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 - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this…)
I’m trying a new thing where I replace “AI” with “the dried centipede powder from Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch movie”.
I only use the dried centipede powder to summarize documents!
Did you know you can get dried centipede powder in different flavors? You don’t have to stick with the default!
So Hank Green is apparently stepping back from his shit for a while after admitting to using AI for research and scriptwriting and acknowledging an unhealthy relationship with the dopamine hit he got from using it. I think this makes him one of the first high-profile users to acknowledge the problem? Which can’t be a good sign for the bubble.
A sign the bubble might pop yes, but also a sign how toxic the whole youtube space is. If a yt’er with 3M+ subs and 500k+ views per video on average feels the pressure to publish or perish like this.
There was a video essay I saw a while back that looked at how the system gamifies and conditions the creator experience. They effectively take every dirty trick you’ve heard of Uber using to get drivers to keep driving and use it to push creators to keep posting and driving engagement, even as the actual value of the platform has dropped to the point where basically every video over 3 minutes ends in a patreon pitch. Textbook enshitttification.
Disappointing that Hank fell for AI, especially after he made that rant video on Sora
I think he falls under the category of “does too much all the time” and “vaguely techo optimist” which definitely put him at risk. I’m not too sure how harshly I should judge him yet, I guess it depends on what he does next.
At first I was wondering why everyone was talking about the guy from “Freddy Got Fingered” but that’s Tom Green. Anyways, glad the propane and propane accessories guy is taking a break from AI.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yTucIB_73L0
I noticed when I posted a little AI scene of me riding my mule and eating cheese sandwiches, but totally AI, like everyone got really mad, which I found quite amusing, y’know? So I kept doing it.
I mean, not sure what I expected when I looked him up.
Sure sounds like aspiring and/or existing professional mathematicians are taking the latest GenAI assault on their craft either with shock or horror, or with full-on welcoming of their new robot overlords
https://borretti.me/article/mathematics-without-mathematicians
I for one know who to point and laugh at when the revolution comes.
OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there’s a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they’d already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it’s not nothing, but it’s also not the end of manual maths.
opinions on maths
Only one of the results is at all interesting to me. Ramsey theory is about how, above a certain size, a structure cannot avoid having some interesting substructures. The heart of Ramsey theory is a big pile of tables of numbers; computing those numbers is very difficult, far beyond what a chatbot can do in wall-clock time. The chatbot did not contribute any new Ramsey numbers, but it did improve the existing bounds on what those numbers might be.
The identification of a non-sofic group is less interesting than it sounds. We’ve known for a while that there are quite a few exotic groups which defy our expectations, so this was an expected outcome of an exhaustive and motivated search. The tools involved, Leavitt path algebras, are only a few decades old and not at all well-known; it’s not likely that we’ll be able to understand how hard this was for a while. Maybe it was low-hanging fruit. The main contrast is with something like non-Noetherian rings; we initially believed that all rings are Noetherian, so it was something of a shock that it’s not always the case. Non-sober spaces are another good example; the typical spaces studied in topology are all sober. See this quote from Johnstone and discussion on MO.
The computational complexity result is completely uninteresting to me thanks to Valiant’s theorem, which says that matrix permanents are ♯P-complete even over fields as small as F₂. You’re not gonna collapse ♯P into P with a fucking chatbot, bros. Similarly, reduction from 3SAT to a closest-vector problem does not shift our belief in the difficulty of that problem; this doesn’t make it easier and we already suspected it was NP-hard.
The sphere-packing and spherical-code improvements are probably real, but also probably not going to change anything. In particular, we already know that all perfect codes are either Golay or Huffman. Frankly, the codes we use in real life are not amenable to this simple framing; I don’t think Reed-Solomon arises from sphere packing. From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work. Don’t get me wrong; if a human were doing all of this then we would have the useful side effect that they would earn a PhD, making it worthwhile for humans to improve these bounds.
I don’t have anything to say about the other four results. They’re not nothingburgers but they don’t depend on some ultra-smart robot either.
