Welcome to November, and 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.)
An interesting question from mcc:
I wonder if at this exact moment one could succeed in filing a issue against an open source project for an entirely ficticious vulnerability, get it assigned a CVE and a github score, and then get the upstream project to accept your patch for the vulnerability, with all these things presented as the issue, the CVE, and the PR being written by generative AI, but in fact you wrote them substantially by hand and the patch for your nonexistent vuln is actually a backdoor
Very probably the more your submission appeared to be written by generative AI, the more likely it would be to be accepted. If some person came in with an ungainly, unreadable patch and was aggressively pushing a project to accept it you’d get suspicious and wonder why but if an AI did that you’d be oh well AIs are just like that and AI written code is just like that
I am beginning to like the cut of this publications jib.
https://defector.com/there-is-no-place-in-a-functional-society-for-elon-musk
The federal government is in tatters, the judiciary seeded with sneering MAGA goons like bear traps on a forest floor, the executive branch a metastatic growth of varyingly murderous criminal enterprises in unholy union with a psychotic, apocalyptic tech industry in suicide-cult thrall to bumbling chatbots.
Happy Saturday. Pleas enjoy a very schadenfreude GitHub issue
@samvines @BlueMonday1984 wait is this guy blaming it on using the wrong version of the idiot robot?
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/59060#issuecomment-6601721599
You haven’t tried shutting down a remote server and having it wipe out the remote machine instead in the last 3 hours? Omg bro the newest models would never make that mistake! Just one more model bro!
That should cause an issue like this I assume.
Should have taken the effort to type ‘shutdown -r now’ yourself.
Prob even quicker than asking an llm.
Ιt could have been part of a larger thing where it made sense to want to keep evidence of the shutdown in the chat context.
It’s not like they design or promote these things in any way that encourages user initiative, can’t have full cognitive surrender if the user is running system commands on the side.
Good point, had not thought about that. And that makes, in a way stuff even worse, as when it goes wrong people go all ‘skill issue’ despite the systems being designed and marketed for full cognitive surrender.
Too many good sneers in this one.
Also, it was only yesterday that I learned that several great conservative thinkers on X thought that making a Harry Potter x Star Wars crossover with a genderbent character would be an exceptionally powerful cultural message that would greatly influence the outcome of the midterm elections. https://www.404media.co/republicans-learn-x-is-an-echo-chamber/
There is a theoretical timeline shimmering somewhere out there in the void in which humanity figured out how to roll out LLM technology - which does have many genuine positive uses
makes wanking motion with right hand while rolling eyes
that making a Harry Potter x Star Wars crossover with a genderbent character
And evil characters they claimed were right even. This is just ‘hitler did nothing wrong’ with extra steps.
There is a theoretical timeline shimmering somewhere out there in the void in which humanity figured out how to roll out LLM technology - which does have many genuine positive uses
God damn it
@istewart@awful.systems Dave Karpf is coming out with a book which will be of interest: Vaporware, Inc.: How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present (W.W. Norton, In Press) bookshop.org - Amazon
For thirty years, techno-optimists have promised dramatic technological innovation as long as we–the public, journalists, regulators, and policymakers–keep out of the way. The results have been great for Silicon Valley but haven’t gone so well for everyone else. They promise to stop climate change while building resource-intensive data centers, evade governmental regulations at our expense, and watch wealth inequality soar as they enjoy a permissive tax code. Venture capitalists and the companies they fund have amassed wealth, status, and political power, but their bold pronouncements have amounted to little more than vaporware.
In Vaporware, Inc., political scientist and tech commentator David Karpf looks back at the history of the digital future to understand the ideological project of techno-optimism, and why it has gone so wrong for the rest of us. With sharp wit and keen insight, Karpf debunks the foundational myths of the techno-optimists and traces how tech billionaires amassed power by selling the idea of the future. Eye-opening and essential, Vaporware, Inc. is a critical reappraisal of how Silicon Valley works and how we can make it work better.
Anthropic is going ahead with their IPO
This is looking like its going to be a bloody disaster but if the world wants to feed my schadenfreude by all means keep it coming
Anthropic appears to be suffering from low $T
Struck some gold on slobstack
this is good for bitcoin
you unfortunately have to dig quite deep for sneers in this weird post about datacenter votes in the recent US elections, but they’re there
especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else, like Iceland (retracted after someone points out that Iceland is probably even more woke than, say, Vermont) and Paraguay (which recently had a digibank seized and closed, leading to the president stepping down).
Then there’s this gem
Data center inputs, unlike almost anything else are much more subsitutable than any other input, and can be built in places where humans don’t care to raise NIMBY concerns.
