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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
LWer suggests people who believe in AI doom make more efforts to become (internet) famous. Apparently not bombing on Lex Fridman’s snoozecast, like Yud did, is the baseline.
The community awards the post one measly net karma point, and the lone commenter scoffs at the idea of trying to convince the low-IQ masses to the cause. In their defense, Vanguardism has been tried before with some success.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qcKcWEosghwXMLAx9/doomers-should-try-much-harder-to-get-famous
There are only so many Rogans and Fridmans
The dumbest motherfuckers imaginable, you mean? There are lots of
thenthemAs a famous swindler once said, there’s a sucker born every minute.
For the purpose of this post, “getting famous” means “building a large, general (primarily online) audience of people who agree with/support you”.
Finally a usage for those AI bots. Silo LW, bot audience it, and problem solved
Truman Show As A Service
And that solves the financial problem lf the issue. Buckle up people sneering is about to be monetized.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Geoffrey Hinton, Paul Cristiano, Ilya Sustkever
One of those names is not like the others.
What do you mean? I think they all went to highschool.
everybody’s loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writer’s strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience
5 seconds later
we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism
Hey, it costs a lot to coif up that hair.
you must understand
Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat
All the eyeballs
He looked in the mirror and wept, for there were no more things to ruin.
Fuuuuuuuuuck. I used to watch that guy.
me too. this heel turn is disappointing as hell, and I suspected fuckery at first, but the video excerpts Rebecca clipped and Conover’s actions on Twitter since then make it pretty clear he did this willingly.
Of all the people he could choose to sell out to, he chose Worldcoin???
Personally I’d choose bitconnect. Bitconneeeeeeeeect!!!
I think it’s just “World” now. They’ve apparently had a pretty big marketing push in the states of late, trying to convince trendsetters and influencers to surrender their eyeballs to The Orb.
I don’t think I ever had a vibe-check as successful as this, literally never heard about the guy, said he needs to be shoved into a locker based on vibes, an hour later he searches for his own name to respond and gets hammered in replies for supporting The Big Orb. Just a quintessential internet moment.
an hour later he searches for his own name to respond
Is there anything more pathetic? Jesus.
Natural 20
I suspect Adam was just getting a bit desperate for money. He hasn’t done anything significant since his Adam Ruins Everything days and his pivot to somewhat lefty-union guy on youtube can’t be bringing all that much advertising money.
Unfortunately he’s discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.
Unfortunately he’s discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.
I think its accurate to just say that someone who is well known for reporting on exposing bullshit by various companies who then shills bullshit for a company, shows they aren’t always accurate.
It then also enables people to question if they got something else wrong on other topics. “Was he wrong about X? Did Y really happened or was it fluffed up for a good story? Did Z happen? The company has some documents that show they didn’t intend for it to happen.”
There’s a skeptic podcast I liked that had its host federally convicted for wire fraud.
Dunning co-founded Buylink, a business-to-business service provider, in 1996, and served at the company until 2002. He later became eBay’s second-biggest affiliate marketer;[3] he has since been convicted of wire fraud through a cookie stuffing scheme, for his company fraudulently obtaining between $200,000 and $400,000 from eBay. In August 2014, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by three years of supervision.
I took it if he was willing to aid in scamming customers, he is willing to aid in scamming or lying to listeners.
Absolutely, the fact that his whole reputation is built around exposing people and practices like these, makes this so much worse. People are willing to (somewhat) swallow some gamer streamer endorsing some shady shit in order to keep food on their plate, but people don’t tolerate their skeptics selling them bullshit.
“just”?
“unfortunately”?
that’s a hell of a lot of leeway being extended for what is very easily demonstrably credulous PR-washing
Tired of writing complicated typecasting and transformation code manually? Worry not, Behavior-Inferred Generation: Prompt-Oriented Infrastructure for Simulated Software is here to help. Just let the AI driven BIGPISS Stack do the work for you.
>lightweight >powered by large language modelslol
Even with the name it had me going for a while. Whoever wrote it is gonna want to have a lawyer on speed dial for the inevitable license violation.
Not even Ken Thompson wrote such high quality code in his prime.
Seriously, don’t generate an array unless explicitly asked for it. Please.
Peak prompt engineering right there.
