Want to wade into the sandy, spooky 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 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 soo 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. The spooks are well underway.)
Scott Aaronson is teaching a Yudkowsky class: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10125
I vividly remember encountering Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Sequences 20 years ago. I remember thinking: even if these people talk and act like crazy cultists, still, let me bend over backwards to be epistemically virtuous, and entertain their ideas on their merits, as very few academics would.
Scott Aaronson is an experiment to discover how many timeshares one man can afford on a professor’s salary. He has never in his life not bought the extended warranty.
Im reminded of how he talked about sneerclub. The epistemically virtuosity only bends one way.
Straw for thee, steel for me.
I forgot he was in Austin. Has he been on Rogan? Great(ly stupid) things could happen.
Joe Rogan should ask Scott Aaronson about Zionism. It will be glorious (adjective over-enunciated with wild Gowron eyes).
Wonder how Rogan would react to the ‘I stole money from the tip jar’ story
deleted by creator
Alessandro Strumia in the comments. Only the best hang out in the online home of Computers Scott.
just a peeve
here’s a personal blogpost on LW entitled “Three types of AI risk: why (some) leftists are against (some) AI regulations” (by “sudo-nym” which I admit is a great nick)
First sentence
You may have seen factions of the left being opposed to current attempts to regulate the AI industry, despite the fact that they clearly also want to stop AI.
OK Mr Sudo-Nym, if that is your real name, imma gonna stop you right there
Which “factions”?
Are these factions actually in existence, or are they just Xhitter/Bluesky handles? If you’re provide like, I dunno, sources, we could maybe evaluate this ourselves. It would also clarify whether these are US leftists as opposed to leftists in other countries which are in my experience a bit more attuned to both political realities and have a more theoretical foundation.
As it is it feels as if you’re fighting windmills in your imagination.
Commenters point out that the “frontier labs” are actually raging capitalists so there’s that.
The factions exist and those are the hardcore anarchists.
A real electoral powerhouse.
(Aka a few guys on bsky with 10k followers max total).
And I say that as somebody who feels anarchist aligned.
Most of rationalism seems to be “Making up a guy and getting mad at him” doesn’t it?
but but but don’t call it strawmanning!!!
My real opponent lives in Canada. And no, you can’t meet him.
I’m not sure if this was highlighted already but from the OpenAI report on the Hugging Face incident:
The internal-only research model is comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol and was trained to advance persistence and multiagent collaboration, among other capabilities. The model was not intended for public use, and was only used by a small number of OpenAI personnel for internal research.
Absolutely typical, the “unexpected communication” is hardly an emergent phenomenon, (I remember them trying to claim unexpected high success at translation tasks without specific training, which was also complete BS), like you can’t act surprised that agents communicate and hack stuff if that what’s you’re instructing them to do.
Just had a shower conversation with myself, and for some reason the crystal meth metaphor (methaphor?) is really coming together in my head.
“Have you even tried some frontier meth?”
“Sure, you can also get energy with exercising, eating well, and structure. But we don’t have to live like amish people, now that we can have meth!”
Nationalized Open Weight Models -> State-funded AI dispensory
There’s surely a rich bounty of comparisons left to mine.
Knowledge workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your teeth.
Also works for cocaine, I’m noticing.
Might be best as a comeback, if someone compares AI to a pharmaceutical breakthrough like antibiotics.
Everything written by AI boosters tracks much more clearly if you simply replace “AI” with “cocaine”. I shall demonstrate! (Not linking to OP, because it’s trash.)
“Let’s pretend you’re the only person at your company using cocaine. You decide you’re going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison. […] In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting cocaine.”
You could also compare it to the lobotomy, with how much it ruins people’s intellect
though the lobotomized themselves weren’t among the loudest advocates of the procedure afaik
unlike trepanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning#Voluntary_trepanation
Unhappy thought: For whatever future we’ve got, the history of mathematics will be scarred by fashtech cocaine. The people with all the money have every incentive to make mathematics intractable as a profession. No time or resources to do anything but clean up after their DDOS attacks. No way to check the correctness of AI-generated proofs except by using more AI to formalize them.
