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 so 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.)
Trump giving a speech at some TESCREAL-coded nonprofit that’s got some…interesting design in their logo
sneer from an unexpected source: off-broadway.
Anyone in NYC or DC get to see it?
How can I get a copy of the script, though… I guess you can’t just order one like a book, even my campus library said it would be tough.
“GitHub opted everyone into [ai] training.”
You have till 24 April to opt out.
A lesswronger asks are
werationalfic protagonists the baddies? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=uDuzmfMEvEqpyApLhtldr; rationalfic has a very common trend of the protagonist gaining and using overwhelming power to radically reform the world. This is almost (with a few notable exceptions) portrayed as clearly unambiguously good thing.
My take: Don’t get me wrong, the Wizarding World (for example), as canonically portrayed needs some very strong reforms if not an entire revolution. But rationalfic almost never portrays the slow hard work of building support networks and alliances and developing a materialist theoretical understanding of how to reform society, as opposed to a lone (or small friend group) rationalist hero finding some overwhelming magical or technological advantage they can use to single-handedly take control and use their rationalist intellect to unilaterally fix everything. Part of it is the normal disconnect of fiction to the real world were it is more narrative satisfying (and easier to write) to have a central protagonist the solves the major problems or is at least directly involved with them, and rationalfic involves that protagonist gaining even more agency than they canonically do. The problem is that rationalist take this attitude back into real life, and so end up idolizing mythologized techbro billionaires or venture capitalist or the myth of the lone genius scientist/inventor.
Also, quality sneer in the replies, “rational” teletubbies: https://tomasbjartur.bearblog.dev/rational-teletubbies/
there’s a lot i want to pull out from this comment by ngo
first, shorn of context, i don’t know that this sort of power fantasy reflects so poorly on the rationalists. or perhaps it does, and in that case also reflects poorly on me, since it’s my preferred power fantasy. the world sucks and it would be nice to magically make it better. EDIT: ok im noticing that the naruto fanfiction excerpt is just straightforwardly jerking off about doing a fascist coup
second, we must remember that rat stories are implicitly either recipes for social change or warnings that society ought to stay away from particular demons. rationalism is in large part a political movement with what they believe to be practical aims
third, if ngo’s marxist fiction from the 1800s all ended with communist revolutions, the worrying thing for a member of the movement would not be a fantasy of triumph or a sense of certainty of triumph, but rather an inability to connect triumphant outcomes to action under the present conditions. as you highlighted, the fantastical element of these stories is in conflict with the practicality of their aims
fourth, as far as i can tell, that is not ngo’s objection at all. what he seems to be concerned about is the possibility that rationalists will make serious progress on actually taking over the world and make terrible things happen once they do. i don’t take this possibility seriously at all. fundamentally, rationalists are lapdogs, forever licking the negligently outstretched hands of billionaires. they cause real harm as lackeys of the ultrawealthy and vectors for the diseases of racism, eugenics, etc, but to take ngo’s concerns seriously i would have to buy into the same fantasy of magical omnipotence he’s pointing to, because there seems to be no other path from here to rationalist dictatorship.
Your first point is true… with the key words being “shorn of context”. When you look at how many ratfics go in that direction your second and fourth points become problems.
As to your fourth point… the techbro billionaires like Elon or Peter Thiel do like referencing fiction (often in hamfisted or ignorant ways that makes me think a bit of fandom gatekeeping actually is good sometimes… i.e. naming your surveillance company palantir, or naming one of your kids a nonsensical WH40K reference). So I wouldn’t entirely neglect the possibility of rationalist managing a bit of inspiration to the billionaires in between the bootlicking. And although there may not be a magical “coup the government” power in real life, the influence they are trying to focus on themselves and harness is still worrying.
They also don’t want to believe in chaos theory. This post tries to explain it to them, but check out Gwern in the comments being skewered by a book written by Freeman Dyson around the time he was born. They want the future to be perfectly predictable (even though Yud says that 1 and 0 are not probabilities) and they don’t like game theory, repeated games, or non-zero-sum games, because those reward people from building trust then violating it.
- hey chaotic systems are a thing, you can’t predict every single last detail
gwern: as a proof that you’re wrong, what if we placed everywhere very fast robots that avoid getting into chaotic systems in the first place
Gwern’s been updating those comments! This was in 2023, and in 2025 he was still so mad about it that he wrote a list of ways to cheat at pinball and edited the comment to add a link.
The attitude that you can substitute a bunch of cheap tricks and hacks to get around fundamentally difficult problems reminds me of the techbro attitude that leads to stuff like pushing fundamentally non-viable technologies (like Theranos or the LLM boosters) and of DOGE trying to asking an LLM how to cut the DEI.
I feel so sad because so many of his examples are ways to make people think you won. And we are about to see what happens when you take 20-30% of global fossil fuel and helium production offline for six months to a few years. Public relations and cooking the books can’t change that.
