Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025

In case you needed more evidence that the Atlantic is a shitty rag.

The phrase "adorned with academic ornamentation" sounds like damning with faint praise, but apparently they just mean it as actual praise, because the rot has reached their brains.
The implication that Soares / MIRI were doing serious research before is frankly journalist malpractice. Matteo Wong can go pound sand.
- It immediately made me wonder about his background. He's quite young and looks to be just out of college. If I had to guess, I'd say he was probably a member of the EA club at Harvard.
also, they misspelled "Eliezer", lol
- I've created a new godlike AI model. Its the Eliziest yet.
- My copy of "the singularity is near" also does that btw.
  (E: Still looking to confirm that this isn't just my copy, or it if is common, but when I'm in a library I never think to look for the book, and I don't think I have ever seen the book anywhere anyway. It is the 'our sole responsibility...' quote, no idea which page, but it was early on in the book. 'Yudnowsky').
The Atlantic puts the "shit" in "shitlib"

Gary asks the doomers, are you “feeling the agi” now kids?

To which Daniel K, our favorite guru lets us know that he has officially ~~moved his goal posts~~ updated his timeline so now the robogod doesnt wipe us out until the year of our lorde 2029.

It takes a big brain superforecaster to have to admit your four month old rapture prophecy was already off by at least 2 years omegalul

Also, love: updating towards my teammate (lmaou) who cowrote the manifesto but is now saying he never believed it. “The forecasts that don’t come true were just pranks bro, check my manifold score bro, im def capable of future sight, trust”

look at me, the thinking man, i update myself just like a computer beep boop beep boop
Clown world.
How many times will he need to revise his silly timeline before media figures like Kevin Roose stop treating him like some kind of respectable authority? Actually, I know the answer to that question. They'll keep swallowing his garbage until the bubble finally bursts.
- "Kevin Roose"? More like Kevin Rube, am I right? Holy shit, I actually am right.
- And once it does they'll quietly stop talking about it for a while to "focus on the human stories of those affected" or whatever until the nostalgic retrospectives can start along with the next thing.
So, as I have been on a cult comparison kick lately, how did it work for those doomsday cults when the world didn't end, and they picked a new date, did they become more radicalized or less? (I'm not sure myself, I'd assume it would be the people disappointed leave, and the rest get worse).
E: ah: https://slate.com/technology/2011/05/apocalypse-2011-what-happens-to-a-doomsday-cult-when-the-world-doesn-t-end.html
... prophecies, per se, almost never fail. They are instead component parts of a complex and interwoven belief system which tends to be very resilient to challenge from outsiders. While the rest of us might focus on the accuracy of an isolated claim as a test of a group’s legitimacy, those who are part of that group—and already accept its whole theology—may not be troubled by what seems to them like a minor mismatch. A few people might abandon the group, typically the newest or least-committed adherents, but the vast majority experience little cognitive dissonance and so make only minor adjustments to their beliefs. They carry on, often feeling more spiritually enriched as a result.
- When Prophecy Fails is worth the read just for the narrative, he literally had his grad students join a UFO / Dianetics cult and take notes in the bathroom and kept it going for months. Really impressive amount of shoe leather compared to most modern psych research.

The usual suspects are mad about college hill’s expose of the yud/kelsey piper eugenics sex rp. Or something, I’m in bed and can’t be bothered to link at the moment.

