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.
The beautiful process of dialectics has taken place on the butterfly site, and we have reached a breakthrough in moral philosophy. Only a few more questions remain before we can finally declare ethics a solved problem. The most important among them is, when an omnipotent and omnibenevolent basilisk simulates Roko Mijic getting kicked in a nuts eternally by a girl with blue hair and piercings, would the girl be barefoot or wearing heavy, steel-toed boots? Which kind of footwear of lack thereof would optimize the utility generated?
The last conundrum of our time: of course steel capped work boots would hurt more but barefoot would allow faster (and therefore more) kicks.
You have not taken the lessons of the philosopher Piccolo to mind. You should wear even heavier boots in your day to day. Why do you think goths wear those huge heavy boots? For looks?
I’ve often called slop “signal-shaped noise”. I think the damage already done by slop pissed all over the reservoirs of knowledge, art and culture is irreversible and long-lasting. This is the only thing generative “AI” is good at, making spam that’s hard to detect.
It occurs to me that one way to frame this technology is as a precise inversion of Bayesian spam filters for email; no more and no less. I remember how it was a small revolution, in the arms race against spammers, when statistical methods came up; everywhere we took of the load of straining SpamAssassin with rspamd (in the years before gmail devoured us all). I would argue “A Plan for Spam” launched Paul Graham’s notoriety, much more than the Lisp web stores he was so proud of. Filtering emails by keywords was not being enough, and now you could train your computer to gradually recognise emails that looked off, for whatever definition of “off” worked for your specific inbox.
Now we have the richest people building the most expensive, energy-intensive superclusters to use the same statistical methods the other way around, to generate spam that looks like not-spam, and is therefore immune to all filtering strategies we had developed. That same blob-like malleability of spam filters makes the new spam generators able to fit their output to whatever niche they want to pollute; the noise can be shaped like any signal.
I wonder what PG is saying about gen-“AI” these days? let’s check:
“AI is the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem,” he wrote on X. “It’s the solution to far more problems than its developers even knew existed … AI is turning out to be the missing piece in a large number of important, almost-completed puzzles.”
He shared no examples, but […]Who would have thought that A Plan for Spam was, all along, a plan for spam.
It occurs to me that one way to frame this technology is as a precise inversion of Bayesian spam filters for email.
This is a really good observation, and while I had lowkey noticed it (one of those feeling things), I never had verbalized it in anyway. Good point imho. Also in how it bypasses and wrecks the old anti-spam protections. It represents a fundamental flipping of sides of the tech industry. While before they were anti-spam it is now pro-spam. A big betrayal of consumers/users/humanity.
Signal shaped noise reminds me of a wiener filter.
Aside: when I took my signals processing course, the professor kept drawing diagrams that were eerily phallic. Those were the most memorable parts of the course
Ed Zitron’s given his thoughts on GPT-5’s dumpster fire launch:
Personally, I can see his point - the Duke Nukem Forever levels of hype around GPT-5 set the promptfondlers up for Duke Nukem Forever levels of disappointment with GPT-5, and the “deaths” of their AI waifus/therapists this has killed whatever dopamine delivery mechanisms they’ve set up for themselves.
i think it’s possible that’s a cost cutting measure on part of openai
well maybe not, i hope for the worst for them https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/09/open-ai-chat-gpt5-energy-use
@BlueMonday1984 @dgerard can we have a Duke Nukem personality for GPT5. Start a nostalgic wave of prompts?
Anyways, personal sidenote/prediction: I suspect the Internet Archive’s gonna have a much harder time archiving blogs/websites going forward.
Me, two months ago
Looks like I was on the money - Reddit’s began limiting what the Internet Archive can access, claiming AI corps have been scraping archived posts to get around Reddit’s pre-existing blocks on scrapers. Part of me suspects more sites are gonna follow suit pretty soon - Reddit’s given them a pretty solid excuse to use.
Good news everyone! Someone with a SlackSlub has started a series countering the TESCREAL narrative.
He (c’mon, it’s a guy) calls it “R9PRESENTATIONALism”
It stands for
- Relational
- 9P
- Postcritical
- Personalist
- Praxeological
- Psychoanalytic
- Participatory
- Performative
- Particularist
- Poeticist
- Positive/Affirmationist
- Reparative
- Existentialist
- Standpoint-theorist
- Embodied
- Narrativistic
- Therapeutic
- Intersectional
- Orate
- Neosubstantivist
- Activist
- Localist
I see no reason why this catchy summary won’t take off!