Non-sober spaces
I guess this is what a matematician calls a bar.
From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work.
I tried shining a light on the Leech lattice but all I got was this 23-dimensional shadow.
Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.
Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they’re wrong!
So Satyress has been getting the headlines lately for their horrifying ThreeHalves monstrosity. But what I find beautiful is that it appears to have been designed first to be functional and second to be easily disabled in the event of a robot uprising. I wish I was kidding.
A screenshot of the Satyress website showing where to shoot the robot to immediately disable it. Presumably in the production model these will be marked with big red glowing circles.
Another screenshot demonstrating how the robot has intentionally been made too big to fit through doors, though I expect that the chainsaw attachment they seem to have as standard could probably remedy that problem.
As comedy art projects go, I really admire their dedication to the bit. The images are remarkably high quality, and they’ve really thought long and hard about those designs. I mean look at this… it’s glorious.
I’d advise against attempting to disable a chainsaw operator by poking them with a knife, though. I guess it’s too bad that pitchforks are pretty uncommon these days.
i think that poking a pressurized vessel is a bad idea in general, whether it is attached to a hostile robot or not. it’s gonna be LOUD and perhaps throw fragments, or take way longer than practical depending on what it was made from. (what if only one of two is damaged?) there are so many things that can go wrong with the alleged failsafe (what if pressure drops slower than designed?)
It’s not fragile and unergonomic, it’s robot-uprising-proof!
Also like will the warranty actually cover damages suffered when trying to squash the rebellion?
How long will it take before they are bought up by a second company which makes military/police models with these ‘problems’ removed?
Kai Lentit: Interview with a Longevity Maxxer in 2026
Onboarding at my new job means I am now “Certified AI Ready” whatever that means. Thankfully other than having copilot available it looks like my team isn’t having it pushed too hard yet, and I only had to interrupt the training video once to rant about how ridiculous their history was for like 20 minutes (working from home has a lot of advantages).
Congratulations for your securing of relatively tolerable employment!
At my place It has reached the stage of:
use AI to "improve" your work, be careful about budget though!
<buys giant bucket of popcorn>
I vaguely recognize the name, apparently he’s a snot-nosed 25-yr old who got fired from OpenAI
In hindsight, it is pretty funny that he called his fund “Situational Awareness” and still lost money.
Maybe someone should start a hedge fund and call it something like, “Maybe This Will All Work Out LLC.” That way there is no disappointment.
Sir, a 2nd EA adj. SF based hedge fund has managed to lose 40 billion dollars
Also apparently young leo is getting married to Dario’s Chief of staff this weekend lmaou
The cope on lesswrong is funny. They are in denial that this is a sign of a wider bubble pop and are insisting it is just because he didn’t hedge on long enough timelines.
“From my perspective as an uninformed spectator, I would expect the bets made by Situational Awareness to be positive EV over the long run.”
Actually the value of his calls in the long run is 0, don’t worry I’m giving this hot financial tip for free. Do these dorks not understand options work? I guess neither did young leo.
Remember, there’s no crying in the casino. *though i have a feeling Leo will continue to fail upward ;_;
he didn’t hedge on long enough timelines
Duh. Everybody knows the market never stays irrational for long, and you should just tough it out.
The LW insider thinks Aschenbrenner is trying to save a stake in Anthropic. I think that is very likely because the press release stressed “public stock position” and Anthropic is privately owned.
Edit / I don’t think Thomas Kwa of METR and LW understands leverage. The idea is that if you borrow $40.5b on $4.5b of collateral, you have $45b to invest but a 10% drop will wipe you out. Before you get there the bank will knock on your door and say “margin call! either you provide more collateral or we seize your assets.”
“He sold? Pamp it”
Intel up 11% in the day and 5% in the after hours. Really looks like big players took the boy out back behind the woodshed to see what swimming with the sharks feels like and devour his entire port at a discount.
sounds like he took the hedge part out of hedge fund, and then margin call took out the fund part
Before the days of AI 2027, he became famous in 2024 for posting one of the original pieces of writing in the line-go-up genre: Situational Awareness. It seems that like any good grifter, he used this opportunity to make money (in this case by starting a hedge fund).
