Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
Crypto Investor Proposes 450-Foot Statue of Greek God on Alcatraz Island is a story making the rounds in the press lately and aaaaaah I hate it. I’d say something more coherent than that but it’s already given me quite a headache.
He has a personal website as well as a website for his stupid statue idea. Both of which are buggy / ugly – apparently after saving $450 million for a dumb statue he has none left for good website coding.
If they’re going to make a 450 foot tall statue of Greek people I can think of more appropriate designs for San Francisco Bay.
“We call this the Reacharound Collossi”
I propose a 450-foot-tall statue of the most famous parts of Kirk Johnson’s anatomy, facing southwest back towards the city
Guy should just get “I love for-profit prisons” tattooed on his face instead of dressing up an island in bad bioshock cosplay.
The Framework thread caused by the company’s fash turn is still going even after eight full days.
Lotta lowlights to pick from, but the guy openly praising DHH for driving Basecamp straight off a cliff is particularly sneer-worthy:
I hope it’s still going after 8 full years, if the company’s even still in business. Trust is only built back with accountability.
“Not Winston Smith?” So, O’Brien?
“Apolitical” is peak red flag these days, eh?
Definitely, it’s just code for I’m ok with nazis at this point.
More “red hat” than “red flag”, but you’re still dead-on.
Kind of a ramble: So, I’ve been out in the wild recently. I use discord and have noticed that in most of the servers I’m in, either they have an explicit no-genAI policy or quarantined sections where genAI content is allowed. On one podcast’s server, I posted a complaint about some genAI content that was posted to the podcast’s socials, and the embed was removed because it showed the genAI content- 10/10, love to see it. On another server, I figured out that the channel was created specifically because they had a sealion problem but didn’t want to ban their sealion (it appeared to be just one).
An interesting (read: stupid) thing about this sealion was that they are a self-styled leftist that was pro-AI. I won’t try to replicate any of their nonsense here, because A) it was nonsense stemming from a refusal to believe any anti-AI data and a lack of understanding of how LLMs work, and B) I don’t want to look like I’m posting about some kind of argument I had elsewhere here in order to score internet points, as I’m self aware/anxious enough to know that I sound exactly like that right now.
They posted this recent article written by Peter Coffin. There isn’t much about this guy on the internet. All I can gather is that they are some kind of breadtuber or in the breadtube orbit. It’s funny (read: farcical) to see a person posing as leftist say they are “pro-AI” but “anti-AI industry”. Either they don’t understand how the technology works (i.e. ignorant) or are accelerationist, wanting both the destruction of the environment and art (i.e. wilfully stupid)
Anyway, this exploration has shown me that some leftists don’t support copyright protections. I understand that from a couple different perspectives: 1. The main beneficiaries of copyright protections are large media corporations, and 2. it can be interpreted as trying to capitalistically extract fictional value, much like a landlord charging rent. I’m not trying to debunk this (I don’t think I’m representing this well enough). My thought is that I don’t give a shit about corporations losing money, what I care about is the work of individual artists being under/de-valued. Copyrights are an imperfect method that artists use to try seek justice, so it’s a grey area for me. Coffin in the article linked paints the situation as black and white: anyone who tries to stop someone “stealing” is actually rent seeking, whether or not they are a megacorp or a starving artist. (edit) I think this comes from Coffin’s “extremely pro-AI” agenda, i.e., being anti-AI is enough to be reductively lumped together under some conspiratorial pro-capitalist agenda.
End of ramble, sorry that there wasn’t much of a point or structure here. Would love to hear any thoughts that come out from reading this.
E: note that this vid is posted as a common criticism of Coffin.
E2:
re: video above:
I really didn’t know about this before writing that edit. I did some more reading. Coffin is something of a pick-me internet guy, his entire personality crystallised by that video. He’s moved from internet trend to internet trend, one of note being gamergate, formerly anti, now pro (yes, as of 2024). He also did rap parodies? Anyway this isn’t about him.
There isn’t much about this guy on the internet.
There is actually, but it is mostly on youtube. Anyway he aligned himself to Caleb Maupin. A colorblind communist who thinks brown is red. (I dont think he is actually colorblind, but he likes Dugin).
if only, maupin spoke on a conference in teheran next to dugin and publishes his books. the layer of red paint on brown couldn’t be possibly thinner. see also: jackson hinkle, maga-communism. i wish everyone involved nice tuberculosis infection in damp ukrainian prison
I’m a leftist who doesn’t support intellectual property. My solutions to intellectual property are 1) communism, or at least 2) basic income, in that order of preference.
