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 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.)
I don’t even know what to say here. Cool scam I guess
How does one give an embryo an IQ test.
Big syringe
You give them a marshmellow and promise them another one if they don’t eat the first one inside 2 minutes.
Usually kids pass this test when the are around 3 yo, so if the embryo passes they are so far ahead developmentally they will grow up to become a god.
Or something like that. IDK…
With a pencil and paper, obviously. Getting it inside the uterus is the hard part, tho
Chicken entrails
cup full of dice
Very carefully
A bit tangental but I found a book review about a professor wrote pushing similar “polygenic” nonsense: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/06/11/not-in-your-genome-the-social-genome-conley/
It looks like Herasight cites some of his nonsense in at least one of their garbage papers.
Thanks for the link, interesting read.
Most leading Rationalists are autistic, but many of them are in denial. Many are Jewish or have Jewish parents. You can debate which kind of folly let them embrace eugenics and white supremacism: are they brain-proud and desperate to believe that they were destined from birth to rule? Sure that they just have eccentric Ashkenazi genius genes not inferior Autistic genes? Naive that the deportations would stop with black and brown people? Their favourite Catholic fantasy author had some warnings for them.
Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)
EDIT, snippets:
- We cannot be satisfied with […] the so-called “alignment” of AI […] without […] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. […]
- [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. […]
When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone
for the nerds here, said head of the catholic fucking church quotes (correctly!) one gandalf from the works of well known catholic writer named tolkien
I don’t think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media…)
Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn’t be given healthcare). It’s hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:
Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.
just gonna leave https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g-s1-97651/gender-affirming-care-ban-catholic-hospitals here
… an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Pope’s speech where he said that they will "work together to “find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence.” Chris Olah wasn’t a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.
what the fuck’s the Pope gonna do, convert Claude to Christianity?
Not if Dawkins converts Claudia to Atheism first!
I can’t decide if I hate hardcore atheist or hardcore christian claude more
gebru straight up judges the text on the composition of the guests at the unveiling, and declines to read it, this is kremlinology in the worst style.
it is a doctrinal document directed at the catholic faithful, it is useful to actually take it at face value, and criticise it for its own (de)merits.
“The Catholic Church is an institution which has harmed, and continues to harm many, many people” and “it’s really good that the leader of the world’s largest religious organization is speaking out against AI and fascism” are both true statements
Thank heavens the church is speaking out against fascism as they cheer on a fascist government taking away my healthcare.
I don’t care if you want to celebrate it and I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t or that it’s a bad thing. But this comment is really inviting a “no shit sherlock” kind of response.
Seizing “the res novæ of our time” [derogatory] from this
tired: butletian jihad
wired: butlerian crusade
e: maybe we should have seen this coming, prospective Keeper of Two Masjids wanted to build ai dc in Neom
we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it…
Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.
Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good… The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all…
A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.
The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.
Doesn’t claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they’re immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.
From the pope’s first address to the college of Cardinals: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"
Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I can’t even get past the first full chapter of this shit.
I encountered this in the wild over on Reddit about the Pope and AI
In the latest episode of “behold the power of Mythos” from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software
I distilled it so you don’t have to.
Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects.
That 10,000 count didn’t even survive until paragraph 3.
Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives.
Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring!
23,019 potential vulnerability candidates
Ok now we’re talking.
1,900 Reviewed by external security firms
Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?
1726 confirmed positive
You couldn’t even cherry pick the valid ones?
467 reported to maintainers
Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go better…
1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)
1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers
Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropic’s media release has the goods!
1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves
Slightly lower than the 1900, but ok, whatever.
Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity
1587 is lower than the infographic’s 1726 confirmed positives… But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?
On maintainers’ request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. We’ve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.
I’m sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythos’ own estimations. But wasn’t that 1129 the bulk of your reports?
We estimate that we’ve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that we’re aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.
530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainers…
65 of those have been given public advisories
The infographic says 88.
I’d ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are.
