Want to wade into the snowy 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.
(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Yud explains, over 3k words, that not only is he smarter than everyone else, he is also saner, and no, there’s no way you can be as sane as him
Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
(side note - it’s weird that LW, otherwise so anxious about designing their website, can’t handle fucking apostrophes correctly)
Handshake meme of Yud and Rorschach praising Harry S Truman
From the comments:
I got Claude to read this text and explain the proposed solution to me
Once you start down the Claude path, forever will it dominate your destiny…
Ah, prophet-maxxing. ‘they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds’
The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes. Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.
This guy wrote this (note I don’t think there is anything wrong with looking like a nerd (I mean I have a mirror somewhere, so I don’t want to be a hypocrite on this), but looking like one and saying you are above tropes is something, there is also HPMOR)
No one point out that “keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs” is also a trope.
deleted by creator
I have found some Medium and Substack blogs full of slop which sneers at the TESCREAL types. Hoist on their own petard. Example: https://neutralzone.substack.com/p/the-genealogy-of-authority-capture (I was looking for a list of posters on the Extropians mailing list to 2001, which is actual precise work so a chatbot can’t do it like it can extrude something essay-like).
I clicked as I was curious as to what markers of AI use would appear. I immediately realised the problem: if it is written with AI then I wouldn’t want to read it, and thus wouldn’t be able to tell. Luckily the author’s profile cops to being “AI assisted”, which could mean a lot of things that just boil down to “slop forward”.
The most obvious indication of AI I can see is the countless paragraphs that start with a boldfaced “header” with a colon. I consider this to be terrible writing practice, even for technical/explanatory writing. When a writer does this, it feels as if they don’t even respect their own writing. Maybe their paragraphs are so incomprehensible that they need to spoonfeed the reader. Or, perhaps they have so little to say that the bullet points already get it across, and their writing is little more than extraneous fluff. Yeah, much larger things like sections or chapters should have titles, but putting a header on every single paragraph is, frankly, insulting the reader’s intelligence.
I see AI output use this format very frequently though. Honestly, this goes to show how AI appeals to people who only care about shortcuts and bullshitting instead of thinking things through. Putting a bold header on every single paragraph really does appeal to that type.
Also endless “its not X— its Y,” an overheated but empty style, and a conclusion which promises “It documents specific historical connections between specific intellectual figures using publicly available sources.” when there are no footnotes or links. Was ESR on the Extropians mailing list or did plausible string generator emit that plausible string?
Chatbots are good at generating writing in the style of LessWrong because wordy vagueness based on no concrete experience is their whole thing.
Could be part of its RLHF training, frequent emphasized headers maybe help the prediction engine stay on track for long passages.
pity it is slop, I’d enjoy a good ESR dunk
New preprint just dropped, and noticed some seemingly pro AI people talk about it and conclude that people who have more success with genAI have better empathy, are more social and have theory of mind. (I will not put those random people on blast, I also have not read the paper itself (aka, I didn’t do the minimum actually required research so be warned), just wanted to give people a heads up on it).
But yes, that does describe the AI pushers, social people who have good empathy and theory of mind. (Also, ow got genAI runs on fairy rules, you just gotta believe it is real (I’m joking a bit here, it is prob fine, as it helps that you understand where a model is coming from and you realize its limitations it helps, and the research seems to be talking about humans + genAI vs just genAI)).
So, I’m not an expert study-reader or anything, but it looks like they took some questions from the MMLU, modified it in some unspecified way and put it into 3 categories (AI, human, AI-human), and after accounting for skill, determined that people with higher theory of mind had a slightly better outcome than people with lower theory of mind. They determined this based on what the people being tested wrote to the AI, but what they wrote isn’t in the study.
What they didn’t do is state that people with higher theory of mind are more likely to use AI or anything like that. The study also doesn’t mention empathy at all, though I guess it could be inferred.Not that any of that actually matters because how they determined how much “theory of mind” each person had was to ask Gemini 2.5 and GPT-4o.
