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.)
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”
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)
“The home of 1999” already beat them to that.
From gormless gray voice to misattributed sources, it can be daunting to read articles that turn out to be slop. However, incorporating the right tools and techniques can help you navigate instructionals in the age of AI. Let’s delve right in and and learn some telltale signs like:
- Every goddamn article reads like this now.
- With this bullet point list at some point.
- I am going to tear the eyes off my head
The worst are slop-generated recipes that you only realise are fake halfway through reading when they tell you to add half a cup of table salt to your cake batter
not even a couple of small rocks? smh
is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? it’s one thing if it’s gaming-related[1], but when i’m at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say “ask for help in our discord server”, i feel like i’m in a fever dream and i’m going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in is run by chatgpt
i guess. not really, fuck discord. ↩︎
this is gonna live in my head forever without paying any rent and i am upset
and so i pass on the burden, like a virus, to all those who seek truth but must instead whip out their phone to scan a QR code and then get welcome-pinged 18 times in #general
Yeah, for multiple reasons. Mostly because all the information in there isn’t accessed or searchable from the outside, and technically not even from the inside because Discord’s search feature fucking sucks.
Also logging is hard, all the various channels are annoying (esp as th, and having to jump through various hoops just get into channels (hoops for which the instructions can be outdated/bad (one of them used a feature that was disabled on my machine for some reason, but nobody had realized that was possible)) is just nuts. And then there is the whole thing that Discord itself wants to make the platform as busy as possible by adding more and more moving things. I just want to chat.
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.”
Crypto bros continue to be morally bankrupt. There is an a coin / NFT called “GreenDildoCoin” and they’ve thrown dildos onto court at multiple WNBA basketball games (ESPN, video). It warms my heart that one of them was arrested. More of that please.
Polymarket even had a “prediction” on it. Because surely the outcome there couldn’t be influenced by someone who also placed a large bet. Oh and Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme about it
None of this is particularly surprising if you’ve followed NFTs at all: the clout chasing goes to the extreme. In the limit memecoins can act as donations to terrible people from donors who want them to be terrible. Still I hate how much publicity this has gotten, and how this has manifested as gross disrespect towards women atheletes / women’s sports by the sorts of losers who make “jokes” about no one watching WNBA games.
It truly blows that cryptocurrency turned out to be useful only for crimes (uncool) and sex weirdos (derogatory).
Well, after 2.5 years and hundreds of billions of dollars burned, we finally have GPT-5. Kind of feels like a make or break moment for the good folks at OAI~~! With the eyes of the world on their lil presentation this morning, everyone could feel the stakes: they needed something that would blow our minds. We finally get to see what a super intelligence looks like! Show us your best cherry picked benchmark Sloppenheimer!
Graphic design is my PASSION. Good thing the entirety of the world’s economy is not being help up by cranking out a few more points on SWE bench right???
Ok. what about ARC? Surely ya’ll got a new high to prove the AGI mission was progressing right??
Oh my fucking God. They actually have lost the lead to fucking Grok. For my sanity I didn’t watch the live stream, but curiously, they left the ARC results out of their presentation. Even though they gave Francois access early to test. Kind of like they knew this looks really bad and underwhelming.
“The word blueberry contains the letter b 3 times.”
Also reported in more detail here:
The word “blueberry” has the letter b three times:
- Once at the start (“B” in blueberry).
- Once in the middle (“b” in blue).
- Once before the -erry ending (“b” in berry). […] That’s exactly how blueberry is spelled, with the b’s in positions 1, 5, and 7. […] So the “bb” in the middle is really what gives blueberry its double-b moment. […] That middle double-b is easy to miss if you just glance at the word.
(via)
Graphic design is my PASSION
Wait just how bad is 4? 30% accurate? Did they train it wrong as a joke? Also hatless 5 worse than 3?
Yeah, O3 (the model that was RL’d to a crisp and hallucinated like crazy) was very strong on math coding benchmarks. GPT5 (I guess without tools/extra compute?) is worse. Nevertheless…
The one big cope I’m seeing is in the METR graph ofc. Tiny bump with massive error bars above Grok 4 so they can claim the exponential is continuing while the models stagnate in all material ways.
50% success rate? sorry, all this for a coin flip?
Looks like they already removed it
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.
OpenAI is food. You can tell because it’s washed, rinsed, and cooked.
this gave me a good chuckle after a few Some Fuckin Days, ty
Call me AGI because I am stealing this without attribution
who’s the bigger fish that’s gonna eat them?
@[email protected] probably. you can tell because of the food poisoning. (Hope you’re feeling better!)