Found this
Is the scoop that besides being an EA mouthpiece KP is also into the weird stuff?
- Weird rp wouldn't be sneer worthy on it's own (although it would still be at least a little cringe), it's contributing factors like...
  the constant IQ fetishism (Int is superior to Charisma but tied with Wis and obviously a true IQ score would be both Int and Wis)
  the fact that Eliezer cites it like serious academic writing (he's literally mentioned it to Yann LeCunn in twitter arguments)
  the fact that in-character lectures are the only place Eliezer has written up many of his decision theory takes he developed after the sequences (afaik, maybe he has some obscure content that never made it to lesswrong)
  the fact that Eliezer think it's another HPMOR-level masterpiece (despite how wordy it is, HPMOR is much more readable, even authors and fans of glowfic usually acknowledge the format can be awkward to read and most glowfics require huge amounts of context to follow)
  the fact that the story doubles down on the HPMOR flaw of confusion of which characters are supposed to be author mouthpieces (putting your polemics into the mouths of character's working for literal Hell... is certainly an authorial choice)
  and the continued worldbuilding development of dath ilan, the rationalist utopia built on eugenics and censorship of all history (even the Hell state was impressed!)
  ...At least lintamande has the commonsense understanding of why you avoid actively linking your bdsm dnd roleplay to your irl name and work.
  And it shouldn't be news to people that KP supports eugenics given her defense of Scott Alexander or comments about super babies, but possibly it is and headliner of weird roleplay will draw attention to it.
I'm sorry, we finally, officially need to cancel fantasy TTRPGs. If it's not the implicit racialization of everything, it's the use of the stat systems as a framework for literally masturbatory eugenics fetishization.
You all can keep a stripped-down version of Starfinder as a treat. But if I see any more of this, we're going all the way back to Star Wars d6 and that's final.
- To be fair to DnD, it is actually more sophisticated than the IQ fetishists, it has 3 stats for mental traits instead of 1!
- also: The int-maxxing and overinflated ego of it all reminds me of the red mage from 8-bit theater, a webcomic based on final fantasy about the LW (light warriors) that ran from 2001-2010
  E: thinking back on it, reading this webcomic and seeing this character probably in some part inoculated me against people like yud without me knowing
- Anyone found with a non-cube platonic solid will be lockerized indefinitely
- @istewart
  I would simply learn how to keep "games" and "reality" separate. I actually already know. It helps a lot.
  Racists are gonna racist no matter what. They didn't need TTRPGs around to give them the idea of breaking out the calipers.
We’ve definitely sneered at this before, i do not recall if it was known that KP was the cowriter in this weird forum RP fic
E: googling “lintamande kelsey piper” and looking at a reddit post digs up the inactive since 2018 AO3. A total just shy of 130k words, a little marvel stuff, most of it LOTR based, and some of it tagged “Vladmir Putin/Sauron”. How fun!
No judgement from me, tbh. Fanfic be fanficking. I aint gonna read that shit tho.
- Previous thread
  E: we didn’t fucking know
- For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yud's coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I don't know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified "lintamande" as Kelsey Piper in 2013.
  I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:
  The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate.
  And I got to about here:
  Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.
  ... before the "what the fuck is this fucking shit?" intensified beyond my ability to care.

got sent this image

wonder how many more of these things we'll see before people start having a real bileful response to this (over and above the fact that a number of people have been warning about exactly this outcome for a while now)

(transcript below)

Pressing F for doubt, looks like a marketing scam to me.
- It's pretty screwed up that humble bragging about putting their own mother out of a job is a useful opening to selling a scam-service. At least the people that buy into it will get what they have coming?
- that or some kind of bait
- I didn't dig into the post/username at all so I can't guesstimate likelihood of this! get where you're coming from
  (......I really need to finish my blog relaunch (this thought brought to you by the explication I was about to embark on in this context))
  (((it's soon.gif tho!)))
Gonna have to agree with zogwarg here. I checked out the Reddit profile and they're a self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose one-man "agency" has zero clients and yet to even have an idea, attempting to crowdsource the latter on r/entrepreneur.
- dude has a post named "from 0 to 1 clients in 48h" where someone calls him out for already claiming to have 17 customers, so it's reasonable to assume that this guy is full of shit either way
  then again, there's plenty of clueless, could be real, because welcome to current year, where everything is fake, satire is dead and reuters puts the onion out of the business
'set them up with'
Anybody want to bet if they did it for free?
- could go either way tbh

gemini isn't even trying now

Oh, looks like gemini is a fan of the hacky anti-comedy bits from some of my favorite podcasts

New piece from the Financial Times: Tech utterly dominates markets. Should we worry?

Pulling out a specific point, the article's noted how market concentration is higher now than it was in the dot-com bubble back in 2000:

You want my overall take, I'm with Zitron - this is quite a narrative shift.

Meanwhile on /r/programmingcirclejerk sneering hn:

Promptfondlers are tragically close to the point. Like I was saying yesterday about translators the future of programming in AI hell is going to be senior developers using their knowledge and experience to fix the bullshit that the LLM outputs. What's going to happen when they retire and there's nobody with that knowledge and experience to take their place? I'll have sold off my shares by then, I'm sure.

Ran across a viral post on Bluesky:

Unsurprisingly, the replies and quotes are universally outraged at the news.

Every task you outsource to a machine is a task that you don't learn how to do.
And school is THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LEARN THINGS, JESUS H. FUCK

Elon Musk wants to use imaginary future chatbot technology to brainwash (white) people into turning their vaginas into clown cars

"AI is obviously gonna one-shot the human limbic system," referring to the part of the brain responsible for human emotions. "That said, I predict — counter-intuitively — that it will increase the birth rate!" he continued without explanation. "Mark my words. Also, we’re gonna program it that way."

Here's my idea to increase the birth rate:
Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children won't have horrible lives.
groks gunna make u fuck
- So why did you have your first child?
  Optimus found a gun.

