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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:
Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts arenāt wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is.
This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then āvolunteeringā to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage āToo big to failā t-shirts floating around on ebay.
Fun times!!
P Thiel is visiting Nashville
Weāre basically the Vatican of middle Tennessee.
The [antichrist lectures]
or
[The antichrist] lectures
the next 72 hours are about to get interesting (if this is true)
The lesswrong reactions are hilarious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s76hbGpaMkhiNwbTX/matrice-jacobine-s-shortform?commentId=B2WSExeg8wfgDqZiM
One commenter realizes the truth, but is heavily downvoted:
For anyone who was at all unclear on the subject: Heās not on your side. Heās against you. He wants you to fail. Stop trying to fix him. AI safety is in the same situation as measles prevention, free trade, military readiness, or the prosecution of the remaining Epstein offenders. Trump & co. are against these things, and theyāre not going to be converted just because you tell them again how important these things are.
Sorry bud, if lesswrongers were capable of grasping this they wouldnāt have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropicās half-hearted gestures of placation to doomer-cultists. And of course, many lesswrongers are genuinely very right wing and will thus rationalize justifications for the more centrist lesswrongers to suck up to Trump.
Do the AI doomers/Yuddites REALLY want their signature policy tied to one of the least competent, least popular presidents in history? I would be thinking very hard about this one if I were part of their crew. āYou know who took p(doom) seriously? TRUMP!ā is, ah, not a marketing coup, to put it mildly
It would be hilarious if the AI doomers actually did manage to get Trump to sign some of their ideas into action with executive orders, only for him to reverse course or fail in implementation details, and then a hard tide of anti-Trump sentiment in the next administration to totally undo them.
Sadly it looks like we will only get the more immediate humor of Trump going hard against them.
And unfortunately several democratic party luminaries getting the AI doom brainworms in response
from the looks of it multiple Republicans are also going turncoat on AI and embracing the doom narrative so itās slowly turning into Trump vs The World
I wish the opposition did not have brain worms
I mean thatās if Trump actually does it. Heās pretty good at ignoring what the public wants
They think this is their last chance to save the entire universe forever and ever amen and will take anything that does not lead to extinction and the conversion of the entire universe into something that does not experience happiness. Keep in mind these are the people who thought that the world could suddenly blow up from a new innovation in a lab in 2015 and had psychotic episodes on that basis.
Trump, who does not experience happiness, would love to convert the entire universe into his own property.
Trump could personally fly up and prevent a 100 kilometre long asteroid from falling on the Earth and I still wouldnāt give him a Nobel Prize
āDemocrat-polarizedā is such a word choice. Like, ah yes, it is clearly the Democratās fault the right goes batshit at even a hint global warming is real or at any sort of gun regulation or any social safety net expansion.
You hardly need me to explain this, but the primary thing a conservative seeks to conserve is their own wealth and influence. Of course the deflation of the bubble begins Yudās conversion process
I hate hate hate that my niche internet morbid fascination from my college laptop in 2009 is now an oval office power struggle.
Quotes from the president of the united states in the last twelve hours:
āThe only control or guardrails that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENTā
āThere is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centersā
āAmericanism, not effective altruismā (!!!)
āAI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIAā
ā¦I guess the Peter Thiel faction won.
Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?
Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?
Nah, lesswrongers donāt even have that level of introspection. Plus a lot of them are outright pro-oligarch-technofedual-lord, at least enough so that it outweighs their doomer-cultists allegiance.
I hate to turn this into a screenshot fest but i meanā¦
Theyāre calling out effective altruism BY NAME from the white house. The president is still ranting about this. This is NEW.
Coxon (that Anthropic employee) Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have all joined forces against AI
All I will say is please god let Anthropicās bullshit backfire and have them pass Bernieās bill to completely shut down all AI development it would be so fucking funny
They are going to try to, in rough order of ease and plausiblity:
- provide a legal excuse for them to stop shoveling money into a furnace of training for exponentially diminishing returns that they can no longer pretend about
- attain regulatory capture where their weirdos are in charge of everything
- to thereby make open source AI illegal, only things that go through THEIR gated portals can be used
- Maybe make ownership of the means of computation for ANY reason illegal so you cannot own anything and have to rent everything from them for any purpose because YOU MIGHT BE SUMMONING THE DEMON IN YOUR GARAGE!!!oneoneoen its only a coincidence that this means you have to rent GPUs for games and rent datacenter space from oligarchs rather than buy them or do what you want on your own hardware
Confirmed
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/14/google-deepmind-ai-warnings
The shape of the solution is simple: stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence. Treat compute, the main ingredient in AI training, like fissile material. Track it and restrict access to quantities large enough to improve AIs beyond known-safe levels. More specifically, the AI Futures Projectās āPlan Aā is a credible starting proposal that limits AI harms while allowing fast AI progress to continue to benefit the world. We have real options for verifying compliance with international compute-restriction treaties, without trusting adversaries like China.
I havenāt seen any mention of this in sneer space, so kind of a request for context/comments. I recently learned about Cortical Labs from a news story that came out about a month ago. Basically (and apologies if Iāve got this wrong), the story is that theyāve built a ābiological data centreā where the computing units use lab-grown human brain neurones. Theyāve been in business (actual business) since 2019. Some shallow searching on reddit and lesswrong shows a flitter of interest from those guys here and there.
Ah yes, a torment nexus.
Looks like they have āneuron culture and interface as a serviceā going on, for all the good its for.
