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 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.)
ed zitron must feel so vindicated rn https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
Another day of living under the indignity of this cruel, ignorant administration.
There’s something particularly galling about “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”. The wholly believable implication that nobody made an active choice to fuck this guy over. Through sheer incompetence that money just vanished into the goddamn ether because God forbid anyone in the modern business or political spaces actually have to take responsibility for their decisions.
Historians like to use “state capacity” as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.
I didn’t think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”
Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts – 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency
“Hmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words.”
Nothing expresses the inherent atomism and libertarian nature of the rat community like this
A rundown of the health risks of alcohol usage, coupled with actual real proposals (a consumption tax), finishes with the conclusion that the individual reader (statistically well-off and well-socialized) should abstain from alcohol altogether.
No calls for campaigning for a national (US) alcohol tax. No calls to fund orgs fighting alcohol abuse. Just individual, statistically meaningless “action”.
Oh well, AGI will solve it (or the robot god will be a raging alcoholic)
OK now there’s another comment
I think this is a good plea since it will be very difficult to coordinate a reduction of alcohol consumption at a societal level. Alcohol is a significant part of most societies and cultures, and it will be hard to remove. Change is easier on an individual level.
Excepting cases like the legal restriction of alcohol sales in many many areas (Nordics, NSW in Aus, Minnesota in the US), you can in fact just tax the living fuck out of alcohol if you want. The article mentions this.
JFC these people imagine they can regulate how “AGI” is constructed, but faced with a problem that’s been staring humanity in the face since the first monk brewed the first beer they just say "whelp nothing can be done, except become a teetotaller yourself)
Change is easier on an individual level.
No fucking shit?
I, for one, happen to live in one of these “Nordics” and alcohol is actually taxed quite heavily here. If we’re looking at change on an individual level, it would actually be good for the society if more people were drinking alcohol, as long as the benefit of them contributing to society through tax euros outweighs the adverse health effects.
There are a bit different axes here. The tax money doesn’t directly go towards alleviating the suffering of family members of alcoholics, nor does it directly lower the effects of drunk driving. The income is a nice to have, for sure, but the stated aim is to be a “sin tax” which makes the bad thing less affordable.
[Drunk, having a good time with friends]: I’ll show you collecting state tithes for immoral substance consumption!
sin tax error
Perfecting the art of getting sloshed is my 80,000 hours of meaningful work.
I just enjoy dabbling
cheers m8, ill drink to that
This post is not meant to be an objective cost-benefit analysis of alcohol.
Oh, you’re not doing the thing that’s supposedly the entire point of the website? Don’t worry, no one else is either.
To be scrupulously fair it is a repost of another slubbslack[1]. Amusingly, both places have a comment with the gist of “well alcohol gets people laid so what’s the problem”. This of course is a reflection that most LWers cannot get a girl into bed without slipping her a roofie.
[1] is that even ok? I know the LW software has a “mirroring” functionality b/c a lot of content is originally on the member’s SS, maybe you cna point it at any SS entry and get it onto LW.
I’ve been recommended more Veo 3 fails by The Algorithm. Apparently even some promptfans think it sucks.
You WILL believe what happened when they tried to replicate Google’s demos using the exact same prompts.
ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you’ve probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.
I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don’t want any part in this shit anymore.
ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australia’s age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSA… yeah.
Yes, of course, it’s everywhere. What’s left but becoming a hermit…?
But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I don’t think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isn’t - that you’ll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.
Would you mind explaining how to do that easily in a way that only reveals age without being a privacy nightmare? Which means that it mustn’t be giving sites an excellent tracking identifier nor requires them to process documents themselves.
I’d have imagined something along these lines:
- USER visits porn site
- PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
- PORN forwards that to USER
- USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
- GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
- GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
- GOV returns that to USER
- USER forwards that to PORN
- PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
- but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)
There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.
PORN site encrypts random nonce
Really unfortunate word in this context. (Not your fault of course.)
an unintended side effect of this is people who can’t or don’t want to verify their age going to less reputable sources. so even though it can be done in a “privacy-respecting fashion” (see, for example, soatok’s post on this[1] ), it’s still a bad idea.
additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]
https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-to-be-a-privacy-footgun/ ↩︎
e.g. “steam porn games” → “this person’s existence is inherently sexual” → “ban lgbtq content” ↩︎
Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting post and interesting blog in general!