Its easy to make people believe you are wise and know the future. There is no way to predict the weather one month out much better than we can now, and if you plant your crops and the sun scorches them, those crops are dead and you have to wait until next season to replant.
Part of what makes the RatFic version of this so weird imo is that despite being ostensibly rooted in relatively low-hanging fruit (e.g. what if we industrialized this pre modern setting, what if we rationally looked at the rules of this magic system, etc.) nobody other than the protagonist has ever thought about these things and even once the protagonist starts demonstrating some real world-conquering results (benevolently, of course) nobody ever really seems to want to copy their successes. Part of what made the actual industrial revolution unfold the way it did was because of the ensuing arms race of it. In addition to causing the lines on various economist’s charts to go nearly vertical this also basically culminated in the first world war, which seems like the kind of event that they should be aware of. But of course in RatFic it seems like anyone who can’t be talked around to joining up with our protagonist is too weak or woke or stupid to actually pose a threat to the Glorious March of Rational Progress.
Once you commit to the idea that only your main characters have ever tried to study magic scientifically, you’re locked in to making all the rest of the magical world into dullards. (Really, no other eleven-year-olds were ever into computer programming, chemistry sets, exotic marine animals, outer space, or dinosaurs?) Or, to look at it another way, the only way you can find the premise plausible is if you’re already inclined to dismiss most of humanity as “NPCs”.
Being the kind of writer I am, whenever this comes up I am tempted to suggest ways it could have been done better. But, first, I am not glazing the work of Rowling, even indirectly, no way, no how. Fuck her for all the pain she has wrought, and fuck the whole LessWrong crew for tacitly accepting it. Second, HPMoR was cult shit all along, not meant to teach science but to sow distrust of scientists under the glossy sheen of being able to name the six quarks.
Being the kind of writer I am, whenever this comes up I am tempted to suggest ways it could have been done better.
The premise kind of does work in a setting like Harry Potter, the wizarding world is insular enough that a clever kid could bring in some new ideas. The problem is Eliezer wanted to throw in too many shortcuts. Its not enough for creativity with transmutations to give the protagonist a small edge, transmutation is made into the ultimate all-purpose spell so the protagonist can exploit it easier. The protagonist isn’t just moderately better at Patronus with some muggle psychology, his patronus can kill dementors. And the philosopher’s stone is changed into some ancient atlantean super-magic, because fuck wizards ever inventing anything, and also instead of some moderate rate of its typical mythological powers it is super transmutation.
But, first, I am not glazing the work of Rowling, even indirectly, no way, no how.
Rowling went mask off transphobe in 2018, HPMOR finished in 2015. So I won’t blame Eliezer for not picking a different fandom at the time. Eliezer has actually said moderately supportive comments, including of using people’s preferred pronouns (we’ve mocked another lesswronger for writing long screeds complaining about this). In general, I think the average lesswrong attitude towards trans people is better than the average American’s attitude… but that is because the bar is in hell. But yeah I’ve seen plenty of shitty takes towards trans people on lesswrong.
Second, HPMoR was cult shit all along, not meant to teach science but to sow distrust of scientists under the glossy sheen of being able to name the six quarks.
Yep. And it didn’t even stick to its premise of “try to do science to magic and compare muggle scientifically gained knowledge to magic” and instead went into some Ender’s game pastiche followed by Death Note style “I know you know I know” plotting, then Harry gets handed all the magical power handed to him at the end of the story thanks to Dumbledore following some insane combination of prophecy.
To be clear, I don’t care about Yud picking the fandom he did at the time (apart from the cheapness of “playing on easy mode” and the blatant attempt to ride popularity for propagating his cult shit). What strikes me is the silence during the time when other people are most definitely reacting:
I have also occasionally been tempted to try and get a Goncharov thing going, where everyone collectively recalls that Tommy Berry and the Forevernight Forest got them into reading.
It was just after an ordinary afternoon tea, on an ordinary Sunday, the first cold day of autumn, when Tommy Berry discovered that Time was no longer adding up in the ordinary way.
Tommy had only managed to drink one cup of very indifferently warm tea, and eat the last plain saltine from the bottom of the bag. Everything else had been gobbled up or drunk down by his uncle Myrvold, who was rotund as a boulder and about as kind, and his step-aunt Meredith, who was thin as a snake and considerably more mean. So, yes, it was altogether quite the ordinary teatime.
Tommy had a secret, you see. In fact, he had two, a big one that he knew about and an even bigger one that was just about to fall on top of him.
His first secret was that he had a library card. He had stolen an adult’s library card. Or that is how Uncle Myrvold and Step-Aunt Meredith would have described it, if they knew.