Nothing expresses the inherent atomism and libertarian nature of the rat community like this
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)
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.
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.
There are a bit different axes here. The tax money doesn’t directly go towards alleviating the suffering of family members of alcoholics, nor does it directly lower the effects of drunk driving. The income is a nice to have, for sure, but the stated aim is to be a “sin tax” which makes the bad thing less affordable.
[Drunk, having a good time with friends]: I’ll show you collecting state tithes for immoral substance consumption!
sin tax error
Perfecting the art of getting sloshed is my 80,000 hours of meaningful work.
I just enjoy dabbling
cheers m8, ill drink to that
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.
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.
an unintended side effect of this is people who can’t or don’t want to verify their age going to less reputable sources. so even though it can be done in a “privacy-respecting fashion” (see, for example, soatok’s post[1] on this), it’s still a bad idea.
additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]
https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-to-be-a-privacy-footgun/ ↩︎
e.g. “steam porn games” → “this person’s existence is inherently sexual” → “ban lgbtq content” ↩︎
Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting post and interesting blog in general!
Yes, any version of age control which would realistically get passed will be bad. This:
additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]
is absolutely true. The fact that those privacy preserving approaches exist but aren’t used is all the proof I personally need of this.
Would you mind explaining how to do that easily in a way that only reveals age without being a privacy nightmare? Which means that it mustn’t be giving sites an excellent tracking identifier nor requires them to process documents themselves.
I’d have imagined something along these lines:
- USER visits porn site
- PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
- PORN forwards that to USER
- USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
- GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
- GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
- GOV returns that to USER
- USER forwards that to PORN
- PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
- but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)
There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.
PORN site encrypts random nonce
Really unfortunate word in this context. (Not your fault of course.)
Sorry to talk about this couple again, but people are discovering the eugenicists are also big time racists
Btw, the ‘teen pregnancy’ thing, is prob a bit ahistorical. If we use teen marriages as a standing for teen pregnancies, these were historically very low. (contrary to what people believe about the past, mostly because strategic marriages by rich people/nobles were not, but those people were not normal people) See: https://bsky.app/profile/nogoodwyfe.bsky.social/post/3lv2ehbn7pc2x
But reactionaries gotta go back to some imagined ideal past. No matter what actually learned people say. (and that is also why the far right is anti-intellectual).
Joining the war on teen pregnancies on the side of teen pregnancies to bring back the ideal past of - check notes - the 1990ies in the US.
(At least a cursory look points toward teen pregnancies in the US peeking some time in the 1990ies.)
I assume they don’t know teen pregnancies peaked in the 90s.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 I think the real question is - are white men incompatible with democracy.
Because it seems like it at the moment.
deleted by creator
This is just haplessly comical. The AI-generated sinister hijab lady, the attempts at algorithm-compliant YouTube face, the fact that they’re doing this instead of raising their kids (which may be beneficial for the kids in the long run…) Who do they imagine they’re convincing?
I’d assume they need X pieces of
flairpropaganda to get their theilbucks.I think they get to cash in their Racism Points for Thielbucks at the end of the month
Wait, are those AMERICANS asking:
“Is the Arab brain 🧠 incompatible with democracy?”
The Americans who overthrew an Iranian democracy to install a dictator and are currently overthrowing their own elected government so they can be ruled by dictator? Those Americans?
🤣🙃
Most inhabitants of Iran would dislike being called Arabs… but I guess the lazy racists are just using it as a shorthand for “brown people who are Muslim”
It’s kind of a missed opportunity too, what with how heavily the OG Persians feature in the early chapters of the racist “clash of civilizations” narrative.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 I was wondering where this was hosted, and it’s just fucking YouTube.
Once again, AUP’s are just brand safety, and brand safety is just whatever make the most money.
The problem is “arab”. I won’t make generalizations of Arab. That’s just where you were born. Cant affect where you were squirted out of a womb.
But Islam? In reality, all the major YHVH religions see women as possessions or second class citizens. That applies to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
And seriously, even Hinduism and Buddhism too discriminate against women as well. Those are #4 and #5 world religions.
The only set of religions that treat women and men equally are Western Paganism. Women and Men are equal. Like, actually equal. Not fake not-really-equal.
Ah, yes, Western Paganism is famed for its uniformity of belief and complete lack of objectionable people saying hateful things. (Pay no attention to the Nazis behind the curtain, they’re not Real Pagans™.)
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.
Making art with the help of tech billionaires is so punk rock man!
Just as Jello Biafra intended. Wait. What?
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.
this guy actually lost a bundle in NFTs a few years ago