The empathy bit was added by people talking about the study, sorry if that wasn’t clear.
anyone else spent their saturday looking for gas turbine datasheets? no?
anyway, the bad, no good, haphazard power engineering of crusoe
neoclouds on top of silicon need a lot of power that they can’t get because they can’t get substation big enough, or maybe provider denied it, so they decided that homemade is just as fine. in order to turn some kind of fuel (could be methane, or maybe not, who knows) into electricity they need gas turbines and a couple of weeks back there was a story that crusoe got their first aeroderivative gas turbines from GE https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers-turn-to-ex-airliner-engines-as-ai-power-crunch-bites this means that these are old, refurbished, modified jet engines put in a chassis with generator and with turbofan removed. in total they booked 29 turbines from GE, LM2500 series, and some other, PE6000 from other company called proenergy* and probably others (?) for alleged 4.5GW total. for neoclouds generators of this type have major advantage that 1. they exist and backlog isn’t horrific, the first ones delivered were contracted in december 2024, so about 10 months, and onsite construction is limited (sometimes less than month) 2. these things are compact and reasonably powerful, can be loaded on trailer in parts and just delivered wherever 3. at the same time these are small enough that piecewise installation is reasonable (34.4MW per, so just from GE 1GW total spread across 29)
and that’s about it from advantages. these choices are fucking weird really. the state of the art in turning gas to electricity is to first, take as big gas turbine as practical, which might be 100MW, 350MW, there are even bigger ones. this is because efficiency of gas turbines increases with size, because big part of losses comes from gas slipping through the gap between blades and stator/rotor. the bigger turbine, the bigger cross-sectional area occupied by blades (~ r^2), and so gap (~ r) is less important. this effect is responsible for differences in efficiency of couple of percent just for gas turbine, for example for GE, aeroderivative 35MW-ish turbine (LM2500) we’re looking at 39.8% efficiency, while another GE aeroderivative turbine (LMS100) at 115MW has 43.9% efficiency. our neocloud disruptors stop there, with their just under 40% efficient turbines (and probably lower*) while exhaust is well over 500C and can be used to boil water, which is what any serious powerplant does in combined cycle. this additional steam turbine gives about third of total generated energy, bringing total efficiency to some 60-63%.
so right off the bat, crusoe throws away about third of usable energy, or alternatively for the same amount of power they burn 50-70% more gas, if they even use gas and not for example diesel. they specifically didn’t order turbines with this extra heat recovery mechanism, because, based on datasheet https://www.gevernova.com/content/dam/gepower-new/global/en_US/downloads/gas-new-site/products/gas-turbines/gev-aero-fact-sheets/GEA35746-GEV-LM2500XPRESS-Product-Factsheet.pdf they would get over 1.37GW, while GE press announcement talked about “just under 1GW” which matches only with the oldest type of turbine there (guess: cheapest), or maybe some mix with even older ones than what is shown. this is not what serious power generating business would do, because for them every fraction of percent matters. while it might be possible to get heat recovery steam boiler and steam turbine units there later, this means extra installation time (capex per MW turns out to be similar) and more backlog, and requires more planning and real estate and foresight, and if they had that they wouldn’t be there in the first place, would they. even then, efficiencies get to maybe 55% because turns out that these heat exchangers required for for professional stuff are huge and can’t be loaded on trailer, so they have to go with less
so it sorta gets them power short term, and financially it doesn’t look well long term, but maybe they know that and don’t care because they know they won’t be there to pay bills for gas, but also if these glorified gensets are only used during outages or otherwise not to their full capacity then it doesn’t matter that much. also gas turbines in order to run efficiently need to run hot, but the hottest possible temperature with normal fuels would melt any material we can make blades of, so the solution is to take double or triple amount of air than needed and dilute hot gases this way, which also means these are perfect conditions for nitric oxide synthesis, which means smog downwind. now there are SCRs which are supposed to deal with it, but it didn’t stop musk from poisoning people of memphis when he did very similar thing
* proenergy takes the same jet engine that GE does and turns it into PE6000, which is probably mostly the same stuff as LM6000, except that GE version is 51MW and proenergy 48MW. i don’t know whether it’s derated or less efficient still, but for the same gas consumption it would be 37.5%
e: proenegy was contracted for 1GW, 21x48MW turbines https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-data-centers GE another 1GW, 29x34.4MW https://www.gevernova.com/news/articles/going-big-support-data-center-growth-rising-renewables-crusoe-ordering-flexible-gas this leaves 2.5GW unaccounted for. another big one is siemens but they haven’t said anything. then 1.5GW nuclear??? from blue energy and from 2031 on (lol)
You’d think that they’d eventually run out of ways to say “fuck you, got mine” but here we are I guess. I’m going to guess that they’re not subject to the same kinds of environmental regulations or whatever that an actual power plant would be because it’s not connected to the grid?