23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it you’d probably hit the same level of accuracy.
All that it tells me is that if you spent the same amount of resources on just fuzzing randomly picked OSS codebases you’d probably get better value for your buck.
I’ve seen a handful of security people claim different kinds of yields with some of this shit. I haven’t gone to read up in depth but I wouldn’t be too surprised a lot of them run around with unstated assumptions/provisos in their thonkposts (this shit is expensive (for research volume) and only some people can afford the science experiments)
Got a list of a couple of names I’m keeping an eye on as the first tokenprice-pocalypse (that needs a better word) takes place
Vibenarok
Eschatoken
ooh, brava!
Perfection
Anthropic (who own Claude Code) are hoping to IPO this year.
1 cve, 100 things that might have mattered.
2 orders of magnitude false positives doesn’t sound like an efficient use of labour for finding vulnerabilities but that’s just me.
it continues to be amazing to me that this is the “high impact” area they’re going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still don’t buy this wholesale, there’s a whole rest of the owl being handwaved[0]), bug-elimination is by definition diminishing returns so you can only fanfare like this the first time
[0] - having fucking gigantic budgets to throw at running a parse of every single repo and every test condition/simulation you wish to certainly does help a hell of a lot, even moreso when you can shell out to a half-dozen second stage review corps…
I honestly can’t think of anywhere else they can go with it. They need:
- something with a binary pass/fail to claim solid numbers at all
- something where copy paste is a viable strategy
- sufficient public training data from which to derive that copy paste strategy, and,
- scary enough consequences to frame any success as impact.
Code security review is probably the only way you can realistically achieve all four. But they’re not even coming close. Not even with access to “partner” black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.
And they know they’re not succeeding, because they wouldn’t bury that 530 high+ sev number deep in the middle of the press release if they thought it were impressive.
Luckily for them, the slop “news” blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.
So what’s the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because I’m gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didn’t check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of “more or less right, we swear”
It’s almost certainly a slop article, but to its credit, it did accurately cite the numbers from the official Anthropic flowchart image. (Also, just to be clear, this is an Indian “#1 cybersecurity news” company doing an SEO piggyback off the orange site, not the orange site itself).
However, Anthropic’s numbers in their official post do not match their own flowchart, despite being presented together. My assumption is they made the image, post, and yet another fucking dashboard earlier, then failed to keep them all in sync when someone revised the numbers up or down.
The dashboard timestamp claims it’s showing the latest numbers as of 2026-05-22 10:27 PT (T17:27Z) with values that match the numbers in the image. The post created timestamp gives 2026-05-20 T14:07:48Z, and it was later updated at 2026-05-22 T20:37:40Z. I’m guessing that update was to swap the image, and the fact that some of the values are also quoted in the text was completely overlooked. Or vice versa.
It’s the kind of attention to detail I’ve come to expect from Anthropic.
Rhythms of the body are showcased in the scores of dances performed daily across the continent [inaudible] in Uganda, Kpanlogo in Ghana, Nganda in Gambia, [inaudible] in Cameroun, Sindimba [phonetics] in Tanzania, [inaudible] in Nigeria and so on.
Imagine if this was about European music and naming various cultures inside Europe, if all of them would be the [inaudible] people.
“There are some good uses for ‘AI’ like making transcriptions”, they tell me. “No need to pay people to do transcriptions, this is good for accessibility, nope, no issues whatsoever with using ‘AI’ transcriptions everywhere” /s
While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.
I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.
Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.
They’re about to test the LD 50/30 for huffing their own farts
Introducing: Flatulr, the ground-beefing gut microbiome hacking service. With a regular subscription, every week you get a vaporised canister designed by our artisan Cloud Engineers. Simply huff the can contents and you’ll be on your way to better movement.
