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.)
Today’s cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as you’d think.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php
(paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools)
the novice climbers, from Roseville, said they’d entrusted Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip — from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them.
On a separate incident:
a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map he’d been following and explained that he’d prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.
“It was terrible — terrible — not even close to accurate,” Meyers said. “It had route lines and place names that were totally off — just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.”
The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people.
I’ve no doubt that they’d have fucked things up in the pre-llm days too… they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams 🫤
In 2015, around the time MetaMed ran out of money, Andrew Rettek raised $2,280 on GoFundMe to hire his wife to write a report on STI transmission risks. https://www.gofundme.com/f/n5kt74 Safer sex is important but its very like our friends to go “thousands of professionals around the world have devoted their lives to this topic, but I bet I can do better in a week with scihub and the power of fanfic.” Some of our friends totally took that report and tried to play the odds rather than stick to strict rules.
Emile Torres just dropped again: What If TESCREAL Is a Conspiracy? I haven’t read the whole thing yet but it does feature all of the classics
Some on Reddit called Mollie Gleiberman a conspiracy theorist when I cited her argument that these people always wanted to build Computer God and conquer the universe. I did not know that our friends tried that gambit as soon as Emile introduced the TESCREAL concept.
https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/the-future-is-not-tech-forward
whole thing is good but long, but then THAT GUY pops up again. Humans First has apparently already came and went, that other article left out this fun bit of lore:
Politics comes for Humans First too. In late March, there’s a high-profile spat online where pro-AI White House allies like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks retweet a piece critical of Humans First. Shortly after, the organization splits along partisan lines. The conservative wing keeps the Humans First name and makes the right-wing political activist Amy Kremer, who helped organize the January 6 “Save America” rally in DC, its chair; Allen leaves the group. When I ask Allen about the changeup, he is curiously coy (but characteristically body-horrible): The group was “undergoing mitosis,” he says. “I am now a lone organelle floating in the residual cytoplasm.”
It’s ok little buddy you still have steve bannon. /s
we now have a slop-free jobs board
A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to “chat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?”
Anyone know when and why polyamory became a Rationalist shibboleth?
I reckon it goes way back to the movements that produced them. My first thought is ayn rand:
In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair. They informed both their spouses, who briefly objected, until Rand “sp[u]n out a deductive chain from which you just couldn’t escape”, in Barbara Branden’s words, resulting in her and O’Connor’s assent.
You can see how “The most rational thing is that I fuck your spouse” would appeal to the less wrong folk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Atlas_Shrugged_and_Objectivism
I don’t exactly why, but based off the dates of various classic lesswrong posts I know it has existed since before 2010 in rationalist culture.
As to inexact reasons why… some key big name starting rationalist (i.e. Yudkowsky for sure, but probably a few others) were into polyamory. (Probably for the obvious reasons of getting to sleep with more people.)
Interesting question because I bet it’s bound to coincide with when the cult dynamics really began to take hold.
Like this isn’t your grandpa’s swingers group, it is vertical workplace polyamory1 with an implicit understanding that if members in good standing don’t get sufficient amounts of ass they might get distracted and become inefficient, costing the universe untold billions in unrealized far future lives.
It’s very easy to imagine a scenario where they just slapped the polyamory brand on an already established culture of culty sex shenanigans.
- I swear the claudism was unintentional
There are a lot of attempts to push polyamory on white-collar and chattering-class culture, but many men in the USA seem to push it so they can tell their primary partner “I sleep with my groupies because I am polyamorous” and tell their groupies “who cares that you have a boyfriend, how about polyamory?” It also lets insecure men show off that they have not just one hot babe but several, and we know many rationalists are desperate for the rest of the world to recognize their genius. The problem, to be clear, is not necessarily with polyamory, just with people who use it as a way to get a gang of domestic servants.
I still have scars from events like the ones documented at https://allegedlythewebsite.org/ So many men in the skeptic and adjacent blogosphere used “sex-positivity” to mean “I can hit on you and encourage you to bottom at kink events, and you can’'t say I am creeping you out or you are looking fro a job not a playmate.” Similar dynamics are common in academia, polyamory was just one trendy excuse in the 2000s and 2010s. Scott Alexander experimented with polyamory and was living with a sex blogger in 2013 and I think Yud had connections in the NYC poly and kink scene.
I don’t know the answer, but I’ve always assumed it’s because it’s just something Yud is really into.
Michael Vassar called sleeping with his staff at MetaMed polyamory. Polyamory is common, and bosses and teachers sleeping with employees and students is common, but the combination stands out.
I had short odds for that entire submission being nuked but apparently there’s enough non-bad stuff there for the mods to keep it up.
the effort of rampant libertarians to jumpstart a social movement is going as well as expected
My first thought was maybe one of them isn’t focused enough on doomerism and is too concerned with practical shit, which in lesswrong and AI doomer spaces is a nono (practical concerns about GenAI and data centers are okay as a way to draw in normies, but they want to make sure you speak the shibboleths that indicate your real concern is Skynet). Thus whichever one is the less doomer one would get a smidgen of credit in my eyes.
