gerikson @ gerikson @awful.systems

Posts

44

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1,404

Joined

2 yr. ago

"Enjoy" this Rat fundamentally misunderstanding Banks:

https://www.boristhebrave.com/2025/09/14/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia/

JFC the comments on LW are even worse..

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia#comments

While the Culture is, on pretty much any axis, strictly superior to modern civilization, what personally appalls me is their sheer deathism.

If memory serves, the average human lives for around 500 years before opting for euthanasia, mostly citing some kind of ennui. What the hell? 500 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

"Why didn't Iain take my neuroses into account??"

Marvelous! This makes more sense of the culture than the books do.

"please sir may I pleasure you sexually"

LOL ofc I spoke too soon, the "messages" were apparently random arrows

Reports are shell cases with messages have been found. My money is still on it being a false flag.

Artnet: Christie’s Quietly Deletes Digital Art Department

deep down they realize that as soon as the machines become superintelligent they'll realize how fucked up humans are and decide it's a net postive to delete us

JFC if he dies he's the new Horst Wessel

I mean it's still just funny money seeing the creator works for some company that resells tokens from Claude, but very few people are stepping back to note the drastically reduced expectations of LLMs. A year ago, it would have been plausible to claim that a future LLM could design a language from scratch. Now we have a rancid mess of slop, and it's an "art project", and the fact it's ersatz internally coherent is treated as a great success.

Willison should just have let this go, because it's a ludicrous example of GenAI, but he just can't help himself defending this crap.

Yet another example of how acceptance of GenAI is increasingly coded as right wing

MAGA hates AI (well, Big Tech):

https://archive.ph/mBo9I

(Originally The Verge: MAGA populists call for holy war against Big Tech)

https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-natcon

I think it's a very "edgy teenager" thing to say, regardless of what cultural or political tribe this mental teenager pledges allegiance to.

Promptfondlers on lobste.rs are unhappy about the tag "vibecoding", used to denote development using GenAI. I'd not recommend reading the thread, just want to observe that if slop coding had actually taken the coding world by storm, I doubt there would be much pearl clutchign about how slop-slingers are treated on the site. We're talking about people willing to pay Scam Altman money monthly after all.

https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms

Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

JFC man, stop digging

Good news, everyone! A Wronger has Thoughts about Female Attractiveness

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cHqCGG5dTmpnM7y92/female-sexual-attractiveness-seems-more-egalitarian-than

30 karma, 15 comments. Very Rational.

Not the first time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=scottaaronson.blog

An update, a Concerned Citizen furrows their brow and Has Questions on how this was handled, about a week later

https://lobste.rs/s/zoirhl/appealing_ban_user_friendlysock

A predictable shitshow erupts, which leads to the creator of Anubis quitting the site, along with a few others.

At least I get more entries in my "lobste.rs assholes" list.

Worth noting is this text from the mod (https://lobste.rs/s/zoirhl/appealing_ban_user_friendlysock#c_6prapm)

This pattern was that every couple years there’d be a long string of cruel, dismissive, or discouraging comments. Not necessarily wrong, not outright abusive, not spam, not any one over the line, but all of them… just endless “ugh, this guy again?” and other users, more or less quietly, leaving rather than deal with it. This final comment called out in the modlog is one more example. The entire goal of the rhetoric is that it’s not explicit, it’s not outright libelous, it doesn’t even take personal responsibility for holding the opinion of the smear it insinuates. It’s deniable out of context, whether the missing context is the author’s writing history or the missing context is the old bigotry that trans people are pedophiles.

I’m not missing that context. The only thing I’m missing is the charity to think that somehow this time it’s different, that after a decade, this time it will the last time would be the last time I have to explain that this is a community where everybody’s going to be treated with some basic dignity. The other mods suggested the idea of a public apology but that didn’t work out, and absent a persuasive reason to expect this pattern wouldn’t continue, this ban stands.

Thanks for this write-up, I just saw the advisory and didn't realize just how dumb the entire thing was.

They bet humanity's future on the premise that very rich people would keep promises.

This seems very stupid to me.

Enjoy this malicious prompt trying to find crapto secrets after a compromise

https://semgrep.dev/blog/2025/security-alert-nx-compromised-to-steal-wallets-and-credentials/#header-6