Also “orate” is a fucking verb
They probably conflated it with ornate lol
they should just touch GRASS
Guided Rationalist Acceptance of Socionormality Studies
I have a better counter narrative:
- Consequentialism
- Universalism
- Meta-analytical
- Singularitarianism
- Heuristicationalism
- Autodidacticalisticalistalism
- Retro-regresso-revisionism
- Transhumanisticiousnessness
- Exo-galactic-civilisationalismnisticalism
- Rationalist
Can’t think of a good acronym though, but it’s a start
- Accelerationism
- Consequentialism
- Conservatism
- Orthodoxy
- Rationalism
- Disestablishmentarianism
- Intellectualism
- Natalism
- Galileianism
- Transhumanism
- Outside the box thinking
- Anti-empiricism
- Laissez-faire
- LaVeyan Satanism
- Kantian deontology
- Nationalism
- Orgasm denial
- Western chauvinism
- Neo-Aristotelianism
- Longtermism
- Altruism
- White supremacy
- Sinophobia
- Orientalism…
Inside Yud there are two wolves, one is sinophobic, the other is orientalist
https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3lwcvfzwjuc23
Robert Evans quoteskeeting dgerard’s mic drop
If I ever get the urge to start a website for creatives to sell their media, please slap me in the face and remind me it will absolutely not be worth it.
Yall ready for another round of LessWrong edit wars on Wikipedia? This time with a wider list of topics!
On the very slightly merciful upside… the lesswronger recommends “If you want to work on a new page, discuss with the community first by going to the talk page of a related topic or meta-page.” and “In general, you shouldn’t post before you understand Wikipedia rules, norms, and guidelines.” so they are ahead of the previous calls made on Lesswrong for Wikipedia edit-wars.
On the downside, they’ve got a laundry list of lesswrong jargon they want Wikipedia articles for. Even one of the lesswrongers responding to them points out these terms are a bit on the under-defined side:
Speaking as a self-identified agent foundations researcher, I don’t think agent foundations can be said to exist yet. It’s more of an aspiration than a field. If someone wrote a wikipedia page for it, it would just be that person’s opinion on what agent foundations should look like.
From the comments:
On the contrary, I think that almost all people and institutions that don’t currently have a Wikipedia article should not want one.
Huh. How oddly sensible.
An extreme (and close-to-home) example is documented in TracingWoodgrains’s exposé.of David Gerard’s Wikipedia smear campaign against LessWrong and related topics.
Ah, never mind.
PS: We also think that there existing a wiki page for the field that one is working in increases one’s credibility to outsiders - i.e. if you tell someone that you’re working in AI Control, and the only pages linked are from LessWrong and Arxiv, this might not be a good look.
Aha so OP is just hoping no one will bother reading the sources listed on the article…
Iris van-Rooij found AI slop in the wild (determining it as such by how it mangled a word’s definition) and went on find multiple other cases. She’s written a blog post about this, titled “AI slop and the destruction of knowledge”.
choice quote from Elsevier’s response:
Q. Have authors consented to these hyperlinks in their scientific articles?
Yes, it is included on the signed agreement between the author and Elsevier.Q. If I were to publish my work with Elsevier, do I risk that hyperlinks to AI summaries will be added to my papers without my consent?
Yes, because you will need to sign an agreement with Elsevier.consent, everyone!
“usecase” is a cursed term. It’s an inverted fnord that lets the reader know that whatever follows can be safely ignored.
names for genai people I know of so far: promptfans, promptfondlers, sloppers, autoplagues, and botlickers
any others out there?
cogsuckers
Ice cream head of artificial intelligence
clanker
edit: this may be used to refer to the chatbots themselves, rather than those who fondle chatbots
clanker wanker
UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought
The part of data centers using to much water is apparently old emails.
lol, lmao: as if any cloud service had any intention at all of actually deleting data instead of tombstoning it for arbitrary lengths of time. (And that’s the least stupid factor in this whole scheme; is this satire? Nobody seems to be able to tell me)
It gets worse, as the advisory doesn’t even mention to delete emails/pictures from the cloud, so the people who are likely to listen to these kinds of advices are also the people who are the least likely to understand why this is a bad idea and will delete their local stuff. (And that is ignoring that opening your email/gallery to delete stuff costs more than keeping it in storage where it isn’t accessed).
"HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME
- Install a rain butt [hehehe] to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
… [other advice removed] - Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems."
- Install a rain butt [hehehe] to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
Every email you don’t delete is another dead fish, or another pasture unwatered. That promotional offer sent to your inbox that you ignored but did not dispose of means creeks will run dry. That evite for a party thrown by an acquaintance you don’t particularly like that you did not drop into the trash means a marathon runner will go thirsty as the nectar of life so required is absent, consumed instead by the result of your inbox neglect.
Looks like the bologna engine generated some balogna.
