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.)

    • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      23 hours ago

      His non-apology apology:

      I’m not going anywhere. I am not retreating from public writing, and I am not retreating from saying inconvenient things in public. I am unfazed by harsh criticism, and I know that a reaction of this magnitude is in part the result of having struck a chord. Bear with me, and if you can, remember that I am a human being with a six-month old boy to raise, a book to write, a new job, and much more questions than answers about our collective future.

      Guys, he has a baby. Don’t be too mean to him.

      • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        18 hours ago

        “please forgive me for spreading sinophobic propaganda for bailouts i have a baby :((“

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        21 hours ago

        I am not retreating from public writing

        That’s OK, it will still mostly be confined to oversized Twitter posts, so most people will ignore it.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      Even /r/singularity, which has a high percentage of boosters and often buys OpenAI/Anthropic talking points uncritically (or with only a few un-upvoted naysayers) eviscerated his comments as the shallow attempt to beg for regulations on China to protect OpenAI that they are. Also, China’s consistent open sourcing and lower relative cost per performance (well insofar as you believe the benchmarks and such indicate performance) has the /r/singularity audience questioning the “China bad” narrative US media tries to sell.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism

      full AI communism

      At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. “A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

      Listen I’m all for hating on the Chinese government, but it’s more enjoyable to hate on them for real reasons rather than whatever this is.

      Second mistake: I was relatively imprecise, writing, as I usually do, for a fairly high-context audience that was inclined to give me grace rather than pick apart every word

      Oh no the lesson he took away from his tweet is that he didn’t use enough words.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        19 hours ago

        I also don’t get it because they already hate pre-social-media institutions, so why are they still angry that American journalists were bad at transmitting public health science at the beginning of COVID? Even if you believe in a COVID lab leak, the United States broke the global public health response while countries in East Asia and the South Pacific showed what to do. There are lab-leakers who blame a partnership between traitorous American scientists and sinister Chinese labs to conduct research that was illegal in the USA.

        Edit / this guy just comes out and uses COVID lab leak theories as an analogy for AI-box fantasies, but these people don’t just cite it as a parallel, they are MAD about what they think happened and want you to be mad too.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      2 days ago

      I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI).

      The strategy seems quite clear to me, and not blind at all: they want to hold a gun to the head of over-capitalized Americans like Mr. Ball and his enablers, and will be perfectly happy if that drives our tech industry into a financial escalation spiral that ultimately neuters it for years to come. He has the barest glimmerings of being aware of this, but frames it wrong because he can’t let go of the sci-fi sentimentality that drives his whole industry.

      The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China’s open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports.

      The Chinese still have overwhelming clout in final electronics assembly, i.e. turning this shit into things people can actually use. Of course they are interested in maintaining that advantage. And if, in the medium term, they can nudge more financially desperate American politicians and executives towards loosening trade and investment restrictions, possibly even towards equity partnerships, so much the better. “Lack of compute for customer inference” is ultimately a red herring. If I’m a Chinese economic strategist, why would I not expect GPU tech to become commoditized over time, like every other aspect of advanced computing technology has? Perhaps even more rapidly, as the designs are inherently massively-parallel implementations of similar base execution blocks!

      The rest of his “accelerationist”/“decelerationist” drivel concerns a silly spat that is mainly centered around and driven by Twitter. It is still difficult to overestimate just how brain-rotted Twitter has made these people.

      e: case in point, he leads out with barely-veiled Covid lab-leak trutherism, surely just to rile up the hogs. What a loser hahahahahaha

      “A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab,” you say? Color me shocked.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      21 hours ago

      These doofuses never actually think through their thought experiments. Quoting from a dead thread half a year ago, where he was downvoted but not yet identified:

      In a universe where all things are transforming all the time it seems pretty fair to ask the question: “What IS IT about humanity that we want to preserve and expand?” If the answer is “23 chromosomes, 2 eyes, 5-6 feet tall, etc” that seems pretty shallow.