First up: thanks for your hard work here in the sneer mines during these ridiculous times!
I saw this being ignored on HN and I thought that you might appreciate it:
Navier-Stokes Lost in Translation – Why Lean Verification of AI Autoformalisation Does not Guarantee Correct Natural Language Proofs
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144
The authors point out that automatic translation of natural language mathematics into Lean is very hard, actually. They also highlight some examples of such translation errors in the Navier-Stokes “paper” published by OpenAI. They tread lightly and don’t take a position on the correctness of the proof, but they do bring a large stack of receipts.
I also thought the reference to the Solvability Complexity Index (which is new to me) was interesting, and there’s an appendix with an explainer on how the SCI hierarchy is constructed. According to this scheme, autoformalisation of natural language proofs is strictly harder than the Halting Problem.
I haven’t had a chance to check on the bona fides of the authors.
This is all beyond my level, but I’d love to see what our local experts think of it in light of the recent gish galop.
If it makes you feel better, the applied / empirical side is just as fucked as pure math. My unhappy thought is we spent 30 years as a discipline trying to decontaminate after The Bell Curve dropped and now, AI Murray will haunt me from beyond the grave.
One of the proofs that OpenAI announced yesterday is for a major open problem in the field I’m working in. I tried to read it but it was a completely incomprehensible 100+ page output. I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding. (I had known about the results weeks in advance before their official announcement. There is a bunch of more drama there that I won’t get into.) Putting aside the serious possibility of Lean bugs, a lot of people don’t realize that there is ultimately no point in having a machine just generate Lean blobs endlessly. The reality is that mathematicians have always done math for the sake of enjoyment or understanding, and math contributes to society by improving understanding. Still, I am worried about the convenient social arrangement that allowed many mathematicians to do this for a modest living.
Anyway, I’m sure it was a good idea to apply the full might of capital for pure math problems, instead of less important social issues like climate change. We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).
Edit: Here is an article by Quanta which I think accurately describes the situation that mathematicians are going through right now: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-end-of-math-as-we-know-it-20261005/
I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding.
Hooray for the Denial of Service attack from the industry that wants to put a meter on thinking itself.
We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).
rational investors enabling marginal utility… thasss capitalism in action baybeeeee
It isnt going to just be math, programming, various sites filled with usefull information that are now being closed because they keep being hammered by bots (or ddos attacks if they manage to actively block the bots) etc. What a waste.
We know that many AI projects are powered or monitored by a Guy in India. It turns out the mass shooter in northern Canada who looked to ChatGPT for advice also had a Discord buddy in the USA who knew about her plans. Police allege that after trying to talk her out of her plans he streamed for her and helped her start her car to get to the site of the murders. I hope he and Sam Altman spent 30 years as roommates. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/tumbler-ridge-mass-shooting-arrest-9.7371316
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons, because simply stealing the collective works of humanity isn’t enough
New Baldur Bjarnason: Software developers are not okay
It has felt like this is where it would end up since ChatGPT launched in late 2022 to be honest.
The bubble will pop. It’s much too big to be sustainable.
But that won’t fix software industry employment because the Large Language Models don’t really need to work that well for this process. They only need to sort of work.
Get ready for the era of digitally sovereign on-premise open weight perpetual software sweatshops.
Think you slightly messed up the link
Should be working now, forgot the https:// prefix
Oir big Old Moldy friend has decided he needs his work doesnt spread enough hitler particles.
edited alt text from the image
Curtis Yarvin post on X on 10/5/2026: "Every time I’m in the UK I hear this. More and more people asking, subtly or straight out: what would Hitler do?
