The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Previously, on Awful, Gutsick Gibbon spent an hour ripping apart T. Beale’s (VD’s) anti-evolution book. She was still angry though, so she got her prior collaborator and four friends to join her for a complete dissection of VD’s bullshit claims. Content warning for literally everything awful we discuss here, including sex crimes, neo-Nazis, Silicon Valley bullshit, and remarkably bad arithmetic. My choice sneer is her chosen video title, “Six Scientists Roast One Racist Loser (Heartwarming) (Four Hours) (Hopecore)”. GG’s requested that we not give VD any attention other than reminding him that he’s such a pathetic loser that even white nationalists disavow him as too boring and insipid, so I’m not posting this to a top-level topic, but I’m getting a lot of household chores done while listening to it in the background and maybe you will too.
.As if insufficient volume of text output was ever a problem among lesswrongers
as soon as AI is good enough to discharge feces out of my butt as good as I would if I had enough fiber in my diet, I intend to use AI to do so. I know how I want to poop, and I could poop so much more if I didn’t need to manual labor little clumps out one by one
obligatory apology for the foregoing
sorry not sorry
Aella was homeschooled by fundies. I don’t think anyone ever sat her down and explained that first and foremost you write to figure out what you think about something. She must know the OnlyFans model of a celebrity and dozens of underlings in a call center answering ‘her’ texts in ‘her’ voice and selling her smut.
Cognitive surrender illustrated.
Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?
I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me “wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies” I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.
AI safety is mostly a sex cult
the guy who posted this is also a singularity fanatic, but this is a good enough summary
It’s a catchy summary because he leans into the weird sex stuff instead of say the cosmism aspect, but the writer is a knob who doesn’t like EA/rats for basically the same reasons as Peter Thiel, so take him with a grain of salt.
He’s also likened anti-data center activism to jewish pogroms and believes that AI resentment can be summed up as “curing cancer is less important than my job satisfaction”.
You also have to transcribe all the screenshots and google them to trace them back to source. RationalWiki his thread is not.
More news about the character dot ai bankruptcy: as it turns out, the true economics of the company are disastrous. At their peak, their revenue was around $1M a month while their AI compute expenses alone were $14M a month! Their total expenses in 2025 were around $18.5M a month before counting legal fees. All of this is for a pure text-based low power LLM (none of the “reasoning” business).
Before AI boosters crow about how much cheaper AI is currently, they tried every trick in the book to enshittify: open models, ads, usage limits, etc. This allowed them to cut down their losses to a mere $9M a month.
Surely this is all one big exception, everyone else in the AI bubble is doing just fine!
I haven’t really kept up, but it looks like Character’s business model was still focused on NSFW content. If so, then this is also a disaster for the industry at large, since NSFW content is one of the few genuine money-printers for chatbot and image-generation services; people really do want thousands of iterations of the same fantasy, slightly changed in order to stay engaging, and Character was highly recommended as a source of affordable slop. (Examples of unaffordability include the rampant free-tier abuse on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok; I’m assuming that customers are willing to open their wallets at least a little. In general, the porn industry turns a profit, so I do think that people will pay for porn.)
My prior estimate (previously, on Awful and on Lobsters) was that token generation was subsidized to the tune of an effective 80-90% discount; this looks to be more in the 90-95% range. For contrast, consider chatbot-booster Willison’s belief, in reply above, that Chinese labs will magically produce a five-fold improvement in token production; this still would be between two to four times slower than needed to turn a profit for Character.
Anthropic has a new angle for trying to get local LLMs banned, apparently they’re about to be able to use your temu android tv to take over your smart toaster:
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested
edit: The TVs need to be off-brand to lack basic security features, and also there must be at least four of them to even start being inference-capable, and the actual setting up of a distributed inference network on android tvs is handwaved as “feasible”.
The thrilling conclusion of this blog post is called Signs of Life, because of course it is.
MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin
Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn
Anthropic really won’t let this botnet thing go. It’s so desperate & ridiculous.
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9B parameter models are so weak that they’re essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.
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Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.
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Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It’s simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.
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Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can’t get in.
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Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.
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Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic’s models, not open-weight ones.
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Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.
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I’m pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it’s eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it’s impossible to believe it’s being done in good faith.
edit: failed to spot the ninja edit so the response made no sense
Sorry I thought this updated comment was a better one 😅
For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I can’t decide whether Dario and co are confidence scammers or genuinely earnestly think that these next word prediction models are sentient due to all the brain damage, they’ve inflicted on themselves. FWIW Sama and friends are almost certainly in that first camp.
Sama is a serial scammer, this is just the biggest scam he’s managed to foster. He’ll say whatever it takes to get the payout.
Dario is a true believer but I also think the prospect of $billions skews his judgement
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rats’ best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton
It’s funny how they’re twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.
What fullsquare said, they’ve got years of sci-fi filtered through lesswrong short stories and sequence posts saying it could happen, so they repeated that despite all the ways it is completely impossible given the limitations and hardware requirements of LLMs.
Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way
Self-replicating prompt text is a much more interesting vector for misbehaving AI systems
Character.AI files for bankruptcy, agrees to sell some assets for $20 million
At one point “valued” at 2.5B, so that sale is 99%+ discount, even charitably assuming 100M sale of it all it’s still 96% discount
Also notable for being the first to get a kid killed by AI suicide encouragement. Burn it to the ground and make teeth fillings from the slag.
Bankruptcy means they’re not going to be paying out damages for all the AI Psychosis they caused.
thank god. horrid, parasocial site
it’s not shutting down so far, and if anyone buys that part it will remain up
They looking to get off the hook before all the class action lawsuits pile up?
or maybe they genuinely ran out of vc money
Wonder who gets all the plaintext logs from all their victims
not done yet
Under this process, Disney’s bid would set a baseline offer while allowing competing bidders to submit higher bids, and the company expects the sale process to conclude by late November or early December 2026.
perhaps them, and maybe these are linked to identities of users
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. Shame they’re probably all made and siphoned off life-changing amounts of money before this happened. I guess we can always hope they take up smoking because AI is going to cure cancer.
This is sad news, as companies are not alive, this means there is no new public toilet.
deleted by creator
A frustrating (and beware, long) post I came across: Coding is NOT solved
Starts off with some good sneers:
Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough: ❌ Haven’t written code in ages ❌ Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers! ❌ Have a low bar for what good looks like ❌ Don’t care about quality or NFR ❌ Have difficulty understanding an S-curve ✅ Are honest: AI genuinely writes better code than them
But the author can’t get over their AI-centrism:
Instead of following other people’s advice, build with AI, gain first hand experience and make up your mind. But whatever you do, please please please don’t fool yourself into believing this is a fad. AI is here to stay, and as I stated above there are some genuine use cases for it already.
New Baldur Bjarnason: It’s not our job to fix our employers
As a note, Baldur dedicates much of the first half to how general sentiment has shifted against the tech industry over the past decade.
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says researchers have started smoking, believing AI will cure cancer via r/nottheonion
The Palantir CTO said that researchers were now so confident in AI that they had started smoking. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Shyam Sankar told CBS. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will—I’m showing you my chips are all in.” Perhaps, the researchers think that there is no better way of showing faith in AI than to indulge in something that could cause them cancer – hopefully AI finds that cure before things get serious.
ok way to snitch on them to health insurance bot. presumably all their CEO customers are prompting “hike premiums on dumbasses. make no mistakes no luigi”. happy open enrollment season. /s
This is proper cult membership credibility testing stuff. “If you really believe, you’ll drink the koolaid”
Costly signaling by which one credibly gives something up to follow the precepts of the cult and demonstrate that one believes in the face of personal disadvantage is one of the strongest things that predicts cohesion of a religious movement.
