Want to wade into the sandy 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.)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    27·
    13 days ago

    All participants in the Stubsack, including awful.systems regulars and those joining from elsewhere, are reminded that this is not debate club. Anyone tempted by the possibility of debate-club behavior is encouraged to touch your nearest grass immediately. We are here to sneer, not to bicker: This is a place to mock the outside world, not to settle grand matters of ideology, unless the latter is done in an extraordinarily amusing way.

  • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    16 days ago

    My dad was a bit freaked out by a video version (We’re not ready for super-intelligence)of the “AI 2027” paper, particularly finding two end scenarios a bit spooky: colossus-style cooperating AIs taking over the world, and the oligarch concentration of power one, which i think definitely echoed sci-fi he watched/read as a teen.

    In case anyone else finds it useful these are the “Comments as I watch it”, that I compiled for him

    Before watching Video Notes:

    • AI Only channel with only 3 videos

    • Produced By “80000hours”, which is an EA branch (trying to peddle to you the best way to organize 40years * 50 weeks * 40 hours [I love that they assume only 2 weeks of holidays]); which is definitely cult adjacent: https://80000hours.org/about/#what-do-we-do. Mostly appears to be attempting to steer young people to what they believe are “High impact” jobs.

    Video Notes:

    • The backing paper is a bit of a joke, one “AI 2027”, for reference one of the main authors is very much a “cult member”, Scott Alexander Siskind, author of “Slate Star Codex” and “Astral Codex Ten”.

    • Other authors include [AI Futures Project] :

      • Daniel Kokotajlo (podcast co-host of siskind, ex open-ai employee, LessWrong/EA regular)
      • Thomas Larsen (ex MIRI [Machine Intelligence Research Institute = really really culty], LessWrong/EA regular)
      • Eli Lifland (LessWrong/EA regular)
      • Romeo Dean (Astra Fellowship recipient = money for AI Safety research, definitely EA sphere)

    • A lot of fluff trying to hype up the credentials of the authors.

    • AGI does not have a bounded definition.

    • They are playing up the China angle to try and drum up jingoistic support.

    • Exaggerating Chat GPT-3 success, by merely citing “users”, without mentioning actual revenue, or actual quality.

    • Quote:

      How do these things interact, well we don’t know but thinking through in detail how it might go is the way to start grappling with that.

      -> I think this epitomises the biggest flaw of their movement, they believe that from “first-principles” it’s possible to think hard enough (without needing to confront it to reality) and you can divine the future.

      -> You can look up “Prediction Markets”, which is another of their ontological sins.

    • I will note that the prediction of “Agents” was not a hard one, since this is what all this circle wants to achieve, and as the video itself points out it’s fantastically incompetent/unreliable.

    • Note: This video was made before the release of GPT-5. We don’t know precisely how much more compute altogether GPT-5 truly required, but it’s very incremental changes compared to GPT-4. I think this philosophy of “More training” is why OpenAI is currently trying (half-succeeding half failing) to raise Trillions of dollars to build out data-centers, my prediction is that the AI bubble bursts before these data centers come to fruition.

    • Note: The video assumes keeping models secret, but in reality OpenAI would have a very vested interest in displaying capability, even if not making a model available to the public. Also even on consumer models, OpenAI currently loses a bunch of money for every query.

    • Note: The video assumes “Singularitarianism”, of ever acceleration in quality of code, and that’s why they keep secret models. I think this hits a compute/energy wall in real life, even if you assume that LLMs are actually useful for making “quality” code. These ideas are not new, and these people would raise alarms about it with or without current LLM tech.

    • Specific threats of “Bio-weapon”, which a priori can not really be achieved without experimentation, and while “automated” labs half exis, they still require a lot of human involvement/resources. Technically grad students could also make deadly bioweapons, but no one is being alarmist about them.

    • Note: “Agent 2” Continuous Online learning is gobbledygook, that isn’t how ML, even today works. At some point there are very diminishing returns, and it’s a complete waste of time/energy to continue training a specific model, a qualitative difference would be achieved with a different model. I suspect this sneakily displays “Singularitarianism” dogma.

    • Quote:

      Hack into other servers Install a copy of itself Evade detection

      -> This is just science-fiction, in the real world these models require specialized hardware to be run at any effective speed, this would be extremely unlikely to evade detection. Also this treats the model as a single entity with single goals, when in reality any time it’s “run” is effectively a new instance.