By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates.
tick tick tick tick
(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)
That fits the pattern, when AI isn’t living up to the sky high promises, the promoters act like people are less special than they are.
See how a debate about are they conscious often devolves into ‘are humans conscious?’
yeah it’s a common trope/cope
like “most human programmers suck too”
ok dude who do you think wrote the code the LLM is cribbing from
It really grinds my gears.
Here is the first sentence: "You can see the future first in San Francisco. "
I feel like I already know everything I need to know about him.
You can see the future first in San Francisco
🔮"I see a city street. Massive wealth disparity and a lot of homeless… Jesus that’s a lot of homeless"
Street advertising no longer references products or services people seeing them may wish to use; after all, more and more people have no money to pay for them. Instead they try and AstroTurf hype for one of the new entries to the VC startup casino.
GDP is up though, so I’m sure the AI god prosperity will trickle down eventually.
good grifter
Not denying that he isn’t also a grifter, but I bet he is a true believer and he had blindly bet his (and other people’s) money on “line goes up” exactly like his scenario said and that is why he is the first one to crack.
This is my xmas, ty santa
Google shut down the AlphaFold team, trying to reassign the people behind the super interesting problem of using ML to predict protein structure from sequence onto chatbot development. A whole bunch left the company.
https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold/
The Business Idiots are truly running the asylum.
One of the defenses I see of LLMs on place like /r/singularity (although recently /r/singularity has started wising up and the committed true believers have shifted to /r/accelerate), is that they are going to cure cancer or some other incredibly valuable thing, conflating AI, ML in general, DNN, vs. LLMs specifically. Technology like AlphaFold was a lot more on the “cure cancer” track (although there is still a huge gap between better protein folding predictions and successful drug discovery) than anything LLM related… this is sad.
This has always been a huge red herring. Llms are built on top of the transformer architecture which does text autocomplete (and yes we can combine text embeddings with other inputs like images). They have some interesting properties where they seem to be able to do text autocomplete in a bunch of different scenarios that they weren’t explicitly trained for, but they were never designed for precise dna analysis. It is their architecture that prevents them from other long horizon tasks like playing chess and the way that they represent text is why they can never count the letters in strawberry (most have this specific question hard-coded in their training data now).
Anyone who believes that LLMs are going to solve cancer either has no idea how they work or has been one-shotted from talking to Claudia
I am continually amused at people not quite understanding what AlphaFold is actually doing, too.
Yes, a bunch of its performance comes from it learning rules about how proteins fold. But not a majority of its performance. MOST of its performance is it effectively acting as a translator of what evolution knows about protein folding into a form we can understand.
A key part of the system is not just cooking the sequence into a structure. A system running alphafold has a database of terabytes of curated sequence information from all over the tree of life. You put in the sequence you care about, and it first searches that database for anything with homology, and builds a “covariation matrix” - wherever theres anything with even vague sequence relatedness, build a matrix of every position in your sequence and the correlation between variation at position X and variation at position Y. This covariation matrix represents implicit information from the evolutionary process about what parts of a sequence are functionally connected to each other, which has a correlation to positional information, and these correlations are in turn learned by the ML system.
You put in de novo designed proteins or orphan proteins without homologs in the curated dataset and performance does not go away, but it drops precipitously. A bunch of what is going on is finding an evolutionary signal, and translating that evolutionary signal into structural information. So still, evolution knows much much more about protein folding than we do or any machine does, and once again a ML system is revealed to essentially be an information channel that takes in information from an interesting source on one end and turns it into a different form of information on the other.
Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on… Come on guys it’s still architecture. Where are you going?
no wonder the staff voted with their feet
Rather than rebelling against google, it seems like they where just poached by anthropic a short while before the project shut down:
[Alphahold VP and nobel winner] Jumper announced in June that he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic. A couple of his colleagues jumped ship to Anthropic, as well. DeepMind has confirmed to the Times that it also moved staff members internally to Gemini-focused projects. Other former staff members were reassigned to Alphabet’s drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs, which is a DeepMind spin-off.
Oh… Well that’s disappointing.
I was an academic in computer science in the last 10 years or so (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing myself) and it has been so depressing seeing so many of my colleagues selling out to OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and even Google (for some reason the latter often gets a reputational free pass because people associate them with the golden days of big tech 10+ years ago)
I am actually in the middle of both trying to advance my career and a project about information theory in evolutionary biology making a bunch of explicit parallels to machine learning. Someone where I work suggested that given the connections I was making I should look to a ‘frontier AI lab’ as an employer.
He did not see the instant flashbacks to chasing these weirdos across the internet for almost two decades, watching in horror as the religious psychosis gained national prominence and great destructive power. All he got to hear was my instant intonation of “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Depends on what Anthropic wants to do with the poached people.
The OpenAI hacking incident has put everyone on edge. Anthropic, not to be outdone, decides to publicly announce that they have committed not one, not two, but three crimes! Come on! I was told this wasn’t a marketing campaign!
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mm5ebihpjvtrdunomulbls5m/post/3mrx2xflgp22d
ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity!
OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission.
ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evilWaiting for Musk to turn up and announce “infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah” momentarily!
TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that’d do the trick…
The reason these (one of these incidents dates back to April, so they’re really not beating the “marketing campaign” allegations) happened in the first place is because of human error on their end, mind you
“AI safety focused” my ass
There is something about this picture, a warehouse full of books to be destroyed by Anthropic for training data, that just makes me sick. Knowing that they are destroying books in the abstract is bad enough, but seeing the sheer scale of it makes me viscerally angry.
Karen Hao called her book Empire of AI for a very good reason. The empire has all these noble narratives of bringing civilization and progress to the colonies, but in reality the empire only sees resources to be extracted, repackaged, and sold back to their subjects at a fee. Kudos to those who saw this immediately and fought against it. Shame on those who believed in the narrative of progress, to the point where many of them are collaborators with the empire.
Whenever a smarmy fellow on Linkedin posts about how AI is making so much progress in coding or math, I want them to see this picture. I want them to see the videos of families in tears after a data center takes away their home with eminent domain, and other families who have to deal with the resulting pollution. Go beyond the bloodless math of tokens and instead see for yourself what this all truly costs. I hope it was worth it.
What kills me is that there are so many obvious ways to be less wasteful about this. Nondestructive book scanners exist. They’re expensive but it’s not like AI companies are averse to throwing money down a fucking hole. Even if that’s not an option, it’s possible to rebind the pages and return the books to the market. And regardless of what happens to the physical books, the scans they create could be archived in a format that could be available as a digital library rather than just being fed into the statistical meat grinder to keep the trough topped off with slop. Even if they’ve got to fight with copyright holders it would cost them basically nothing to leave the option open and given the PR battle they’ve been losing it feels like doing so would be incredibly obvious. Hell, even Google Books was able to navigate this in a way that was less cartoonishly evil than this because they could point to their digitization effort as a public good in ways that Anthropic here just fucking can’t.
The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we’ve discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books’ ingestion process, so I’m thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won’t take a decade this time.
Fuck Anthropic. Snotty little bastards want to talk about AI safety and then destroy books to make a pollution machine.
The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion via naked capitalism
choice quotes:
More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).
In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.
Yet, the “AI race” story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.
If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.
At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.
We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.
I need one of those UFO posters that are like “I want to believe” but it’s a picture of the PRCs flag lol.
As always though pointing at the
SpanishgermansRussiansChinese remains an evergreen excuse as to why you can’t be anything other than wholely on board with madness or you’re a traitor.
