Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
deleted by creator
“The Publisher of the Journal “Nature” Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work”, by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:
Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated “Media Kits” to summarize and promote their research.
In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will “maximize the impact” of their research, saying the $49 package will return “high-quality” outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher’s sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.
ah yeah exactly what i needed: a button that burns a square km of rainforest with every press, that might generate an abstract (that i’ve already wrote) but wrong, or fake press release that goes nowhere and also is wrong, while at the same time sending what might be restricted data fuck knows where with pinky promise that they won’t blend it and force feed their imagined machine god
Earlier this week, for instance, the massive publishing body announced in a press release that it would be deploying a “new AI-driven tool” crafted to automate “editorial quality checks” and notify editors to “potentially unsuitable manuscripts”. The announcement adds that manuscripts may be held back from peer review if the AI tool deems them editorially unfit.
watch this to be used as a bludgeon against ESL authors. oh noes poor country people, go somewhere else because Computer Says No. then they decrease acceptance rate on their website
A Guy in India (specialist) approach to detection of slop will still work, but it’s not resistant to office politics of complaining that it’s not web scale and such. i can’t wait for collapse of this bubble
[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty
When the very first thing you say about a character is that they “have money in crypto”, you may already be doing it wrong
wow i hate this so much
it’s neat how the cartooning gets lazier and lazier as it goes though
holy shit you really weren’t kidding about how lazy it gets. there’s a bunch of frames that are just text I’m not gonna read on a black background???
- has money in crypto
- skin is actively melting
- will keep monologuing even when unconscious, like a broken video game cutscene
The FDA thing gave me whiplash what the fuck, what did I miss
evil regulators prevent sv megaminds from unrestricted access to adderall probably
idk what specifically, there has been a thing with anti-cavity bacteria that didn’t work or maybe that’s about some transhumanist bs
I remember from my misspent youth reading Scott’s ramblings a fair bit of antipathy towards FDA regulations in particular. What I can only attribute to ignorance of history makes them fall prey to the standard libertarian talking points about slowing down drugs that could improve people’s lives, never mind the fact that in the absence of those regulations everybody who could hypothetically benefit from psychedelic nootropics or whatever would have been too busy dealing with phocomelia to care.
they think they can reason from first principles out of this problem and obviously all these pitfalls won’t happen to them, they’re too smart for this. they aren’t like these filthy obstructionists of progress that actually know what they’re doing, you see
Even if that was true, they have to understand that other people exist and may take advantage of this, right? Like, even if you believe you and your friends are paragons of moral and intellectual virtue, the same law applies to villains and dumbasses.
i don’t think that they think that everyone else has as much agency as they do (and it’s kinda true, but not because of npc world, but because they’re rich fucks with too much time to waste)
also, if they had a way they’d make carveouts iq-dependent
Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.
Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.
Ah, here’s the post I was thinking of; I missed it somehow.
yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.
Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI
I just want to harp on this one:
“Existing methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.”
Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? “Existing methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for users”. “Existing methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patients”. “Existing methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for users”.
The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that it’s TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, “ye, cars kinda suck because making sure they don’t is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to do”.
It’s YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. “Oh but it’s very technical” YOU’RE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR???
The worst bit is, the devs who aren’t like this are basically forced to comply anyway. Whenever I justify a delay in some release with that testing/bugfixing takes time, I get slapped with release it anyway, you can patch it later, and although I am lucky to be in a privileged position where I can fight this for some amount of time, every young programmer who comes into a job with a good mindset is not and has to bend over or face shit like negative performance reviews because they’re too slow.
This is so fucking infuriating. I don’t want to release shit software, I want to make sure the stuff I ship works. Back when patching meant you had to ship a physical medium to a non-trivial amount of users, that was how things worked, but apparently only because IT HAD TO and not because it’s good fucking work ethics to have. Now that you can just zero-day patch everything it’s apparently okay to ship unfinished shit and use your customers as beta testers.
I hate this so much and I try to avoid doing this as much as I can professionally. And whenever I can’t I actually feel bad and want to apologize to everyone who has to use that shit release.
A great example of ‘we are bad at our jobs and if you rely on us everybody will die’
Thanks, that was infuriating to read.