I was disappointed to learn the real reason…
We endorse pointing out harmful actions. But we condemn attacks on people’s character.
…although it is probably a good thing that someone is willing to call Sam Altman a slimeball and Anthropic lying hypocrites? So I’ll give PauseAI-US a tiny bit of credit for that.
…or maybe not
When I read Holly’s Twitter feed, I get why someone would have a gut reaction like “this is an unhinged person who’s stooping to the level of personal attacks on people who seem nice and are just trying to do their best”.
Whatever credit this PauseAI-US person gets for willingness to call people out, they lose for doing so through twitter.
This is terrible, absolutely horrible, disendorsement is only a few short steps from defenestration. How could these people do this
Not sure about the Libertarian connection, but the comments feature Eliezer Yudkowsky and at least one member of the MAPLE cult (Goldenberg).
A “no attacks on people’s characters” policy seems like a terrible idea in this space because so many people are grifters, liars, and apocalyptic cultists. At some point you have to say “you are a bad person who uses false words to do bad things.”
A “no attacks on people’s characters” policy seems like a terrible idea
Rationalists: “Its not our fault that we got deceived and manipulated by SBF, lots of people were fooled by him!
pay no attention to the fact we repeated the pattern of falling for it with OpenAI and Anthropic also”Also Rationalists: “You can’t jsut call people
in or adjacent to our in-groupbad people!”Also Eliezer: "There’s a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn’t matter that God doesn’t actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f’d-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it. "
not Libertarian in the organized political sense, more like steeped in the dominant California ideology
Just in time for Irreplaceable to show up!
that dyson toothbrush, huh
“everything is camera” is this decade’s “shove a bluetooth in there”
think of the monetisation opportunities!
but yeah it’s pretty weird, people are out of ideas for what to do I guess. endless growth mindset can’t have a thing just be done 🤷♂️
yeah, the only idea left is “insert as much financial friction that is tolerated between people and the things they use in their lives”.
Dan Luu and tptacek are very mad at Ed Zitron, and they claim to have slammed him with FACTS and LOGIC
I enjoyed one of the comments comparing Zitron to a fire and brimstone priest… like dude, Big Yud and Dario are right there
Zitron is a better writer though. Yud is bland personified.
If I have a billion trillion dollars but 20% of the population hates me, but I get to live in a giant solid gold mansion with an army of servants keeping the 20% away from me, have I really failed?
I don’t know, you tell me.
Part of the deal you took when you got the billion trillion dollars is that we get to make fun of you for being a sellout, why are they trying to renegotiate now?
@pikesley
the simpsons did jeff bezos(with too much hair and too few dollars)
@Amoeba_Girl @o7___o7
I’m not going near your solid gold mansion by the way, that’s a death trap!
Speaking of wrong predictions… the entire US military budget would have to be spent on OpenAI/Anthropic to keep the bubble from bursting.
well that really is rather a tell, isn’t it
Ed Zitron says water is wet but he didn’t properly quantity wetness or indeed how long it would take me to be soaked through if I touch water… Checkmate atheists!
It’s impressive how these very rational millionaire tech lords get so bent out of shape by anyone outside of their club getting any attention (edit: about AI) whatsoever. Just peak pettiness.
They can all go choke on a pelican.
my feeds are full of news of the death of Wendell Berry who I have absolutely no relationship to but this quote is relevant to our interests
Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/ai-off-balance-sheet-obligations-hit-a-subprime-like-reset-wall-in-2027-and-2028.html by Yves / naked capitalism
Critically, it is these “frontier labs” that contract for, lease and build data centers. The very little I have seen about this process has caused me concern. For instance, I read of Meta contracting for a data center for what sounded like 20 years but was 4 back-to-back five year leases. Recall that the once AAA rated General Electric has taken a big fall in investor grace. How strong will the now-mighty-seeming Meta be, particularly if AI bets come a cropper?
Groundbreaker has identified a key element of risky AI leverage, which are obligations that are not accounted for as debt at the AI sponsor. Those of you who are corporate finance literate will know this is a cardinal sin. When I was a wee young thing at Goldman, where we went through hard copies of financial statements to extract key data which we entered into green accountants’ ledger paper, one of the aims was to determine total debt to assets. One of the footnote items we would root out was operating lease payments. For instance, big companies often use leased mainframes. We would capitalize them and treat them as a long-term liability.
=> https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom
The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM.
Going to take me a while to digest this one
new odium symposium episode. we look at the evolution of keyboard warrior and self described most censored man on the internet jk sheindlin
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/23-gobsmacking-168259713
This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can’t imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.
Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle
It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas’ current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he’s been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it’s get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: they’re quite the opposite), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort “the AI app says this is plagiarized” attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race “science” is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between “impartial” academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle
It should be said here again that these people don’t even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.