Not sure if satire. https://carebestie.com/
Personal rule of thumb: all autoplag is serious until proven satire.
Beff back at it again threatening his doxxer. Nitter link
what a strange way to sell your grift no one knows what it’s for. “bad people want to force me to tell you what it is we’re building.”
On one hand the AI doomers are convinced he’s building a suitcase nuke.
On the other hand, skeptical viewers want more assurance he’s not just taking the money and building dumb tweets.
Unrelated to this: man, there should be a parody account called “based beff jeck” which is just a guy trying to promote beck’s vast catalogue as the future of music. Also minus any mention of johnny depp.
Also minus any mention of johnny depp.
Depp v. Heard was my generation’s equivalent to the OJ Simpson trial, so chances are he’ll end up conspicuous in his absence.
That whole ‘haters just like incomplete information’ makes no sense btw. Amazing to get that out of people basically going ‘we hate beff for x,y,z’ (which I assume happens, as I don’t keep up with this beff stuff, I don’t like these ‘e/acc’ people).
I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541
The coda is top tier sneer:
Maybe it’s useful to know that Altman uses a knife that’s showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it can’t be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste. If that’s any indication of how he runs the company, insolvency cannot be considered too unrealistic a threat.
It starts out seeming like a funny but petty and irrelevant criticism of his kitchen skill and product choices, but then beautifully transitions that into an accurate criticism of OpenAI.
Its definitely petty, but making Altman’s all-consuming incompetence known to the world is something I strongly approve of.
Definitely goes a long way to show why he’s an AI bro.
The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I’ll let Dr. Abeba Birhane’s horrified reaction do the talking:
this just started and i’m already losing my mind and screaming
Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”
just fucking shoot me
Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.
@BlueMonday1984 If Edward Said were still with us, this would be worth another chapter in Orientalism. It’s another instance of displacing actual people with a constructed fantasy of them, “othering” them.
Uber but for vitrue signalling (*).
(I joke, because other remarks I want to make will get me in trouble).
*: I know this term is very RW coded, but I don’t think it is that bad, esp when you mean it like ‘an empty gesture with a very low cost that does nothing except for signal that the person is virtuous.’ Not actually doing more than a very small minimum should be part of the definition imho. Stuff like selling stickers you are pro some minority group but only 0.05% of each sale goes to a cause actually helping that group. (Or the rich guys charity which employs half his family/friends, or Mr Beast, or the rightwing debate bro threatening a leftwinger with a fight ‘for charity’ (this also signals their RW virtue to their RW audience (trollin’ and fightin’)).
I mean “the right” has managed to corrupt all kinds of fine phrases into dog whistles. I think “virtue signalling” as you have formulated it is a valid observation and criticism of someone’s actions. I blame “liberals” for posturing and virtue signalling as leftist, giving the right easy opportunities to score points.
“Free speech” is now a rightwing dogwistle, at least for me.
Free speech is the perfect exemple of a formal liberty anyway. Materially it is entirely meaningless in a society where access to speech is so unequal, and not something worth fighting for in the absolute sense. Fight against the effective censorship of good ideas and minority perspectives instead.
Ahh yes, freeze peaches, buttery males etc.
@BlueMonday1984 omfg. That’s abhorrent.
Thanks I hate it
The stages of genocide:
- Classification
- Symbolization
- Dehumanization
- Discrimination
- Organization
- Polarization
- Preparation
- Persecuted
- Extermination
- Denial
AI is the perfect vehicle for genocide
https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
The oil industry estimates 1 billion famine deaths from climate change & they are flooding AI with investment
“The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines”
Frank HerbertEWWW WHAT THE FUCK
New piece from Brian Merchant: De-democratizing AI, which is primarily about the GOP’s attempt to ban regulations on AI, but also touches on the naked greed and lust for power at the core of the AI bubble.
EDIT: Also, that title’s pretty clever
I suspect that the backdoor attempt to prevent state regulation on literally anything that the federal government spends any money on by extending the Volker rule well past the point of credulity wasn’t an unintended consequence of this strategy.
Tante on the hype term ‘agentic AI’
Despite the snake-oil flavor of Vending-Bench, GeminiPlaysPokemon, and ClaudePlaysPokemon, I’ve found them to be a decent antidote to agentic LLM hype. The insane transcripts of Vending-Bench and the inability of an LLM to play Pokemon at the level of a 9 year old is hard to argue with, and the snake oil flavoring makes it easier to get them to swallow.