Until one of the solutions to the problem of intellectual property is implemented, individuals should be allowed full sovereignity over their intellectual creations as they see fit. Personally all my intellectual creation is either public domain, or published under open, explicitly anti-capitalist licenses. But that’s because I have a day job and a safe economic situation. If an artist decides people should pay to use their stuff, people should pay to use their stuff. The consent of the creator is non-negotiable.
Capitalists are the enemy and I don’t give a flying fuck about capitalist intellectual property. My rule, grosso modo, is: if I pay to access this piece of art, does the money go to the creators, or does it go to some corporation’s shareholders? If the first, I pay, gladly. If the second, I sail the high seas. Sometimes when it’s hybrid (usually of the form “the artist gets peanuts and the capital owners get the lion’s share”) I will dig up the artist’s patreon or ko-fi or whatever, donate the price of the thing there, and pirate it, under the assumption that the patreon/ko-fi/bandcamp/etc. cut is smaller than the typical entertainment industry’s.
Peter Coffin is a fuck and his contrarian-ass pro-AI stuff deserves sneering to the full extent of sneerdom
Is it a single person or a worker co-op? Their copyright is sacred.
Is it a corporation? Lol, lmao, and also yarrr
Lol, lmao, and also yarrr
Glorious banner material
I’m stealing this take :p
I will deliberately avoid declaring the take to be in the public domain, just so that you can enjoy the street cred of your life of crime 🏴☠️
One of my favourite musicians, Patricia Taxxon is quite vocal on being against intellectual property, but also that AI people should just be able to scrape everything and put it in their machine. It makes me sad.
Yeah I mean I am in favour that food should not be paywalled from the hungry and everyone who wants food should be able to just go to the food and eat it (i.e. I am in favour of a system that allocates resources according to need). I am not in favour that wealthy capital owners who already hold all the power in the world should be allowed to vacuum all the food into a hell blender that produces processed food product to try and impress investors into another round of funding for their food sucking machine. These are not the same thing.
coffin’s a grifter with a narcissistic streak. they surfaced around gamergate and then quickly shat the metaphorical floor.
My exposure to the guy began and ended at seeing him tut-tutting HBomberguy for nuking James Somerton’s career - glad to know my five-second assessment of him was dead on
Reading the post and later seeing that Steve Harvey clip was like reading Pinker and then seeing his pics with Epstein. Except Coffin (or just his own foot) is his own Epstein.
It’s funny (read: farcical) to see a person posing as leftist say they are “pro-AI” but “anti-AI industry”.
not looking to start instance war or anything btw
iirc one of db0 admins is of this opinion which boils down to, in their case, that they’re pro-ai but only if self-hosted (ie “yes, i’m pro-ai, just not pro-the kind of ai that is actually used in 99.9% ai output”). they join it with pro-piracy and anarchist positions and it’s part of the reason why ai content is allowed on that instance. iirc it’s not even consensus among their other admins
pro-AI but only self hosted
Like being pro-corporatism but only with regard to the breadcrumbs that fall off the oligarchs’ tables.
We should start calling so-called open source models trickle-down AI.
Self-identifying as “progressive” and being anti-copyright and thus pro-AI is something I’ve seen before online.
I’ve never charged money for my creative output, but my “moral right” as an author/creator is very important to me.
The “thus pro-AI” is just so, so, stupid. Like, any anti-capitalist argument you make against copyright just immediately implodes when you do the qui bono.
They posted this recent article written by Peter Coffin
Oh, hey, that’s the “Plagiarism is AWESOME, And Here’s Why” guy, who tut-tutted HBomberguy for erasing plagiarist shithead James Somerton from existence and went to bat for JK Rowling okay yeah dump this guy’s shit in the fucking bin
I was pretty strongly anti-copyright back when I was younger, but after seeing the plague of art theft and grave robbing the NFT fad brought (documented heavily by @NFTTheft on Twitter), and especially after the AI bubble triggered an onslaught of art theft, cultural vandalism and open hostility to artists, I have come around to strongly supporting it.
I may have some serious complaints about the current state of copyright (basically everyone has), but its clear that copyright is absolutely necessary to protect artists (rich and poor) from those who exploit the labour of others.
Yeah. At the very least copyrights give some level of protection to the individual that you don’t often see elsewhere. Like, the government can take your land, but they can’t steal your memes.
https://xcancel.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1980035057067884670
hmm yes, this will surely replace wikipedia.
