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.)
A classic example of the “AI can’t be dumb because humans are dumb too” trope, Pokemon Red edition:
I mean, it’s obviously true that games have their own internal structures and languages that aren’t always obvious without knowledge or context, and the FireRed comparison is a neat case where you can see that language improving as designers have both more tools (here meaning colors and pixels) and also more experience in using them. But also even in the LW thread they mention that when humans run into that kind of problem they don’t just act randomly for 6 hours. Either they came up with some systematic approach for solving the problem, they walked away from the game to ask for help, or something else. Also you have the metacognition to be able to understand easily “that rug at the bottom marks the exit” once it’s explained, which I’m pretty sure the LLM doesn’t have the ability to process. It’s not even like a particularly dumb 6-year-old. Even if it’s prone to similar levels of over matching and pattern recognition errors, the 6-year-old has an actual conscious brain to help solve those problems. The whole thing shows once again that pattern recognition and reproduction can get you impressively far in terms of imitating thought, but there’s a world of difference between that imitation and the real deal.
this is so embarrassing. “you say Claude is less capable than a typical six year old? yeah well what if the six year old is notably stupid? did you think of that?”
LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.
Claude couldn’t exit the house at the beginning of Pokémon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore it’s dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldn’t figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!
I hate that this shit has an established name now.
Do we have any experts on Wikipedian article-deletion practices around here? Because that looks really thinly sourced.
To sorta repeat a prediction of mine, shit like this is gonna tank the public image of coding as a profession.
Inevitable software issues aside, “vibe coding” as a concept undermines any notion of coding as being a difficult/skillful thing, making it sound like coders are doing the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That the software produced by this method is inevitably derivative, dogshit or derivative dogshit is gonna help damage coding’s image, too.
AI is going to wreck the world without even being asked to turn things into paperclips. Just giving all coders out of the loop performance problems.
New piece from Brian Merchant: So the LA Times replaced me with an AI that defends the KKK
Recommending a piece I ran across: I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
ok so on the one hand fuck solitary confinement on the other hand
LMAOU
truly the podcasting bros are the most oppressed minority in america
(also it looks like a bit more than the usual audience numbers for carlson channel, but it’s only one day so it’s kinda a bit more than nobody watched it. but it’s much less than when he openly pandered to schizos, cryptobros or vatniks)
occasionally mentioned here Jan Marsalek implicated in surveillance (sometimes comically bad) and planned murder of journalists who crossed him https://theins.press/en/inv/279034 https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/07/uk-court-convicts-three-bulgarians-of-spying-for-russia
State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear “pro-Hamas”
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-foreign-student-visas-hamas
Odds that this catches some Israeli nationalists in the net because they were posting about Hamas and arguing with the supposed sympathizers? Given their moves to gut the bureaucracy I can’t imagine they have the manpower to have a human person review all the people this is going to flag.
we live in hell https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-global
(this is compounded by how some segment of heavy ai boosters/users - former cryptobros, but not only them - were already immersed in this particular bubble)
Ow look the thing I worried about on r/scc (yes I know my own fault for touching it) which could not happen ‘because you dont understand how llms work’ happend.
This just hit my inbox (and spurred me to unsubscribe from future BuiltIn slop) and man, so tired of this sort of mindless drivel. Like companies still have trouble with basic application and management processes, but magic robot will fix? Fucking hell.
New thread from Ed Zitron, focusing on the general trashfire that is CoreWeave. Jumping straight to the money-shot, he noted how the company is losing money selling shovels in the gold rush:
You want my off-the-cuff prediction, CoreWeave will probably be treated as the Leyman Brothers of the 2020s, an unofficial mascot of everything wrong with Wall Street (if not the world) during the AI bubble.
Nvidia’s current downturn is probably moreso due to the disastrous launch of it’s 5000 series rather than AI.
If it was AI I’m guessing the drop would be larger.
it’s possibly a distinction without a meaningful difference, but I wouldn’t say they’re selling shovels - this shit is more like renting out shovels. or maybe timeshare?
