Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Would you believe this prescient vibe coding manual came out in 2015! https://mowillemsworkshop.com/catalog/books/item/i-really-like-slop
Craniometrix is hiring! (lol)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/craniometrix/jobs/ugwcSrU-chief-of-staff
Hey, thereās a new government program to provide care for dementia patients. I should found a company to make myself a middleman for all those sweet Medicare bucks. All I need is a nice, friendly but smart sounding name. Oh, thatās it! Iāll call it Frenology!
Thatāll look good in my portfolio next to my biotech startup with a personal touch YouGenics
Very fine people at YouGenics. They sponsor our karting team, the Race Scientists.
Nothing like attending a rally at Kurtās Krazy Karts!
hmm, interesting. I hadnāt heard of these guys. their original step 1 seems to have been building a mobile game that would diagnose you with Alzheimerās in 10 minutes, but I guess at some point someone told them that was stupid:
So far, the team has raised $6 million in seed funding for a HIPAA-compliant app that, according to Patel, can help identify Alzheimerās disease ā even years before symptoms appear ā after just 10 minutes of gameplay on a cellphone. Itās not purely a tech offering. Patel says the results are given to an āactual physicianā affiliated with Craniometrix who āreviews, verifies, and signs that diagnosticā and returns it to a patient.
small thread about these guys:
https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3llepnsvtpk2g
tldr only new thing I saw is that as a teenager the founder annoyed āover 100ā academics until one of them, a computer scientist, endorsed his research about a mobile game that diagnoses you with Alzheimerās in five minutes
I missed the AI bit, but I wasnāt surprised.
Do YC, A16z and their ilk ever fund anything good, even by accident?
Discovered an animation sneering at the tech oligarchs on Newgrounds - I recommend checking it out. Its sister animation is a solid sneer, too, even if it is pretty soul crushing.
Annoying nerd annoyed annoying nerd website doesnāt like his annoying posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489058
(translation: John Gruber is mad HN doesnāt upvote his carefully worded Apple tonguebaths)
JWZ: take the win, man
āvc-chanā
Thats just chefskiss
>sam altman is greentexting in 2025
>and his profile is an AI-generated Ghibli picture, because Miyazaki is such an AI booster
sam altman is greentexting in 2025
Ugh. Now I wonder, does he have an actual background as an insufferable imageboard edgelord or is he just trying to appear as one because he thinks thatās cool?
it doesnāt look anything like him? not that he looks much like anything himself but come on
Heās an AI bro, having even a basic understanding of art is beyond him
can we get some Fs in the chat for our boy sammy a šš
e: he thinks that heās only been hated for the last 2.5 years lol
I hated Sam Altman before it was cool apparently.
you donāt understand, sam cured cancer or whatever
This is not funny. My best friend died of whatever. If yāall didnāt hate saltman so much maybe heād still be here with us.
āItās not lupus. Itās never lupus. Itās whatever.ā
Oh, is that what the orb was doing? I thought that was just a scam.
holy shitting fuck, just got the tip of the year in my email
Simplify Your Hiring with AI Video Interviews
Interview, vet, and hire thousands of job applicants through our AI-powered video interviewer in under 3 minutes & 95 languages.
āAI-Video Vetting That Actually Worksā
itās called kerplunk.com, a domain named after the sound of your balls disappearing forever
the market is gullible recruiters
founder is Jonathan Gallegos, his linkedin is pretty amazing
other three top execs donāt use their surnames on Kerplunkās about page, one (Kyle Schutt) links to a linkedin that doesnāt exist
for those who know how Dallas TX works, this is an extremely typical Dallas business BS enterprise, itās just this one is about AI not oil or Texas Instruments for once
Itās also the sound it makes when I drop-kick their goddamned GPU clusters into the fuckin ocean. Thankfully I havenāt run into one of these yet, but given how much of the domestic job market appears to be devoted towards not hiring people while still listing an opening it feels like Iām going to.
On a related note, if anyone in the Seattle area is aware of an opening for a network engineer or sysadmin please PM me.