    • Note: This subculture loves the concept of “science in secrecy”, which features a lot in the writings of Elizer Yudkowsky. Which is cultish both in keeping their own deeds “in a veil of secrecy”, and helpful here when making a prophecy/conspiracy theory, by making the claim hard to disprove specifically (it’s happening in secret!)

    • Note: Even today Chain-of-thought is not that reliable at explaining why a bot gives a particular answer. It’s more analog to guiding “search”, rather than true thought as in humans anyway. Them using “Alien-Language” would not be that different.

    • Agent 3, magically fast-and-cheap, assuming there are now minimum energy requirements. Then you can magically run 200,000 copies of. magically equivalent to 50,000 humans sped up by 30x. (The magic is “explained” in the paper by big assumptions, and just equating essentially how fast you can talk with the quality of talking, which given the length of their typical blog posts is actually quite funny)

    • Note: “Alignment” was the core mission of MIRI/Eliezer Yudkowsky

    • Note: Equating Power and Intelligence a lot (not in this video, but in general being suspiciously racist/eugenicist about it), ignoring the material constraints of actual power [echo: Again the epitomical sin of “If you just think hard enough”]

    • Note: Also assuming that trillions of dollars of growth can actually happen, simultaneously with millions losing their jobs.

    • I am betting that the “There is another” part of the video is probably deliberately echoing Colossus.

    • The video casually assumes that the only limits to practical fusion and nanotech just intelligence (instead of potential dead-ends, actually the nanotech part is a particular fancy of theirs, you can lookup “diamondoid bacteria” on LessWrong if you want a laugh)

    • The two outcomes at the end of the video are literally robo-heaven and robo-hell, and if you just follow our teachings (in this case slow-downs on AI) you can get to robo-heaven. You will notice they don’t imagine/advocate for a future with no massive AI integration into society, they want their robo-heaven.

    • Quote:

      None of the experts are disagreeing about a wild future.

      -> I would say specifically some of them are suggesting that AGI soon is implausible quite strongly. I think many would agree that right now the future looks dire with or without super-AI, or even regular AI.

    Takeaway section:

    Yeah this really is a cult recruitment video essentially.

    • BigMuffN69@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      16 days ago

      We’re almost at the end of 2025 and agents don’t fucking exist the way they predicted. Literally 0% acc so far. Ai 2027 agmi.

      ^image of Daniel K who already updated his rapture prophecy to 2029 because he’s a mark

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      16 days ago

      I stumbled onto that vid a while back, watched the first minute or so, lol’ed at the glazing of kokotajlo, and stopped the vid. I did think about posting it here to be torn apart but forgot about it. I watched a little bit further and got “they chose to write this as a narrative” of course they fucking did. It’s their one thing. Write a shitty 10k word story that amounts to some combination of “really makes you think” and “big if true”.

      Here’s a story: Once upon a time there was a world. In it people were sad. Then one day swlabr was elected supreme benevolent ruler and then nobody was sad again :) the end. Wow make u think. Many experts agree

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    14 days ago

    Haven’t seen this skeet posted here. Skeet:

    It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    13 days ago

    today in I fucking called it fedora aka mostly red hat has decided to allow slop code in a way that violates even their utterly mid stated principles around the tech

    if you’re downstream from any fedora packages (and I don’t know the scope of this policy so it might be safe to consider anything owned by red hat in general to be tainted — yes I realize most of us are downstream from a bunch of red hat shit) it might be time to evaluate an alternative if available

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    14 days ago

    New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. […] 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.

    • 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.

    • 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.

    • Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content

    And yet the BBC still has a Programme Director for “Generative AI” who gets trotted out to say “We want these tools to succeed”. No, we don’t, you blithering bellend.

  • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    12 days ago

    In lighter news, this anti-LLM rhyme made me chuckle:

    I will not talk with a chatbot
    I do not want it while I shop

    I do not want it on Windows X-box
    I do not want it in Firefox

    I do not want it in my house
    I do not want it on my mouse
    I do not want it here or there
    I do not want it anywhere.

    I do not want AI and Spam
    I do not want them Sam-Alt-Man

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      13 days ago

      of course the organization I know primarily for platforming fascists and astroturfing on YouTube was secretly an even worse grift and somehow tied in with Yarvin, why wouldn’t it be

      given that Rossmann’s at the head of this thing too, I’m starting to regret not taking GrapheneOS (who, notably, were also a target for this grift) seriously when they said Rossmann’s involved in a bunch of terrible shit. the right to repair deserves a better figurehead.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        8·
        13 days ago

        fuckin pisses me off, given his clippy campaign is helping move pivot shirts

        sigh

        I WILL NOT CHANGE, CLIPPY SUCKED FIRST

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          13 days ago

          Damn right. He needs to quit, he’s the one who sucks.