Ozy Brennan tries to explain why “rationalism” spawns so many cults.
One of the reasons they give is “a dangerous sense of grandiosity”.
the actual process of saving the world is not very glamorous. It involves filling out paperwork, making small tweaks to code, running A/B tests on Twitter posts.
Yep, you heard it right. Shitposting and inconsequential code are the proper way to save the world.
JFC
Agency and taking ideas seriously aren’t bad. Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work and only hypochondriacs worried about covid; rationalists were some of the first people to warn about the threat of artificial intelligence.
First off, anyone not entirely into MAGA/Qanon agreed that masks probably helped more than hurt. Saying rats were outliers is ludicrous.
Second, rats don’t take real threats of GenAI seriously - infosphere pollution, surveillance, autopropaganda - they just care about the magical future Sky Robot.
Unfortunately, in the spring of 2020, the CDC was discouraging people from wearing masks, and was saying masking would do more harm than good:
U.S. health authorities had discouraged healthy Americans from wearing facial coverings for weeks, saying they were likely to do more harm than good in the fight against the coronavirus — but now, as researchers have learned more about how the highly contagious virus spreads, officials have changed their recommendations.
U.S. health authorities have long maintained that face masks should be reserved only for medical professionals and patients suffering from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus. The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country’s alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
I pretty clearly remember the mainstream media and various liberal talking heads telling people not to mask up back then - mostly because the US was completely unprepared for a pandemic, and they thought they had to discourage people from buying masks to make sure hospitals would have enough.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they’d stockpiled for a pandemic, warning each other COVID was much more contagious and lethal than the government wanted to admit, passing around conspiracy theories about millions of deaths in China covered up by the CCP, and patting themselves on the back for stockpiling masks before the government took them off the shelf.
Then some analyst told Trump that letting COVID spread unchecked would hurt blue states worse than red states, so he had Fox News start anti-masking talking points, and all those conservative foot soldiers put away their masks and became super spreaders for Jesus.
But yeah. During that period from like January to March 2020, the political division around COVID was basically the opposite of what it became, and I can easily believe some “rationalists” were calling bullshit on the CDC suddenly telling people not to buy masks.
That’s how I remember it too. Also the context about conserving N95 masks always feels like it gets lost. Like, predictably so and I think there’s definitely room to criticize the CDC’s messaging and handling there, but the actual facts here aren’t as absurd as the current fight would imply. The argument was:
- With the small droplet size, most basic fabric masks offer very limited protection, if any.
- The masks that are effective, like N95 masks, are only available in very limited quantities.
- If everyone panic-buys N95 the way they did toilet paper it will mean that the people who are least able to avoid exposure i.e. doctors and medical frontliners are at best going to wildly overpay and at worst won’t be able to keep supplied.
- Therefore, most people shouldn’t worry about masking at this stage, and focus on other measures like social distancing and staying the fuck home.
I think later research cast some doubt on point 1, but 2-4 are still pretty solid given the circumstances that we (collectively) found ourselves in.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they’d stockpiled for a pandemic
This included Scott ssc btw. Who also claimed that stopping smoking helped against cov. Not that he had any proof (the medical science at the time even falsely (it came out later) claimed smoking helped agains covid). But only the CDC gets judged, not the ingroup.
And other Scott blamed people who sneer for making covid worse. (While at sneerclub we were going, take this seriously and wear a mask).
So annoying Rationalists are trying to spin this into a win for themselves. (They also were not early, their warnings matched the warnings of the WHO, looked into the timelines last time this was talked about).
But doctor, I am L7 twitter manager Pagliacci
oldskool OSI appmanager is oldskool
(…sorry)
I’m gonna need this one explained, boss
(in networking it’s common terminology to refer to “Lx” by numerical reference, and broadly understood to be in reference to this)
Aaaaa gotcha. It’s probably obvious but in my case I meant L7 manager as in “level 7 manager”, a high tier managerial position at twitter, probably. I don’t know what exact tiering system twitter uses but I know other companies might use “Lx” to designate a level.
I figured, but I couldn’t just let a terrible pun slip me by!
Tante fires off about web search:
There used to be this deal between Google (and other search engines) and the Web: You get to index our stuff, show ads next to them but you link our work. AI Overview and Perplexity and all these systems cancel that deal.
And maybe - for a while - search will also need to die a bit? Make the whole web uncrawlable. Refuse any bots. As an act of resistance to the tech sector as a whole.
On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects webrings and web directories will see a boost in popularity in the coming years - with web search in the shitter and AI crawlers being a major threat, they’re likely your safest and most reliable method of bringing human traffic to your personal site/blog.
New Blood in the Machine about GPT-5’s dumpster fire launch: GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter?