Previously posted here: https://awful.systems/post/10025000
Via Kevin Bird (who has taken on the Rationalists before) a substack taking down Jordan Lasker/Crémieux Recueil
New Odium Symposium. We go through an episode of Loveline, a once wildly popular call-in radio show, then look at where its hosts Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew ended up.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/26-chudline-with-172120239 or www.odiumsymposium.com for all the usual rss sources
Looks like a Stanford philosophy professor either didn’t get invited to the orgies, or had a bad time, and took out his frustration by writing an op-ed in The Economist decrying the EAs for caring more about shrimp than people.
An outraged green-leaf LWer took to the substacks to attack him, saying he cares less about shrimp than people.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mEZAjDR9HuwJCJfWH/leif-wenar-s-takedown-of-effective-altruism
charming.
A local sneer enthusiast sat through the Nashville Thiel lectures so that we wouldn’t have to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1x4b4au/notes_from_the_room_peter_thiels_antichrist/
It’s neat that there are two of us!
recently I got into crocheting and I was immediately thrown into the hobby drama about all the havoc that generative “AI” is wreacking into the community. fake slop patterns that don’t work, fake photos of impossible amigurumi, that kinda stuff.
then I learned that, a few months ago, Hobbii, an once-beloved crafts supplier currently in a death spiral after being purchased by private equity, had the brilliant idea of alienating their entire client base by talking about how they love “AI” and use it all the time at the company. while firing a ton of people no less, including all the familiar faces that interacted with people online.
in damage control during the entirely predictable backlash, the new CTO Tomas Antvorksov Krag posted this:
While we take our responsibility very serious we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market or risk being left behind.
My brother in Christ Tomas Antvorksov Krag CTO of Hobbii, you are the CTO of a textile crafts company. Every client of yours does crochet or knitting or fucking macramé by hand, for fun. What technology do you figure we would be afraid of being left behind by? The spinning jenny??
Yeah it’s really bad, I’ve been into crocheting and knitting (more of a knitter now) for about 2 years and if it’s not fake AI patterns or yarn companies dropping the ball, it’s pattern designers using AI to generate background pictures and stuff. I’ve been really disappointed with some people who really should have known better. You are in a creative, artistic hobby space! Why are you using a slop machine and devaluing work of other artists! Ugh.
At least being on ravelry and checking out other people’s project attempts/pattern comments has so far saved me from falling for AI bs.
My wife has been talking about the scourge of AI in fiber arts for like a year or more, and when I asked if she had any brands that were still trustworthy she said “good luck, mate”.
It’s so bad.
I follow a couple (like, 2~3) of fiber arts people and that was about the impression I got too, it’s blown up with that much spill
Also, why apply new technology to core product lines and communication with customers, and not back office number crunching crap.
risk being left behind
Im also simply not sure how much of a risk that is, people keep saying that but I’m not sure being conservative on new tech has lead to much business closures the past 20 years.
It’s just such a clichéd remark from AI bros now that I cringe whenever I hear it along with “sure the current model can’t do X but the next one will be able to bro… Just one more model bro”
My NFT blockchain store selling segways in second life is now using LLMs! (Now also available on your Blackberry). Im ready to be raptured, I dont want to be left behind!
ijlth: quantum
I think there’s a typo: we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market TO risk being left behind [by our customers].
Holy shit, I also got into crocheting last week. I have, however, managed to entirely avoid any hobby drama so far, but of fucking course this one is also being thrown into the fucking AI meatgrinder, ugh money people are so smart, man
yay one of us! if you want to, feel free to follow @[email protected] if you want to see me hyperfocusing on crochet details! here are two threads that are particularly infodumpy as I learn the ropes: on turning chains, and on the magic circle and counting
Love your threads (haha). I didn’t have a mastodon account, so actually you’re my first follow :)
I DO NOT LIKE THESE ROBOTS by Becky Chambers