I’d love to see a postmortem on deals and development… I have some suspicions on how it all got in this mess to start with (largely “if we sink piles of capex now to corner the market on the magical future, we can totes make it through 5y!” type variations), but I want to see if I’m right
see the funny thing is that ms et al are walking back/scaling down their deployment plans, but that’s all partial on the whole. microsoft isn’t going to completely explode overnight the moment everyone groks llms are trash, even though they’re gonna take a hit
the entities like coreweave whose entire existence is predicated on the fairy tale, however…
(I am still worried about the multi-industry downstream impact of when this shit finally pops though, it is going to be nasty)
I didn’t know a16z was so devoted to developing new hires! Don’t you just love to see it.
During the trial, Penny’s defense brought in a forensic pathologist who claimed that Neely hadn’t died from being choked but from a “combination of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, sickle cell trait and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint,
I get that defense attorneys have to work with what they have but goodness am I tired of this argument.
“Your honor the deceased did not die from being shot through the temple, but due to having chronic migraines and exposure to second hand smoke 3 years ago and also walking towards the bullet thus increasing it’s relative velocity slighty”
It’s just racist as hell. A revival of excited delirium pseudoscience.
HEY GUYS CHECK THIS OUT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1yHrZR_Sgg
with the awful (systems) assistance of self, fasterandworse and jp of this parish
no idea when i’ll do another one, this one was 3 hrs faff for 5 min video lol
things I need: a better mic, a chair that doesn’t swivel
I did in fact have fun! If the quick-hit format turns out to be worth your time, I have to say I quite enjoy it, and I hardly count myself as a TikTok-obsessed zoomer.
I’ve been a little bit sad that Ed Z dropped the rapid-fire 15-minute format once he hit the podcast big time. I really appreciated that format’s conciseness; not sure if you’d want to pick that sort of thing up. I have to wonder if it’s easier or harder to book people for such a delimited time slot.
oh yeah loved that format, perfect
however, Better Offline makes money
fuck yeah! it’s a very solid start, and I appreciate the (is that clickbaity enough) in the thumbnail
how much is templated now? reckon it’ll be 3hrs every time?
if i stop saying “um” all the time that’s half an hour less in post right there
I was going to write that it was good that you didn’t say “um” all the time. (Being silent in pauses is in my experience a learned skill for most people and one that comes once one has heard oneself say “um” too many times.)
The sound was fine. I think your (Jabra?) headset did its job unless that was also the result of editing.
The imagery got a bit distracting because you look to the side of the camera. No problem for podcasts, but for video it’s better to look straight at the camera to look at the audience so to speak. (Also a learnt skill.) So maybe a webcam you can place in front of the screen you are presumably reading of?
No idea about marketing a YouTube, but you got in the “like and subscribe”, so that is probably good.
I thought I was looking into the camera, but phones are annoying
lol I have no idea if anyone would recognize me by that reference
(I don’t mind, just surprised at someone Of The Internet actually using that name :D)
google stepping up their quest to disorganize the world’s information
what if, right, we made a search engine so good it became the verb for searching, and then we replaced it with a robot with a concussion
New ultimate grift dropped, Ilya Sutskever gets $2B in VC funding, promises his company won’t release anything until ASI is achieved internally.
I’m convinced that these people have no choice but to do their next startup, especially if their names are already prominent in the press like Sutskever and Murati. Once you’re off the grift train, there is no easy way back on. I guess you can maybe sneak back in as a VC staffer or an independent board member, but that doesn’t seem quite as remunerative.
It’s the Saul Goodman effect, if you’ve grifted before and know you can make such easy money the only way for you to stop is to go through some major internal growth and internalise that it’s deeply unethical, but that’s so hard, man, why would you do that when you can just raise a billion dollars with a smile
Fellas, 2023 called. Dan (and Eric Schmidt wtf, Sinophobia this man down bad) has gifted us with a new paper and let me assure you, bombing the data centers is very much back on the table.
"Superintelligence is destabilizing. If China were on the cusp of building it first, Russia or the US would not sit idly by—they’d potentially threaten cyberattacks to deter its creation.