          The fash don’t have magic doodoo fingers that obligate decent people to surrender every time they touch something we like, and we should never concede as if they do.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        13 days ago

        hadn’t been aware that rossman’s into dodgy stuff (knew fairly little about him outside of some repair stuff on his channel), but ugh

        also clicking through into FUTO’s projects and it’s all a bit gravitating around a point, “built on polycentric”. so I wonder what that means?

        Polycentric is an open-source, distributed social network that lets you publish content to multiple servers.

        already at “I’m interested” because it’s interesting to see what other work happens in this space.

        and then very next sentence we get to

        If you’re censored on one server, your content remains accessible from other servers

        ah. I see. the “opt-out moderation” is also telling - how does it work? who knows! it’s got a paragraph under introduction but seems to not be mentioned anywhere else in the docs.

        extra frustrating to see because the projects these fucks are taking on (like the open cast thing) are items that sorely need stronger options in the open space. but not like this. never like this.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            10 days ago

            certainly has more than a bit of that urbit coiner Sovereign Individual shit going on yeah

            I tried looking around a bit to see if I could find any info about contributors there, and for the most part none of them really seem to have much internet fingerprint at all. did find one person with a moderately extensive set of personal repo/project commits spanning back a few years, spanning long enough so as to find that they were doing a BSc/Hons/something circa 2018. which isn’t concrete but does strongly hint at a current age of mid 20s to mid 30s. “get 'em while they’re young and you can poison their brains early!” - the bayfucker mantra

    • veganes_hack@feddit.orgEnglish
      5·
      13 days ago

      god damn it. i guess the name of the founder might have been a hint, only one letter away from our favorite roman saluter.

      i use immich, one of the projects they seem to have actually funded in a big way. it’s a very good selfhosted replacement for google photos. at least the license is actually open source, as opposed to grayjay, so here’s hoping it has a future in case the fascists try to fuck with it.

      i guess the problem though isn’t with the funding and/or control of individual projects, it’s with the long-term influence in the foss community they seem to be after.

    • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      13 days ago

      i had a feeling about FUTO because of rossmann’s involvement. became leery of him after this youtube bullshit from 2018:

      Let’s discuss why journalists are afraid of Elon Musk right now(and why they deserve to be)

      Elon Musk wants to come up with a way to rate the credibility and accuracy of media organizations & individual journalists. This blatant misrepresentation of his words, given in the middle of this conversation, is a PERFECT example of WHY this is so badly needed in modern society.

      I’m not a fan of Tesla for being, in many ways, the “Apple of cars.” That being said, whether or not I like Tesla when it comes to a repair standpoint has nothing to do with the hate being thrown at Elon for something he never meant in the words he said, and is entirely separate from my agreement with him on the idea of a media credibility rating platform.

  • PMMeYourJerkyRecipes@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    16 days ago

    This is not a sneer so much as a sneer request; anyone know of any good articles written about the total hypocrisy of the Free Speech brigade since the inauguration? By far the most anti-speech environment in decades and most of them are still just whining about pronouns on campus or whatever.

    (Yes; FIRE has passed this very basic test and has occasionally switched topics from whining about “leftist professors” to saying stuff like “it’s not great that we’re deporting people for writing articles for their school paper about how genocide is bad”. Literally everyone else is a hypocrite)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    11·
    12 days ago

    For something lighter, here’s an AI bro getting wowed by the shittiest “video game” I’ve ever seen (trust me, the screenshot doesn’t do it justice):

    In lieu of sneering this shit, I’d like to argue that arts education should become mandatory for all students post-bubble, regardless of their profession. STEM, humanities, tech, doesn’t matter - give them four years of art so they don’t turn out like this guy.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    10·
    14 days ago

    New paper on LLMs just dropped, titled LLMs Can Get “Brain Rot”!

    Currently a novelty at this point, but could prove useful to make the likes of Iocaine and Nepenthes more effective - especially since the paper notes:

    the damage is multifaceted in changing the reasoning patterns and is persistent against large-scale post-hoc tuning.

    It does also suggest doing some actual quality control to prevent damage to the LLMs, but that sure ain’t happening

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      14 days ago

      Closely related is a thought I had after responding to yet another paper that says hallucinations can be fixed:

      I’m starting to suspect that mathematics is not an emergent skill of language models. Formally, given a fixed set of hard mathematical questions, it doesn’t appear that increasing training data necessarily improves the model’s ability to generate valid proofs answering those questions. There could be a sharp divide between memetically-trained models which only know cultural concepts and models like Gödel machines or genetic evolution which easily generate proofs but have no cultural awareness whatsoever.

