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 so 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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
In his second twitter account, Brangus / Ronny Fernandez talks about using substances including LSD and 5-MeO-DMT which is found in plants and the Colorado River Toad, as well as methamphetamine. He says its really funny to drug women without them knowing to gaslight them, and that he uses substances before committing sexual abuse. I updated the big post on LessWrong and psychedelics.
spotted on r/betteroffline: Nscale, one of neocloud companies, released S-1. even when they show “adjusted EBITDA” and “adjusted operational loss” where they exclude, among other things, depreciation and stock based compensation, they never break even on that “adjusted operational loss”, net losses are multiple hundred % (ie. they lose 4x-23x as much as they receive in revenue)
but yeah, it’s profitable on inference, it’s the worst it’ll ever be and other marketing lies from twitter’s most concussed boosters
No direct links but various people on bsky have discovered LW and EA and are having a collective ‘wtf is wrong with these people’ and ‘wait all the top AI guys are like this?’ moments. And it is funny to see.
Sadly the 'you can’t explain this stuff without either looking like an insane conspiracy theorist, or you need to write an actual book because people don’t believe you remains a bit true.
E: ok one link: https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3mvpuq2deo22u (Guess this is a reference to the SE Gyges thread).
Fyi, I blocked him a while back. Didnt like his whole ‘im the reasonable centrist’ bit while making blocklists of anti ai people.
Turns out the centrist subscribes to transhumanism (hipster edition)
the overtone window can’t be that fucked, can it?
Ah, “Kurzweilian h+,” there’s his marketing tagline. Too bad importing Kurzweil also brings in all his bullshit extrapolation about exponential curves that all the other weird shit is based on. You’re never going to shout down the hyperbolic lunatics by adopting the core thesis of their hyperbole.
Yeah, at best, “Kurzweilian h+” will be pseudoscientific guff. I suppose that keeping the lower strata of intellectually bad elements while discarding the worst of the social ones is progress, but, I mean, it’s kind of like saying you’re into your fad diet and LLM-generated supplement regimen and then looking over at RFK and saying “but that’s totally different!”.
I’ve lost it now, but somewhere in the replies to one of those threads was a person complaining that SneerClub was too much like beating up on nerds in high school. To which I say, first, here’s my blueberry bread recipe, and a nice photo of a winter sunrise, and my Star Trek fanfiction. We all friendly now? Good. Then let me suggest, cordially, that if you are continuing to think of social dynamics in terms of high-school hierarchies and shitty '80s movies well into adulthood, that is a you problem. If I can stop living as the gender I had in high school, you can stop letting your membership in a granfalloon lead you by the nose.
the next 72 hours are about to get interesting (if this is true)
if trump says “rokos basilisk” on tape I’m done
Nobody knows statistics like me. My uncle, great professor, great genes, he knew, frequentist is the worst. Now, Bayes-e-an statistics is the best, the biggest statistics. You gotta have priors! You have a belief, a tremendous belief, beautiful belief in your head. And then you learn, you get the data, and frankly its nasty and unfair, fake news.
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: He’s not on your side. He’s 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 they’re 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 wouldn’t have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropic’s 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.
Another comment:
My knowledge of politics is nil, but <steelman about what if trump actually wasn’t trump>
(emp mine)
AI ‘actress’ Tilly Norwood melts down and starts talking in CANTONESE as she is interviewed by Piers Morgan h/t Naked Capitalism
Long-in-the-tooth Mr Morgan remained remarkably calm as the AI bot unleashed a monologue in Cantonese, staring down the lens and allowing her to finish her point.
But Mr Conti was stunned, shaking his head incredulously at the unexpected answer to his question before turning his head to smile, presumably at someone else sitting in the room with him.
He soon managed to compose himself, offering the simple rebuttal, ‘I didn’t quite get that,’ which proved sufficient to cut Tilly off and fix the glitch.
At this point, even Mr Morgan had to laugh, chuckling for a few seconds before addressing the AI bot, who sat in her seat expectantly as if rolling out a Cantonese soliloquy on an English-language YouTube show was the most normal thing in the world.
Delivering the bad news, he said: ‘You suddenly seemed to be speaking Chinese, completely randomly for no reason.’