So cutting through the jargon, “inputs” in this case means
- power
- cooling
- construction / planning
- the actual fucking contents in the racks
- data
All of these are constrained in various ways. The places with abundant accessible power tend to be relatively developed parts of the world. Same with water which is the most efficient mode of cooling.
Building your datacenter in Texas means you’re on familiar ground with local laws and regulations, and can draw on skilled manpower to actually construct the thing and keep it running. I’d wager that the actual hardware is cheaper than almost anywhere else. Once it’s built it’s in the security zone of the USA, which means property is efficiently defended by LEO and emergency services.
Paraguay? You need to find a skilled workforce there, or import it. Same for all the bits and bobs needed. Then you probably have to pay more for the same, as well as having to deal with an unfamiliar planning process. Not to mention political instability. And you might have to build a shit-ton of supporting stuff yourself, like power generation and fiber comms.
These people are delusional.
especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else
there’s no fucking way people will happily accept data centres near them after Big Tech has so happily made clear that they’re on the side of MAGA and fascism
Also I can’t imagine the MAGA crowd being excited about their tech minions operating in someone else’s territory. Data sovereignty is all fun and games until some Paraguayan commie starts getting chummy with China or whatever.
iceland also has gdpr, and i’d like to see how it fits with data thievery of ai companies, but they prefer to put excess electricity generation into aluminum smelting
especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else
Why didn’t they start out there then?
I think they’re saying that stopping a datacenter won’t do squat to stop AGI takeoff
at least this a reading of
Efficiency gains from AI are absolutely massive, and while they don’t apply to training, they do apply to inference, and even accounting for endogenity, state bans only slow AI progress by 9 days at the absolute most pessimistic.
so we can re-state this as a form of Pascal’s wager:
- if I stop a datacenter near me, the world will still be taken over by a superhuman intelligence, albeit 9 days later, and my local environment will be moot
- if I stop a datacenter, and no superhuman intelligence appears, I won’t have a datacenter near me
I’m not Blaise but I feel that stopping a datacenter is a win, all in all.
state bans only slow AI progress by 9 days at the absolute most pessimistic.
I don’t know, I think that’s insanely optimistic
And this is why they invented the basilisk.
Sometimes you miss a few shots. Well, sometimes you miss 40 shots in a row with those anti-data center ballot measures. I’m sure their streak of bad luck will end eventually and they’ll find tons of people who love having data centers near their homes.
just bribe 'em, bro!
They’ll just skip straight to the Dyson Sphere, dontchyaknow
“How to be Rational: Use Drugs”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8qYuy9Cr6BNpgjJjT/help-your-friends-get-adhd-and-depression-meds
this only works when you are veterinarian
–
there is a case for broadening access to mental healthcare, this is not it
actually, no – i’m not a veterinarian, but i follow these rules and it works beautifully. but i’m in the position where i can actually afford paying those few hundred zlotys a month.
i take you’re not diagnosed by a chatbot, because this is part of rationalist healthcare
Dont think that getting people who need those meds in meds is bad actually. (Do go through the proper channels however, me getting some therapy with meds was quite useful).
Very conveniently cropped out the 46% accuracy on their Mid 2026 China predictions. And the graph that shows every single data point is below AI 2027.
(the tweet’s timestap reads August, which makes this even funnier)
Found another stellar AI 2027 take
” They don’t go through scenarios where AI doesn’t happen because they are unrealistic given what we know now, and even if that did happen somehow, it’s just business as usual in that case? So they don’t have any commentary to give.”
Yeah I’m sure the massive tech stock selloff and Big Tech allying themselves with the now widely despised and crumbling MAGA party and Anthropic’s IPO becoming shakier and shakier and all those voters saying data centred and tech were key issues that lead to them voting and all those anti-data centre bills being approved except one means that AI not being big is totally unrealistic
The comment got so downvoted reddit now autocollapses it when you open the page. /r/BetterOffline posters seem to be good people:
Icy-Recognition-7453 wrote
My brother in Christ, it is dreamed-up rubbish. It comes from an offshoot of EA/Rationalist thinking where the foundational documents are Terminator 3 and a Harry Potter fanfic written by an “AI researcher” who never went to high school. The pay-off of the “good” scenario is you get to live as an emulated human on AI God’s hard drive.
Credit to the tweeter behind the original screenshot, at least they call AI 2027 a ‘blog’, and not e.g. a ‘paper’ like at least one of the reddit commenters does.