why wouldn’t they be subject to emission controls if they’re islanded? anyway they aren’t islanded, they’re using gas turbines to supplement what they can draw from substation or the other way around, either way it’s probably all synchronized and connected, they just put these turbines behind the meter
i guess they’re not subject to emission controls because they’re in texas and anything green is woke, so they might just not do any of that and vent all the carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides these things belch. also, no surprises if they fold before emaciated epa gets to them, if republicans don’t prevent it outright that is
welcome to the abyss, it sucks here
i mostly meant to point out that it looks like they prioritized delivery speed and minimum construction, while paying top dollar for extra 50-70% fuel so it makes sense short term, and who cares what comes in two years when they’re under. this also means they bought out all gas turbines money can buy. if marine diesels weren’t so heavy these would be next
2 links from my feeds with crossover here
Lawyers, Guns and Money: The Data Center Backlash
Techdirt: Radicalized Anti-AI Activist Should Be A Wake Up Call For Doomer Rhetoric
Unfortunately Techdirt’s Mike Masnick is a signatory some bullshit GenAI-collaborationist manifesto called The Resonant Computing Manifesto, along with other suspects like Anil Dash. Like so many other technolibertarian manifestos, it naturally declines to say how their wonderful vision would be economically feasible in a world without meaningful brakes on the very tech giants they profess to oppose.
Anybody writing a manifesto is already a bit of a red flag.
i am pretty sure i am shredding the Resonant Computing Manifesto for Monday
and of course Anil Dash signed it
The people who build these products aren’t bad or evil.
No, I’m pretty sure that a lot of them just are bad and evil.
With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise.
[citation needed]
[to a source that’s not laundered slop, ya dingbats]
i don’t know if they are unusually evil, but they sure are greedy
to a source that’s not laundered slop, ya dingbats
Ha thats easy. Read Singularity Sky by Charles Stross see all the wonders the festival brings.
Kovid Goyal, the primary dev of ebook management tool Calibre, has spat in the face of its users by forcing AI “features” into it.
Does this mean calibre’s use case is a digital equivalent of a shelf of books you never read?
https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8966942 😭
also this guy is a bit of a doofus, e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934, where he is a dick to someone reporting a bug, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027, where someone points out that you can execute anything as root because of a security issue, and he argues like a total shithead
You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user
mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows
him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I’m shocked.
Implement a system that allows an appilcation to mount/unmount/eject USB
devices connected to the system securely, then make sure that system is
universally adopted on every linux install in the universe. Once you’ve done that, feel free to
re-open this ticket.i would not invite this person to my birthday
I was vaguely aware of the calibre vulnerabilities but this is the first I’ve actually read the thread and it’s wild.
There were like 11 or so Proof of Concept exploits over the course of that bug? And he was just kicking and screaming the whole time about how fine his mount-stuff-anywhere-as-root (!!?) code was.
I’m always fascinated when people are so close to getting something-- like in that first paragraph you quoted. In any normal software project you could just put that paragraph as the bug report and the owners would take is seriously rather than use it as an excuse for why their software has to be insecure.
yeah it was pretty wild
like we get it, you think your farts smell good, but this is an elevator sir
h/t YT recommender, mildly unhinged: The Secret Religion of Silicon Valley: Nick Land’s Antichrist Blueprint
0:40 In certain occult circles, Land is a semi-mythical figure. A man said to have been possessed by not one, but four Lemurian time demons. Simultaneously.
Well, that explains things.
Is this some CCRU lore I’m not aware of?