Whenever techbros use the word “storytelling”, some disaster follows…
The New Antitrust is so goddamn meta, deep writing from the 2025 authors
An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it’s much worse:
https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/
[Do not post} Insults, including those about […] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
You can see the full diff from last version if you click “Jan 8, 2025” and yeah it’s a doozy.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn’t really concentrate on work. It’s hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn’t dunking on them for it.
On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.
* or indeed simply having a gender and I’m not sure fascists know how to use words right.
See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day it’s gonna be like 5 hours tops.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.
same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because we’ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; it’s so core to the mission that we don’t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that can’t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I don’t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact “this is just how it is” way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way — that is shocking.
as usual, Nina said it more coherently than I did
Now the new language merely bans “unsupported comparisons” between protected groups’ on the basis of their “inherent intellectual capacity”
Im sure we all noticed that this is also exactly one of those things which was allowed in the Rationalist places. And one of the reasons that it took them forever to get rid of slurinnameO on the ssc subreddit (E: He now moved to twitter where he has a terrifying 200k followers (cremieuxrecueil if you want to block the shithead)).
It is very disturbing and scary.
They’re explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?
Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.
I’m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.
The backlash already happened - it’s been a few years of far right protests against drag shows and prides. Not that it can’t get worse!
I’ve been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and “making fun” of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don’t remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.
It was always “we don’t censor speech but don’t be an asshole” with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen even the worst places say, “we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead”.
Holy fucking shitballs.
My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:
You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you’re selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ
(From the comments for “The average rationalist IQ is about 122”.)
I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?
Yes it has had good ideas. As rationalwiki said. The good ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not good.
even some of their bad ideas aren’t original
<insert rant about lizardman constant here again>, and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!
E: ow god the first comments are ‘actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQ’
E: in other related new turns out Cephalopods have a higher IQ that the people on themotte. Article unrelated, just thought it was neat.
25475 O Jan 08 Duke University ( 42K) Help Us Evaluate New Personalized AI Learning Tool
groan
put an article in mdpi and you’ll get 70 of these per month
Zuck wants to get back to his roots
It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: […] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.
Ah i recall somebody got mad when I mentioned traditionally capitalists will team up with fascists.
Maybe I was naive, but I didn’t expect all this to go that fast and that blatant…
No, I’m with you. Bad feeling about where this is going.
a few people have been posting along the lines of “we all knew Facebook was evil, why are you surprised” which seems to miss the point — this is happening so fast and blatant that we’re almost definitely seeing the early stages of a playbook being executed. and even if not: Facebook was already the fash pipeline targeting mom, dad, and grandma. should I feel good that the pipeline is getting much more efficient and pervasive? none of them are ever gonna be on something like the fediverse.
the new FB standards guy is a Heritage Foundation guy, he would be the precise vector
internally at Meta:
-trans and nonbinary themes stripped from Messenger
-enforcement policy now allows for the denial of trans people’s existence
-tampons removed from men’s restrooms
-DEI programs shuttered
-Kaplan briefed top conservative influencers the night before policy changes were announced
holy fuck :|
Meta’s memo to employees rolling back DEI programs (axios.com) 916 points by bsilvereagle 17 hours ago | hide | 1315 comments
orange site is having a moment
haven’t tried to look at the comments yet though, those numbers are ominous
zuck is really pulling that gaddafi look recently, wonder if he will be found someday in a drainage pipe
this is going in hard enough that I suspect zuck is not expecting there to be another meaningful election
Is that a comedy account? The announcement surely reads as if it was…
To add an insult to the injury meta renames pride themed skins in chat https://labyrinth.zone/objects/e129982d-997e-489b-985a-3ef547b66bf3
It’s not. Surprise! All of Silicon Valley has gone mask off in preparation for the new administration in Washington!
deleted by creator
Fascist virtue signalling aside, candy floss should not exist. That’s like the exact opposite of dental care.
Edit: I have been made aware that Candy Floss is another name for cotton candy, which is delicious. Though my point kind of still stands.
we regret to inform you that mullenweg is still posting through it
no matter how unhinged you may expect this to be on starting to read it, you’re probably guessing low
To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
The passive-aggressive language and the pettyness is such a combination.
[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.
end_me_now.jpg
the sheer amount and rapidity of times it goes from “fucking wot m8” to moments where you can just see him cackling to himself, “hee heeeeee… that’ll teach 'em!”, just constant whiplash
my neck hurts and I should’ve stretched
SEOs match quality websites to those users trying to find them. As much as Google and Bing like to pretend that they’re perfect there are very real indexing issues that crop up and need experts to debug, mitigate, and prevent; so in a very real way the SEOs do make the web better for users.