As if it was that easy. Have you looked around you? Man, Hitler wouldn’t even know where to start"
Doesn’t he have a kid to raise or something (…yeah…)? Small miracle he still has custody
The China-Whisperers are trying to figure out how to get Rationalist Ideals into Chinese AI researchers
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmxkHm2dTLKG6GZ6i/the-anatomy-of-a-chinese-ai-researcher
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china
Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China won’t appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to “safety-pill” China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825
The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:
When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.
Goddamn it, people
It continues
the HPMOR comic
No no no no
HPMOR is the rationalist version of the Nigerian prince scam. It immediately weeds out anyone who isn’t a good mark.
I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the world… it’s bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute “Watchtower magazine” or “Dianetics” for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.
checkin’ into my motel room in Santa Clara, nearly falling flat on my face as I walk in the door. because instead of a Gideon Bible in the nightstand, this place has a printed copy of HPMoR as a doorstop
The things I printed at print shops while infiltrating a HPMOR reading group under cover in 2014…
Today I learned that Gwern has a folder of Nano Banana comics. Moreover, on HN, he’s proud of them. Masterful gambit, sir.
My God, it’s like the art becomes more bafflingly poor the closer he gets to stumbling into a decent joke. There’s a finite amount of quality that has to be balanced between the two, and it’s capped at “shit”.
Why does the kitchen in the “zen of instant coffee” strip have two stoves?
Also: needing Claude to make a pie chart. No, that is someone with a cognitive surrender fetish. I refuse to engage.
Not only are they grade-school level awful, he totally misses the point of the original
A lesswrong has a cri de coeur:
Are we a community who, when someone is thrown out of Lighthaven our response is to be like ‘maybe he should be given a free ticket to manifest’ and if I accuse someone of a felony, our response is ‘hmmm that’s probably free speech and cancellation’?
I did a shallow dive on the subject of that, he was thrown out of lighthaven primarily because he didn’t pay (they let non payers hang out for a bit but not after 11pm) but secondarily because he made people feel uncomfortable. He was not thrown out for probably being a rapist, in fact people were starstruck to meet the author of the rapeblog. His writing is utterly disgusting but the lighthaven account does provide an interesting window into rat spaces that rats themselves won’t.
Feels like for a community that swelled its ranks by welcoming disaffected gamergaters and anti-feminists of all stripes to become a safe space for rapists would be the most natural progression ever.
It is also an incredible strength that they actually practice what they preach, and don’t exclude someone based on hearsay and “probably a rapist”.
Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise
Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo
Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs
A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, “Sounds like you’re probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.”
more in the comments
I already disliked the original [Harry Potter] for its lack of rationality as a child (how can they have magic and poverty at the same time?) so I loved the flip.
OK so does HPMOR solve poverty? (Q is rhetorical don’t answer)
If you didn’t like HP check out Grossman’s The Magicians. A lot of graduating magicians there join non-profits or hedge funds.
I unironically wish there were a faithful prose adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist I could point people to.
not that it makes any real difference but I have been seeing “Galfoy”. Knowing that “foid” has increased in usage is a bummer tho
I’ve genuinely never seen anything as cringe as ‘Malfoid’. it’s basically just riding the coattails of the much better Petra Parker trend except with incel language
Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.
let’s continue with the HP theme
Well, who could’ve guessed, AI crossover mods are actually unplayable, only made to be clipped and go viral on twitter
There’s also this Jaden Williams skit
Had someone tell me that they could use the method they use to make these games to make superintelligence, despite the fact that trying this with AI models would be wildly different than doing it with games, and also trying to combine every single AI model into one with this would absolutely obliterate your computer
Boiling the oceans for a goddamn Nostalgia Critic-level “What if Batman met Mario?!” exploration of media.
Not a surprise, but the Tarbell Center – a big EA-funded journalism outlet – is funding Kevin Roose’s and Casey Newton’s new podcast, “Machine Gods”. I’m sure it will have no impact on the topics they choose to cover or the way they cover them.
