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. Sorry this wasn’t up earlier, I couldn’t connect to awful.)
Wow this website is cursed: https://detrans.ai/en
Conversion Therapy as a Service.
ah sweet horrors that are perfectly in my comprehension. what the fuck
Detrans.ai is on X, the everything app
Modern fascism in one sentence.
D:
whaaaaat the fuuck
Balaji’s free floating independent network state turns out to be subject to national laws of Malaysia https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3360679/malaysias-anwar-warns-any-israelis-johor-tech-commune-be-deported-immediately
Lol, of course, it’s hosted at the Chinese-financed disaster man-made island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_City,_Johor
I was just reading about this place the other day. Massive environmental damage in a sensitive area, dismal property sales that didn’t come anywhere near meeting projections, and ultimately one of the major case studies in the de-leveraging of the Chinese real estate bubble. If the landlords there are palling up with our buddy Balaji, I sincerely doubt they’re doing much better. Not really here for the official government antisemitism, but I also can’t imagine that there’s huge overlap between Israelis who want to get in tight with Balaji and the sorts of Israelis who are burning their IDF draft cards.
uggh, I dragged my feet too much on giving our instance more disk and the database fell over
it seems to have recovered alright, but please check if there’s any weirdness or missing posts around the time when it went down
there’s been a wave of spam posts on writefreely couple of days back not sure if there’s a relation
uh oh, ours? that’s a different disk but it’s also a tiny disk
Tech execs are now travelling with bodyguards due to AI backlash great quote at the end:
“That’s why people are setting warehouses on fire,” a former Pinterest employee named Bonnie Kate Wolf, who was laid off during an AI-focused restructuring, told the WSJ. “You can’t go back to serfdom. It really feels like the people in power want to be kings. Historically, that doesn’t work out for kings.”
You know, I think there’s an argument to be made for death threats against tech oligarchs being a crude form of direct action towards redistribution.
self your masto feed has been magnificent and uplifting
for those not following it’s https://mas.to/@zzt/
thank you! I feel terrible I haven’t been posting as much here as life’s been finding a way to consistently disrupt my writing and admining time, but mastodon’s format is pretty good for turning disrupted, high-anxiety writing into threads
The Linus news has been a real downer, to which you’ve been a solid antidote!
Attempting to credit Luigi’s actions to AI millenarianism putting him in a weird headspace almost feels like stolen valor.
Still, if that’s where his mental health defence is going to hinge on then I guess it’s relevant.
[Tim Urban] goes on to claim that ASI, with an IQ of 12,000, will eventually replace humankind as the dominant species on the planet:
That IQ works like mana points is both a widespread misconception and a red flag that you’re far more ignorant than you let on.
i mean, he was a rationalist EA who tweeted pronatalism
i saw TPOTs on Twitter going “shit I know him”
If the argument is that too much rationaltruism fried his brain then fine I guess.
Otherwise I don’t think United Healthcare doing AI assisted fraud falls into any rationalist framework of doom, and also those people are allergic to direct action.
Also the article is already setting the bar very high by using the Zizians, a sect that’s almost completely predicated on semi-obsure rationalist lore, as their first point of reference for rationalism gone wild.
“The robot god will be in the 99.9999999999999999999999999999th percentile for intelligence” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/china-registered-the-humans-last
Last July, China gave every internet user a state identity: one number and one credential, good at the bank, the hospital, and the civil-service exam. That system took effect on July 15, 2025.¹ Yesterday, on July 15, 2026, exactly one year later, China did the same thing for AI.
These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot. As of yesterday, agents in China get registered on a national platform. They receive a digital identity and declare their capabilities the way a business declares its scope, and they can be recalled the way a defective car is recalled. A state planning analyst offered the official gloss: every agent gets a 数字身份证, a digital ID card.² Call it what it is, a birth certificate for machines.
I never know how to parse mainstream reporting about China or Wilcox’s writing in particular. Maybe this means they have a universal kill switch.
