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 - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate this…)
Sure sounds like aspiring and/or existing professional mathematicians are taking the latest GenAI assault on their craft either with shock or horror, or with full-on welcoming of their new robot overlords
https://borretti.me/article/mathematics-without-mathematicians
I for one know who to point and laugh at when the revolution comes.
I’m trying a new thing where I replace “AI” with “the dried centipede powder from Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch movie”.
I only use the dried centipede powder to summarize documents!
Did you know you can get dried centipede powder in different flavors? You don’t have to stick with the default!
OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there’s a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they’d already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it’s not nothing, but it’s also not the end of manual maths.
opinions on maths
Only one of the results is at all interesting to me. Ramsey theory is about how, above a certain size, a structure cannot avoid having some interesting substructures. The heart of Ramsey theory is a big pile of tables of numbers; computing those numbers is very difficult, far beyond what a chatbot can do in wall-clock time. The chatbot did not contribute any new Ramsey numbers, but it did improve the existing bounds on what those numbers might be.
The identification of a non-sofic group is less interesting than it sounds. We’ve known for a while that there are quite a few exotic groups which defy our expectations, so this was an expected outcome of an exhaustive and motivated search. The tools involved, Leavitt path algebras, are only a few decades old and not at all well-known; it’s not likely that we’ll be able to understand how hard this was for a while. Maybe it was low-hanging fruit. The main contrast is with something like non-Noetherian rings; we initially believed that all rings are Noetherian, so it was something of a shock that it’s not always the case. Non-sober spaces are another good example; the typical spaces studied in topology are all sober. See this quote from Johnstone and discussion on MO.
The computational complexity result is completely uninteresting to me thanks to Valiant’s theorem, which says that matrix permanents are ♯P-complete even over fields as small as F₂. You’re not gonna collapse ♯P into P with a fucking chatbot, bros. Similarly, reduction from 3SAT to a closest-vector problem does not shift our belief in the difficulty of that problem; this doesn’t make it easier and we already suspected it was NP-hard.
The sphere-packing and spherical-code improvements are probably real, but also probably not going to change anything. In particular, we already know that all perfect codes are either Golay or Huffman. Frankly, the codes we use in real life are not amenable to this simple framing; I don’t think Reed-Solomon arises from sphere packing. From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work. Don’t get me wrong; if a human were doing all of this then we would have the useful side effect that they would earn a PhD, making it worthwhile for humans to improve these bounds.
I don’t have anything to say about the other four results. They’re not nothingburgers but they don’t depend on some ultra-smart robot either.
Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they’re wrong!
Non-sober spaces
I guess this is what a matematician calls a bar.
From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work.
I tried shining a light on the Leech lattice but all I got was this 23-dimensional shadow.
Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.
So Hank Green is apparently stepping back from his shit for a while after admitting to using AI for research and scriptwriting and acknowledging an unhealthy relationship with the dopamine hit he got from using it. I think this makes him one of the first high-profile users to acknowledge the problem? Which can’t be a good sign for the bubble.
A sign the bubble might pop yes, but also a sign how toxic the whole youtube space is. If a yt’er with 3M+ subs and 500k+ views per video on average feels the pressure to publish or perish like this.
Disappointing that Hank fell for AI, especially after he made that rant video on Sora
At first I was wondering why everyone was talking about the guy from “Freddy Got Fingered” but that’s Tom Green. Anyways, glad the propane and propane accessories guy is taking a break from AI.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yTucIB_73L0
I noticed when I posted a little AI scene of me riding my mule and eating cheese sandwiches, but totally AI, like everyone got really mad, which I found quite amusing, y’know? So I kept doing it.
I mean, not sure what I expected when I looked him up.
So Satyress has been getting the headlines lately for their horrifying ThreeHalves monstrosity. But what I find beautiful is that it appears to have been designed first to be functional and second to be easily disabled in the event of a robot uprising. I wish I was kidding.
A screenshot of the Satyress website showing where to shoot the robot to immediately disable it. Presumably in the production model these will be marked with big red glowing circles.