Yes, any version of age control which would realistically get passed will be bad. This:
additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]
is absolutely true. The fact that those privacy preserving approaches exist but aren’t used is all the proof I personally need of this.
Archive.is because substack sucks. Remember Peter Todd, the ghost in the LLMs? New one of them dropped. Elara Voss
I noticed starting a couple weeks ago that archive.is is requiring me to complete captchas nearly every time I visit. Are other people experiencing this? If so, I wonder if the site’s maintainers are reacting to increased traffic from LLM crawlers. The crawlers probably find Archive extraordinarily useful when they get blocked by source sites.
If you use cloudflare DNS or similar: there has been some inscrutable drama going back years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Cloudflare_DNS_availability
(You might be using Cloudflare DNS without realizing it if you use Firefox, since it’s the default with DNS over HTTPs enabled)
(Oh no how much of my brain is dedicated to remembering random inscrutable tech drama?)
I’m aware of the cloudflare issue, and I don’t use them. So I’m pretty sure it’s not that. (I use firefox but I turn off DNS over HTTPS)
They get mad at any DNS server that strips/doesn’t include EDNS subnet info (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDNS_Client_Subnet)
NextDNS was another that would give me endless captchas.
Found an AI bro making an incoherent defense of AI slop today (fitting that he previously shilled NFTs):
Needless to say, he’s getting dunked on in the replies and QRTs, because people like him are fundamentally incapable of being punk.
Yes, doing the thing which the entire business world is pouring billions into and trying their hardest to shove onto everyone to maximize imagined future profits, that’s what counterculture is all about.
this guy actually lost a bundle in NFTs a few years ago
Making art with the help of tech billionaires is so punk rock man!
Just as Jello Biafra intended. Wait. What?
Wikipedia has higher standards than the American HIstorical Association. Let’s all let that sink in for a minute.
Wikipedia also just upped their standards in another area - they’ve updated their speedy deletion policy, enabling the admins to bypass standard Wikipedia bureaucracy and swiftly nuke AI slop articles which meet one of two conditions:
-
"Communication intended for the user”, referring to sentences directly aimed at the promptfondler using the LLM (e.g. "Here is your Wikipedia article on…,” “Up to my last training update …,” and "as a large language model.”)
-
Blatantly incorrect citations (examples given are external links to papers/books which don’t exist, and links which lead to something completely unrelated)
Ilyas Lebleu, who contributed to the update in policy, has described this as a “band-aid” that leaves Wikipedia in a better position than before, but not a perfect one. Personally, I expect this solution will be sufficent to permanently stop the influx of AI slop articles. Between promptfondlers’ utter inability to recognise low-quality/incorrect citations, and their severe laziness and lack of care for their “”“work”“”, the risk of an AI slop article being sufficiently subtle to avoid speedy deletion is virtually zero.
-
Image should be clearly marked as AI generated and with explicit discussion as to how the image was created. Images should not be shared beyond the classroom
This point stood out to me as particularly bizarre. Either the image is garbage in which case it shouldn’t be shared in the classroom either because school students deserve basic respect, good material, and to be held to the same standards as anyone else; or it isn’t garbage and then what are you so ashamed of AHA?
Will probably repost this in the next sack. A redditor over at r/philosophy tries to argue that AI bans are ideological and therefore bad, after a 3 day ban for posting slop.
E: OP is an EA/LWer. lol
Do you mean op as in the guy who posted it or who wrote it? The latter has some really bad arguments imho. Esp for a ‘professional philosopher’.