If you read it the way a lawyer would and the genre is unmistakable. It follows an agent through an entire life. At birth, registration: identity, declared capabilities, payment rails, a procedure for disputes. In life, an audit trail, because in sensitive settings every action must be verifiable and traceable, with blockchain named as the technology of record, so that no act ever floats free of a responsible principal. At death, recall, in the language of defective products.
hmmm
The man behind the partnership is Lin Le, founder of Lingshu Technology, the firm ranked first in China for blockchain and trusted-data infrastructure. The founder of the country’s leading trusted-data company signed for board-level entry into a police-agent vendor five weeks before a law requiring trusted-data audit trails on police agents came into force.
OK back to be being terrified I guess.
article is llm-generated
looks like a confluence of dumb shit that may or may not result in anything that means anything or does anything
there was a big blockchain push from 2019 on, basically in response to Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency plan. This directly brought us the e-CNY central bank digital currency. They tried to do this with a blockchain, but quickly realised you weren’t going to scale a blockchain to fucking China. So far e-CNY is just another phone money like Alipay or Tenpay. I suppose it’s a public good to have cash be under public control and not just private control, but it doesn’t really have a compelling use case in its own right.
These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot.
Are these agents in the room with us now?
How can all this possibly be enforceable.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen basic questions about functionality answered by “something something blockchain” but that appears to be the answer here.
So this exists: https://readscottalexander.com/stats/links
Link Stats
Across every post, these are the external websites Scott Alexander links to most often. “Links” counts every hyperlink; “Posts” counts how many distinct articles link there.
So far these are probably the clearest non-leaked emails indication of what the good doctor actually believes.
He cites Samo Burja and Nicholas Decker? And Cremieux is the twitter account he cites second most often, with Richard Hanania in 4th place?
Yeah, the foam-at-the-mouth racist college drop out with an imaginary phd in race science and at least one nazi alt that we know of is his overall top account to boost by some margin.
I don’t think I’ve heard of Nicholas Decker.
https://www.reddit.com/r/murdle/comments/1ux0g4r/murdle_uses_ai/
Unfortunately you’re right about the Marot— in early 2022 I used a pre-ChatGPT transformer to come up with some of the symbolism, because I thought it was a funny source for essentially arbitrary “revelation.” It probably amounted to about 20-30 words in the final corpus and, although I only vaguely recall this, I believe I remember it being very bad at it. (Significantly more of it was decided under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms.)
OK I think we give GT Karber a pass on this one.
Honestly If we want to use the hallucinatron the same way we use hallucinogens (minus the “transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm” part) I have no real problem with that. Scrambling and remixing the contents of the world in ways that might prompt actual minds to create new connections and interesting art seems to fit.
I don’t think there’s enough of a market for that to support scaling to any meaningful degree and so have less problems from an enabling/infrastructure perspective. I mean the chemical alternatives let you transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm. AI can’t do that.
In some ways, it’s a lot like the cut-up technique used by the Dadaists and William S. Burroughs, though much less efficient. Maybe Markov chains are a happy medium. Going to run M-x dissociated-text on my ePub collection.
We had an IRC bot at the first software company I worked at that ingested conversation along with all the contents of some books from Project Gutenberg, all for the purposes of making the bot say silly things.
Some years ago (2018-ish?) there was a fad on Fedi for making MYNAME_ebooks accounts that posted markov chain generated mashups of your previous posts.
I remember having a lot of fun with Roborosewater where they could generate something that matched the format of a Magic: the Gathering card perfectly and sometimes even something playable within the rules but it was always nonsensical in some ridiculous way. There’s a couple streams from the LoadingReadyRun gang drafting a cube from the resulting chaos that are a hoot.
Ed: Here’s a sampling in video form because I can’t find a “best of” article and they get into the “analysis” a bit.
dan olson jumpscare
Samo Burja (“How Roman Emperors Handled the Succession Problem”), SlateScott, and POTUS have all expressed interest in Herbert Hoover. Is this part of a broader online right thing in the USA?
If you want to re-litigate the New Deal, rehabilitating Hoover is a good first step.
The American far-right has the New Deal as its foundational Dolchstosslegende.
Was unsure if I was gonna post this but might as well. A letter about AI job losses has dropped its very short but has 200 signatures already (most of which are familiar names around here like Jack Clark) this article goes over it
By forcing the question of whether to act before debating how, the signatories appear to be clearing ground for legislative and regulatory work that has not yet arrived.