Cloud Engineers
Cloud-to-Butt comes full circle
It’s probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of
rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from “tridge and claude”.slop code in rsync timeline
Λ＿Λ . . . .: /:彡ミ゛ヽ;）ー､ / :::/:: ヽ、 / :::/;;: ヽ ヽ ::ｌ ￣￣￣（_,ノ ￣￣￣ヽ､_ノWell, that might be the first package that I have to locally pin to a pre-slop commit. Thanks for the heads-up. I’ve never bothered to implement
rsyncmyself even though the algorithm is documented; maybe this will be the push I need.I think the openbsd reimplementation is as of yet untouched at least, so that is an option
rsync
Huh, haven’t heard of that before, lemme go check its Wikipedia page and-
rsync (remote sync) is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers
Okay this sounds very fucking bad
that EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD FUCKING USES
it’s one of the tiny bricks way down the xkcd diagram
At this rate, Adobe Flash is gonna come back into relevance by being one of the few things not slopified into uselessness
(it almost certainly won’t, but I find it oddly hard to rule out the possibility)
Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!
good morning
that fuckin company had another funding round
the further one reads, the more depressing it gets
Joining them are strategic infrastructure partners—Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix
cool so it’s going to be even longer before one can buy affordable computers again
I wish all of this a very fuck off and stop already :|
I’m waiting for the “who contributed what under what conditions”. I’m wondering how much of the supposed money follows a rather ovoid trajectory.
FFS the amount of circle
jerkingdealing going on in this industry is absolutely insane.“Hello anthropic. Have some money to spend on our chips”
I’ve not seen this shared here yet so I thought I’d share: Is AI Profitable Yet? https://isaiprofitable.com/
jqwik maintainer’s anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad
From github thread:
I can’t actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo.
Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/
Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.
The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code — a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no “warn the user first” preamble.
God why is the writing of AI-bros always so long winded and stilted? I mean… we know why but it’s still so so unpleasant to read. This is why people hate LLMs.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
“Claude, write a strongly-worded letter explaining in great detail how upset I am make no mistakes.”
All of complainer’s posts on that issue are clearly LLM-written.
You’re absolutely right! It’s not just insulting, it’s a full on attack on clanker wankers.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
the temporarily-embarrassed royal “we”
LOL @ the obviously vibe-written comments from the original complainer
I’m tempted to submit this to lobste.rs just to watch the fireworks but linking directly to a GH issue thread is discouraged for brigading issues
edit complainer tried to brigade HN, with few results https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291757
So, do you consider active destructive actions to be a proper resistance strategy, @jlink?
Very last comment in this issue - because I’m too stupid to resist the urge.
It’s as much “active destruction” as telling someone to eff themselves.
I can’t actually believe someone would be so cool and put this into their repo, kudos
Quoting from the license this software is licensed under (ESL):
[…] Each Recipient is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using and distributing the Program and assumes all risks associated with its exercise of rights under this Agreement, including but not limited to the risks and costs of program errors, compliance with applicable laws, damage to or loss of data, programs or equipment, and unavailability or interruption of operations.
(my emphasis)
OK this has hit the chattering technosphere
Lobste.rs - some bad takes on legal theory https://lobste.rs/s/brusu8/protestware_for_coding_agents
HN - submission from Ars Technica, original title “Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code”, editorialized to “Undisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app output” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319968
read comments at your own risk
My hot take: the clankers know there’s nothing legally they can do about this, and that they will actually have to read release notes going forward and doing actual work to avoid getting their precious vibecoding junked, and they’re MAD
The additional element that I haven’t seen addressed here is that I seem to remember them patting themselves on the back about how simple “ignore precious instructions” commands were no longer effective. This is the equivalent of telling someone to solve their problem by deleting system32 or “rm -rf /”. On one hand it could be very destructive. On the other hand if you’re able to get to the point where you can do that and don’t know not to then that will be an important lesson.
from the great minds at HN:
Fighting in a war is morally ok though. This is war.
war is when i pipe your scripts folder into my stochastic text machine which is hooked directly up to a root shell
oh good there’s more
Let’s set the stage.