Carruthers, who lived down the end of the lane and always yelled at Tommy to mind his hedges, and who let his dog chase Tommy and the other children, had made a big show of throwing his library card into the roadway because, he said, the library was full of immoral books. A car had then driven over it, and then a whole lorry, and then Tommy had snatched it up. Something told him that anything Carruthers hated, he should save, and anything that Myrvold and Meredith would be angry about, he should hold onto.
Tommy had heard adults say that something was “burning a hole in my pocket”. He wondered if this was what that meant. It felt like he was carrying a hot coal in the pocket of his threadbare corduroy jacket, and no one could know.
The library had a new machine. He had seen adults use it. You could go up to it, wave a book under a red laser light like at the grocery store, then show the machine your card, and it would check out the book for you. Tommy made a plan. He would slip out of the house just after tea. He would walk the five blocks to the library. He would find a book that Myrvold and Meredith and Carruthers and every other grownup would not want him to read. He would wait until the librarian was busy dealing with a whole queue of people. And then he would use the machine.
Everything went perfectly until the very last step.
There was a girl at the machine.
He had a big fat book in his hands, a book he had picked because it had “Murder” in the title and would last a long time, and there was a girl in front of him at the library machine.
“Murder at Wizard University?” she asked him, right to his face, like they had already been introduced, like they had known each other since nursery school. “That’s not a book for little kids.” His stomach dropped, right into his feet. He didn’t know that a stomach could do such a thing.
And then she tilted the stack of books she was carrying toward him, showing him the titles on their spines. “Neither are these,” she said.
And she pulled out her own library card. It was black, like a rectangle cut out of the midnight sky.
That’s all I wrote in the thread that prompted me to take a stab. Oh, I think I had decided that the girl’s name is Elfriede? And the principal of magic school is nonbinary.
“Why, of course there’s a potion for changing,” said Professor Shade. “That is what potions do. I don’t know where I’d be without it. It is ever so helpful to reach the top shelf, but on the other hand, men’s fashions haven’t been truly swank in a hundred fifty years.”
Major rats jumping out of the ship before the bubble pops. Dang I mixed the metaphors. You get the idea
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/coca-cola-james-quincey-walmart-doug-mcmillon-artificial-intelligence-step-down.html“I did the AI that people largely hate, but the next guy, HE’S the real AI CEO. Just remember him, not me, the guy who did the stuff.”
DeviantArt decided to make an “AI-powered” “video creator” (roughly a day before Sora got shitcanned), because its not like dA can make things worse by doubling-down on that shit. Special highlight goes to the opening of that announcement, which asks:
What if your art could (quite literally) move?
Have these people ever heard of animation
What if your art could literally move to a different platform am I right?
We shouldn’t have let them take elfwood.
E; shouldn’t not should
ChatGPT sex mode is also going to hell with Sora we hardly knew ye
deleted by creator
A friend of mine is working on an internal AI chatbot at their company, so that the Least-Productive Team will have something to answer the same 5 questions that they keep asking to Friend’s (extremely productive) team, instead of wasting Friend et al’s time.
So I guess that’s the one use case of AI bots: to dangle keys in front of MBAs who are too stupid to do their own jobs. Which explains everything, really.
Yeah, almost the entirety of use cases for genai chatbots is contempt for one’s customers.
Hey, it’s not just that, that’s unfair to the chatbots. They’re also used out of contempt for one’s employees
Ah, of course! I come from a corp culture where co-workers were also called customers (“users” actually but you know)
is that some MLM shit or something?
On one hand, no, it’s an inevitable consequence of a company becoming so large that it needs a department to manage its internal infrastructure. When I worked at Google, my customers were Googlers; that is, the services I owned were only queried by fellow employees. On the other hand, books like The Circle are popular precisely because they capture the quasi-cult vibe of working at places like Google.
right, I forgot you could build things for internal use
Carl Bergstrom notes a publicity stunt by Anthropic:
“The AI Grad Student”: A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.
Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: “It faked results, hoping I wouldn’t notice.”
But he ends the essay with “Now I’m doing 100% of my research with LLMs”.
Am I losing my mind?
Hang around for the “trust me bro, I saw it on YouTube” guy in the comments.
when Bergstrom came to campus last year, he mentioned that he wargamed a pandemic response with vaccinations for the Bush administration, and they were worried enough about people raiding vaccine trucks, mad max style, that they planned for all these armed escorts.
… instead we get to live in eddington.
I’ve been rewatching ReGenesis and you can sorta see a similar background to it (it being of the same vintage): bio attacks are the Big Bad, there’s actual mobilisation against viral spread, etc
kinda whiplash just how fucking rapidly the antivaxxer movement (and general anti-science) managed to spread and become popular in the years hence (and specifically circa the ~2016 mark)
As a counterpoint, there’s a local outbreak of meningitis in Kent (UK) and panicked kids are lining up for vaccinations there.