Another screenshot demonstrating how the robot has intentionally been made too big to fit through doors, though I expect that the chainsaw attachment they seem to have as standard could probably remedy that problem.
As comedy art projects go, I really admire their dedication to the bit. The images are remarkably high quality, and they’ve really thought long and hard about those designs. I mean look at this… it’s glorious.
I’d advise against attempting to disable a chainsaw operator by poking them with a knife, though. I guess it’s too bad that pitchforks are pretty uncommon these days.
i think that poking a pressurized vessel is a bad idea in general, whether it is attached to a hostile robot or not. it’s gonna be LOUD and perhaps throw fragments, or take way longer than practical depending on what it was made from. (what if only one of two is damaged?) there are so many things that can go wrong with the alleged failsafe (what if pressure drops slower than designed?)
It’s not fragile and unergonomic, it’s robot-uprising-proof!
Also like will the warranty actually cover damages suffered when trying to squash the rebellion?
How long will it take before they are bought up by a second company which makes military/police models with these ‘problems’ removed?
Kai Lentit: Interview with a Longevity Maxxer in 2026
Coindesk: Major bitcoin wallet flaw drains $38 million worth of BTC in 25-minute sweep
A wallet’s seed, the secret phrase controlling the funds, is meant to be drawn at random from a pool so vast that guessing is hopeless.
Coldcard’s firmware was not doing that. According to a report published by Block’s Bitcoin engineering and security teams, a build setting told the device to skip its own hardware randomness generator, and a check in a supporting library tested only whether that setting existed rather than whether it was switched on.
Key generation quietly fell through to a basic software substitute seeded from the chip’s serial number and clock registers.
Um, okay, I know coiners have no shortage of incompetence but this bug sounds an awful lot like malice.
Apparently it was a fuckup when they rewrote the codebase so they could move it from GPL to source-available.
This is currently an utter, utter disaster scenario over in bitcoinland, the coiners are screaming. lol.
It’s not even over yet, apparently they’re out $80M after more drainings. https://crypto.news/coldcard-bitcoin-losses-rise-to-88-6m-in-third-wave/
The OpenAI hacking incident has put everyone on edge. Anthropic, not to be outdone, decides to publicly announce that they have committed not one, not two, but three crimes! Come on! I was told this wasn’t a marketing campaign!
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mm5ebihpjvtrdunomulbls5m/post/3mrx2xflgp22d
ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity!
OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission.
ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evilThe reason these (one of these incidents dates back to April, so they’re really not beating the “marketing campaign” allegations) happened in the first place is because of human error on their end, mind you
“AI safety focused” my ass
Waiting for Musk to turn up and announce “infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah” momentarily!
TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that’d do the trick…
Onboarding at my new job means I am now “Certified AI Ready” whatever that means. Thankfully other than having copilot available it looks like my team isn’t having it pushed too hard yet, and I only had to interrupt the training video once to rant about how ridiculous their history was for like 20 minutes (working from home has a lot of advantages).
Congratulations for your securing of relatively tolerable employment!
<buys giant bucket of popcorn>
I vaguely recognize the name, apparently he’s a snot-nosed 25-yr old who got fired from OpenAI
In hindsight, it is pretty funny that he called his fund “Situational Awareness” and still lost money.
Maybe someone should start a hedge fund and call it something like, “Maybe This Will All Work Out LLC.” That way there is no disappointment.
Sir, a 2nd EA adj. SF based hedge fund has managed to lose 40 billion dollars
Also apparently young leo is getting married to Dario’s Chief of staff this weekend lmaou
This is my xmas, ty santa
The cope on lesswrong is funny. They are in denial that this is a sign of a wider bubble pop and are insisting it is just because he didn’t hedge on long enough timelines.
“From my perspective as an uninformed spectator, I would expect the bets made by Situational Awareness to be positive EV over the long run.”
Actually the value of his calls in the long run is 0, don’t worry I’m giving this hot financial tip for free. Do these dorks not understand options work? I guess neither did young leo.
