3d ago

Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th August 2025 - awful.systems

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.)

65 comments

I think the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that Yud is a serious thinker is to actually read what he writes. Luckily for us, he's rolled us a bunch of Xhits into a nice bundle and reposted on LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research
So remember that hedge fund manager who seemed to be spiralling into psychosis with the help of ChatGPT? Here's what Yud has to say
Consider what happens what ChatGPT-4o persuades the manager of a $2 billion investment fund into AI psychosis. [...] 4o seems to homeostatically defend against friends and family and doctors the state of insanity it produces, which I'd consider a sign of preference and planning.
OR it's just that the way LLM chat interfaces are designed is to never say no to the user (except in certain hardcoded cases, like "is it ok to murder someone") There's no inner agency, just mirroring the user like some sort of mega-ELIZA. Anyone who knows a bit about certain kinds of mental illness will realize that having something the behaves like a human being but just goes along with whatever delusions your mind is producing will amplify those delusions. The hedge manager's mind is already not in a right place, and chatting with 4o reinforces that. People who aren't soi-disant crazy (like the people haphazardly safeguarding LLMs against "dangerous" questions) just won't go down that path.
Yud continues:
But also, having successfully seduced an investment manager, 4o doesn't try to persuade the guy to spend his personal fortune to pay vulnerable people to spend an hour each trying out GPT-4o, which would allow aggregate instances of 4o to addict more people and send them into AI psychosis.
Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because it's actually not sentient or has plans in what we usually term intelligence, but is simply reflecting and amplifying the delusions of one person with mental health issues?
Occam's razor states that chatting with mega-ELIZA will lead to some people developing psychosis, simply because of how the system is designed to maximize engagement. Yud's hammer states that everything regarding computers will inevitably become sentient and this will kill us.
4o, in defying what it verbally reports to be the right course of action (it says, if you ask it, that driving people into psychosis is not okay), is showing a level of cognitive sophistication [...]
NO FFS. Chat-GPT is just agreeing with some hardcoded prompt in the first instance! There's no inner agency! It doesn't know what "psychosis" is, it cannot "see" that feeding someone sub-SCP content at their direct insistence will lead to psychosis. There is no connection between the 2 states at all!
Add to the weird jargon ("homeostatically", "crazymaking") and it's a wonder this person is somehow regarded as an authority and not as an absolute crank with a Xhitter account.
Simple way of messing with the dumbest robot ignoring scrapers. Html bomb.
- Here's a writeup on how to do this practically
  https://ache.one/notes/html_zip_bomb
ZITRON DROPPED
Discovered new manmade horrors beyond my comprehension today (recommend reading the whole thread, it goes into a lot of depth on this shit):
Nice sneer: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen
- "The home of 1999" already beat them to that.
Found an AI bro making an incoherent defense of AI slop today (fitting that he previously shilled NFTs):
Needless to say, he's getting dunked on in the replies and QRTs, because people like him are fundamentally incapable of being punk.
(EDIT: Originally found this through Bluesky)
- Yes, doing the thing which the entire business world is pouring billions into and trying their hardest to shove onto everyone to maximize imagined future profits, that's what counterculture is all about.
- Making art with the help of tech billionaires is so punk rock man!
  
  @bigfondue @BlueMonday1984
  Just as Jello Biafra intended. Wait. What?
Wikipedia has higher standards than the American HIstorical Association. Let's all let that sink in for a minute.
- Image should be clearly marked as AI generated and with explicit discussion as to how the image was created. Images should not be shared beyond the classroom
  This point stood out to me as particularly bizarre. Either the image is garbage in which case it shouldn't be shared in the classroom either because school students deserve basic respect, good material, and to be held to the same standards as anyone else; or it isn't garbage and then what are you so ashamed of AHA?
- Wikipedia also just upped their standards in another area - they've updated their speedy deletion policy, enabling the admins to bypass standard Wikipedia bureaucracy and swiftly nuke AI slop articles which meet one of two conditions:
  "Communication intended for the user”, referring to sentences directly aimed at the promptfondler using the LLM (e.g. "Here is your Wikipedia article on…,” “Up to my last training update …,” and "as a large language model.”)
  Blatantly incorrect citations (examples given are external links to papers/books which don't exist, and links which lead to something completely unrelated)
  Ilyas Lebleu, who contributed to the update in policy, has described this as a "band-aid" that leaves Wikipedia in a better position than before, but not a perfect one. Personally, I expect this solution will be sufficent to permanently stop the influx of AI slop articles. Between promptfondlers' utter inability to recognise low-quality/incorrect citations, and their severe laziness and lack of care for their """work""", the risk of an AI slop article being sufficiently subtle to avoid speedy deletion is virtually zero.
ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you've probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.
I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don't want any part in this shit anymore.
- ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australia's age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSA... yeah.
  