Its a real thing. You grow some neurons and stick some electrodes into it, and you can measure the activity of neurons or groups of neurons through some electrodes and induce some to fire through other electrodes. Now, if you have some external process that you define that takes the output from the electrodes and does some computation on it and returns signals to the input electrodes, the way that neurons work and change their synaptic weights over time ensures that the network will learn to produce outputs that make the inputs more predictable. Hence teaching a few thousand neurons to play ādoomā - you have a program that takes the screen and turns it into a set of input strengths, take some outputs and turn them into controls, and it feeds back, and you eventually have something that learns to do predictable actions.
Their innovation appears to be having standardized software you can use to define the input and output electrodes with respect to whatever other software you are running connected to the stuff. Who is willing to pay for this is anyoneās guess.
So, uh, remember that call for stories set in a world where we āsomehowā donāt get AGI and instead get modern-style LLMs providing such incredible value to the world that it is transformed? https://www.gpuworld.org/
Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board. So the Singularity never happensābut GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM. What happens in this ābusiness as usualā future?
(Incidentally, this reminds me strongly of āProject Heiroglyph: Stories and Vision for a Better Futureā, also by Neal Stephenson, somewhat desperately trying to pretend that there is a bright future ahead of us rather than slow grinding decline)
Somehow we gotā¦ this. I canāt even. I really just canāt even.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6hFByFwDLxtnbvje/a-normal-friday-in-2042
I thought I had lost my ability to be surprised by these people. In here we get:
- anthropomorphization of current LLMs as conscious beings
- Graverobbing
- Trump magically doing everything these people want
- Married couples paying each other for chores
- Prediction market language
- Weird sex stuff
I wonder if that āfrontier progress stoops as of 1 steptember 2026ā is part of this apparently coordinated push to try to freak people out and get the government involved. Maybe the AI labs are angling to make that the cutoff and stop shoveling money into the furnace of training. This is all too conveniently timed.
As always with LW, we can adapt the vector definition of ānormalā, i.e. what is being said is completely orthogonal to reality
Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of āCPUā and rode the nopetopus out of there.
Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.
I meanā¦ what is this? Itās even weirder than usual
Itās the regurgitation of an insular communityās bizarre beliefs, up to and including sexual fixations, back to that community for unquestioning consumptionā¦ a vore-ouboros, if you will.
Back when our friends were just forum and Tumblr posters there was the Center for Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Who could be against that?
6 August 2013, SANTA ROSA, Calif. (CN) ā In a lurid lawsuit, a former employee claims the Marin County-based Foundation for Critical Thinking is a ācultlikeā group whose married bosses tried to make him have sex with the wife, and fired him for refusing. ā¦ Hale, a 40-year-old married man and father, claims he quit his job as a high school teacher to accept an offer to work as a āfull-time Fellowā for the Foundation for Critical Thinking (FCT) in August 2004. According to the complaint, the Foundation for Critical Thinking, based in Tomales, ātrains educators how to analyze information in an āobjective āfair-mindedā manner, without allowing their own biases, prejudices and opinions to influence their objective analysis of an issue. It is a āthink tankā of sorts that promotes a casual work environment. Defendants Elder and Paul frequently hold meetings at both FCT offices and their personal residence, where they sit and lie on the floor amongst pillows. To encourage the free flow of ideas, defendants Elder and Paul often discuss uncomfortable topics, and encourage employees to rid themselves of social, including sexual, taboos. ā¦ About three years after he was hired, Hale claims, Elder and Paul began bringing up āinappropriate sexual topicsā and asking him āabout his sex life with his wifeā during business meetings. ā¦ In October 2010, Hale claims, Elder and Paul graduated from discussing sex to encouraging him to have sex with Elder. After calling Hale to a meeting, Paul āexplained to Hale that he was concerned about defendant Elder, his younger wife by approximately 20 years, and wanted to ensure that her sexual urges could be satisfied,ā the complaint states. āDefendant Paul proposed that Hale should have sexual intercourse with Paulās wife, defendant Elder, while defendant Paul observed them. Hale immediately became uncomfortable and anxious, as he listened to defendant Paul, and worried about his ability to keep his job, if he declined. Hale politely declined defendant Paulās request.ā
I wonder how many of our friends deliberately studied other grifts and not just pop psychology books, or if this is just in the water. Their form 990 is here, and shows they lost most of their income in 2019 and are struggling since.
University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:
And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and Iām like, what do you want me to do? I canāt control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didnāt tell me what it was.
The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, whoās the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? Theyāre going to figure out a way.
Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.
@nfultz what HF incident? I did search
The huggingface incident: https://awful.systems/post/9312280/12315846
Interesting, he usually falls for all their BS.
So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to āslow downā āAIā development:
- itās too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all
- the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and thereās no obvious way to fix that
Iāll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.
edit I missed āblatant regulatory captureā
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Also they dare not actually let the market price their shares.@gerikson My assumption is that they want a regulatory moat to protect āfrontierā models from āopen weightā / AKA cheap models.
Itās just margin protection.
The symbiosis between the rabid cultists, the technofedual wannabe-lords, and the get rich quick grifters is so weird to watch.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Yeah, the whole idea is to perpetuate the myth that these companies are really close to coming out with a product that people will actually pay to use. A product that people will pay enough to cover its cost. They want to simultaneously make an excuse for why it is taking so long while making gormless investors think it is just around the corner.
Also the frontier ālabsā are rapidly running out of money and having to raise more and more insane investment rounds. This is a great way to save face and back away from burning $$$$ on training runs that push the frontier of can a model rearrange some arbitrary coloured squares by 10% next they just need to solve the problem of how to make their customers pay cost+ on inference when theyāve been giving it away at steep discounts for nearly 4 yearsā¦ Easy!
Starting things off, New Mexico State Parks got scammed by an AI bro when looking for new mascot art.