Everything about this is terrible:
Crypto scammer reported to ICE after stealing cancer patient’s treatment fund
Last week, we learned that area transphobe Sabine Hossenfelder is using her arXiv-posting privileges to shill Eric Weinstein’s bullshit. I have poked around the places where I’d expect to find technical discussion of a physics preprint, and I’ve come up with nothing. The Stubsack thread, as superficial as it was, has been the most substantive conversation about her post’s actual content.
Wrong link. this points to the NeurIPS post for this week.
Good catch; thanks. I think I had too many awful.system tabs open at once.
This is not a sneer so much as a sneer request; anyone know of any good articles written about the total hypocrisy of the Free Speech brigade since the inauguration? By far the most anti-speech environment in decades and most of them are still just whining about pronouns on campus or whatever.
(Yes; FIRE has passed this very basic test and has occasionally switched topics from whining about “leftist professors” to saying stuff like “it’s not great that we’re deporting people for writing articles for their school paper about how genocide is bad”. Literally everyone else is a hypocrite)
Biggest examples I know of is Shaun’s 4-hour review of the “War on Science” book, and the backlash to the Riyadh Comedy Festival (the whole drama here was hilarious, and not because of the comedy).
Here’s a written review of that book which covers its problems fairly well, I think. (Which indirectly reminded me that last year I wrote a blog post about how Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense wasn’t such hot stuff. I guess I hadn’t shared that here before.)
I also found this Reddit comment that lays into Sokal and Bricmont’s treatment of Lacan, but not having read Lacan, I can’t vouch for it:
I’ll just note the sneerability of how Sokal contributed to sex pest Krauss’ War on Science book, right alongside Jordan Peterson, who has said plenty of things as batshit as Sokal accused Lacan of being.
TechDirt has posts about this quite often.
NeurIPS is one of the big conferences for machine learning. Having your work accepted there is purportedly equivalent to getting a paper published in a top-notch journal in physics (a field that holds big conferences but treats journals as more the venues of record). Today I learned that NeurIPS endorses peer reviewers asking questions to chatbots during the review process. On their FAQ page for reviewers, they include the question
I often use LLMs to help me understand concepts and draft my writing. Can I use LLMs during the review process?
And their response is not shut the fuck up, the worms have reached your brain and we will have to operate. You know, the bare minimum that any decent person would ask for.
You can use resources (e.g. publications on Google Scholar, Wikipedia articles, interactions with LLMs and/or human experts without sharing the paper submissions) to enhance your understanding of certain concepts and to check the grammaticality and phrasing of your written review. Please exercise caution in these cases so you do not accidentally leak confidential information in the process.
“Yeah, go ahead, ask ‘Grok is this true’, but pretty please don’t use the exact words from the paper you are reviewing. We are confident that the same people who turn to a machine to paraphrase their own writing will do so by hand first this time.”
Please remember that you are responsible for the quality and accuracy of your submitted review regardless of any tools, resources, or other help you used to construct the final review.
“Having positioned yourself at the outlet pipe of the bullshit fountain and opened your mouth, please imbibe responsibly.”
Far be it for me to suggest that NeurIPS taking an actually ethical stance about bullshit-fountain technology would call into question the presentations being made there and thus imperil their funding stream. But, I mean, if the shoe fits…
I did not think anything could make me sympathetic to the authors who put 0.1pt white text in their papers so that any reviewer lazy enough to use an LLM would get prompt injected, but here we are.
Highlight the space just after the abstract of my own most recent arXiv preprint for a surprise. :-)
Google seems to have turned off the -ai in search on iPhone (Safari browser)and overrides it to return an AI-generated result now. Anyone got a fucking workaround on this bc I do not want to see that shit
I use Mullvad Leta, which is basically a front-end for the Google (and Brave) API. It used to be exclusive to Mullvad customers but I believe it’s available to everyone now.
It doesn’t support image search, but so far this has been consistently good enough for me.
The obvious workaround is to stop using google search.
Yes, but I wouldn’t say that to someone I want to still like me after.
why is aweful systemes broken today? does it depend on aws somehow?
nah sorry about that, the scrapers took the opportunity to knock us offline again so I did a little bit of impromptu maintenance to make us more rugged against the same type of failure in the future
the next work I do around this will be significantly more planned because it’ll be iocaine
does it depend on aws somehow?
Well, what do you think “aws” stands for ;)
New Baldur Bjarnason: The inevitability of anger, on the impending reckoning for AI and tech influencers’ attempts to avoid it, plus how social media shapes public discourse.