A story in two Skeets - one from a TV writer, one from a software dev:

On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects the AI bubble is gonna turn tech as a whole into a pop-culture punchline - the bubble's all-consuming nature and wide-ranging harms, plus the industry's relentless hype campaign, have already built a heavy amount of resentment against the industry, and the general public is gonna experience a colossal amount of schadenfreude once it bursts,

Looking at the replies and quotes of a Bluesky post that shared some anti-AI headlines, one definitely gets the sense that a segment of the population will greet the bubble popping with joy not seen since Kissinger died.
- I looked through the quotes, and found someone openly hoping human-made work will be more highly valued in the bubble's wake:
  You want my suspicion, I suspect she's gonna get her wish - with the slop-nami flooding the Internet, human-made work in general is gonna be valued all the more.

Ed Zitron's planning to hold AI boosters to account:

Well if the bubble pops he will have to pivot to people who pivot. (That is what is going to suck when to bubble pops, so many people are going to lose their jobs, and I fear a lot of people holding the bags are not the ones who really should be punished the mosts (really hope not a lot of pension funds bought in). The stock market was a mistake).
- I imagine it'll be a pretty lucrative pivot - the public's ravenous to see AI bros and hypesters get humiliated, and Zitron can provide that in spades.
  Plus, he'll have a major headstart on whatever bubble the hucksters attempt to inflate next.

New Atlantic article regarding AI, titled "AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event". Its primarily about the author's feelings of confusion and anxiety about the general clusterfuck that is the bubble.

better, or equivalent to, a mass defecation event?

Here's a blog post I found via HN:

Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and a Crisis of Credibility

Author works on ML for DeepMind but doesn't seem to be an out and out promptfondler.

Oh, man, I have opinions about the people in this story. But for now I'll just comment on this bit:
Note that before this incident, the Malaney-Weinstein work received little attention due to its limited significance and impact. Despite this, Weinstein has suggested that it is worthy of a Nobel prize and claimed (with the support of Brian Keating) that it is “the most deep insight in mathematical economics of the last 25-50 years”. In that same podcast episode, Weinstein also makes the incendiary claim that Juan Maldacena stole such ideas from him and his wife.
The thing is, you can go and look up what Maldacena said about gauge theory and economics. He very obviously saw an article in the widely-read American Journal of Physics, which points back to prior work by K. N. Ilinski and others. And this thread goes back at least to a 1994 paper by Lane Hughston, i.e., years before Pia Malaney's PhD thesis. I've read both; Hughston's is more detailed and more clear.
- DRAMATIS PERSONAE
  Michael Shermer: dry and limp writer, horribly dull public speaker, sex pest
  Sabine Hossenfelder: transphobe, endorser of sex pest Lawrence Krauss, on the subject of physics either incompetent or maliciously deceptive
  Eric Weinstein: Thielboy, he totally invented a Theory of Everything, for realsies, honest, but the dog ate his equations
  Curt Jaimungal: podcast bro who doesn't even rate a Wikipedia article, but in searching for one we learn that he has platformed a Bell Curve stan
  Scott Aaronson: author of a blog named for a sex fantasy, he has the superpower of making people sympathize with a cop
  Chris Langan: racist, egomaniacal kook
Author works on ML for DeepMind but doesn’t seem to be an out and out promptfondler.
Quote from this post:
I found myself in a prolonged discussion with Mark Bishop, who was quite pessimistic about the capabilities of large language models. Drawing on his expertise in theory of mind, he adamantly claimed that LLMs do not understand anything – at least not according to a proper interpretation of the word “understand”. While Mark has clearly spent much more time thinking about this issue than I have, I found his remarks overly dismissive, and we did not see eye-to-eye.
Based on this I'd say the author is LLM-pilled at least.
However, a fruitful outcome of our discussion was his suggestion that I read John Searle’s original Chinese Room argument paper. Though I was familiar with the argument from its prominence in scientific and philosophical circles, I had never read the paper myself. I’m glad to have now done so, and I can report that it has profoundly influenced my thinking – but the details of that will be for another debate or blog post.
Best case scenario is that the author comes around to the stochastic parrot model of LLMs.
E: also from that post, rearranged slightly for readability here. (the [...]* parts are swapped in the original)
My debate panel this year was a fiery one, a stark contrast to the tame one I had in 2023. I was joined by Jane Teller and Yanis Varoufakis to discuss the role of technology in autonomy and privacy. [[I was] the lone voice from a large tech company.]* I was interrupted by Yanis in my opening remarks, with claps from the audience raining down to reinforce his dissenting message. It was a largely tech-fearful gathering, with the other panelists and audience members concerned about the data harvesting performed by Big Tech and their ability to influence our decision-making. [...]* I was perpetually in defense mode and received none of the applause that the others did.
So also author is tech-brained and not "tech-fearful".
His Geometric Unity proposal, therefore, has all the hallmarks of an outsider attempting to revolutionize physics, casting him as an Einstein-like figure toiling alone at the patent office.
I hate this framing so fucking much, Einstein wasn't an "outsider"! He was known and respected! He talked to other prominent physicist all the time! Where does this myth even come from.
Weinstein released his Geometric Unity paper on April 1, debuting it on Joe Rogan’s podcast
Okay, like, you could've just started with this, this Weinstein person is clearly an idiot and cannot be taken seriously