On the subject of AI art being bad for artists: “Compare banning lightbulbs for putting candle-makers out of work. Then suppose that lightbulbs are in fact perfectly legal, but some luddite ideologues manage to capture certain online spaces and ban anyone from using a backlit screen to view the website”
I did look into this at time of edit: the author of the article linked AND the poster of the link are nestled in rat space. So yes
E: when I wrote this comment, I was only thinking about the statement “OP is an EA/LWer”. to be clear:
author of the article claims that they tried to post one of their articles to r/philosophy, and because the article contained AI generated content, they received a 3 day ban
poster of the article is a separate person
E2: the author of the article is also participating in the reddit thread, FWIW
Ah so both. Yeah the candle maker quote is from the writer of the article.
discussion continued here: ----> https://awful.systems/comment/8326480
OpenAI is food. You can tell because it’s washed, rinsed, and cooked.
this gave me a good chuckle after a few Some Fuckin Days, ty
who’s the bigger fish that’s gonna eat them?
@dgerard, probably. you can tell because of the food poisoning. (Hope you’re feeling better!)
Call me AGI because I am stealing this without attribution
Ran across a pretty solid sneer: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.
Found a particularly notable paragraph near the end, focusing on the people focusing on “prompt engineering”:
In fear of being replaced by the hypothetical ‘AI-accelerated employee’, people are forgoing acquiring essential skills and deep knowledge, instead choosing to focus on “prompt engineering”. It’s somewhat ironic, because if AGI happens there will be no need for ‘prompt-engineers’. And if it doesn’t, the people with only surface level knowledge who cannot perform tasks without the help of AI will be extremely abundant, and thus extremely replaceable.
You want my take, I’d personally go further and say the people who can’t perform tasks without AI will wind up borderline-unemployable once this bubble bursts - they’re gonna need a highly expensive chatbot to do anything at all, they’re gonna be less productive than AI-abstaining workers whilst falsely believing they’re more productive, they’re gonna be hated by their coworkers for using AI, and they’re gonna flounder if forced to come up with a novel/creative idea.
All in all, any promptfondlers still existing after the bubble will likely be fired swiftly and struggle to find new work, as they end up becoming significant drags to any company’s bottom line.
Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If you’re willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: they’re called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your “natural language” prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha you’re doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.
At my big tech job after a number of reorgs / layoffs it’s now getting pretty clear that the only thing they want from me is to support the AI people and basically nothing else.
I typed out a big rant about this, but it probably contained a little too much personal info on the public web in one place so I deleted it. Not sure what to do though grumble grumble. I ended up in a job I never would have chosen myself and feel stuck and surrounded by chat-bros uggh.
You could try getting laid off, scrambling for a year trying to get back into a tech position, start delivering Amazon packages to make ends meet, and despair at the prospect of reskilling in this economy. I… would not recommend it.
It looks like there are a weirdly large number of medical technician jobs opening up? I wonder if they’re ahead of the curve on the AI hype cycle.
- Replace humans with AI
- Learn that AI can’t do the job well
- Frantically try to replace 2-5 years of lost training time
Amazon should treat drivers better. I hate how much “hustle” is required for that sort of job and how poorly they respect their workers.
I think my job needs me too much to lay me off, which I have mixed feelings about despite the slim-pickings for jobs.
I’m also trying to position myself to potentially have to flee the USA* due to transgender persecution**. There’s still a lot of unknowns there. I’ll probably stay at my job for awhile while I work on setting some stuff up for the future.
That said part of me is tempted to reskill into a career that’d work well internationally (nursing?) – I’m getting a little up in years for that but it’d probably be a lot more fulfilling than what I’m doing now.
* My previous attempt did not work out. I rushed things too much and ended up too stressed out and unbelievably homesick.
** This has been getting incredibly stressful lately.
Most medical careers work well internationally, in principle. Something to keep in mind is that language proficiency may be a stated or unstated prerequisite for employment, in particular if you have contact with patients. If you work with the machines (lab technician, etc) the language may be of less importance. Or at least, so I have heard. Relevance depends on your country of choice and your pre-existing language skills, of course.
To bad attempt number one didn’t work well. Better luck with attempt number two.
Good news everyone, we will be living with Big Yud until the literal end of time (see comments)
Anybody have the adresses of the lw people? I have some oil I want to sell them, has a very small chance of extending life.
If only there was some widely-known Rationalist cliche about incredibly small probabilities with absurdly high negative impacts.
Stars are very likely extremely wasteful anyway and worth disassembling
ugh you guys suck
Only taste tester I trust dropped his verdict
(Bonus)