AI Crisis Flowchart spotted on linkedin
spoiler
and the actual article: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-ai-that-hacked-its-way-out-and-the-hype-that-followed-it
quoted zvi haha :|
To be fair, the safety community can plausibly claim vindication here. At worst, an autonomous agent that breaches containment and attacks a real third party is precisely the scenario researchers have warned about for years, which enthusiasts have routinely dismissed as speculative. And at best, the company in charge of maintaining safety failed to construct an adequate containment system.
are you fucking kidding me, they have been DDoSing sites for months, everybody knows about it, and the “safety” community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions. I know multiple companies that woke up one day to 10-20k netlify bills until they could stand up an anubis.
Just let hugging face sue the idiots, it isn’t like law enforcement will do anything even though there’s already laws on the books for unauthorized access, industrial espionage, etc etc etc.
and the “safety” community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions.
Occasionally I see a sane relatively workable idea on lesswrong (like making stricter laws on liability and transparency for everything AI companies do, I’ve also seen this idea put forward on lawfare a few times), but that is like 1 idea out of 20, with the other 19 being absurd, like the absolutely unworkable fantasies of AI: 2040.
Enjoy today’s craziest link: https://atomarine.co/
YES LET’S NUKE THE FUCKING OCEAN. FUCK YOU FISH WE NEED OUR SLOP.
On land, cooling and water are among a site’s largest costs.
Oh gosh that sounds… uhmm not too bad actually? I wonder what the largest costs are at sea with a floating nuclear reactor in salt water and tugged around by large ships.
Salt water is famously a forgiving environment to build in, and oceanic weather is benign and predictable. Not that it would be a problem anyway, because move-fast-and-break-things people can be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to running delicate equipment in places more hostile than mid california, and will not skimp on staffing and maintenance. You can look at all the the successful seasteading operations to see how well this will go.
There are also no problems I can foresee with putting a bucketload of fissiles in international waters, with no scope for finally uniting old-school piracy with new-school piracy, either. This plan is great, and no-one will have a problem with it.
I mean, it’s less dumb than trying to do it in orbit, but it’s still profoundly dumb.
but you see, in case of accident they can just dump reactor core into seawater which will provide ample cooling and shielding. no biggie, just put multi thousand ton object that requires a village of engineers to work out on high seas
there are normal nuclear powerplants that use seawater as coolant and they’re all on shore. these require a lot of corrosion resistant heat exchangers along the way. there is one power barge like this, it provides power to russian far east, whole 70MW of it, costed 414 million dollars and needs 300 people onsite. your guess is as good as mine how many of them are military. 70MW, aka two or three aeroderivative gas turbines
I see you, and raise by a Gundam solar space laser - https://www.reflectorbital.com/
Oh, I’ve seen this one before. At least we know where the LLM who gave them this pitch scraped the idea from.
Great idea, let’s seastead a data center next to some low income sea steading communities.
So it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour
So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?
All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.
It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
Yeah. Behind all the hype about percieved productivity etc., there’s really only one benchmark - will GenAI help produce better software, faster, and at less cost? So far this doesn’t seem to be happening.
The major shift of not needing SaaS middleman products because AI can spin them up instantly at scale never happened. Instead we see lay-offs to pay for AI tokens while quality plummets and services offered do not increase.
The AI shills would say: Are you still using the models from six months ago? Because the new models are sooo much more powerful.
I once listened to a talk by a guy from german OSHA that hit a lot of the good points. Perceived productivity opposed to actual productivity from the METR studies. Mental load of alien code review. (This was a company-internal IT-expert exchange thingy.)
A question in Q&A (submitted anonymously on slido like a sniveling coward) was deadass “Have you ever coded with a frontier model?”
Have you ever tried meth, tho?
yea you just don’t have enough experience, I do bath salts every week and I promise you productivity gets a huge boost after week 5
The government agents who live in my walls and plant microphones in all my appliances impose entirely different productivity metrics, which are simultaneously more and less attainable
you just know one of these guys has microdosed bath salts out of sheer contrariness
Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!