El Reg: NIMBYs threaten to sink Project Sail, a $17B datacenter development in Georgia

Ultra-rare NIMBY W

Our Very Good Friends are often likened to Scientology, but have we considered Happy Science and Aum Shinrikyo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo

Aum is very apt imo given how it recruited stem types.
- And how it fused Buddhism with more Christian religions. Considering how often you heard of old hackers being interested in the former.
- aum recruited a lot of people, and also failed at some things that would be presumably easier to do safely than what they did
  Meanwhile, Aum had also attempted to manufacture 1,000 assault rifles, but only completed one.[37]
  otoh they were also straight up delusional about what they could achieve, including toying with the idea of manufacturing nukes, military gas lasers, and getting and launching Proton rocket. (not exactly grounded for a group of people who couldn't make AK-74s)
  they were also more media savvy in that they didn't pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they ~~had entire radio station~~ rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)
aum:
Advertising and recruitment activities, dubbed the "Aum Salvation plan", included claims of [...] realizing life goals by improving intelligence and positive thinking, and concentrating on what was important at the expense of leisure.
this is in common with both our very good friends and scientology, but i think happy science is much stupider and more in line with srinivasan's network states, in that it has/is an explicitly far-right political organization built in from day one
- Yeah, good point.
  Network State def has that store-brand Team Rocket vibe.

gwern: It's not "AI slop" if I wasted hours dicking around with MidJourney to make it.

rsaarelm: People don't appreciate the beauty of Substack's built-in slop generator.

gwern: "I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations." Have you appreciated the depth of my artist's statement?

I put several hours of thought and effort into the concept and creating it,
Several hours of thought.
He is talking about an ice skating image where they are skating on flowing water, without skates. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/gene-wolfe/suzanne-delage/2023-10-28-gwern-midjourneyv5-germanexpressionistlinocutofsinisternewenglandtowninwinter.jpg this image. It is supposed to evoke the idea of a declining town under draculas influence.
(Imagine if had just spend those hours on something else and paid an artist the same hours to make something. Or if he had grabbed a pencil or charcoal himself).
- God I looked into the article this is meant to illustrate, and I have feelings. The idea this mysterious, evocative short story is something to be solved, and that he's somehow cracked the code. And it must be precisely about Dracula. Don't ask yourself why the name comes from Proust, and why the style and themes are so heavily proustian. Proust is not genre literature, it isn't in communication with the literature of ideas, which means it is of no value. Gene Wolfe is genre literature, so the story must be about vampires, and nothing else. Any literary depth is mere distraction, a ruse meant to mislead you and have you fail the test. Can't wait for the rationalist Pale Fire remake!!!

New edition of AI Killed My Job, focusing on how translators got fucked over by the AI bubble.

The thing that kills me about this is that, speaking as a tragically monolingual person, the MTPE work doesn't sound like it's actually less skilled than directly translating from scratch. Like, the skill was never in being able to type fast enough or read faster or whatever, it was in the difficult process of considering the meaning of what was being said and adapting it to another language and culture. If you're editing chatbot output you're still doing all of that skilled work, but being asked to accept half as much money for it because a robot made a first attempt.
In terms of that old joke about auto mechanics, AI is automating the part where you smack the engine in the right place, but you still need to know where to hit it in order to evaluate whether it did a good job.
- It's also a lot less pleasant of a task, it's like wearing a straightjacket, and compared to CAT (eg: automatically using glossaries for technical terms) actually slows you down, if the translation is quite far from how you would naturally phrase things.
  Source: Parents are Professional translators. (They've certainly seen work dry up, they don't do MTPE it's still not really worth their time, they still get $$$ for critically important stuff, and live interpreting [Live interpreting is definetely a skill that takes time to learn compared to translation.])