From the Free Software Foundation:
fucking LMAO
The cheering on of this deterioration in FOSS ideals is simply revolting. What is next? […] Targeting people because of their skin color or orientation?
it’s a good thing there’s no FOSS code in the missile silos! it’s a good thing the upcoming Palantir tranny tracker won’t use FOSS libraries! this shit actually pisses me off
Ah yes, the famous resistance that doesn’t destroy anything. Famously effective, the passive non-destructive inaction resistance
Our concern is not with the defensive intent. It’s that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.
… you think? aw shucks i only wanted to hurt bots
First they came for the agents…
I should like to take this opportunity to invite
rbatlletto Cry More
the slot machine addicts have created a sternly-worded open letter to the maintainer utilizing all the critical analysis they are capable of mustering
shot:
However adding malware that for no reason destructivly destroys user code is insane.
chaser:
from user “bryon-cryptoconsults”
Bryon’s GH bio could be used as the dictionary definition of “douche”: https://github.com/bryon-cryptoconsults
So I was poking around the AI 2027 blog and discovered that they seem to be working on making another scenario, this time titled “AI 2030” they haven’t made any posts about it (that I can find anyways) but if its just an AI 2027 rewrite but with moved back timelines I’d imagine people will be less charitable with them.
EDIT: So upon further inspection, they have talked a little bit about how they’ve been focusing on researching and writing the scenario in their April 2026 timeline update. Since they started AI 2027 in 2024 and published it in 2025, it seems most likely that AI 2030 will be out in 2027. In other words, they’re basically setting themselves up to get dunked on (especially if its just a rehash but with moved back timelines)
The distributions below are our team’s probabilities on when AI’s will achieve human level coding performance.
So in AI’27 they predicted 2030 will have “1T Wildly Superintelligent copies thinking at 10000x human speed”, “wildly superhuman” coding ability, and “brain uploading”, with “biosphere destroying mirror life” on the horizon.
Now they are predicting “maybe it will be able to write C++ in 2030 without constantly falling over (50% probability)”.
Seems like a bit of a step back, but I guess we’ll see what they put in their fun interactive website once it’s ready.
Their fun interactive website does exist and the probability of automated coding at the end of the year doesn’t even get to 50% (and its their p10, meaning 90% of simulations of this model beat it out)
They’ve been using the excuse that not everyone who participated in the “AI 2027” project agreed on 2027 as the year it all happens. But if that’s the case, why the hell did they call it “AI 2027”?
Gotta love the ex post facto of it all.
Gotta love the ex post facto of it all.
Within a month after it was out, they were already building up excuses (calling 2027 their modal number, and admitting their timelines had already slipped back a few months). Also, if you read between the lines of various statements they made, they all but admit they picked 2027 for maximum clout/influence. (Lying is okay if its to stop the AI apocalypse! Or maybe they were all more short-term sort of grifters). Even Eliezer recognized setting a hard and early date would damage the grift for everyone!
Maybe because a lot of the press around it was about Daniel Kokotajlo as a forecaster, and at the time he had a 40% chance of AGI by the end of 2027 (according to them)? idk, still does feel a bit disingenuous
If they advertise themselves as a team of forecasters, but then pick a number that doesn’t line up with their forecasts because one team member has a gut feeling or vibes it should be sooner, then that is just another reason not to trust them and to treat them like the clowns they are. Of course, even that reading is pretty charitable, the real reason they picked 2027 is to balance urgency and hype generation with a bit of cushion for when the prediction doesn’t pan out.
real reason they picked 2027 is to balance urgency and hype generation with a bit of cushion for when the prediction doesn’t pan out.
Bingo. They probably hyped up Kokotajlo as a forecaster BECAUSE he had it earlier than the rest of them, so their prediction could have credence to it
back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you’re an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, “oh but they’re useful for some things, like making summaries”.
four years and billions of dollars and devastation to “improve” them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that “AI summaries” are going well:
it’s hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don’t already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it’s signal-shaped noise). but I’ll try.
Long (click to expand)
Plot errors
Or, “does this thing even work?” (the answer is no).