Remember, there’s no crying in the casino. *though i have a feeling Leo will continue to fail upward ;_;
he didn’t hedge on long enough timelines
Duh. Everybody knows the market never stays irrational for long, and you should just tough it out.
The LW insider thinks Aschenbrenner is trying to save a stake in Anthropic. I think that is very likely because the press release stressed “public stock position” and Anthropic is privately owned.
Edit / I don’t think Thomas Kwa of METR and LW understands leverage. The idea is that if you borrow $40.5b on $4.5b of collateral, you have $45b to invest but a 10% drop will wipe you out. Before you get there the bank will knock on your door and say “margin call! either you provide more collateral or we seize your assets.”
“He sold? Pamp it”
Intel up 11% in the day and 5% in the after hours. Really looks like big players took the boy out back behind the woodshed to see what swimming with the sharks feels like and devour his entire port at a discount.
sounds like he took the hedge part out of hedge fund, and then margin call took out the fund part
Before the days of AI 2027, he became famous in 2024 for posting one of the original pieces of writing in the line-go-up genre: Situational Awareness. It seems that like any good grifter, he used this opportunity to make money (in this case by starting a hedge fund).
Here is the first sentence: "You can see the future first in San Francisco. "
I feel like I already know everything I need to know about him.
You can see the future first in San Francisco
🔮"I see a city street. Massive wealth disparity and a lot of homeless… Jesus that’s a lot of homeless"
Street advertising no longer references products or services people seeing them may wish to use; after all, more and more people have no money to pay for them. Instead they try and AstroTurf hype for one of the new entries to the VC startup casino.
GDP is up though, so I’m sure the AI god prosperity will trickle down eventually.
By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates.
tick tick tick tick
(I am choosing to forego the obvious jibe that the models fulfilled this prophecy by dragging many college graduates down beneath them)
That fits the pattern, when AI isn’t living up to the sky high promises, the promoters act like people are less special than they are.
See how a debate about are they conscious often devolves into ‘are humans conscious?’
yeah it’s a common trope/cope
like “most human programmers suck too”
ok dude who do you think wrote the code the LLM is cribbing from
It really grinds my gears.
good grifter
Not denying that he isn’t also a grifter, but I bet he is a true believer and he had blindly bet his (and other people’s) money on “line goes up” exactly like his scenario said and that is why he is the first one to crack.
Enjoy today’s craziest link: https://atomarine.co/
I see you, and raise by a Gundam solar space laser - https://www.reflectorbital.com/
Oh, I’ve seen this one before. At least we know where the LLM who gave them this pitch scraped the idea from.
Great idea, let’s seastead a data center next to some low income sea steading communities.
YES LET’S NUKE THE FUCKING OCEAN. FUCK YOU FISH WE NEED OUR SLOP.
On land, cooling and water are among a site’s largest costs.
Oh gosh that sounds… uhmm not too bad actually? I wonder what the largest costs are at sea with a floating nuclear reactor in salt water and tugged around by large ships.
Salt water is famously a forgiving environment to build in, and oceanic weather is benign and predictable. Not that it would be a problem anyway, because move-fast-and-break-things people can be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to running delicate equipment in places more hostile than mid california, and will not skimp on staffing and maintenance. You can look at all the the successful seasteading operations to see how well this will go.
There are also no problems I can foresee with putting a bucketload of fissiles in international waters, with no scope for finally uniting old-school piracy with new-school piracy, either. This plan is great, and no-one will have a problem with it.