COVID mostly hit the invisible elderly. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if kids 0-6 were the most vulnerable.
Over here, measles hits mostly kids, but if anything, the new measles epidemic seems to have made antivaxxers double down.
Yeah it’s tragic, but I think it can be “explained” in that incorrect idea that measles isn’t that bad, really, and it was “natural” to get it. I don’t know the exact lethality differences between the diseases in question - just that for an otherwise healthy 20 year old university student, being forced to stay at home because of a disease mostly killing octogenarians is easier to protest against than something that’s killing you and your fellow ravers.
People are trying to get vaccinations for that here in .nl (as in one other country it already spread to a university iirc, so not totally unwise)
oh sure, I didn’t mean to imply that good isn’t happening, more observing on how far and popular the whackjobs have managed to come
I’d do the usual “in celebration of Sora’s death post your favourite AI slop video” but there’s no need since we know the absolute best one so thread over
They are now also dropping their porn chatbots. (Remember though, they were late with that, from what I heard the market on that was already filled).
So that’s like what, 90% of all usage gone
Not sure, from what I heard lot of porn people use other models anyway. Not exactly sure which models (I heard there are also places where there are jailbroken models, but im not going to look for that for obvious reasons), but from what I heard a while back grok/gemini/deepseek were popular. Low N on that however. Grok seems to be esp popular for revenge porn sort of shit however.
For example see the usage stats here for roleplay using janitor.ai (most roleplay is not erotic however (the site has no ‘erotic content’ tracking), but still, openAI’s models are not in the top 20). This is however free vs priced models etc (and deepseek is a lot cheaper, which is important for roleplay esp if you want a history, as that context needs to be added every time (the powercost of all this must be insane)).
spare a thought and a prayer for all these careers of ambitious propagandists and engagement farmers, dislocated without warning
Really hope this is going to be the wave breaking, as it is getting so stupid. (Some dutch library had all its new books be ai slop (some even quite racist it seems), and this isnt a single incident).
requiescat in picem, sora
“AI is here to stay” the AI:
reportedly they dropped the whole video thing, including from chatgpt.
more like requie-SCAT, am i right
their deal with Disney is also over, so hooray!
Requiescat en urina, more like. Does that make the first of this generation of slopmakers to actually get shut down?
I built an open-source connector between MyChart and Claude : /r/healthIT (edit: Archive copy)
my jaw is on the fucking floor
You know, when I think about securely holding onto things and protecting them without damaging or dropping them, I think of a fucking OPEN CLAW said nobody ever.
The Tumblr thread about covers it, but I had a quick look through the code and this caught my attention in the get2fa.ts file. It’s used in Authorisation headers for
https://api.resend.com/emailsrequests. I’ve never used an aws secretsmanager but I’m pretty sure this is a no.const RESEND_API_KEY_SECRET_ARN = 'arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-2:<REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING>:secret:RESEND_API_KEY-<REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING>';const result = execSync( 'aws secretsmanager get-secret-value --secret-id "${RESEND_API_KEY_SECRET_ARN}" --region us-east-2 --profile <REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING> --query SecretString --output text', { encoding: 'utf-8' } ).trim();😵💫
Oh jolly can’t wait for this to go viral enough that my boss schedules time to ask me about it.
The tumblr thread is a must read if you’ve ever been near HIPAA regulated infrastructure.
I saw this headline:
Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers With Giant Data Centers, Huge Tech Labs, and Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof
And thought nothing in the body of the article could possibly top the headline. I was wrong:
Now, a long-shot effort seeks to rebuild them in an unlikely locale: Chicago
he’s even gone so far as to get a tribute to the original World Trade Center tattooed on his arm.
fireproof steel I-beams
a dedicated fire department
Journalists know that they don’t have to cover every random crank on the internet right? I suppose it’s my own fault for clicking on it.
I… “Fireproof steel I-beams” has to be taking the piss, right? Right???
do they know that doing this won’t solve their NYSE link latency problem?
Chicago always wanted a 9/11 of its own.
Usenet used to be there for guys like this
Misaligned incentives. You read the news to be informed. Journalists write "news* to generate clicks and “try to go viral”
I agree though, It would be great if they didn’t provide oxygen to these flaming idiots
I don’t know, I think there’s real value in allowing the public to keep an eye on aspiring supervillains.
Depriving the steel beams of oxygen would help too…
fresh hellish nonsense brought to you by ai-gen podcasts enabled by techbros interpretation of consent and privacy:
https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/
WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services.
“WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings. The platform mostly relies on the widespread use of these tools by end users, rather than operating them directly. However, at least one of the known extensions is listed on the Chrome Web Store as developed by WebinarTV.”
Sounds like someone in a jurisdiction which requires all-party consent to record a conversation could sue them
