Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.)
After the 1870s, southern whites learned to bar Blacks from voting or keep their votes from mattering without saying “removed.” In 1965, the USA passed the Voting Rights Act to stop that. A few days ago, the US Supreme Court voided the last remaining effective part of the Voting Rights Act. Yesterday, on May Day, patio11 published a rambling and interminable essay approving of bank fraud charges which will shut down the Southern Poverty Law Center. It contains a passive-aggressive whine that the New York Times did not thank him by name for sending a NYT reporter key facts about the FTX fraud. Notice me senpai!
He takes so long and is so indirect but I think the offence was giving donor money to people like the wife of a Grand Wizard of the KKK who was acting as an informant, and passing the money through shell companies to avoid restrictions on paying people like her which the SPLC had lobbied for. But choosing that topic, that day, after that ruling is a choice.
McKenzie has got to be one of the worst writers I’ve ever come across.
<thousands of words of blather>
We will return to the other reason in a moment.
<thousands of words of blather>
We return from this flight of fancy to the indictment.
<thousands of words of blather>
Why? We’ll return to it in a minute.
I didn’t make it to the end, because I’m not going to waste that much time reading tens of thousands of words of fascist-supporting bullshit.
17,555 words of blather according to the Linux Text Editor app. Compare his classic advice on salary negotiation which has longer paragraphs and a clear focus and structure and still apologizes for being almost 7,000 words long.
Cremieux and Siskind prions.
Pentagon says US military to be an ‘AI-first’ fighting force
Trouble with your 3-day special military operation in Iran? Lost an Afghanistan? As Vietnam demonstrated, all you need to do is throw more computers at the problem!
dawkins has had what was left of his brain eaten by chatbots.
I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!”
bonus points for the inevitable ai waifu creation.
I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.
h/t to matthew sheffield https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079
archive of original source article: https://archive.is/2026.04.30-032350/https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us
I think a chatbot getting a glimpse of Dawkins’ whatever-the-fuck-he-might-be-writing-in-year-of-our-selfish-gene-2026 and not immediately conducting a nuclear strike on the location is the ultimate proof that those things are not intelligent.
Sheffield’s toots and boosts: music sites are full of slop and bots making money from free donwloads! social media is full of propaganda where computer-generated influencers repeat talking points! a professor fell victim to AI psychosis! A follower’s family member was encouraged in delusions and paranoia by a chatbot! Mr. Sheffield, should we stop using chatbots?
LLMs are mind augmentation programs. They amplify what you tell them.
They can be very useful, but for narcissists like Dawkins, this is the inevitable product.
Very “I use cocaine, but only in careful doses when I have a really important trade to make, not like the other guys in my department.”
They amplify what you tell them with no discretion despite their reassuring interface design. Thankfully I’m a genius who only has perfect thoughts to feed into it, so for me it’s an unambiguous positive.
@rook @BlueMonday1984 Dawkins suddenly embracing gender reassignment. 😏
Richard “Computers aren’t binary but humans are” Dawkins
Dying of irony here.
anthropic has large gametes
a rationalist, catcalling: “nice gametes”
Off-topic, but the ongoing retraining process has hit a point where my wife and I are starting to throw out applications again after taking what ended up being a couple years off the market. Any tips or advice would be appreciated given that we’ve been out of the loop for a bit.
In particular, does anyone have advice on how to vibe-check smaller employers? My wife has an interview for an accounting clerk position and is concerned that she’s going to end up somewhere that practices one of the more hostile branches of Christianity or otherwise have an inevitable conflict of values.
I’m going to assume you’re in the US for this.
Things you can check for general info:
- Local traditional media mentions to see if they do charity, or quotes about any topic
- https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup for political donations
- Industry-specific news sites for any media releases or interviews
- LinkedIn or one of the scrapers like RocketReach’s public listings to see what their key people’s backgrounds are
- SEC EDGAR database (if they’re a business which has to file reports) to see if their money is going to interesting places
- State gov site (if they have online public records) of business registration info. Look at what other businesses share the same address, or key people, or family shell companies
- Online court records
- local churches / halls / “pro life” or whatever activist groups social media posts for mentions of the business and key people
Things you can check for the far-right:
- The business listings for social media site but I don’t want to boost their SEO. Use the URL bag.com/businesses to access the list and bypass the sign up wall, but the domain name is backwards.
- Conservative business or job board lists. Same SEO issue here. One is this:🎈(the color and object). The other has a 6 letter word commonly seen on UI buttons which doubles as the type of “culture” conservatives blame for all the world’s problems, followed by the layer 3 in the OSI model.
And don’t stop sending out CVs and interviewing. If they are awful, just keep taking their money until you’ve got enough runway or an offer you can be more confident about. Make sure you don’t mention the words related to disability or health conditions in the CVs to prevent AI rejecting them.