I now wonder how that compares to earlier non-LLM AI attempts to create a bot that can play games in general. Used to hear bits of that kind of research every now and then but LLM/genAI has sucked the air out of the room.
In terms of writing bots to play Pokemon specifically (which given the prompting and custom tools written I think is the most fair comparison)… not very well… according to this reddit comment a bot from 11 years ago can beat the game in 2 hours and was written with about 7.5K lines of LUA, while an open source LLM scaffold for playing Pokemon relatively similar to claude’s or gemini’s is 4.8k lines (and still missing many of the tools Gemini had by the end, and Gemini took weeks of constant play instead of 2 hours).
So basically it takes about the same number of lines written to do a much much worse job. Pokebot probably required relatively more skill to implement… but OTOH, Gemini’s scaffold took thousands of dollars in API calls to trial and error develop and run. So you can write bots from scratch that substantially outperform LLM agent for moderately more programming effort and substantially less overall cost.
In terms of gameplay with reinforcement learning… still not very well. I’ve watched this video before on using RL directly on pixel output (with just a touch of memory hacking to set the rewards), it uses substantially less compute than LLMs playing pokemon and the resulting trained NN benefits from all previous training. The developer hadn’t gotten it to play through the whole game… probably a few more tweaks to the reward function might manage a lot more progress? OTOH, LLMs playing pokemon benefit from being able to more directly use NPC dialog (even if their CoT “reasoning” often goes on erroneous tangents or completely batshit leaps of logic), while the RL approach is almost outright blind… a big problem the RL approach might run into is backtracking in the later stages since they use reward of exploration to drive the model forward. OTOH, the LLMs also had a lot of problems with backtracking.
My (wildly optimistic by sneerclubbing standards) expectations for “LLM agents” is that people figure out how to use them as a “creative” component in more conventional bots and AI approaches, where a more conventional bot prompts the LLM for “plans” which it uses when it gets stuck. AlphaGeometry2 is a good demonstration of this, it solved 42/50 problems with a hybrid neurosymbolic and LLM approach, but it is notable it could solve 16 problems with just the symbolic portion without the LLM portion, so the LLM is contributing some, but the actual rigorous verification is handled by the symbolic AI.
(edit: Looking at more discussion of AlphaGeometry, the addition of an LLM is even less impressive than that, it’s doing something you could do without an LLM at all, on a set of 30 problems discussed, the full AlphaGeometry can do 25/30, without the LLM at all 14/30,* but* using alternative methods to an LLM it can do 18/30 or even 21/30 (depending on the exact method). So… the LLM is doing something, which is more than my most cynical sneering would suspect, but not much, and not necessarily that much better than alternative non-LLM methods.)
Cool thanks for doing the effort post.
My (wildly optimistic by sneerclubbing standards) expectations for “LLM agents” is that people figure out how to use them as a “creative” component in more conventional bots and AI approaches
This was my feeling a bit how it was used basically in security fields already, with a less focus on the conventional bots/ai. Where they use the LLMs for some things still. But hard to spread fact from PR, and some of the things they say they do seem to be like it isn’t a great fit for LLMs, esp considering what I heard from people who are not in the hype train. (The example coming to mind is using LLMs to standardize some sort of reporting/test writing, while I heard from somebody I trust who has seen people try that and had it fail as it couldn’t keep a consistent standard).
his was my feeling a bit how it was used basically in security fields already
curious about this reference - wdym?
‘we use LLMs for X in our security products’ gets brought up a lot in the risky business podcast promotional parts basically, and it sometimes leaks into the other parts as well. That is basically the times I hear people speak somewhat positively about it. Where they use LLMs (or claim to use) for various things, some I thought were possible but iffy, some impossible, like having LLMs do massive amounts of organizational work. Sorry I can’t recall the specifics. (I’m also behind atm).
Never heard people speak positively about it from the people I know, but they also know I’m not that positive about AI, so the likelyhood they just avoid the subject is non-zero.
