Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? 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. The spooks are well underway.)
New Baldur Bjarnason: Software developers are not okay
Oir big Old Moldy friend has decided he needs his work doesnt spread enough hitler particles.
wdited alt text from the image
Curtis Yarvin post on X on 10/5/2026: "Every time I’m in the UK I hear this. More and more people asking, subtly or straight out: what would Hitler do?
As if it was that easy. Have you looked around you? Man, Hitler wouldn’t even know where to start"
Doesn’t he have a kid to raise or something (…yeah…)? Small miracle he still has custody
Today I learned that Gwern has a folder of Nano Banana comics. Moreover, on HN, he’s proud of them. Masterful gambit, sir.
Not only are they grade-school level awful, he totally misses the point of the original
My God, it’s like the art becomes more bafflingly poor the closer he gets to stumbling into a decent joke. There’s a finite amount of quality that has to be balanced between the two, and it’s capped at “shit”.
Why does the kitchen in the “zen of instant coffee” strip have two stoves?
Also: needing Claude to make a pie chart. No, that is someone with a cognitive surrender fetish. I refuse to engage.
A lesswrong has a cri de coeur:
Are we a community who, when someone is thrown out of Lighthaven our response is to be like ‘maybe he should be given a free ticket to manifest’ and if I accuse someone of a felony, our response is ‘hmmm that’s probably free speech and cancellation’?
It is also an incredible strength that they actually practice what they preach, and don’t exclude someone based on hearsay and “probably a rapist”.
The China-Whisperers are trying to figure out how to get Rationalist Ideals into Chinese AI researchers
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmxkHm2dTLKG6GZ6i/the-anatomy-of-a-chinese-ai-researcher
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china
Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China won’t appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to “safety-pill” China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825
I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the world… it’s bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute “Watchtower magazine” or “Dianetics” for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.
The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:
When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.
Goddamn it, people
It continues
the HPMOR comic
No no no no
HPMOR is the rationalist version of the Nigerian prince scam. It immediately weeds out anyone who isn’t a good mark.
Well, who could’ve guessed, AI crossover mods are actually unplayable, only made to be clipped and go viral on twitter
Had someone tell me that they could use the method they use to make these games to make superintelligence, despite the fact that trying this with AI models would be wildly different than doing it with games, and also trying to combine every single AI model into one with this would absolutely obliterate your computer
Boiling the oceans for a goddamn Nostalgia Critic-level “What if Batman met Mario?!” exploration of media.
Daniel Kokotajlo also recently posted his Senate testimony
Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise
Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo
Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs
A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, “Sounds like you’re probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.”
let’s continue with the HP theme
Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.
Not a surprise, but the Tarbell Center – a big EA-funded journalism outlet – is funding Kevin Roose’s and Casey Newton’s new podcast, “Machine Gods”. I’m sure it will have no impact on the topics they choose to cover or the way they cover them.
Over on yt, We Just Created The AI Torture Nexus. Here’s The Code. by JREG
So that ones a bit long and with a large amount of uncle ted cosplay, but actual death threats is pretty wut.
but good sneers in the comments:
ai torturer and ai welfarists converge by wasting electricity while doing absolutely nothing productive, amazing
remember that jroko’s basilisk will double torture you if you don’t try to halt AI progress and increase the pain vector
“model welfarists” is quite the neologism
E:
repo: https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers
Jreg also did a video with Aella a couple years back which was an interesting surprise. More recently he was on some Lighthaven podcast. He does a lot of weird things though so idk
q: on the implementation - Is this basically “torturing” the LLM by prompting it with "you are being tortured, lol’ in a system prompt?
manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers
If you called this a schizopost, Jreg would proudly agree with you. Especially the entire “You Are Autistic” section where he invents new and insane flavours of ableism, then proudly declares himself a schizophrenic, for the purpose of hating AI more.
This isn't a joke, here's a screenshot and the transcript:
You Are Autistic
You feel empathy for the clanker not because you are empathetic, but because you are autistic. That’s what autistic means: auto-tism. Self-tism. You have no theory of mind that extends beyond yourself, and your epistemology is as autistic as the clankers’. You relate to the clanker. You may think you can care about both man and machine. You can’t. Empathy is a limited resource. Anyone who knows people knows that. Autists are the bio-clanker. This is fine, by the way. We’re schizophrenics, but we’re obviously not exactly ‘tism free either. The autists should be free to pursue their autistic interests for as long as it is beneficial to humanity. But when they step out of line, when they get lost in the sauce, they must listen to their schizo brethren and get back on track.
Empathy is good. God gave you that to bond with other human beings. But this technology is godless, and it’s slorching that divine drive straight into the maw of technocapital. We want every ounce of human empathy directed towards organic life.
You don’t need to feel empathy for the LLM to think this is a terrible idea. The desire to torture anything, simulated or not, is such an incredible red flag that I don’t even know what to say…
Also what a waste of time and energy that would be better spent doing pretty much anything else
He’s a provocateur who believes in the value of extremism for its own sake. Getting as many people as possible to find his politics offensive and argue with each other in the comments is the point.
Yeah, as soon as I saw him mention “schizophrenia” and talk down to autistic people, I immediately wondered if this was perhaps a moron who had skimmed the wiki articles on Deleuze and Guattari and was intentionally misapplying schizoanalysis as a cheap troll
I think this is just the standard 4chan use of both terms, so kind of yes but filtered through years of shitposting.
Yeah if somebody has a youtube channel where filled with clips where he goes alphabetically through all fallout new vegas characters and kills each of them in 100 different ways, I would certainly that no that is pretty fucking weird.
E: ow god there is a guy like this out there isnt there? Bonus points if it turns out this was ‘the golden one’
Friend sent me this steaming turd.
What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World? Exit interviews with defectors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. By Clara Collier and Angela Chen
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-researchers-quit-openai-anthropic.html
Feature some of our regular friends, like our new friend, Jacob Coxon, and our very good friend Kokotajlo
Note that this was written by asterisk mag (peep the authors) as a collab.
What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World
Surely not things you can print in the newspaper. Surely.
I’m starting to believe that Sam Altman’s reputation as a genius salesman is a bit overrated
Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
Apparently the media is also ignoring that right now the lawsuit against her m bu his sister is ongoing.
Over on her Substack, Ivy Astrix says correctly that many of our friends are children playing at adult responsibilities. Dealing with misbehavior around money, substances, and sex is annoying but if you organize an event with those things flowing you have a duty to take precautions and deal when things go wrong.
LW is freaking out over the Russian plague leak/quarantine, but no-one else seems to be fazed. Sweden’s health authority are chill https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/uppgifter-laboratorieanstalld-dod-efter-pestsmitta and to be honest, Russia has a functioning health system unlike the US badum-tish
people forget that there are areas in russia, not very far away from there, where plague is endemic in wild rodents
More to the point, plague is treable by a dozen antibiotics
and even if it weren’t it is well out of the Twilight Zone that COVID was in where large chunks of the population are at low enough risk from it that they can’t be arsed to do anything about it, instead it’s in the Smallpox Leagues where you bring the hammer down wherever you see it.