      Okay, but first surely he can recognize that humanity is already multicultural and multispecies? Like, in a non-specious sense, we’ve incorporated many mammals, birds, plants, fungi, etc. into our daily lives and can’t really separate them out at this point. Sure, there’s some ineffable and beautiful relationship between humans in general which we want to preserve, but before worrying about whether robots should join in, we should first notice that there’s already an expansion of that relationship to include e.g. face mites, and there’s no sense in which face mites are a Worthy Successor to whom we should cede all managerial decisions. (I was gonna say “cats”, but I know plenty of y’all would rather have a cat in charge than a human, and you’re not wrong.)

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      Oh no every day sneerclub teaches me about a new guy.

      So he’s basically arguing that the Borg did nothing wrong (note: the Borg do not actually exist, note #2: the Borg are space fascists).

      Worthy Successor: A posthuman intelligence so capable and morally valuable that you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself.

      This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this idea in rationalist circles: that is bad / wrong / irrational to be biased in favor of humans and or humans to succeed in particular. Often the idea is taken as obviously true, but I cannot understand it at all.

      Like I don’t care if you can make a computer “better” than me or less sad than me or less likely to eat an innocent shrimp than me. I am not that computer-- if it’s a choice between me and them I’m fighting on team me. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make one’s space in the universe or to “selfishly” want self-actualization or to want humans to thrive.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        I think this particular pattern is another consequence of long-termism in the water supply. It’s easy to disconnect yourself from humanity as a concept when you’re in a space that often assumes that you and everyone you could ever have a personal relationship with are already long dead. The fact that this makes it easy to ignore the problems that people today are having in front of your face is purely coincidental.

      • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Oh no every day sneerclub teaches me about a new guy.

        I’ve been aware of Faggella for a while (entirely against my will) he’s got an interview with Yud on his podcast which contains this all-timer quote:

        ”If sacrificing all of humanity were the only way, and a reliable way, to get … godlike things out there — superintelligences who still care about each other, who are still aware of the world and having fun — I would ultimately make that trade-off.”

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Hey, new ludicity post. wonder why he did a saturday post, he’ll miss the HN monday cycle.

    https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

    For this reason, our team has quickly learned while on an engagement not to ask anything about ongoing AI projects in any context – by the time that project has started, it is too late for the management team, and intervention is not possible until a crisis point is inevitably reached. There is no conceivable positive outcome. The failure rate is so high that even basic inquiry leaves us in an untenable position. Any coherent question about how it’s going, what the goal is, who is using it, constitutes an inadvertent attack on the chain of command responsible for the work because there are no good answers to anything.

    Matches my experience consulting these last few years. I’m still waiting to hear about the one gig where AI doesn’t eventually degenerate into a CYA circlejerk. Perhaps that is just the dominant eigenvector of the technical consulting process.

    Several of my peers now “AI-wash” their work, meaning that even when they can perfectly competently execute on their jobs to the satisfaction of their management teams, said managers are unhappy if the engineers haven’t used AI in the work.

    Been there too.

    Also, apparently layoffs.fyi added an “attributed to AI” filter - https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    Patreon CEO Jack Comte uploaded a visionary CEO talk about AI and artists and the future. I don’t fully understand why they needed an interpretative dance section, or multiple people playing synthesizers, but I guess AI is good for artists, but also bad for artists, but also a big opportunity for artists, but also taking opportunities away from artists, but also? Also lots of bragging about how many millions of followers he has.

  • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    4 days ago

    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.”

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 days ago

      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@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    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

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        4 days ago

        “The robot god will be in the 99.9999999999999999999999999999th percentile for intelligence” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        6·
        4 days ago

        i mean, he was a rationalist EA who tweeted pronatalism

        i saw TPOTs on Twitter going “shit I know him”

        • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago

          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.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      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.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        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.