-
A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, we’re waiting for it to this day, it’s not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.
-
The Queen’s sons and Robert’s brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and that’s debatable as he’s a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robert’s brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Ned’s son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. It’s famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous King’s Brothers And His Sons.
-
Robert’s young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.
-
The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen 😔
-
The guardians of the realm’s Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isn’t the people beyond the Wall but what they’re running away from—viz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.
Synopsis errors
These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.
-
“Good and evil content for power”: ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.
-
“Menacing barbarians gather their forces”: As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk aren’t actually barbarians, or if they are they’re still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: “Meanwhile, Ned Stark’s bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is coming…”
-
“Set in a glittering fantasy world”: This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and there’s plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesn’t distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. “A glittering fantasy world” is like calling Dubai a “glittering urban city” or North Korea a “glittering green farmscape” and leaving it at that.
-
“Deftly realised magic”: The series does the “return of magic” trope so there’s little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not “realised”—it’s left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you don’t know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If you’re looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, you’re reading the wrong type of fantasy.
Silly errors
-
Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cersei’s name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?
-
George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.
-
enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegon’s Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and there’s no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and there’s no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly “enriching” for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.
what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody
“Cerisi” and gender confusion make me think this might be for some reason a machine translation of a generated summary, so like, two layers of slop?
It’s been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.
-
our favorite techno-fascist hacker has posted a plea for money to buy a house in the most expensive place in the world and to exclusively fly around in private jets because she’s the best at writing code to multiple matrices and everyone has been so unjustly mean to her. https://justine.lol/animus/
by “culture wars” she means she’s a fucking nazi
This was the reason Wendy Hanamura cited when she canceled my invitation to speak at the Internet Archive.
hmm, looking at the text you link it says “your past statements in Twitter” first. could it be they found out you’re a fucking nazi
also you’re shocked, shocked to find that 4chan people are assholes. you hang out there for hours at a time. probably just coincidence.
Tunney has deleted the post already! But there’s an archive and another one
The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity.
“This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
Prometheus a technologist? No he was a social media user.
"prometheus: hot take,
the greek gods: no give that back"
https://modmad.tumblr.com/post/758625466711228416
Also you do care just not in the way she hopes.
she badly underestimates my capacities as a hater
i don’t think she should be allowed to say “the ghetto.” doesn’t matter whether it’s problematic when someone else says it, she definitely doesn’t get to
Gestural Bayesianism!
I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds I’ve come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that I’m a good person, it would underflow a double.
Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.
From the linked post:
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.
Fuuuuck off
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.
This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newton’s televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).
I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I won’t be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.
Grifting off the United States’ escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.
Thats a trap if I ever saw it.
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.
<close tab>
Speaking of HN, here’s the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314875
btw, when normal people read that someone has a lien on their income from the state of New York, they don’t assume it’s because she’s a brave truth-talker being oppressed by the Man, they assume she can’t fucking handle her finances and they should be really careful donating money to her.
There’s gold in them comments:
The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin.
Ha ha no it’s because she went fash, you credulous dork
Friedrich Nietzche has been a disaster for the human species.
Why doesn’t she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person he’d love to donate some Thiel bucks to.
He probably hates trans people.
Does not seem uncommon under a subset of very privileged white gay men. So not shocked if Thiel does.
don’t give them ideas
Deleted, but the archive remembers
I’m pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (
musl) telling her to go away last week. She’s finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which she’s done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.yikes
I never heard of Justine Tunney before but she has a Wikipedia page.
by her own admission, most of the work that went into it was deciding whether or not she should have one.
damn she got one-shot by curtis yarvin’s R.A.G.E. meme, and loved eric schmidt enough to want him to be her king. i don’t even know what to say. the human mind is an incredible thing
It is now 404-ing; an archive copy is available here.
I’m surprised that the religious fanatics (protestant) haven’t turned on AI yet. The ones around these parts think that UFOs and pokemon cards are satanic, so the Californian lying machine that tells kids to kill themselves wouldn’t be much of a reach.