Based on my cursory perusal of CCRU lore, it all seems to boil down to amphetamine-induced mania and hallucinations
So, yeah, probably
That’s one Lemurian time demon for each side of the Time Cube.
Iirc A Dirty Joke.
Bay Area rationalist Sam Kirchner, cofounder of the Berkeley “Stop AI” group, claims “nonviolence isn’t working anymore” and goes off the grid. Hasn’t been heard from in weeks.
Article has some quotes from Emile Torres.
Most insane part about this is after he assaulted the treasurer(?) of his foundation trying to siphon funds for an apparent terror act, the naive chuckle fucks still went and said “we dont think his violent tendencies are an indication he might do something violent”
Like idk maybe update on the fact he just sent one of his own to the hospital??
Jesus, it could be like the Zizians all over again. These guys are all such fucking clowns right up until they very much are not.
Yud’s whole project is a pipeline intended to create zizians, if you believe that Yud is serious about his alignment beliefs. If he isn’t serious then it’s just an unfortunate consequence that he is not trying to address in any meaningful way.
fortunately, yud clarified everything in his recent post concerning the zizians, which indicated that… uh, hmm, that we should use a prediction market to determine whether it’s moral to sell LSD to children. maybe he got off track a little
to
fucksell LSD to children
A belief system that inculates the believer into thinking that the work is the most important duty a human can perform, while also isolating them behind impenetrable pseudo-intellectual esoterica, while also funneling them into economic precarity… sounds like a recipe for
delicious browniestrouble.Growing up in Alabama, I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, but I definitely had the feeling when meeting some people, “Given the bullshit you alreasy buy, there is nothing in principle stopping you from going full fash.” I get the same feeling now from Yuddites: “There is nothing in principle stopping you from going full Zizian.”
the real xrisk was the terror clowns we made along the way.
Bayesian Clown Posse
Banger
robots gonna make us Faygo, better stab a data center and by data center I mean land lord who had nothing to do with AI shit.
Whoop whoop
just one rationalist got lost in the wilderness? that’s nothing, tell me when all of them are gone
The concern is that they’re not “lost in the wilderness” but rather are going to turn up in the vicinity of some newly dead people.
look some people just don’t like women having hobbies
Is it better for these people to be collected in one place under the singularity cult, or dispersed into all the other religions, cults, and conspiracy theories that they would ordinarily be pulled into?
From Lila Byock:
A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education.
The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.
The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.
I try to avoid having to even see the outputs of these fucking systems, but you just made me realize that there’s going to be more than a few of them that will “leak” (read: preferentially deliver, by way of training focus) the kinks of its particular owner. I mean it’s already happening for the textual replies on twitter, soothing felon’s ever so bruised ego. the chance of it not Shipping beyond that is pretty damn zero :|
god I hate all of this
hi please hate this article headline with me
If TCP/IP stack had feelings, it would have a great reason to feel insulted.
hi hi I am budweiser jabrony please join my new famous and good website ‘tapering incorrectness dot com’ where we speculate about which OSI layers have the most consciousness (zero is not a valid amount of consciousness) also give money and prima nocta. thanks
Tcp/ip knew what it did, with its authoritarian desire to see packets in order. Reject authority embrace UDP!
But yes, they are using ‘layer’ wrong
Well that and “core”. I could consider social media and even chatbots parts of internet infrastructure, but they both depend on a framework of underlying protocols and their implementation details. Without social media or chatbots the internet would still be the internet, which is not the case for, say, the Internet Protocol.
Also I would contend they’re misusing “infrastructure”. Social media and chat bots are kinds of services that are provided over the internet, but they aren’t a part of the infrastructure itself anymore than the world’s largest ball of twine is part of the infrastructure of the Interstate Highway System.
Heh yeah, “infrastructure” in the same way that moneyed bayfuckers are “builders”
It is also a useful study in just how little they fucking by get about how anything works, and what models of reasoning they apply to what they perceive. Depressing, but useful
It legitimately feels like at least half of these jokers have the same attitude towards IT and project management that sovereign citizens do to the law. SovCits don’t understand the law as a coherent series of rules and principles applied through established procedures etc, they just see a bunch of people who say magic words that they don’t entirely understand and file weird paperwork that doesn’t make sense and then end up getting given a bunch of money or going to prison or whatever. It’s a literal cargo cult version of the legal system, with the slight hiccup that the rest of the world is trying to actually function.