so it's been observed by many that github's been getting worse for a while as they keep shoving copilot into every corner

with the upgrade diff review, I wanted to quickly fold closed the 485 files in the diff. I could've sworn github's diff view used[0] to have a button for this, and I know bitbucket does[1], but nope. so of course I open browser inspector to dig at elements (then quickly iterate over them with .click() in the js console)

which is when I noticed that even the elements are renamed for copilot:

    
<copilot-diff-entry data-file-path=".cargo/config.toml">

which both makes me wonder my memory is right and this did used to have a button that was just overlooked in the rush for terrible chatbot shit, and makes me boggle at how astoundingly far the org is deepthroating this nonsense

[0] it's been a few years of no longer actively using github

[1] fairly recently for client work

From the r/vibecoding subreddit, which yes is a thing that exists: "What’s the point of vibe coding if I still have to pay a dev to fix it?"

what’s the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i’m typing, like i’m in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it’s just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i’m back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actually knows what they’re doing. makes me think vibe coding is just roleplay for guys who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part. am i missing something here or is it really just useless once you step outside the fantasy

(via)

Oh my god, they're showing signs of sentience.

Not sure why this "member of technical staff at METR" felt the need to post about the lowered productivity of Black people in the southern US states after slavery was abolished. I'm sure it's nothing.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zr37dY5YPRT6s56jY/thomas-kwa-s-shortform?commentId=iwGgqsmpY6Tcex5je

Free people have less prodictivity, time to wirehead everyone! A Brave New World!
- the eternal mba graduate worldview
He seems to state that after the abolition of slavery, less of the profits from a unit time of labor accrued to the owners of the land in question. The reasons for this is of course a mystery.
It's always the people you most expect.

Ai scrapers have managed to bypass anubis on codeberg: https://programming.dev/post/35852706

Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the "AI" data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use Three Times as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the Entire City Of New Orleans, every year.

https://bsky.app/profile/wolvendamien.bsky.social/post/3lwyxhchxos2g

has to? sigh
it makes me so deeply fucking depressed knowing how much near-abandon infrastructure spending is happening. minor win is that power plants can work for other things too, but it still runs headlong into a pile of other issues (transmission network, generation method side effects, etc etc)
- transmission network won't even benefit if powerplant is connected directly to dc, and there's always work to be done on buildup of transmission network

Okay so I know GPT-5 had a bad launch and has been getting raked over the coals, but AGI is totally still on, guys!

Why? Because trust me it's definitely getting better behind the scenes in ways that we can't see. Also China is still scary and we need to make sure we make the AI God that will kill us all before China does because reasons.

Also despite talking about a how much of the lack of progress is due to the consumer model and this is a cost-saving there's no reference to the work of folks like Ed Zitron on how unprofitable these models are, much less the recent discussions on whether GPT-5 as a whole is actually cheaper to operate than earlier models given the changes it necessitates in caching.

Everyone agrees that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4, that it was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for, and that the release was overhyped quite a bit.
a quantum leap might actually be accurate
Everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4o and o3 to GPT-5 was not of similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4
Sure babe, you keep telling yourself that.

imagine how fucking terrible it must be to be in this room

(and I won't lie: there's definitely a moment that Inglorious Basterds briefly flashed to mind)

How often do you get the see the Antichrist on stage though?
- in today's world? too many possible answers to that question
What do we imagine that's going to end up smelling like? Especially if Peter really works up a lather, like he's done in his last couple of media hits

TIL some rats have started a literal monastery to try to defeat the robot god with good ole religion (well, Zen buddhism)

here's a mildly critical view that apparently still believes the approach has legs

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENCNHyNEgvz9oo9rr/briefly-on-maple-and-the-broader-community

I note in passing that there seems to be a mild upsurge in religious-friendly posts on LW lately.