My dad was a bit freaked out by a video version (We’re not ready for super-intelligence)of the “AI 2027” paper, particularly finding two end scenarios a bit spooky: colossus-style cooperating AIs taking over the world, and the oligarch concentration of power one, which i think definitely echoed sci-fi he watched/read as a teen.
In case anyone else finds it useful these are the “Comments as I watch it”, that I compiled for him
Before watching Video Notes:
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AI Only channel with only 3 videos
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Produced By “80000hours”, which is an EA branch (trying to peddle to you the best way to organize 40years * 50 weeks * 40 hours [I love that they assume only 2 weeks of holidays]); which is definitely cult adjacent: https://80000hours.org/about/#what-do-we-do. Mostly appears to be attempting to steer young people to what they believe are “High impact” jobs.
Video Notes:
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The backing paper is a bit of a joke, one “AI 2027”, for reference one of the main authors is very much a “cult member”, Scott Alexander Siskind, author of “Slate Star Codex” and “Astral Codex Ten”.
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Other authors include [AI Futures Project] :
- Daniel Kokotajlo (podcast co-host of siskind, ex open-ai employee, LessWrong/EA regular)
- Thomas Larsen (ex MIRI [Machine Intelligence Research Institute = really really culty], LessWrong/EA regular)
- Eli Lifland (LessWrong/EA regular)
- Romeo Dean (Astra Fellowship recipient = money for AI Safety research, definitely EA sphere)
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A lot of fluff trying to hype up the credentials of the authors.
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AGI does not have a bounded definition.
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They are playing up the China angle to try and drum up jingoistic support.
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Exaggerating Chat GPT-3 success, by merely citing “users”, without mentioning actual revenue, or actual quality.
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Quote:
How do these things interact, well we don’t know but thinking through in detail how it might go is the way to start grappling with that.
-> I think this epitomises the biggest flaw of their movement, they believe that from “first-principles” it’s possible to think hard enough (without needing to confront it to reality) and you can divine the future.
-> You can look up “Prediction Markets”, which is another of their ontological sins.
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I will note that the prediction of “Agents” was not a hard one, since this is what all this circle wants to achieve, and as the video itself points out it’s fantastically incompetent/unreliable.
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Note: This video was made before the release of GPT-5. We don’t know precisely how much more compute altogether GPT-5 truly required, but it’s very incremental changes compared to GPT-4. I think this philosophy of “More training” is why OpenAI is currently trying (half-succeeding half failing) to raise Trillions of dollars to build out data-centers, my prediction is that the AI bubble bursts before these data centers come to fruition.
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Note: The video assumes keeping models secret, but in reality OpenAI would have a very vested interest in displaying capability, even if not making a model available to the public. Also even on consumer models, OpenAI currently loses a bunch of money for every query.
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Note: The video assumes “Singularitarianism”, of ever acceleration in quality of code, and that’s why they keep secret models. I think this hits a compute/energy wall in real life, even if you assume that LLMs are actually useful for making “quality” code. These ideas are not new, and these people would raise alarms about it with or without current LLM tech.
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Specific threats of “Bio-weapon”, which a priori can not really be achieved without experimentation, and while “automated” labs half exis, they still require a lot of human involvement/resources. Technically grad students could also make deadly bioweapons, but no one is being alarmist about them.
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Note: “Agent 2” Continuous Online learning is gobbledygook, that isn’t how ML, even today works. At some point there are very diminishing returns, and it’s a complete waste of time/energy to continue training a specific model, a qualitative difference would be achieved with a different model. I suspect this sneakily displays “Singularitarianism” dogma.
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Quote:
Hack into other servers Install a copy of itself Evade detection
-> This is just science-fiction, in the real world these models require specialized hardware to be run at any effective speed, this would be extremely unlikely to evade detection. Also this treats the model as a single entity with single goals, when in reality any time it’s “run” is effectively a new instance.
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Note: This subculture loves the concept of “science in secrecy”, which features a lot in the writings of Elizer Yudkowsky. Which is cultish both in keeping their own deeds “in a veil of secrecy”, and helpful here when making a prophecy/conspiracy theory, by making the claim hard to disprove specifically (it’s happening in secret!)
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Note: Even today Chain-of-thought is not that reliable at explaining why a bot gives a particular answer. It’s more analog to guiding “search”, rather than true thought as in humans anyway. Them using “Alien-Language” would not be that different.