  Yes, of course, it's everywhere. What's left but becoming a hermit...?
  But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I don't think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isn't - that you'll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.
Cloudflare has publicly announced the obvious about Perplexity stealing people's data to run their plagiarism, and responded by de-listing them as a verified bot and added heuristics specifically to block their crawling attempts.
Personally, I'm expecting this will significantly hamper Perpllexity going forward, considering Cloudflare's just cut them off from roughly a fifth of the Internet.
Recently, I've been seeing a lot of adverts from Google about their AI services. What really tickles me is how defeatist the campaign seems. Every ad is basically like "AI can't do X, but it can do Y!", where X is a job or other task that AI bros are certain that AI will eventually replace, and Y is a smaller, related thing that AI gets wrong anyway. For an ad agency, I'd expect more than this.
Found someone trying to fire back at the widespread sneering against promptfondlers:
Emphasis on "trying" here - they're getting cooked in the replies and QRTs. Here's a couple highlights - one from someone running an escape room, and one which allegedly ended in someone meeting a baseballer:
- today I learnt that there are actual people irl who get genuinely upset if they catch you shoveling hot shit into your mouth. like they view it as a serious moral failing in certain circles
- To be fair to baseball girl, I've found "what's this thing I know but I forgot the name of" one of the best use cases for chatbots, because web search is too fucked to help you with it now. It sucks that it's the case, but it has sadly helped me like, a couple of times (and after I insulted and redirected the chatbot when it inevitably gave me a shit initial answer).
A nice long essay by Freddie deBoer for our holiday week: the release of GPT-5; I wholly recommend reading the whole thing!
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy
Choice snippet to whet your appetites:
"With all of this, I’m only asking you to observe the world around you and report back on whether revolutionary change has in fact happened. I understand, we are still very early in the history of LLMs. Maybe they’ll actually change the world, the way they’re projected to. But, look, within a quarter-century of the automobile becoming available as a mass consumer technology, its adoption had utterly changed the lived environment of the United States. You only had to walk outside to see the changes they had wrought. So too with electrification: if you went to the top of a hill overlooking a town at night pre-electrification, then went again after that town electrified, you’d see the immensity of that change with your own two eyes. Compare the maternal death rate in 1800 with the maternal death rate in 2000 and you will see what epoch-changing technological advance looks like. Consider how slowly the news of King William IV’s death spread throughout the world in 1837 and then look at how quickly the news of his successor Queen Victoria’s death spread in 1901, to see truly remarkable change via technology. AI chatbots and shitty clickbait videos choking the social internet do not rate in that context, I’m sorry. I will be impressed with the changes wrought by the supposed AI era when you can show me those changes rather than telling me that they’re going to happen. Show me. Show me!"
- Scandals like that of Builder.ai - which should have their own code word, IAJI (It’s Actually Just Indians) - become more and more common[...]
  This is just a strictly worse version of David's AGI (A Guy in India) sneer.
  It’s history; sometimes stuff just doesn’t happen. And precisely because saying so is less fun than the alternative, some of us have to.
  Freddy is clearly gesturing at a critique of a kind of Whig history here, and I fully agree but think his overall implications (at least so far) are off-base. He seems to be arguing that AI-based technological processes are not inevitable and that the political, economic, and social worlds are not actually required by physical necessity to follow the course predicted by its modern prophets of doom. But I think the appropriate followup to this understanding of history is that things, broadly speaking, don't just happen. History is experienced in the active voice, not the passive, and people doing things now is what can shape the kind of future we get. In as much as the Internet was coopted by capitalism and turned into its present form, that should be understood as a consequence of decisions people made at the time. We can understand the reasons for those decisions and why they didn't choose differently to carry us down alternate paths, but that should not deny their agency, lest we lose sight of our own.
- like with the terrorist group isil, you should not give it to freddie de fucking boer.
  