So it’s a pointless attempt to send up a “take me seriously” flare?
Also I think this discourse as always misses the distinction between economic displacement caused by AI and economic displacement justified by AI. Hiring managers seem to be anticipating AI capabilities that do not exist yet, and the disruption to labor is well beyond what the current AI systems are actually able to replace. I think instead we’re seeing a combination of business rubes buying the hype and the consequences of bad incentives that make headcount reduction look really good on quarterly financials while in a lot of areas not having an immediate negative impact on capabilities or production. Especially when it comes to IT infrastructure, for example, the fact that you’re not paying someone goes immediately on the financial statements, but the fact that your infrastructure is less reliable and crashes more often has a huge experiential impact on your customers and employees but it takes time for that to cash out into something that impacts the numbers.
Oh, it’s the usual suspects. For fucks sake.
Always has been
I’m not sure if we missed this one or if just I did, but there’s a class action suit against Eightfold AI. The company is accused of essentially creating a social credit score based on your digital footprint and using it to drop applications before anyone at the hiring company got a chance to see them.
I spent the last two years watching my options for keeping my family housed slowly dry up while throwing out hundreds of applications. Now I’m concerned that it dug up my old reddit account from when I was a stupid teenager or decided that comments I made here weren’t suitable for participating in the goddamn economy.
Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability https://samoburja.com/ He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published except for a few opinion pieces and his highest educational credential is “studied at the University of Ljubljana.” The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.
I remember him tweeting in February 2022 where immediately after the invasion he confidently predicted that Russia would gobble up all of Ukraine in a matter of weeks. Unlike all those legacy academics with their degrees he really see into the future of governance, you see.
Was it really the sensible position that the poorest country in Europe would go on to embarrass an ostensible superpower? Predicting a Russian victory in the short term in the early days doesn’t seem too daring a hot take.
It was mostly the analysts who were predicting a three day walk in the park with the ukrainians cheering them on as liberators that turned out problematic all the way.
westerners and their clever takes about eastern europe, eh.
The Leverage article kept referring to him as “the slovenian” and that’s at least honorary eastern europe, but I’ve no idea if he actually grew up there.
He runs an analytics company and was specifically touting how his models showed a quick Russian victory, even weeks into the invasion, which was more than just the usual Besserwisserism among western europeans towards eastern Europe. If the whole shtick is that the mainstream is lame but my patented crystal ball actually tells the future from first principles and you then tank even harder than the mainstream, you not only embarrass yourself but reveal your own preferences as well.
And the mainstream predictions in the West of Ukrainian resistance weren’t as negative as what he advanced, which is precisely why many refused to believe the Kremlin would actually step on this rake of a war. That he wholeheartedly defended a quick Russian victory made him seem steeped more in the Kremlin’s narratives than the West’s, even as all imperial powers tend to be hubristic.
Sounds like he went for the low hanging fruit to showcase his business and ate shit, good to know.
His great founder theory certainly seems amenable to going all in on dictators.
That’s a non-provably non-punchable face if I’ve ever seen one.
lolol
I looked at the table of contents of his manuscript and … zero history. All blathering on about some theory he cooked up from first principles to fellate rich people. The fact that anyone takes this seriously is a stunning indictment on the state of humanities education.
If you look at literally page 1 you’ll find the first footnote pointing at another chapter of the same goddamn book and now I’m going to go weep tears of impotent rage.
Ed: sorry, it’s page 8, which is the first page after the self-congratulatory preface.
Hey, gotta pump up these self-citation numbers somehow
Hol up! It’s kind of unfair to blame some poor soul with a PhD in Beowulf for failing the beat the fash out of a determined dickhead over the course of a single quarter. (half serious)
I mean, did Samo even complete a degree?
The other hell site, LinkedIn, says University of Ljubljana but no major / degree listed. maybe he studied with zizek though.
… apparently he’s a second connection. !?
In a quick DuckDuckGo I can’t find any site that claims Samo Burja has a degree.
His concept of live player is just another way of saying that most people are NPCs. The manuscript appears to call Elon Musk an engineer which is like calling Cheops an architect (alternatively, Musk must “fundamentally understand engineering”).