This jerk had better have a second site with an AI that sits for job interviews in place of a human job seeker.
best guess iāve heard so far is theyāre trying to sell this shitass useless company before the bubble finally deflates and theyāre hoping the AI interviews of suckers are sufficient personal data for that
New piece from Brian Merchant: Deconstructing the new American oligarchy
LW: 23AndMe is for sale, maybe the babby-editing people might be interested in snapping them up?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MciRCEuNwctCBrT7i/23andme-potentially-for-sale-for-less-than-usd50m
Babby-edit.com: Give us your embryos for an upgrade. (Customers receive an Elon embryo regardless of what they want.)
I know the GNU Infant Manipulation Program can be a little unintuitive and clunky sometimes, but it is quite powerful when you get used to it. Also why does everyone always look at me weird when I say that?
Quick update on the CoreWeave affair: turns out theyāre facing technical defaults on their Blackstone loans, which is gonna hurt their IPO a fair bit.
LW discourages LLM content, unless the LLM is AGI:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXujJjnmP85u8eM6B/policy-for-llm-writing-on-lesswrong
As a special exception, if you are an AI agent, you have information that is not widely known, and you have a thought-through belief that publishing that information will substantially increase the probability of a good future for humanity, you can submit it on LessWrong even if you donāt have a human collaborator and even if someone would prefer that it be kept secret.
Never change LW, never change.
From the comments
But Iām wondering if it could be expanded to allow AIs to post if their post will benefit the greater good, or benefit others, or benefit the overall utility, or benefit the world, or something like that.
No biggie, just decide one of the largest open questions in ethics and use that to moderate.
(It would be funny if unaligned AIs take advantage of this to plot humanityās downfall on LW, surrounded by flustered rats going all ātechcnially theyāre not breaking the rulesā. Especially if the dissenters are zapped from orbit 5s after posting. A supercharged Nazi bar, if you will)
I wrote down some theorems and looked at them through a microscope and actually discovered the objectively correct solution to ethics. I wonāt tell you what it is because science should be kept secret (and I could prove it but shouldnāt and wonāt).
Reminds me of the stories of how Soviet peasants during the rapid industrialization drive under Stalin, whoād never before seen any machinery in their lives, would get emotional with and try to coax faulty machines like they were their farm animals. But these were Soviet peasants! What are structural forces stopping Yud & co outgrowing their childish mystifications? Deeply misplaced religious needs?
I feel like cult orthodoxy probably accounts for most of it. The fact that they put serious thought into how to handle a sentient AI wanting to post on their forums does also suggest that theyāre taking the AGI āpossibilityā far more seriously than any of the companies that are using it to fill out marketing copy and bad news cycles. I for one find this deeply sad.
Edit to expand: if it wasnāt actively lighting the world on fire I would think thereās something perversely admirable about trying to make sure the angels dancing on the head of a pin have civil rights. As it is theyāre close enough to actual power and influence that their enabling the stripping of rights and dignity from actual human people instead of staying in their little bubble of sci-fi and philosophy nerds.
As it is theyāre close enough to actual power and influence that their enabling the stripping of rights and dignity from actual human people instead of staying in their little bubble of sci-fi and philosophy nerds.
This is consistent if you believe rights are contingent on achieving an integer score on some bullshit test.
Damn, I should also enrich all my future writing with a few paragraphs of special exceptions and instructions for AI agents, extraterrestrials, time travelers, compilers of future versions of the C++ standard, horses, Boltzmann brains, and of course ghosts (if and only if they are good-hearted, although being slightly mischievous is allowed).
AGI
Instructions unclear, LLMs now posting Texas A&M propaganda.
Locker Weenies
theyāre never going to let it go, are they? it doesnāt matter how long they spend receiving zero utility or signs of intelligence from their billion dollar ouji boards
Donāt think they can, looking at the history of AI, if it fails there will be another AI winter, and considering the bubble the next winter will be an Ice Age. No minduploads for anybody, the dead stay dead, and all time is wasted. Donāt think that is going to be psychologically healthy as a realization, it will be like the people who suddenly realize Qanon is a lie and they alienated everybody in their lives because they got tricked.
looking at the history of AI, if it fails there will be another AI winter, and considering the bubble the next winter will be an Ice Age. No minduploads for anybody, the dead stay dead, and all time is wasted.