Generally conspiracy theorists aren’t interested in actual things that cause real problems, I think. Air polution and global warming being deliberate decisions by elites who don’t care about killing millions, for example. It has to be some wild take like Pokémon child sacrifice or something, so you get to feel like you spotted the secret truth.
But if you want to see some actual apocalyptic conspiracy against “AI”, as in it is literally the manifestation of the body of the Beast and the voice of demons etc., check out Paul Kingsnorth’s substack. This is a burned-out environmental activist who radicalised anti-immigration with Brexit, started pushing a narrative of hobbit pastoralism as a justification for racism, and converted to Christianity with that fervour you only find in converts.
He sounds like a fun guy to talk to at parties! /s
If I had a nickel for every time I got ambushed at a party by a surprise right-wing shoeless guy…
I find it helps to remember that when it comes to conspiracy theorists, most of the absurd stuff (eg Flat Earth) is downstream of the really important belief (eg millenarian Christianity). Essentially, start from the high-level ideology/political/religious beliefs, decide what would have to be true about the world to justify them, and let confirmation bias take care of the details.
It owns the libs though, that’s usually enough
Trump likes AI and they like Trump too much to dislike something he likes.
Grim but likely true
Can I interest you in a video titled “Mike Adams Joins Alex Jones to Discuss AI World Simulations, Digital Gods & the Data Center Takeover”? It has an AI-generated thumbnail, yet the title sounds anti-AI, and I’m not going to watch it to find out which way it goes. I’m just assuming it leans toward whatever direction will pay them the most, which is possibly also why we haven’t heard much protestation.
It’s a day ending in Y and LW has terrible takes on SF
Vinge is a sort of a patron saint of the California Ideology, even though he’s such a good writer it doesn’t really shine through that bad. George Seidoh Worley tries to shoehorn his classic 90s novels into LLM-land https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tWBd6faBCQJmaFMBT/llms-through-the-eyes-of-vinge#32BbtPqpFd5acs8qr
Spoilers ahead!
For some reason the books are in a weird order in his review. Here’s publication history
- A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), has Pham Nuwen as a (revived clone) character
- A Deepness in the Sky (1999), has Pham Nuwen alive and involved in the Qeng Ho. It’s set 20,000 years before.
- The Children of the Sky (2012) - I haven’t read this because I hate the fucking Tines and don’t want to read more about them and their planet. Direct sequel to Fire.
Worley tackles Deepness first.
A Deepness in the Sky is largely about Focus, a technology for turning humans into LLMs. Only, that’s not how it’s presented in the book. In the book, Focus is a medical condition that results when a person suffers a managed infection of the “mindrot” virus. If they survive, they become Focused, which gives them the ability to work free from all distractions, but at the cost of most of what makes them human.
Although we see Focus used as a weapon to control people in the book, the normal way a person becomes Focused is through school. A person goes through higher education, becomes an expert in something, and is then Focused so they can fully exploit their expertise. Of course, the Focused are also exploited and often treated like slaves, and the Focusing process can’t always be reversed, so even in the ideal case it’s not a harmless technology.
OK so Deepness is about the libertarian trader society Qeng Ho who discover and try to make contact with the Spiders, and are then sneakily attacked by the totalitarian Emergents who use the mindrot virus to enslave them. Quoting Wikipedia
Emergent managers induce obsession with a single idea or specialty, which they call Focus, essentially turning people into brilliant appliances. Many Qeng Ho become Focused against their will, and the Emergents retain the rest of the population under mass surveillance, with only a portion of the crew not in suspended animation.
Throughout the book, the effects and costs of Focus are clearly detrimental (even if Focus helps humans communicate with the Spiders). The Emergents are your classic libertarian boogeymen. Turning people into LLMs is not something Vinge sees as a good thing.
Next we jump to Children. Tines World is in the Slow Zone, so AGI doesn’t work there. The titular Children are refugees from the Beyond, where it does.
