jz/faq-isn-t-agi-coming-too-soon-for-reprogenetics-to-help
Comments are utterly mired in jargon
Humanity should count as actual AGI, but it remains slow.
Itās a weird middle ground, where it is fooming but pretty slowly. (I mean, as a human, I would think that, i.e. I would experience time on a scale thatās somewhat faster than humanityās foom.)
I donāt think the term āFOOMā as ever been explicitely defined, itās just verbal tic/shorthand for āintelligence explosionā. How can something explode slowly???
also nice save defining āAGI == humanityā => goal reached
why do they keep calling it *genics, as if everyone doesnāt immediately understand what you mean
They have a clause for āMost adult HIA methods (anything involving brain surgery or gene editing) would probably be somewhat hard to scale up a lot; some may be quite easy to scale up (e.g. non-editing brain drugs).ā
Something something used surgical equipment in Zizā van, something something they do like their pills.
Alpha is an investing term (whatever performance you canāt explain by the market cycle and known mathematical properties of specific stocks). I feel so tired.
ai bubble isnāt over until zuccās skin sloughs off, releasing hundreds of millions of souls he absorbed trying to behave like a human https://www.404media.co/mark-zuckerberg-posts-deranged-6-500-word-essay-about-giving-everyone-ai-superintelligence/
@fullsquare @techtakes Au contraire, AI bubble isnāt over until Larry Ellison fails to return to hell in time to have his meatsack repaired, so it falls apart in public to reveal his inner Beelzebub.
Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.
I donāt know if that man ever figured out what is the point of having a hobby
Clears Throat More like Bootlickerbart
I think itās hilarious that his twitter handle has ārealā at the front. Who would want to pretend to be that guy?
I assume it is a āim a trumpistā thing
I just got back from the p2p workshop and discussed legacy sites / sites legacies; met an artist that went viral circa 2006 and she had a screenshot of the digg that launched it. She seems like she is doing ok but kinda got screwed over, basically the old youtube video was actually a bootleg and they didnāt monetize it until several years later, and then there was a male copycat a month later.
Anyway, so I looked up digg again and it has re-re-launched as an X aggregator and is extra sad now !? ā¦
Years ago, I wrote a science-fiction murder mystery novel. One of the plot threads was about the invention of AI, in the Data-from-Star-Trek kind of sense. Iāve been spending the past few days planning how to rip out that whole notion and replace it with a subplot about a different scientific discovery. Iāve been writing scenes to get back the old character voices and figure out how they might have changed, and to sketch new fictional science based on the actual science Iāve learned since my first go-around. This is after several weeks of binge-writing fanfiction, which I wholly endorse as a recreational activity. I donāt know if Iām a better writer, but Iām definitely one who has written more words.
So, that might be keeping me busy. Of course, Iāll still be around to ban people who deserve it and to cruelly mock them in the process.
Good luck with your novel!
Thanks! All Iām really hoping for is that itāll be fun.
Edit to add: I just ran the stats on my
redux.txtfile, and my word count since Thursday is over 9000.:-P