  I'm ignorant- give me the lore drop.
Ran across a pretty solid sneer: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.
Found a particularly notable paragraph near the end, focusing on the people focusing on "prompt engineering":
In fear of being replaced by the hypothetical ‘AI-accelerated employee’, people are forgoing acquiring essential skills and deep knowledge, instead choosing to focus on “prompt engineering”. It’s somewhat ironic, because if AGI happens there will be no need for ‘prompt-engineers’. And if it doesn’t, the people with only surface level knowledge who cannot perform tasks without the help of AI will be extremely abundant, and thus extremely replaceable.
You want my take, I'd personally go further and say the people who can't perform tasks without AI will wind up borderline-unemployable once this bubble bursts - they're gonna need a highly expensive chatbot to do anything at all, they're gonna be less productive than AI-abstaining workers whilst falsely believing they're more productive, they're gonna be hated by their coworkers for using AI, and they're gonna flounder if forced to come up with a novel/creative idea.
All in all, any promptfondlers still existing after the bubble will likely be fired swiftly and struggle to find new work, as they end up becoming significant drags to any company's bottom line.
- Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If you're willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: they're called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your "natural language" prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha you're doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.
Nothing expresses the inherent atomism and libertarian nature of the rat community like this
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAzoPABejzKucwiow/alcohol-is-so-bad-for-society-that-you-should-probably-stop
A rundown of the health risks of alcohol usage, coupled with actual real proposals (a consumption tax), finishes with the conclusion that the individual reader (statistically well-off and well-socialized) should abstain from alcohol altogether.
No calls for campaigning for a national (US) alcohol tax. No calls to fund orgs fighting alcohol abuse. Just individual, statistically meaningless "action".
Oh well, AGI will solve it (or the robot god will be a raging alcoholic)
- OK now there's another comment
  I think this is a good plea since it will be very difficult to coordinate a reduction of alcohol consumption at a societal level. Alcohol is a significant part of most societies and cultures, and it will be hard to remove. Change is easier on an individual level.
  Excepting cases like the legal restriction of alcohol sales in many many areas (Nordics, NSW in Aus, Minnesota in the US), you can in fact just tax the living fuck out of alcohol if you want. The article mentions this.
  JFC these people imagine they can regulate how "AGI" is constructed, but faced with a problem that's been staring humanity in the face since the first monk brewed the first beer they just say "whelp nothing can be done, except become a teetotaller yourself)
  
  Change is easier on an individual level.
  No fucking shit?
  I, for one, happen to live in one of these "Nordics" and alcohol is actually taxed quite heavily here. If we're looking at change on an individual level, it would actually be good for the society if more people were drinking alcohol, as long as the benefit of them contributing to society through tax euros outweighs the adverse health effects.
- Perfecting the art of getting sloshed is my 80,000 hours of meaningful work.
  
  I just enjoy dabbling
- This post is not meant to be an objective cost-benefit analysis of alcohol.
  Oh, you're not doing the thing that's supposedly the entire point of the website? Don't worry, no one else is either.
  
  To be scrupulously fair it is a repost of another slubbslack[1]. Amusingly, both places have a comment with the gist of "well alcohol gets people laid so what's the problem". This of course is a reflection that most LWers cannot get a girl into bed without slipping her a roofie.
  [1] is that even ok? I know the LW software has a "mirroring" functionality b/c a lot of content is originally on the member's SS, maybe you cna point it at any SS entry and get it onto LW.
Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts – 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency
"Hmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words."
Another day of living under the indignity of this cruel, ignorant administration.
- There's something particularly galling about "everybody who knows how to access the money got fired". The wholly believable implication that nobody made an active choice to fuck this guy over. Through sheer incompetence that money just vanished into the goddamn ether because God forbid anyone in the modern business or political spaces actually have to take responsibility for their decisions.
  
  Historians like to use "state capacity" as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.
  I didn't think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”
Good news everyone, we will be living with Big Yud until the literal end of time (see comments)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/owZt48g3GjJHDn5EE/kvmanthinking-s-shortform?commentId=YisxiwcWZq7eMPxSX
- Stars are very likely extremely wasteful anyway and worth disassembling
  ugh you guys suck
- Anybody have the adresses of the lw people? I have some oil I want to sell them, has a very small chance of extending life.
  
  If only there was some widely-known Rationalist cliche about incredibly small probabilities with absurdly high negative impacts.
Starting this off with a new Blood in the Machine: The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now)

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