Similarly, the Silicon Valley Business Idiot set sees the tech industry as one where people say the right things and make the buttons look pretty and sometimes they get bestowed reality-warping sums of money. The financial system is sufficiently divorced from reality that the market doesn’t punish the SVBIs for their cargo cult understanding of technology, but this does explain a lot of the discourse and the way people like Thiel, Andreesen, and Altman talk about their work and why the actual products are so shite to use.
Yeah, it is just a part of the application layer, and not even the whole one.
Ah but, you see, the end goal of the internet is serving slop and ads
They somehow misused every word in that sentence.
Chicken penne is now rivaling spaghetti Bolognese as a core layer of pasta infrastructure.
please hate this article headline with me
I’m right there with you
the article headline: “Chatbots are now rivaling social networks as a core layer of internet infrastructure”
Counterpoint: “vibe coding” is rotting internet infrastructure from the inside, AI scrapers are destroying the commons through large-scale theft, chatbots are drowning everything else through nonstop lying
The real infrastructure is the friends we made along the way
I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let’s dig into the findings.
[…]
Did you guess “that paper does not actually exist”?
Did you also guess that NOT A SINGLE PAPER IN THEIR REFERENCES APPEARS TO EXIST? […] When I was searching in various places to confirm that those citations were fabricated, Google’s AI overview just kept the con going.
Jill Walker Rettberg in the comments:
There’s a peer reviewed published paper in AI & Society called Cognitive Imperialism and Artificial Intelligence which is clearly mostly AI-generated. Citations are real but almost all irrelevant. I emailed the editors weeks ago but it’s still up there and getting cited.
Dexerto has reported on an unnamed Japanese game studio weeding out promptfondlers (by having applicants draw something in-person during interviews).
Unsurprisingly, the replies have become a promptfondler shooting gallery. Personal “favourite” goes to the guy who casually admits he can’t tell art from slop:
More grok shit: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/grok-doxxing it in contrast to most other models, is very good at doxing people.
Amazing how everything Musk makes is the worst in class (and somehow the Rationalists think he will be their saviour (that is because he is a eugenicist)).
(thinks) groxxing
the base use for LLMs is gonna be hypertargetted advertising, malware, political propaganda etc
well the base case for LLMs is that, right now
the privacy nerds won’t know what hit them
/r/SneerClub discusses MIRI financials and how Yud ended up getting paid $600K per year from their cache.
Malo Bourgon, MIRI CEO, makes a cameo in the comments to discuss Ziz’s claims about SA payoffs and how he thinks Yud’s salary (the equivalent of like 150.000 malaria vaccines) is defensible for reasons that definitely exist, but they live in Canada, you can’t see them.
Guy does a terrible job explaining literally anything. Why, when trying to explain all the SA based drama, does he choose to create an analogy where the former employee is heavily implied to have murdered his wife?
S/o to cinnaverses for mixing it up in there.
Cinnas
The Rolling Stone article is a bit odd (it appears to tell the story of the ex-employee who created Miricult twice, the first time without names and the second naming the accuser) but I trust them that MIRI did pay the accuser. Rolling Stone are a serious news organization which can be sued.
“Nah, salary stuff is private”, starting to think this sort of stuff is an idea introduced to protect capital and nobody else.
I was teasing this out in my head to try come up with a good sneer. First thought: for an organisation that tries to appeal to EAs, you’d think that they would do a good job of being transparent about why so much money is being spent on someone with such low output. But immediate rebuttal: the whole point of the TESCREAL cult shit is that yud get free tuocs because he’s the chosen one to solve alignment.
Was thinking more about how the radical, dont fall to biasses think for yourself and cone here to really learn to think (so we can stop the paperclipmachine and resurrect the dead) defend a half million dollars salary with a ‘thats private’.
But that is the same conclusion. The prophet must be protected.