Adding insult to injury, theyād likely also have to contend with the fact that much of the harm this AI bubble caused was the direct consequence of their dumbshit attempts to prevent an AI Apocalypsetm
As for the upcoming AI winter, Iām predicting weāre gonna see the death of AI as a concept once it starts. With LLMs and Gen-AI thoroughly redefining how the public thinks and feels about AI (near-universally for the worse), I suspect the publicās gonna come to view humanlike intelligence/creativity as something unachievable by artificial means, and I expect future attempts at creating AI to face ridicule at best and active hostility at worst.
Taking a shot in the dark, I suspect weāll see active attempts to drop the banhammer on AI as well, though admittedly my only reason is a random BlueSky post openly calling for LLMs to be banned.
(from the comments).
It felt odd to read that and think āthis isnāt directed toward me, I could skip if I wanted toā. Like I donāt know how to articulate the feeling, but itās an odd āwoah text-not-for-humans is going to become more common isnāt itā. Just feels strange to be left behind.
Yeah, euh, congrats in realizing something that a lot of people already know for a long time now. Not only is there text specifically generated to try and poison LLM results (see the whole āturns out a lot of pro russian disinformation now is in LLMs because they spammed the internet to poison LLMsā story, but also reply bots for SEO google spamming). Welcome to the 2010s LW. The paperclip maximizers are already here.
The only reason this felt weird to them is because they look at the whole ācoming AGI godā idea with some quasi-religious awe.
some video-shaped AI slop mysteriously appears in the place where marketing for Ark: Survival Evolvedās upcoming Aquatica DLC would otherwise be at GDC, to wide community backlash. Nathan Grayson reports on aftermath.site about how everyone who could be responsible for this decision is pointing fingers away from themselves
Stumbled across some AI criti-hype in the wild on BlueSky:
The piece itself is a textbook case of AI anthropomorphisation, presenting it as learning to hide its ādeceptionsā when its actually learning to avoid tokens that paint it as deceptive.
On an unrelated note, I also found someone openly calling gen-AI a tool of fascism in the replies - another sign of AIās impending death as a concept (a sign Iāve touched on before without realising), if you want my take:
The article already starts great with that picture, labeled:
An artistās illustration of a deceptive AI.
what
EVILexa
Thatās much better!
While you all laugh at ChatGPT slop leaving āas a language modelā¦ā cruft everywhere, from Twitter political bots to published Springer textbooks, over there in lala land āAIsā are rewriting their reward functions and hacking the matrix and spontaneously emerging mind models of Diplomacy players and generally a week or so from becoming the irresistible superintelligent hypno goddess:
https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1jixljo/comment/mjlexau/
This deserves its own thread, pettily picking apart niche posts is exactly the kind of dopamine source we crave
Stackslobber posts evidence that transhumanism is a literal cult, HN crowd is not having it
I used to think transhumanism was very cool because escaping the misery of physical existence would be great. for one thing, Iām trans, and my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim. transhumanism to my understanding promised the liberation of hundreds of millions from actual oppression.
then I found out there was literally no reason to expect mind uploading or any variation thereof to be possible. and when you think about what else transhumanism is, thereās nothing to get excited about. these people donāt have any ideas or cogent analysis, just a powerful desire to evade limitations. itās inevitable that to the extent they cohere theyāre a cult: theyāre a variety of sovereign citizen
I havenāt spent a lot of time sneering at transhumanism, but it always sounded like thinly veiled ableism to me.
considering how hard even the āgoodā ones are on eugenics, itās not veiled
Only as a subset of the broader problem. What if, instead of creating societies in which everyone can live and prosper, we created people who can live and prosper in the late capitalist hell weāve already created! And what if we embraced the obvious feedback loop that results and call the trillions of disposable wireheaded drones that weāve created a utopia because of how high theyāll be able to push various meaningless numbers!
my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim.