I mean, it’s less dumb than trying to do it in orbit, but it’s still profoundly dumb.
but you see, in case of accident they can just dump reactor core into seawater which will provide ample cooling and shielding. no biggie, just put multi thousand ton object that requires a village of engineers to work out on high seas
there are normal nuclear powerplants that use seawater as coolant and they’re all on shore. these require a lot of corrosion resistant heat exchangers along the way. there is one power barge like this, it provides power to russian far east, whole 70MW of it, costed 414 million dollars and needs 300 people onsite. your guess is as good as mine how many of them are military. 70MW, aka two or three aeroderivative gas turbines
A LWer runs the numbers and doesn’t run away screaming like Zitron:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EeTQGxa8RSpwHo4Ez/the-biggest-bet-in-history
Note that this implies massive efficiency gains to the economy. For their one-third slice to equal 8% of those salaries [59% of the total workforce in the USA], the total savings (productivity across that share of the workforce) will need to rise by roughly 24%. So they are absolutely serious about this, and are betting heavily that the productivity boost arrives within four years.
Guys guys guys hear me out guys what if I say what if uh the market can’t be irrational? Because of all the money? That would be really cool right?
But using like 2000 words.
“surely all these very wealthy people and the people they pay to invest for them can’t all be under some sort of mass delusion”
(there’s actually one other dynamic, in which they all know someone will lose, and are just hoping it isn’t them, but that’s another post)
Uh huh.
There is something about this picture, a warehouse full of books to be destroyed by Anthropic for training data, that just makes me sick. Knowing that they are destroying books in the abstract is bad enough, but seeing the sheer scale of it makes me viscerally angry.
Karen Hao called her book Empire of AI for a very good reason. The empire has all these noble narratives of bringing civilization and progress to the colonies, but in reality the empire only sees resources to be extracted, repackaged, and sold back to their subjects at a fee. Kudos to those who saw this immediately and fought against it. Shame on those who believed in the narrative of progress, to the point where many of them are collaborators with the empire.
Whenever a smarmy fellow on Linkedin posts about how AI is making so much progress in coding or math, I want them to see this picture. I want them to see the videos of families in tears after a data center takes away their home with eminent domain, and other families who have to deal with the resulting pollution. Go beyond the bloodless math of tokens and instead see for yourself what this all truly costs. I hope it was worth it.
What kills me is that there are so many obvious ways to be less wasteful about this. Nondestructive book scanners exist. They’re expensive but it’s not like AI companies are averse to throwing money down a fucking hole. Even if that’s not an option, it’s possible to rebind the pages and return the books to the market. And regardless of what happens to the physical books, the scans they create could be archived in a format that could be available as a digital library rather than just being fed into the statistical meat grinder to keep the trough topped off with slop. Even if they’ve got to fight with copyright holders it would cost them basically nothing to leave the option open and given the PR battle they’ve been losing it feels like doing so would be incredibly obvious. Hell, even Google Books was able to navigate this in a way that was less cartoonishly evil than this because they could point to their digitization effort as a public good in ways that Anthropic here just fucking can’t.
The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we’ve discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books’ ingestion process, so I’m thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won’t take a decade this time.
Fuck Anthropic. Snotty little bastards want to talk about AI safety and then destroy books to make a pollution machine.
AI Crisis Flowchart spotted on linkedin
spoiler
and the actual article: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-ai-that-hacked-its-way-out-and-the-hype-that-followed-it
quoted zvi haha :|
To be fair, the safety community can plausibly claim vindication here. At worst, an autonomous agent that breaches containment and attacks a real third party is precisely the scenario researchers have warned about for years, which enthusiasts have routinely dismissed as speculative. And at best, the company in charge of maintaining safety failed to construct an adequate containment system.
are you fucking kidding me, they have been DDoSing sites for months, everybody knows about it, and the “safety” community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions. I know multiple companies that woke up one day to 10-20k netlify bills until they could stand up an anubis.
Just let hugging face sue the idiots, it isn’t like law enforcement will do anything even though there’s already laws on the books for unauthorized access, industrial espionage, etc etc etc.
and the “safety” community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions.
Occasionally I see a sane relatively workable idea on lesswrong (like making stricter laws on liability and transparency for everything AI companies do, I’ve also seen this idea put forward on lawfare a few times), but that is like 1 idea out of 20, with the other 19 being absurd, like the absolutely unworkable fantasies of AI: 2040.