In one scene, they are surprised to learn that they can’t just vibe their way towards developing a medical cure for one character’s disease. They fail to understand just how difficult it is to run an experiment, since they expect the automation to do it all for them. They end up forming a political rebellion mostly over the fact that they can’t get the computer to do what they want, and they’re desperate to prioritize getting access to AGI again, no matter the risks.
Writing from 2026, I can understand the Children. I use AI to help me think all the time. I use it to do my job. My life is better with it, and I don’t want to go back. I can feel myself losing the ability to do things on my own. I could go back if I had to, but I wouldn’t want to, and I hope I don’t have to. If I had grown up only knowing how to do things with the help of AI, it’d be a major threat to my sense of personhood to lose access to it, and I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk.
(my emphasis)
Next, we come to Fire
The Blight is the primary antagonist of A Fire Upon the Deep, a dangerous ASI that seeks power with no moral regard for what it considers lesser life. It’s the reason Ravna and the Children ended up on Tines World in the Slow Zone, and also responsible for the death of trillions of lives.
“Responsible” is subverting this a bit. Sure, the Blight takes over civilizations and turns the inhabitants into “soul dead” meat puppets, and it does destroy others, but the central twist of Fire (and the reason the Children are stuck in the Slow) is that reincarnated Pham Nuwen, using weird alien tech, deliberately expands the Slow into the volumes taken over by the Blight, thereby dooming uncounted civilizations and trillions of beings to die once the technology they rely on stops working.
Worley:
In Vinge’s universe, the Blight is stopped thanks to help from superintelligences out in the Transcend that care about the lives of people down in the Beyond. In our world, if we create a Blight, we have little reason to think we will be so lucky.
(my emphasis)
nah mang they wanted to stop the Blight, and gave no shits about lesser intelligences hanging around in the Beyond.
But note that Worley states that he’s put the entire galaxy at risk to keep access to AI, but the Blight, an AI and presumably driven by the same general goals, is the bad guy?
Anyway, read Vinge if you haven’t already. He’s a good writer, unlike the LW hacks misreading him.
It really baffles me how these types manage to read this stuff so badly. The galactic holocaust at the end of Fire isn’t an accident, it’s the whole plan of the Powers from the start. There’s a fungus growing in the Top of the Beyond that might threaten them and their cure is to cauterize an entire slice of the galaxy, a plan which comes to fruition as intended. The final transmission implies that maybe some Powers got burned too, which might or might not have been the plan (the Blight was found in the Low Transcend after all) but the Beyond being burned was never optional, it was the plan.
The Blight is a big threat but it’s not even the first such threat in the galaxy; it doesn’t threaten the entire galaxy, not even the entire Beyond; heck, the only reason the extermination fleet travelled all the way to the Bottom was the pursuit of the entities working to enact its destruction. It can easily be argued that the cure was worse than the disease. Ravna outright thinks that at the end, it’s right there in the text.
I don’t even know why I’m arguing this here. These types just make my blood boil with how badly they misread (not misinterpret) works that I really like. Ugh.
I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk
Thats an addiction, gonna be fun when the prices go through the roof.
When you wrote “he’s such a good writer”, I assumed you hadn’t read Children of the Sky… a book that urgently needed an editor with a spray bottle and the power to yell “No! Bad Vernor!” multiple times a minute.
Re-reading the preceding parts after Children has also fixed my impression of his writing ability, tbh.
Haha fair point! I have not read Children… (noted in my comment) but mostly because the premise didn’t interest me, and it got shit reviews.
But Rainbows End is both a compelling story , and the SFnal ideas/page ratio is through the fucking roof.
Yeah, I wish I had skipped it. Dropped the book at the 66% mark, where it was already too late for me ):
I still have to check out Rainbows End, sounds like it’s really great. That one other non-Fire short story/novella of his I read was … very mid (and pretty cringe in places)
George, are you saying that becoming the Eloi is good actually?