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      14 days ago

      Every time I hear a moderate AI argument (e.g. AI will be an aid for searching literature or writing code), it’s like, “Look, it’s impressive that the AI managed to do this. Sure, it took about three dozen prompts over five hours, made me waste another five hours because it generated some completely incorrect nonsense that I had to verify, produced an answer that was much lower quality than if I had just searched it up myself, and boiled two lakes in the process. You should acknowledge that there is something there, even if it did take a trillion dollars of hardware and power to grind the entire internet and all books and scientific papers into a viscous paste. Your objections are invalid because I’m sure things are gonna improve because Progress.”

      I am doubly annoyed when I turn my back and they switch back to spouting nonsense about exponential curves and how AI is gonna be smarter than humans at literally everything.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      14 days ago

      Wouldn’t f(x) = x^2 + 1 be a counterexample to “any entire (differentiable everywhere) function that is never zero must be constant”? Or are some terms defined differently in complex analysis than in the math I learned?

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    13 days ago

    look at the depth of this grifting

    a whole One (1!) H100! in space!

    note how it mentions nearly absolute fucking nothing about the supporting cast. about storage and networking, about interface capabilities, what kind of programmatic runtimes you could have! none of it. just gonna yeet a sat into space, problem solved! space DCs!

    compute! in space! “what do you mean ‘compute what’? compute!” I hear, as the jackass rapidly packs up their briefcase and starts edging towards the door. who needs to care about getting data to and from such a device? it’ll run Gemma![0] magic!

    SAR, in particular, generates lots of data — about 10 gigabytes per second, according to Johnston — so in-space inference would be especially beneficial when creating these maps.

    scan-time “inference”, like you’d definitely know every parameter you’d want to query and every result you’d want to have, first-time, at scan! there’s a fucking reason this shit gets turned into datasets, and that the tooling around processing it is as extensive as it is.

    and, again, this leaves aside all the other practical problems. of which there are many. even just the following ones should make you wince: launch, maintenance, power, heat dissipation (vacuum is an insulator!), repair, (usable) lifetime, radiation. and that’s before even touching on the nuances in those, or going further on the list

    good god.

    I guess the one good bit here is that it isn’t the “we’re gonna micromachine them in orbit!” bullshit fantasy, but I bet that’s not far behind

    [0] - “multimodal and wide language support” so literally a Local LLM, but that means it needs… input… and… response… which again goes back to all those pesky “interaction” and “network” and “storage” questions.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        13 days ago

        Heh I haven’t seen that, will have to go look

        If we knew how to use hot air for rocket propulsion we could just shove saltman et al in there and solve multiple problems at once…alas

            • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
              5·
              12 days ago

              unfortunately. hard to say if this is caused by them being primarily contrarians or because alice is too much into warsaw pact nostalgia, or because it’s edgy; edgelordism and reflexive contrarianism cause so many people to lose the contact with reality.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      7·
      13 days ago

      (vacuum is an insulator!)

      This is something the writers of the Mass Effect series got right, and they were doing a sci-fi trilogy, not handling a literal space mission!

    • ndevenish@mas.to
      6·
      13 days ago

      @froztbyte but this article clearly states that the vacuum is an advantage!

      > Instead of relying on fresh water for cooling through evaporation towers, as many Earth-based data centers do, Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink.

      <cry>

    • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      13 days ago

      this reminds me of that episode of justice league unlimited where the superheroes are all on a satellite and batman says getting it built was just

      a line item in the Wayne Industries R&D budget

      though, to be fair, that explanation is more plausible than starcloud working

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        5·
        13 days ago

        though, to be fair, that explanation is more plausible than starcloud working

        Batman’s superpower is being a billionaire, there was probably some Shenaniganstm involved

        • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          13 days ago

          i don’t think it’s fair to assume that a billionaire who dresses up like a bat to extra-legally fight crime necessarily engages in shenanigans when donating a satellite to his vigilante friends

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        13 days ago

        Yeah heat management in space turns out to be pretty fucking hard. You could ask “who knew?!” but there’s that whole space program thing…

        I presume that they’re not in fact blind to this fact, mind you. You cannot be doing actual astro tech design without it (your object would never make it to launch - there’s too many blockers that’d stop it), but the properties of heat generation from a H100 are known, and thus whatever they’re applying to deal with it very can’t be lightweight/little