Here in Belgium some investigative journalists have been reporting on Cofnas since his appointment in March. They recently translated one of their pieces to English and made it available for non-subscribers (click on ‘Lees alleen dit artikel gratis’ to close the pop-up):
https://apache.be/2026/03/05/self-declared-race-realist-nathan-cofnas-receives-appointment-ugent
The UGent philosophy department is also not without controversy. Maarten Boudry, a former employee there, is one of the main people in this country pushing ‘climate realism’, ‘concerns about Islam’ and ‘cultural marxism was a Nazi conspiracy theory but right now we itnis actually happening in our institutions’. He’s very buddy buddy with Steven Pinker and likely trying to get more international reach.
Apart from that, plagiarism issues never make news headlines because they happen very often at universities. The only cases I’m aware of are Arday and Claudine Gay. Probably because they have a political skin color.
Also a German Minister of Defense. My impression is that Arday was a fabulist, but so are many academics at wealthy research institutions, and the global campaign against him was clearly motivated by racism. Not sure about the plagiarism because I am not on Cambridge’s academic integrity committee.
Without having read that specific article
From what I heard Cofnas research is quite bad (it has cases of him seemingly not having read the sources he cites as those say the opposite of what he claims they do, and that is above the normal badness of race science shit. Some of his tweets (I think it was tweets, could also have been facebook posts or something) certainly read as ‘intended for internal racist fights’ and not intended for academics). And the guy who appointed him is also being looked at with suspicion. So hope they also take a good look at the guy who hired him (without using the normal process for it apparently).
Part of the accusations were also that he faked running a lot of marathons in a short period. Which he actually did. I even heard that some news outlets who accused him of faking it actually had reported themselves on him running the marathons.
It is a kiwifarms style witch hunt but started by a racist academic, and perpetuated with help from the media.
The thing that bothers me the most is that while this happens in Cambridge but over at Data Colada, Ariely is just like “whoopsie” and gets to keep his job. https://datacolada.org/138 - personally I consider fabricating your entire study to be worse than sloppy quotes, but it is insane how these two people are treated so differently.
I also think it’s really lazy that BBC couldn’t even mention Claudine Gay (AND Martin Luther King) since it was the exact same thing. Different country I guess.
even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated
The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing.
It’s insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying he’s a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didn’t do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t murder.
I was pretty disgusted by that. It seems like the guy’s crimes were some poor citation (he did cite the academic he alledgedly plagiarised so obviously it’s not plagiarism lol) and maybe exaggerating some of his life?
Seeing the media go from uncritically regurgitating a racist’s allegation, to reporting about the allegation controversy, to uncritically reporting what people claim to have or have not remembered about his life from 30 years ago, to digging through his entire life. For, I’ll reiterate, maybe citing something badly and doing some sloppy scholarship.
You know, the thing that gets someone a disciplinary chat and maybe a bump down if anything.
I have to take this story in small doses, it’s fuckin terrible.
over on linked in
as a statistician, I’m so tired of hearing they’re “updating their priors.” No you didn’t. gwern at least posts his R code, but you are just an idiot regurgitating something you half heard, probably on Lex.
(00:39:39) Let me put it. Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux system. It’s an alternative operating system to macOS and Windows, and it’s freaking amazing.
No it isn’t. It’s your glorified dotfiles. too bad Lex can’t tell the difference. I feel bad that Lex is exposing literally a million people to your crap. /s
these guys.
How did Lex Fridman’s podcast become so popular? He has no affect, always seems like he is about to fall asleep, and most of his guests are horrible people. He is a less intense Joe Rogan.
Being on YT is a big driver here, and Lex is smart enough to work the algo. Have John Carmack on, get views when people search for Quake. Have Elon on, get subs when people search for Tesla. Have Mr Beast on and get some kids in the funnel. He’s very good at piercing through filter bubbles to get extra reach and pull numbers, unlike an Alex Jones. (EDIT: For this, the bland persona is a feature not a bug)
I’d ballpark that he made $20k off this DHH interview and picked up some rails devs along the way.
Whenever new coworkers bring up Lex, I always feel like it’s a test, like are they oblivious, or are they secret closet magas trying to test the water. Slate Star has a similar thing. And YT is bad enough but now I have to see it pop up on LinkedIn too.
I feel like his initial momentum came from picking interview subjects who were technical leaders but not well-known outside their niches and rarely were subjects of long-form interviews. Jim Keller and Chris Lattner were two who stood out for me early on, although I couldn’t finish their interviews because Lex himself was such a drag to listen to. He’s put some work into public speaking skills, but not nearly enough.
I refuse to knock him for his accent; a strong accent could even be an asset for standing out in the hugely overcrowded podcast industry. But the guy just doesn’t seem to cultivate any charisma or any real curiosity. The only time I’ve seen him show a smidge of passion was when I saw a clip of him ranting about “anti-woke” bullshit, which should tell you what his (and his backers’) real objective is.
Oh yeah, transfer my enthusiasm, mister high-stepping HH man. Update my priors till they’re so bleeding-edge that they’ve become subsequents. This is masterfully persuasive marketing rhetoric that will convince everyone and leave no holdouts. Scott Adams would be smearing his hands with Vaseline to prep for your appearance on his podcast, if he was still around.