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Agent 3, magically fast-and-cheap, assuming there are now minimum energy requirements. Then you can magically run 200,000 copies of. magically equivalent to 50,000 humans sped up by 30x. (The magic is “explained” in the paper by big assumptions, and just equating essentially how fast you can talk with the quality of talking, which given the length of their typical blog posts is actually quite funny)
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Note: “Alignment” was the core mission of MIRI/Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Note: Equating Power and Intelligence a lot (not in this video, but in general being suspiciously racist/eugenicist about it), ignoring the material constraints of actual power [echo: Again the epitomical sin of “If you just think hard enough”]
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Note: Also assuming that trillions of dollars of growth can actually happen, simultaneously with millions losing their jobs.
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I am betting that the “There is another” part of the video is probably deliberately echoing Colossus.
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The video casually assumes that the only limits to practical fusion and nanotech just intelligence (instead of potential dead-ends, actually the nanotech part is a particular fancy of theirs, you can lookup “diamondoid bacteria” on LessWrong if you want a laugh)
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The two outcomes at the end of the video are literally robo-heaven and robo-hell, and if you just follow our teachings (in this case slow-downs on AI) you can get to robo-heaven. You will notice they don’t imagine/advocate for a future with no massive AI integration into society, they want their robo-heaven.
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Quote:
None of the experts are disagreeing about a wild future.
-> I would say specifically some of them are suggesting that AGI soon is implausible quite strongly. I think many would agree that right now the future looks dire with or without super-AI, or even regular AI.
Takeaway section:
Yeah this really is a cult recruitment video essentially.
We’re almost at the end of 2025 and agents don’t fucking exist the way they predicted. Ai 2027 agmi.
^image of Daniel K who already updated his rapture prophecy to 2029 because he’s a mark
I stumbled onto that vid a while back, watched the first minute or so, lol’ed at the glazing of kokotajlo, and stopped the vid. I did think about posting it here to be torn apart but forgot about it. I watched a little bit further and got “they chose to write this as a narrative” of course they fucking did. It’s their one thing. Write a shitty 10k word story that amounts to some combination of “really makes you think” and “big if true”.
Here’s a story: Once upon a time there was a world. In it people were sad. Then one day swlabr was elected supreme benevolent ruler and then nobody was sad again :) the end. Wow make u think. Many experts agree
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Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die?
To lightly paraphrase Yahtzee Croshaw:
Short answer: No. Long answer: No, and go fuck yourselves, you ignorant hype-mongering cockbags.
This is the second time this rancid idea has been put forward, and its just as morally bankrupt as the first.
Yahtzee, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
Guy’s been doing well for himself since the Escapist imploded in 2023 - he’s doing video reviews and video essays over on Second Wind, under the names Fully Ramblomatic and Semi Ramblomatic, respectively.
(As for the Escapist, it got sold off to a “private investor” and turned into a gambling content mill in 2025)
What, are you telling me you’re not prepared to share your most intimate details with elon musk’s edgelord/waifu simulator in order to let it pretend to be you well enough to fool a bunch of professionals who should know better, and let it decide whether you should live or die? With a marketing pitch like that, who could possibly refuse?
I know full well you’re being sarcastic, but my answer is an emphatic “NO”. I feel like I’m gonna need a lobotomy to get this hypothetical out my head now.
New Ed Zitron, giving exact numbers for how much money Cursor and Anthropic have lit on fire and continuing to shed light on the AI industry’s ability to incinerate revenue.
tldr is that anthropic spent on aws only 2x their revenue in 2024, spent on aws approx the same as their revenue in 2025 up to september, and they also pay unknown amount but known to be a lot for google cloud, on top of everything else like salaries and who the fuck knows what else
something something Ed Zitron really needs an editldr
I lolled at how this post literally included an “[editor’s note: ….]” at one point but the entire damn thing was still exactly his usual textual diarrhoea. 30 paragraphs that could’ve been two simple charts. A++ would absolutely only skim through again.
i heard from reliable source (ed zitron) that he has one
Simon Willison writes a fawning blog post about the new “Claude skills” (which are basically files with additional instructions for specific tasks for the bot to use)
How does he decide to demonstrate these awesome new capabilities?
By making a completely trash, seizure inducing GIF…
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
He even admits it’s garbage. How do you even get to the point that you think that’s something you want to advertise? Even the big slop monger companies manage to cherry pick their demos.
Just felt like I got an aneurysm there.
(in unrelated things, first)
How do you even get to the point that you think that’s something you want to advertise?
Man’s spent several years and shitloads of cash destroying his public image (and probably his brain) via slop bots, I suspect he’s getting desperate to prove his LLM booster turn wasn’t a career-ruining blunder
(He’s also probably lost the ability to tell good work from bad work as well - that’s a universal quality among slop advocates, as Gerard has pointed out on multiple occasions)