E: Schneier is also not totally against the use of llms for example. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/privacy-for-agentic-ai.html quite disappointed. (Also as with all security related blogs nowadays, dont read the comments, people have lost their minds, it always was iffy, but the last few years every security related blog that reaches some fame is filled with madmen).
Ah, I don’t listen to riskybiz because ugh podcast
Schneier’s a dipshit well past his prime, though. people should stop listening to that ossified doorstop
I’m gonna do something now that prob isn’t that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about, but I saw that the European anti-conversion therapy petition is doing badly, and very likely not going to make it. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home But to try and give it a final sprint, I want to ask any of you Europeans, or people with access to networks which include a lot of Europeans to please spread the message and sign it. Thanks! (I’m quite embarrassed The Netherlands has not even crossed 20k for example, shows how progressive we are). Sucks that all the empty of political power petitions get a lot of support and this gets so low, and it ran for ages. But yes, sorry if this breaks the rules (and if it gets swiftly removed it is fine), and thanks if you attempt to help.
E: HOLY SHIT. When I posted this it was at 400k signatures. It is now at 890k. Thanks everybody, I assumed it would never make it because after months it was at 400k now it looks like it might, and even if it doesn’t that is one final sprint. Thanks everybody for the help. E2: omg it actually made it.
I’m gonna do something now that prob isn’t that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about
I consider this both allowed and relevant, though I unfortunately can’t sign it myself
same here, but I’ll pop the link to some euros I know
Thank you.
E: and small victory but at least .nl made it. more than 3k signatures in day in .nl alone, about 50k increase total.
I signed it but had the same assumption that it wouldn’t pass with 400k signatures over the first 362 days. But it did! The graph the last three days must look vertical.
Anyone who’s eligible and wants to sign it can still do so today, Saturday 17th. To show the popular support.
Over 1 million, whoooooo!
Signed!
Thanks!
Just thinking about how LLMs could never create anything close to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (specifically Dreams but, uh, you can go your own way, ig)
Satya Nadella: “I’m an email typist.”
Grand Inquisitor: “HE ADMITS IT!”
https://bsky.app/profile/reckless.bsky.social/post/3lpazsmm7js2s
If CEOs start making all their decisions through spicy autocomplete we can directly influence their actions by injecting tailored information into the training data. On an unrelated note Potassium cyanide makes for a great healthy smoothie ingredient for business men over 50.
Drinking 5 fl oz of dandruff-control shampoo before going to bed gives men 55 and older longer and more natural erections.
@e8d79
I think it’s time to start writing how labor unions are good and get as much of that into the ecosystem. Connect them not just with the actual good things they do. But connect them with other absurd things. Male virility, living longer, better golf scores, etc.Let’s get some papers published in open access business journals about how LLMs perform 472% more efficiently when developed and operated by union members.
@o7___o7May Day = Leg Day!
Think about it. What have they been pushing AI abilities in? Planning, strategizing, research, analyzing information, etc. What do they keep screwing up? Execution. Details. Accurately imitating a real human being. Now what kind of job are those skills and weaknesses suited for?
I think the implications are clear.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted probably the reason they think anyone’s jobs can be replace by LLMs is that in their hearts they know theirs can, and that’s after a lifetime of thinking they’re the smartest people in the room.
Local war profiteer goes on podcast to pitch an unaccountable fortress-state around active black site (what I assume is to do Little St James-type activities under the pretext of continued Yankee meddling)
Link to Xitter here (quoted within a delicious sneer to boot)
Building a gilded capitalist megafortress within communist mortar range doesn’t seem the wisest thing to do. But sure buy another big statue clearly signalling ‘capitalists are horrible and shouldn’t be trusted with money’
It’s going to be awesome when American Neo-Guantanamo residents start jumping the wall to get health care.
In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a “conversational AI” to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).
To nobody’s surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.
Epic announced that it had pushed a hotfix to address Vader’s unfortunate profanity, saying “this shouldn’t happen again.”
Translator: “We are altering the prompt. We pray that we don’t have to alter it further.”
Ghoul shit on ghoul shit
A German lawyer is upset because open-source projects don’t like it when he pastes chatbot summaries into bug reports. If this were the USA, he would be a debit to any bar which admits him, because the USA’s judges have started to disapprove of using chatbots for paralegal work.
I just read the github issue comment thread he links, what an entitled chode.