@ericschmidt @alexandr_wang and I propose a new strategy for superintelligence. 🧵
Some have called for a U.S. AI Manhattan Project to build superintelligence, but this would cause severe escalation. States like China would notice—and strongly deter—any destabilizing AI project that threatens their survival, just as how a nuclear program can provoke sabotage. This deterrence regime has similarities to nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD). We call a regime where states are deterred from destabilizing AI projects Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), which could provide strategic stability. Cold War policy involved deterrence, containment, nonproliferation of fissile material to rogue actors. Similarly, to address AI’s problems (below), we propose a strategy of deterrence (MAIM), competitiveness, and nonproliferation of weaponizable AI capabilities to rogue actors. Competitiveness: China may invade Taiwan this decade. Taiwan produces the West’s cutting-edge AI chips, making an invasion catastrophic for AI competitiveness. Securing AI chip supply chains and domestic manufacturing is critical. Nonproliferation: Superpowers have a shared interest to deny catastrophic AI capabilities to non-state actors—a rogue actor unleashing an engineered pandemic with AI is in no one’s interest. States can limit rogue actor capabilities by tracking AI chips and preventing smuggling. “Doomers” think catastrophe is a foregone conclusion. “Ostriches” bury their heads in the sand and hope AI will sort itself out. In the nuclear age, neither fatalism nor denial made sense. Instead, “risk-conscious” actions affect whether we will have bad or good outcomes."
Dan literally believed 2 years ago that we should have strict thresholds on model training over a certain size lest big LLM would spawn super intelligence (thresholds we have since well passed, somehow we are not paper clip soup yet). If all it takes to make super-duper AI is a big data center, then how the hell can you have mutually assured destruction like scenarios? You literally cannot tell what they are doing in a data center from the outside (maybe a building is using a lot of energy, but not like you can say, “oh they are running they are about to run superintelligence.exe, sabotage the training run” ) MAD “works” because it’s obvious the nukes are flying from satellites. If the deepseek team is building skynet in their attic for 200 bucks, this shit makes no sense. Ofc, this also assumes one side will have a technology advantage, which is the opposite of what we’ve seen. The code to make these models is a few hundred lines! There is no moat! Very dumb, do not show this to the orangutan and muskrat. Oh wait! Dan is Musky’s personal AI safety employee, so I assume this will soon be the official policy of the US.
link to bs: https://xcancel.com/DanHendrycks/status/1897308828284412226#m
Also I think he doesn’t understand MAD like, at all. The point isn’t that you can strike your enemy’s nuclear infrastructure and prevent them from fighting back. In fact that’s the opposite of the point. MAD as a doctrine is literally designed around the fact that you can’t do this, which is why the Soviets freaked out when it looked like we were seriously pursuing SDI.
Instead the point was that nuclear weapons were so destructive and hard to defend against that any move against the sovereignty of a nuclear power would result in a counter-value strike, and whatever strategic aims were served by the initial aggression would have to be weighed against something in between the death of millions of civilians in the nuclear annihilation of major cities and straight-up ending human civilization or indeed all life on earth.
Also if you wanted to reinstate MAD I think that the US, Russia, and probably China have more than enough nukes to make it happen.
You mean MAD doesn’t stand for Unilaterally Assured Destruction?
I guess now that USAID is being defunded and the government has turned off their anti-russia/china propaganda machine, private industry is taking over the US hegemony psyop game. Efficient!!!
/s /s /s I hate it all
If they’re gonna fearmonger can they at least be creative about it?!?! Everyone’s just dusting off the mothballed plans to Quote-Unquote “confront” Chy-na after a quarter-century detour of fucking up the Middle East (moreso than the US has done in the past)
Credit to Dan, who clearly sees the winds are changing. The doomer grift don’t pay as much no mo’ so instead he turns to being a china hawk and advocate for chip controls and cyberwarfare as the way to stay in the spotlight. As someone who works in the semiconductor biz and had to work 60 hours last week because our supply chains are now completely fucked due to the tariffs, these chucklefucks can go pound sand and then try to use that pounded sand to make a silicon ingot.
two giant upsets to the semi market in the space of half a decade is probably perfectly fine and won’t have multi year global impacts, right? right?
(oof at that week, and g’luck with whatever still comes your way with that)
Ah appreciate it. Don’t worry too much about me, I enjoy the work in a fucked-up way because it makes me feel like a big business boy and my mommy is real proud of me.
But it is stressful cuz there are a bunch of people in China and the US whose jobs depend on us being able to solve this problem and that keeps me up at night. I got the handle tho.