Mr Conti by now had completely lost control, giggling hysterically - either in amusement at Tilly’s off-script answer, or in unbridled relief that his job might be safe for the time being.
Why the hell is it so hard to find a translation of what it ‘said’? Not a single news outlet could ask a native speaker, can’t even be bothered to dump it through whisper? This, how many years after YouTube force pushed autodubbing? The lack of effort is telling.
r/Cantonese not impressed either.
Anyway once we replace long in tooth piers with PiersBot 9000, itll just know Cantonese and this won’t even make the paper
God those grifters are still trying to make that collection of two year old product demos A Thing? And entertainment industry boomers are still falling for it?
“r/Cantonese not impressed either.”
Theyre arguing about if it was actually any form of legible chinese at all, rather than translating it
Scott The Greater appears to be crashing out a bit, for once not over personal issues:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10062
If you want to know my current take, you simply start with the one above, then update on the fact that the wild prophecies have come true. The first rumblings, I’d say, came a decade ago with AlphaGo, they got noticeably louder with LLMs and coding and reasoning agents, and they’ve accelerated this summer and fall into a crescendo of wonders and terrors that one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny.
My position on AI is merely the conservative, skeptical position of 2006, updated with intellectual honesty for the reality of late 2026. And that position, if you need me to spell it out, is as follows: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
And most fun:
For anyone who says AI doom sounds like an apocalyptic religion, that the rationalists/Singulatarians seem like a Bay Area cult, that Eliezer Yudkowsky gives off the vibes of a messianic prophet: yes, yes, and yes. But crucially, today you’re no longer being asked to believe in arguments and extrapolations, but only in the front-page news. Accepting the reality of the coming machine god after it’s solved Navier-Stokes and dozens of other longstanding open math problems (while dramatically ramping up in capability every month), is sort of like accepting Jesus after he’s returned to earth on the gleaming cloud. It’s the epistemic bare minimum.
EDIT: Unfortunately (and I suppose inevitably) this shows up a few posts back
I’ve been unloading every day to—who else?—GPT 5.6 Pro about all the pain and trauma and embarrassments of my past. It turns out that, where two years ago GPT was a passable therapist, now it’s the greatest therapist in history, at least for what I need.
Well, I suppose I should thank Mr. Aaronson for conveying to us what it feels like to be a precisely targeted demographic
For anyone who says AI doom sounds like an apocalyptic religion, that the rationalists/Singulatarians seem like a Bay Area cult, that Eliezer Yudkowsky gives off the vibes of a messianic prophet: yes, yes, and yes. But crucially, today you’re no longer being asked to believe in arguments and extrapolations, but only in the front-page news. Accepting the reality of the coming machine god after it’s solved Navier-Stokes and dozens of other longstanding open math problems (while dramatically ramping up in capability every month), is sort of like accepting Jesus after he’s returned to earth on the gleaming cloud. It’s the epistemic bare minimum
So we’re going full mask off now. Awesome
On top of that, why the hell are you using ChatGPT as a therapist when you say that it’ll end the world???
The next few years are going to be so incredibly stupid
I’ve been unloading every day to—who else?—GPT 5.6 Pro about all the pain and trauma and embarrassments of my past. It turns out that, where two years ago GPT was a passable therapist, now it’s the greatest therapist in history, at least for what I need.
Has he not heard about all the cases where LLMs have led people to delusion and sometimes severe self harm or suicide? And yes, each of them thought that ChatGPT really understood them. That’s what delusion is.
If you want to know my current take, you simply start with the one above, then update on the fact that the wild prophecies have come true. The first rumblings, I’d say, came a decade ago with AlphaGo, they got noticeably louder with LLMs and coding and reasoning agents, and they’ve accelerated this summer and fall into a crescendo of wonders and terrors that one needs to be a particular kind of idiot to deny.