[comment continues below the ad]
For example let’s say there was a user who wanted to read a website full of LLM written articles and ads but they keep stumbling across low quality websites with poor SEO practices like Wikipedia instead, why that would be terrible. In order to prevent this terrible possiblity it is the noble duty of SEOs to buy well respected high ranking domain names so that users get a brand they can trust. Like Forbes. Or Radioshack.
[comment continues below the ad]
Sincerely, the myseonews.now “staff”.
You could hook Cthulhu with bait that big.
OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I don’t think ai noticed.
At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.
I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.
That seems reasonable.
LessWrongers find cool reception for translated HPMOR copies sent to Russia’s highest IQ youth
big sending bibles to north korea energy
Lmaou. “We need to alignment pill the Russian youth.” Fast forward to the year 20XX and the haunted alignment pilled adults are now ‘aligning’ their bots to the world’s top nuclear armed despot.
tony_soprano_how_could_this_happen.jpg (for some reason awful systems won’t let me upload pictures anymore (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ)
Holy Moses in heaven, iirc both Sam and Dario have said that their urge to build the torment nexus came from being inspired by online RAT forums. Maybe alignment ‘pilling’ youths is counterproductive to human flourishing? As the LWers say, “update your priors fuckheads”
people in the Russian-speaking EA community are all busy with other things.
i.e. working for Putin, running from Putin, or dying for Putin
I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people.
Zoom and enhance!
alignment-pill
The inability to hear what their own words sound like is terminal. At this stage, we can only provide palliative care, i.e., shoving into lockers.
Man, now I’m bummed that I don’t have a cult trying to distribute translations of my Daria fic in which Jane becomes Hell Priest of the Cenobites.
please excuse me while I infinitely recursively scream into the void
Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications
(this shit has been getting airtime at a couple of different networking conferences, and it’s all as ridiculous and pointless as you’d blindly guess)
i know it’s not a competition, but consider https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/generative-ai-virtual-cell/681246/
It still has to go through peer review, so I fully expect one (1) accepted paper with the title “Large Generative AI Models in Telecommunications - What? No. Why? No!”
Hit me up if you want to collaborate on one lol
Here’s a start:
Given their enormous environmental cost and their foundation upon exploited labor, justifying the use of Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications is an uphill task. Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit, climbing that hill has no merit.
Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit [1],
== References
[1] Frankfurt H. On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 1986; 6:81-100.
Let’s start collecting a bibliography
here have incomprehensible meme
inb4
I love the leaves and gold meme and I use it constantly even though quite literally no one ever understands it, so, thank you, now I know there’s two of us.
Zapisz obrazek jako ahgsfds doesn’t translate well, i think that’s why
Maybe EAs should ditch malaria nets and start subsidizing bum ticklers
disclaimer
(not a claim made by linked OP)
su;dr
(saw URL; didn’t read)
Re: disclaimer
Not OP indeed, butt …
The comments are something else alright:
The part about kids is wrong. Per Aella’s survey, many people report having masturbated well before puberty. Breeding and pregnancy were actually one of my earliest kinks when I was 7.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
yeah I wasn’t sure about what to post either but this about gets it
feels bad when “Per Aella’s survey” is the high point of a post
I’m sure her surveys are immune to sampling bias and therefore perfectly represent the general population. /s
There even is a SSC post talking about how even professionally ran surveys have a 5% rate of bullshit (the lizardman constant, mentioned by Scott in 2013, and now in a lot more places (I think the idea is fine, just that Scott seems to draw a few to generalizing conclusions (in the article, not the conclusion) about classifying people as trolls/malicious vs 'sometimes people give a trollish/malicious answer. I also don’t think the percentage is constant)). (Yes, SSC style Rationalists not internalizing the SSC lore is one of my pet peeves). And as Amoeba_girl said, this is the highlight of the post.
E: and as the LC was written in 2013, I really don’t want to know how often Rationalists/LWers/etc have referred to a poll after that as being important. (And how often they have used the LC to dismiss polls used as arguments by others).
Oof ouch
Im going ro pretend i never saw that.
just when you think you’re at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the rationalists take you lower