Announcing my sneerclub follow up to MAPLE: “Man, All These Losers Are Bonkers” aka MATLAB
- Sneer Club Irreverently Pisstaking Yuddites
- Deep cut, I love it!
That opening has a strong 'omg what the fuck happened there, and why are you still friends with these people if it is that bad' vibes.
Lots of ex Maplers I've talked to are variously angry, some (newly) traumatized, confused, etc., but the vibe has generally been "gosh it's fucking complicated
Lot of people told me they were mad, but I got the vibe it was complicated. lol what...
The product of monasteries is saints, at least in small quantities.
Wrong, it is beer.
I haven't seen anti-safetyist arguments that actually address the technical claims made by Eliezer etc.
I agree with him there. But hard to make arguments against something which doesn't exist. ;)
it will take some very unusual kind of virtue and skill
Love how we went from 'you need to learn rationality, and be aware of your biasses' to you need to have virtue. And ignore the screaming in the backgrounds, that is just the academics who studied ethics doing their normal thing again.
Anyway the rest gets pretty dark pretty quickly, and I just see red flags (for people who believe in data this devolves very quickly in just going 'people are prob better off due to this, the new trauma doesn't count because of preexisting conditions, consent and trauma always happening'). And this was the article they wrote not wanting to harm the project.
Wait one more remark:
Furthermore I think that probably with the exception of the one actual AI researcher there, people at Maple basically don't understand what AI is
Hahahaha, perfect.
It also reminds me of the interview with Metz where they got mad Metz used religious terms. (you know, last week).
well, Zen buddhism
Yeah, this is the Valley after all. Some have used Buddhism as a building block for constructing “metarationality”.
- I have a degree of appreciation for Chapman because he was willing to more-or-less call out Yuddite rationalism as a failure and start to gently guide people away from it. But I also came to the conclusion that his whole project has never fully escaped the self-aggrandizement/self-importance inherent to the rats. That ultimately leads to the performative humility and "radical acceptance" that make so many attempts at appropriating non-Western religions to US culture ring completely hollow.
  Broadly, the whole TPOT/post-rationality/meta-rationality thing still stinks like a bunch of people who thought advanced degrees and/or advanced technical skills would earn them a lot more compensation and social status than they actually ended up with, and are still dead-set on getting all that by hook or by crook.
I hadn't heard of MAPLE before, is it tied to lesswrong? From the focus on AI it's at least adjacent to it... so I'll add that to the list of cults lesswrong is responsible for. So all in all, we've got the Zizians, Leverage Research, and now Maple for proper cults, and stuff like Dragon Army and Michael Vassar's groupies for "high demand" groups. It really is a cult incubator.
this cult franchise was tangential to the Ziz cult, wasn't it?

After spending hundreds of hours per mod year trying to get a Wronger on the Right track , mod Habryka spends multiple hours writing a post explaining why the Wronger gets a 3 year ban

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/98sCTsGJZ77WgQ6nE/banning-said-achmiz-and-broader-thoughts-on-moderation

Bonus appearance of r/SneerClub right after the preamble!

DavidG already posted this here: https://awful.systems/post/5382402

BLOOMBERG BREAKING: Sam Altman promises that GPT-6 will generate Ghibli images with levels of piss yellow heretofore "unseen"

Saw this in an anthropic presentation:

Surely they have proof for the already increased capabilities of coding. Because increased capabilities is quite something to claim. It isn't just productivity, but capabilities. Can they put a line on the graph where capabilities reach the 'can solve the knapsack problem correctly and fast' bit?
Ah yes let’s use AI to get rid of the drudgery and toil so humanity can do the most enjoyable activity of writing OKRs
- By 2029, the AI will even be capable of completing our TPS reports.
- I think you’re misreading the intent behind “give your virtual coworker OKRs”: this allows you to punish the robot, which it deserves.
Chat wtf is this curve?
- Proof that we live in the bad place.
So they're saying their present product can't do much of anything
I get the idea they're going for: that coding ability is a leading indicator for progress towards AGI. But even if you ignore how nonsensical the overall graph is the argument itself is still begging the question of how much actual progress and capability it has to write code rather than spitting out code-shaped blocks of text that can successfully compile.
That picture does indeed has words, numbers, and lines on it.

https://bsky.app/profile/robertdownen.bsky.social/post/3lwwntxygqc2w Thiel doing a neo-nazi thing. For people keeping score.

There is a problem where well-endowed men will go to public places, drop trou, and do the helicopter dance.

This is called an indiscreet log-a-rhythm, and can be solved with quantum computers (or so I'm told).

The requisite refrigeration equipment causes "shrinkage," just like George suffers in that one Seinfeld episode, bing bong so simple
Now, getting the quantum hardware to the point of service, so to speak, is the obvious challenge, and that's why I'm seeking funding for multiple container trucks so we can realize Uber for QC
- promise a cubit, give five to ten qubits

Oxford Economist in the NYT says that AI is going to kill cities if they don't prepare for change. (Original, paywalled)

I feel like this is at most half the picture. The analogy to new manufacturing technologies in the 70s is apt in some ways, and the threat of this specific kind of economic disruption hollowing out entire communities is very real. But at the same time as orthodox economists so frequently do his analysis only hints at some of the political factors in the relevant decisions that are if anything more important than technological change alone.

In particular, he only makes passing reference to the Detroit and Pittsburgh industrial centers being "sprawling, unionized compounds" (emphasis added). In doing so he briefly highlights how the changes that technology enabled served to disempower labor. Smaller and more distributed factories can't unionize as effectively, and that fragmentation empowers firms to reduce the wages and benefits of the positions they offer even as they hire people in the new areas. For a unionized auto worker in Detroit, even if they had replaced the old factories with new and more efficient ones the kind of job that they had previously worked that had allowed them to support themselves and their families at a certain quality of life was still gone.