The strange thing here that I did not expect is that somehow, all of these major achievements are only in proving mathematical theorems (and
committing felonieshacking computer systems). The massive improvements are in such restricted domains that the AI labs haven’t even solved the mundane problem of making a profit. And no, any rumors of more mathematical theorems being solved doesn’t change that. (It’s almost like the progress is in areas where hallucinations aren’t a problem. Nobody cares about your failed attempts at felony hacking, and math is formally verifiable.)My colleagues always point to coding when asked to name any other domain where AI has seen major success. But one of my friends works in software for a company far away from SF with no mandatory AI policy. The apocalypse has become so clear that when I asked him about all the doomsday talk about software engineering, he seemed a bit confused. After I asked him if AI has made software engineering obsolete, he said that this week he had an intern try to use AI to fix some code that wasn’t compiling and ended up with a giant mess with tons of files that appeared to compile but didn’t run (with errors filling several screens). Then I asked him, what about AI being indispensable in coding now? “Yeah, if you never learned coding because you’ve only ever used AI, then of course you need AI to code.” Some of his coworkers use it as a tool, others don’t, life has just kept on going for him.
Maybe my friend just doesn’t know all the right skills needed to use AI properly, even though the entire point of AI is that you can take skill out of the equation. Maybe he doesn’t know about all the CLAUDE md skill files and agentic looping and whatever nonsense that definitely fixes everything. Maybe he is just six months out of date, because that’s when all of the real progress happened.
Maybe he is just “a particular kind of idiot”.
(If you hate anecdotes, I made an actual argument here.)
I was just about to follow up my own comment with “also just because AI is good at maths doesn’t mean it’s good at everything” but beat me to it
Scott also makes the assumption that AI won’t run into any financing issues that could stop progress flat, the growing number of people in power striving to regulate it and all that jazz
A bone-deep belief in “general intelligence” is vulnerable to exploitation.
Tired of people misrepresenting HPMOR as a Harry Potter fanfic where Harry uses science to study magic.
Anyone who has actually read the fic knows it’s a Death Note/Waiting for Godot/Spaceballs crossover fic about aristocrat failchildren bringing glowstick swords into an airsoft match. There are zero superfluous sentences. Every sentence a painting, especially when Glup of the Most Noble and Ancient Judean People’s Front of Shitto casts Compelled Duel on Backgroundella O. C. Technicallynot of the Superlatively Posh and Antiquarian Judean Popular Front of Whatsherface.
In the words of Anton Chekhov: if you establish in the first act that you must never burn anything you have transfigured, you must have a character transform something into a rocket in the third act and then fire that rocket without any harm done. This will prove you’re a better writer than Chekhov.
Final exam question: You are facing the most reddit serial killer of all time and his dumbass henchmen. Armed with only your wits and a spell that can transform anything into anything else, devise an escape. For extra credit, invoke one or more of the following science fiction plot devices: nuclear fusion, carbon nanotubes/fullerenes, wormholes/warp drives, neutronium, wave/particle duality, brown notes, grey goo, the anthropic principle, quantum tunneling, Maxwell’s demon.
HPMOR: the only novel that has been fully read by fewer people than mistakenly believe to have fully read it.
HPMOR does have one great lesson that all the rationalist and even Eliezer himself have failed to internalize: Fascists should be decapitated.
I can’t believe I’m saying this… I am one of those who actually fully read it, because:
Out of sheer morbid anthropological fascination, I infiltrated an in person HPMOR reading group (not in the Bay area) in the latter days of it coming out. I described it to friends as going undercover. It was a trip and a half.
Copied to the general HPMoR sneer thread top post.
our friends are taking Donald Trump seriously
A comparative demands a comparison class, and the natural completion is “superior to us.” The President is supplying a foundation premise of many superintelligence arguments: how does the less intelligent party remain durably in charge of the superior one?
A strange question to ask given the existence of Donald Trump in the first place.
As of the time of posting, “Superior” has a narrow lead. I’ll be hoping it remains so, as it seems like the most positive-world-leaning outcome to me.
Is this some kind of strange 5D chess gambit that if Trump picks the name that pisses people off the most, then people will try the hardest to regulate it or something? Somehow assuming that people will take this Trump renaming stunt seriously after all the other Trump renaming stunts? Why do I even bother? Fuck. This is so stupid.
When you think you are at the Hinge of Ages that decides the Fate of the Very Universe Forever And Ever Amen, how many waffles you eat this morning has cosmic significance. This is part of what drove the Zizians insane.