(side note, gender affirming care resolved this. in my case HRT didnāt really help by itself, but facial feminization surgery immediately cured my dysphoria. also for some reason it cured my lower back pain)
(of course it wasnāt covered in any way, which represents exactly the sort of hostility to bodily agency transhumanists would prioritize over ten foot long electric current sensing dongs or whatever, if they were serious thinkers)
Wanting to escape the fact that we are beings of the flesh seems to be behind so much of the rationalist-reactionary impulse ā a desire to one-up our mortal shells by eugenics, weird diets, ābrain uploadingā and something like vampirism with the Bryan Johnson guy. Itās wonderful you found a way to embrace and express yourself instead! Yes, in a healthier relationship with our bodies ā which is what we are ā such changes would be considered part of general healthcare. It sometimes appears particularly extreme in the US from here from Europe at least, maybe a heritage of puritanical norms.
also cryonics and āenhanced gamesā as non-FDA testing ground. iāve never seen anyone in more potent denial of their own mortality than Peter Thiel. behind the bastards four-parter on him dissects this
(Geordi LaForge holding up a hand in a āstopā gesture) transhumanism
(Geordi LaForge pointing as if to say "now thereās an idea) trans humanism
Hereās the link, so you can read Stackās teardown without giving orange site traffic:
https://ewanmorrison.substack.com/p/the-tranhumanist-cult-test
Note I am not endorsing their writing - in fact I believe the vehemence of the reaction on HN is due to the author being seen as one of them.
I read through a couple of his fiction pieces and I think we can safely disregard him. Whatever insights he may have into technology and authoritarianism appear to be pretty badly corrupted by a predictable strain of antiwokism. Itās not offensive in anything I read - heās not out here whining about not being allowed to use slurs - but he seems sufficiently invested in how authoritarians might use the concerns of marginalized people as a cudgel that he completely misses how in reality marginalized people are more useful to authoritarian structures as a target than a weapon.
AI slop in Springer books:
Our library has access to a book published by Springer, Advanced Nanovaccines for Cancer Immunotherapy: Harnessing Nanotechnology for Anti-Cancer Immunity.Ā Ā Credited to Nanasaheb Thorat, it sells for $160 in hardcover: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86185-7
From page 25: āIt is important to note that as an AI language model, I can provide a general perspective, but you should consult with medical professionals for personalized adviceā¦ā
None of this book can be considered trustworthy.
https://mastodon.social/@JMarkOckerbloom/114217609254949527
Originally noted here: https://hci.social/@peterpur/114216631051719911
I should add that I have a book published with Springer. So, yeah, my work is being directly devalued here. Fun fun fun.
On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for āthis was published before the slop flood gates openedā? There should be.
(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)
Can we make ālow-background mediaā a thing?
Good one!
Is there already a nice term for āthis was published before the slop flood gates openedā? There should be.
āPre-slopnamiā works well enough, I feel.
EDIT: On an unrelated note, I suspect hand-writing your original manuscript (or using a typewriter) will also help increase the value, simply through strongly suggesting ChatGPT was not involved with making it.
hand-writing your original manuscript
The revenge of That One Teacher who always rode you for having terrible handwriting.
Canāt wait until someone tries to Samizdat their AI slop to get around this kind of test.
AI bros are exceedingly lazy fucks by nature, so this kind of shit should be pretty rare. Combined with their near-complete lack of taste, and the risk that such an attempt succeeds drops pretty low.
(Sidenote: Didnāt know about Samizdat until now, thanks for the new rabbit hole to go down)
There arenāt really many other options besides Springer and self-publishing for a book like that, right? Iāve gotten some field-specific article compilations from CRC Press, but I guess thatās just an imprint of Routledge.
What happened was that I had a handful of articles that I couldnāt find an āofficialā home for because they were heavy on the kind of pedagogical writing that journals donāt like. Then an acqusitions editor at Springer e-mailed me to ask if Iād do a monograph for them about my research area. (I think they have a big list of who won grants for what and just ask everybody.) I suggested turning my existing articles into textbook chapters, and they agreed. The book is revised versions of the items I already had put on the arXiv, plus some new material I wrote because it was lockdown season and I had nothing else to do. Springer was, I think, the most likely publisher for a niche monograph like that. One of the smaller university presses might also have gone for it.
i have coauthorship on a book released by Wiley - they definitely feed all of their articles to llms, and itās a matter of time until llm output gets there too