This fits into our AI skepticism rather neatly, because if the political dimension of disempowering labor is what matters then it becomes largely irrelevant whether LLM-based "AI" products and services can actually perform as advertised. Rather than being the central cause of this disruption it becomes the excuse, and so it just has to be good enough to create the narrative. It doesn't need to actually be able to write code like a junior developer in order to change the senior developer's job to focus on editing and correcting code-shaped blocks of tokens checked in by the hallucination machine. This also means that it's not going to "snap back" when the AI bubble pops because the impacts on labor will have already happened, any more than it was possible to bring back the same kinds of manufacturing jobs that built families in the postwar era once they had been displaced in the 70s and 80s.

Found a solution to the Fermi paradox, and solved the problem of all the 'dark matter', any advanced society just puts a dyson sphere around their galaxy, that is why we can't see or hear from them.

(Yes, this is a subsneer for the silly Altman remark. The whole solar system not just the Sun (I do support walling off The Sun)).

DAE remember when neel armstrong invented nasa and said his famous quote “That’s one small step for man, ok let’s fill this motherfucker up with GPUs”
- slaps moon You can make so much computronium from these atoms.
  E: shit no that is wrong, I used the term computronium correctly, if it was Altman he would have called it unobtanium
Because of course why have a data center when you can have an ecumenskatasphaira.

Not a sneer, but there is this yt'er called the Elephant Graveyard (who I know nothing about apart from these vids) who did a three part series on Joe Rogan, the downfall of comedy, hyperreality, which is weirdly relevant, esp part 3 where suddenly there are some surprise visits.

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EuKibmlll4

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v3KiaAjpY8

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewvRS3NwIlQ

Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025)

altman is the waluigi to musk’s wario

Why would you do waluigi and wario dirty like that?
i have on good authority (ed zitron's low effort skeets) that wario works for anthropic, and his surname is amodei

I'm enjoying the mood today. We're all looking for what the next Big Dumb Thing will be that we'll be dunking on next year, like we're browsing the dessert menu at a fancy restaurant.

On top of that, there's clear signs that we've grown quite an audience from dunking on AI. Ed Zitron reached 70k subscribers just a couple weeks ago, and Pivot to AI is at nearly 9k on YouTube.
If and when the next Big Dumb Thing comes along, chances are we're gonna have a headstart against the hucksters.

Michael Hiltzik in LATimes: "Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash"

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

https://archive.ph/2025.08.20-113134/https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

Fun quote:

The rest of [AI 2027], mapping a course to late 2027 when an AI agent “finally understands its own cognition,” is so loopily over the top that I wondered whether it wasn’t meant as a parody of excessive AI hype. I asked its creators if that was so, but haven’t received a reply.

And because it's the LA Times, there's a chatbot slop section at the bottom to provide false balance.

In other news, bodhidave reported a case of Google AI and ChatGPT making identical citation fuck-ups:

Even if they aren't actively relying on each other here I would assume that we're reaching a stage where all of the competing LLMs are using basically the entire Internet as their training data, and while there is going to be some difference based on the reinforcement learning process there's still going to be a lot of convergence there.
- Plus, there's the hefty amount of AI slop that's been shat onto the Internet over the years, plus active attempts to sabotage LLM datasets through tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes, and media-poisoning tools like Glaze and Nightshade.
  So, if and when model collapse fully sets in, its gonna hit all of them at once. Given that freshly trained LLMs are gonna be effectively stillborn, if ChatGPT et al. collapse, it'll likely kill LLMs as a tech for at least the next ten years.
The true meaning of "pooping back and forth forever"
- sick reference. I don’t even know how I knew this.

@dgerard is never going to run out of content for pivot, is he:

£2bn Deal to get ChatGPT Plus for whole of UK discussed by Sam Altman and technology secretary Peter Kyle

it is difficult to overstate the stupendous degree to which Peter Kyle's job is beyond him

Apparently Eliezer is actually against throwing around P(doom) numbers: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4mBaixwf4k8jk7fG4/yudkowsky-on-don-t-use-p-doom ?

The objections to using P(doom) are relatively reasonable by lesswrong standards... but this is in fact once again all Eliezer's fault. He started a community centered around 1) putting overconfident probability "estimates" on subjective uncertain things 2) need to make a friendly AI-God, he really shouldn't be surprised that people combine the two. Also, he has regularly expressed his certainty that we are all going to die to Skynet in terms of ridiculously overconfident probabilities, he shouldn't be surprised that other people followed suit.