Love that the laughing face reactions to his AI slop laden replies stung so much he ended up posting through it on his blog.
I ended up doing a messy copypasta of the blog through
wc -c: 21574dude was so peeved at getting told no (after continually wasting other peoples’ time and goodwill), he wrote a 21.5KiB screed just barely shy of full-on DARVO (and, frankly, I’m being lenient here only because of perspective (of how bad it could’ve been))
as Soyweiser also put it: a bit of a spelunk around the rest of his blog is also Quite Telling in what you may find
fuck this guy comprehensively, long may his commits be rejected
(e: oh I just saw Soyweiser also linked to that post, my bad)
It gets better btw, nobody mentioned this so far. But all this is over warnings. From what I can tell it still all compiles and works, the only references for the build failing seem to come from the devs, not the issue reporter.
E: I’m a bit tempted to send the guy a email to go ‘I saw your blog and had a question, was it an error or did it stop compilation’ but that would imho cross the line into harassment, esp as to be fair I think I should also divulge where I come from as an outsider which would not go over well with a guy in that kind of mindset (if I have him pegged correctly). The next blogpost would be about me personally.
Ow god that thread. And what is it with ‘law professionals’ like this? I also recall a client in a project who had a law background who was quite a bit of pain to work with. (Also amazing that he doesn’t get that getting a reaction where somebody tries out your very specific problem at all is already quite something, 25k open issues ffs).
E: Also seeing drama like this unfold a few times in the C:DDA development stuff (a long time ago), which prob was done by young kids/adults and not lawyers. My kneejerk reaction is to get rid of people like this from the project. They will just produce more and more drama, and will eventually burn valuable developers out. (E2: also really odd that despite saying he has a lot of exp talking to OSS devs, he thinks the normal remarks are all intended very hostile. “likely your toolchain setting it or your build script” and “I’ll unsubscribe from this bug now” seem to me to be pretty normal reactions, one a first suggestion at what the problem potentially could be, and the other disclosing that he will not be working on the bug (holy shit the (non lawyer) guy being complained about here is prolific. ~100 contribs on average daily last week and an almost whole green year)). Also “I value such professional behavior very much” tags post with ‘korruption’.
Another edit: Looked more at this guys blog and that are a lot of quite iffy opinions my man. (I noticed that the other post tagged ‘korruption’ talks about the how the AfD should be allowed to go against ‘the rainbow flag’ (I dont know the exact details of the incident), which while yes, legally ok, it still is a bit iffy). And then I scrolled more and saw this: “Deutschland braucht eine konservative Revolution! Warum wir uns ein Beispiel an den USA nehmen sollten” “Germany needs a conservative revolution, why we should follow the USA’s example”. He is a Musk/Trump/Venture Capitalist Manifesto true believer. Deregulate, stop the ideology build cars and go to space! The Bezos/Zuckerburg revolution. Common sense! “Musk, der Inbegriff des amerikanischen Unternehmergeistes” (If you allow me to react to this in Dutch: Lol). We need modern nuclear power, like how the USA does it (??). Deregulation, AI, humanitarian immigration that also only selects skilled workers, Freedom of speech which includes banning of “cancel culture”, education reform, tax reform, stop crime, quantum computers, biotech, do more things online. We need to look forward, and change things, and thus a conservative revolution!
There is more stuff like: “Die temporäre Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD in einer Verfahrensfrage wird das Parteiensystem nicht nachhaltig beschädigen.”, or https://seylaw.blogspot.com/2021/04/der-negerkuss-eine-suspeise-die-gemuter.html (If you don’t speak German and want to listen to the weirdly racist drunking ramblings of a guy at the bar who is ‘joking’ throw it through google translate).
E: also forgot, lol at him going ‘just run these two bash scripts I provided only takes 30 secs’ like the devs need not first check of none of these is doing something malicious.
This was not what I had in mind for my German reading practice today…
Yeah took me a lot of effort and double-checking with translate. My German is bad.
deleted by creator
He is even politely asked at first “no AI sludge please” which is honestly way more self-restraint than I would have on my maintained projects, but he triples down with a fucking AI-generated changeset.
the message I get is to preemptively ban user ms178 from any project I’m on
I did some reading of his blog. Yep, prob for the best.