Shockingly the comments are calling out that there’s no way the 30% stock market rise is happening, among other things, but to single out a specific comment:
“RSI in 2026 isn’t predicted by that forecast. They predict AI-assisted speedups of progress. We are currently observing that, in fact a little ahead of schedule. According to METR’s best guess, we have the level of speedup now that AI 2027 had expected in Mar 2027. It isn’t “misleading” for a model to present things you consider boring or incremental and then be scored as correct when the boring or incremental things happen. That’s just being right”
Afaik this is a lie? METR’s time horizons graph still hasn’t updated past Claude Mythos, unless this comment is referring to another piece of METR data that I don’t know about.
Edit: quickly looked it up, they’re probably referring to this
Edit 2: yeah, I think this comment is some baloney. AI 2027’s coding ability in March 2027 is listed at 2.3x (and goes up to sped up by 30x). METR estimates Anthropic has been growing at roughly 1.9-2x the rate they were going at March 2024-Oct. 2025 (though they outright state that the estimate is given with high uncertainty)
Edit 3: BetterOffline post better explains why this is bullshit
comment chain so good it must be seen to be believed
Tech industry is coping well with the midterms it seems
“The results offer little evidence of a voter mandate to crack down on AI or data centers,” Kovacevich said, per Ars, noting that “Democratic gubernatorial candidates who opposed data center bans won at a higher rate than those who supported them. “Let’s not confuse an anti-Trump wave with an anti-tech mandate,” he added.
Except every single anti-data centre measure made it through the ballot
He could also read any exit poll and see that 56% of voters thought AI data centers were a crucial or major issue. Oh well, I’ll let him cherry pick a random out of context data point if it helps him cry himself to sleep at night.
todays adexchanger had a lolworthy note that the binance hack began with a search ad.
If you hadn’t heard, Binance was totally pwned in a $6 billion crypto heist last week, suspected to be a North Korean operation. Well, Binance has now published what amounts to a preliminary autopsy report of the incident.
The heist began when a Binance Wallet DevOps team member accidentally downloaded a malicious copy of Homebrew – a popular open-source tool – from a mirror site promoted in a search ad. The malware was spotted, but not before the hackers had obtained the real identities of Wallet DevOps team members.
Using those identities, the North Korean hacking unit spent months targeting Binance’s wallet team with covert schemes. One involved a prolonged fake job interview that lured a Binance DevOps engineer into downloading an “assignment” onto their work device.
After taking control of the Binance DevOps engineer’s laptop, the hacker used an unnamed internal AI tool to log in to the devices of other engineers. Access to multiple credentials allowed the heist to go through.
Binance guy fell for “top link is ads”. COME ON.
Never understood why my employer would drop $30m on Crowdstrike but not add uBlock Origin to their company chrome profile for free.
Never understood why my employer would drop $30m on Crowdstrike but not add uBlock Origin to their company chrome profile for free.
Ugh, using websites on work computers is such a completely different experience from at home. And yeah, it’s such an easy defence against malware!
All the US markets are down today. Gary Marcus is declaring the GenAI bubble burst - I think that’s a little premature but I am smiling seeing Coreweave at -55% of their value at the start of the year.
Yeah until they seriously start talking about bailouts I don’t think the bubble has burst.
Bloomberg: Mystery Seller Seeks to Dump $500 Million of Data Center Loans
Via a zitron skeet, finally some news that feel slightly more portentous that tech stocks hitting a slump:
That was how the big boys figured out Leopold Aschenbrenner was in trouble a few months ago.
The funny thing is that his name could be interpreted as “money burner”. Asche means ash but its also one of the many German synonyms for money. Brenner literally means burner.
According to a random tweet I came across he’s been liquidating like mad again.
Is this loss farming?
I don’t think the bubble has truly burst until OpenAI and/or Anthropic go down, but I do however think that this (and the blue wave at the elections) marks that time is running out for the AI industry
r/wsb has started posting suicide prevention hotline, but i’d say that bubble is over when oracle implodes
I will not say the bubble has burst until OpenAI and Anthropic are dead.
I hope they’re all pissing their pants right now
To be fair, who could have predicted that fascism would be unpopular and unstable?
They banked on Trump & co being reasonable competent at fascism and getting rid of meaningful democratic participation in the 2 years before the midterms. And if he’d had a bit more of a plan apart from building marble and gold monstrosities, he’d have gotten away with it, too!
That’s the thing about fascism: incompetence and corruption are built in!
Many tech figures have spent the past few years relocating operations [to Texas], including former trillionaire Elon Musk.
Emphasis mine
Zing 🔥🔥🔥
thoughts & prayers
I know what I’m thinking and praying