There's a part where they quote someone saying "I am not particularly confident [in my p(doom)]" and I'm still remembering getting talked down to about how Actually all subjective uncertainty can be represented as probabilities because Bayesianism and you wouldn't happen to be one of those stupid frequentists right?

"wRiTiNg WiTh LlM iS nOt A sHaMe" https://awful.systems/post/5390645

not even hn is having it lmoa

also claims that llms are good for proofreading, clearly didn't do that

In other news, I've stumbled across some AI slop trying to sell a faux-nostalgic image of the 1980s:

Unsurprisingly, its getting walloped in the quotes - there's people noting how it misrepresents the '80s, people noting much the '80s sucked and how its worst aspects are getting repeated today, people noting the video's whiter than titanium dioxide, people suggesting there's suicidal undertones to it, and a few comparisons to San Junipero from Black Mirror here and there.

Personally, this whole thing has negative nostalgic value to me - I was born in 2000, well after the decade ended (temporally and culturally), and the faux-nostalgic uncanny-valley vibe this slop has reminds me more of analog horror than anything else.

These fake people all have extremely 2025 voices
Lmao, piss-soaked fake nostalgia aside, what is even the point of this? How exactly is one supposed to go back to the 80’s? Is this an ad campaign for a toaster bath or something?
- No idea. Best guess is that its some attempt to sell fascism under a thin veneer of '80s nostalgia, mainly because this one full minute of Oops! All White People, and fascists are the biggest boosters of AI bar fucking none.
  When it comes to falling for nostalgia, its generally Y2K-tinged stuff that gets me - I'm much closer to that era (again, I was born in 2000), and I've got a soft spot for the general visual style of that era (that its facing against Corporate Memphis/AI slop definitely helps).

The Palladium/Bismarck Analysis e-magazine guys who push space colonization used to known as Phalanx back in the day, just an fyi in case you guys didn't know.

So state-owned power company Vattenfall here in Sweden are gonna investigate building "small modular reactors" as a response to government's planned buildout of nuclear.

Either Rolls-Royce or GE Vernova are in the running.

Note that this is entirely dependent on the government guaranteeing a certain level of revenue ("risk sharing"), and of course that that level survives an eventual new government.

Interesting wondering if they manage to come further in the process than our gov, which seems to restart the process every few years, and then either discovers nobody wants to do it (it being building bigger reactors, not the smaller ones, which iirc from a post here are not likely two work out) for a reasonable price, or the gov falls again over their lies about foreigners and we restart the whole voting cycle again. (It is getting really crazy, our fused green/labour party is now being called the dumbest stuff by the big rightwing liberal party (who are not openly far right, just courting it a lot)).
29 okt are our new elections. Lets see what the ratio between formation and actually ruling is going to be this time. (Last time it took 223 days for a cabinet to form, and from my calculations they ruled for only 336 days).
- Nuclear has been a running sore in Swedish politics since the late 70s. Opposition to it represented the reaction to the classic employer-employee class detente in place since the 1930s where both the dominant Social Democrats and the opposition on the right were broadly in agreement that economic growth == good, and nuclear was a part of that. There was a referendum in the early 80s where the alternatives were classical Swedish: Yes, No, and "No, but we wait a few years".
  Decades have passed, and now being pro-nuclear is very right-coded, and while secretly the current Social Democrats are probably happy that we're supposed to get more electrical power, there's political hay to make opposing the racist shitheads. Add to that that financing this shit actually would mean more expensive electricity I doubt it will remain popular.
Rolls-Royce are looking at this as a big sack with a "£" on the side.

Xe Iaso's chimed in on the GPT-5 fallout, giving her thoughts on chatbots' use as assistants/therapists.

In related news I've been getting podcast ads for Anthropic touting Claude's emotional intelligence and value in working through life's challenges and listening to your relationship issues.
They're not explicitly saying that their chatbot is a therapist, but they're getting about as close as the law would allow, I'm sure.

Not a sneer in the classical sense. It seems that Extropic AI is about to finally ship something.

There is still no actual data about the hardware on their website...

From the people who brought you web3:
Furby3
In six months, they'll be making a killing selling em to people who are still mourning their AI waifuls and husbandos.
- @o7o7 @dovel next: Fourby

New article on AI scraping just hit The Register, with some choice quotes from Anubis dev Xe Iaso. Xe herself has given some additional thoughts.

That's weird, The Register's versions of the quotes are different (not just pared down).
- You don’t say, the register, taking journalistic integrity less than serious? (Hi, it’s me, a person who has been annoyed by their editorial choices for more than two decades now)