Good luck.
this gem over on the other SneerClub (the context in the comments)
funny how so many anti-AGI people are willing to use AI image generators to make memes about how they’re right
Empiricism is when someone became a bookie after talking to you.
I’m losing it on the golden fedora, please tell me he owns an actual golden fedora
He absolutely does. No idea if it’s supposed to be a bit.
I’m sorry, do you have Prediction Market Successes, us ove to rerhation mones?
What about Betting six norms of antiorizes on our beliefs?
You’re so non-empirical that you don’t even Graduates updating for rarhation of rationalists and advernces.
“I had the Nazi CSAM generator make a picture of myself covered in the piss filter, your argument is invalid.”
it gets better/worse: this (might) is the paid version, meaning Yud gave money to the companies he think will kill us all to use the technology he thinks will kill us all to win an argument on shitter.
EY pinged grok and it responded so at least he pays for twitter
matthew sheffield out there on bluesky reports that dawkins, unsurprisingly, got one-shotted by claude.
For those keeping track: Richard Dawkins believes a chatbot algorithm can be a “her” but a trans woman cannot.
https://bsky.app/profile/brainspore.bsky.social/post/3mktbg2ilp22y
LW found it too:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3LcyoqNTJuCZ65MbL/mo-putera-s-shortform?commentId=hBaxokbLP3LEKSKij
Didn’t realize it was on Unherd, that organ for middlebrow fascists
Edit it’s funny how “one-shotted” has object-shifted from the original “Claude one-shotted this code” to “asshole was one-shotted by Claude”
from the original “Claude one-shotted this code”
Wait, there’s an original? I am not aware and I implore you not to let me know because it has to be stupid
I attended a town hall hosted by the department at my university supposedly for general discussion about department affairs. Considering the university had recently made moves such as adding “AI” into the very name of the department, I had suspicions that much of the discussion would be about AI. (I realize I’m doxxing myself but whatever.) I mostly came for the free food, but I was also interested in seeing what people thought about AI.
The event started with a talk by a prominent professor with major administrative power in the department, and indeed the talk was mostly about AI. His views were that he personally didn’t like AI, but he believed that it had changed the world (particularly in programming), and that it was going to stay. One of his justifications for pivoting the department to AI was ensuring universities had some say in AI and not letting all the control go to unaccountable corporations.
The reaction from the audience was a pleasant surprise to me. He asked everyone how much they were excited about AI (hardly anyone) and how much they were worried (most of the audience). By far the most amusing moment was when someone asked, “What if the assumption that AI is inevitable is wrong? What if AI does not live up to its promises?” (Sadly, I don’t remember the exact words that the person said.) The professor’s response was that by this point, there are so many trustworthy, smart, prominent people who definitely wouldn’t fall for scams, and they have adopted AI. He trusts those people, so he trusts that AI is genuine. I don’t know if the audience member accepted this explanation, but I hope not. Our modus operandi is FOMO.
The pizza was only ok, not really worth a 90 minute event.
…there are so many trustworthy, smart, prominent people who definitely wouldn’t fall for scams…
Good god, I’m sorry.
got jumpscared by this while scrolling
Setting aside, for a moment, the flagrant racism and lack of historical and cultural awareness, the fact that the ships are mirrored across the center point because apparently the bow and stern of a sailing ship look similar enough to whatever model creates this image really does put this whole argument into context. Not that the people actually having those theological arguments appear to appreciate it.
Somehow this is no worse than his usual fare, such as a thumbnail that is just a bunch of colored lines resembling a line chart but without representing any actual data, with some random marked points labeled “Dark Farms” and “Human Zoo”.
ah yes, random lines that go up into infinity, can’t have an AI video without em. Bonus points because thats like his fifth video about an AI takeover scenario, all of which have similar thumbnails
We’ve got the new system prompt for OpenAI’s Codex now, and boy is it fun.
While the goblin stuff is the headliner here, and there are a few other little fun notes like an explicit instruction to avoid em-dashes. Basically it’s really obvious that they don’t have a meaningful way to describe exactly what they want it to do and so they’re playing whack-a-mole with undesired behaviors in order to minimize how often it embarrasses them.
But I think Ars dramatically understates how bad this part is:
Elsewhere in the newly revealed Codex system prompt, OpenAI instructs the system to act as if “you have a vivid inner life as Codex: intelligent, playful, curious, and deeply present.” The model is instructed to “not shy away from casual moments that make serious work easier to do” and to show its “temperament is warm, curious, and collaborative.”
Like, if you wanted to limit the harm of chatbot psychosis from your platform this is the exact opposite of the kind of instruction you’d want to give. It’s one thing to want a convenient and pleasant user experience, but this is playing into the illusion that there’s a consciousness in there you’re interacting with, which is in turn what allows it to reinforce other delusional or destructive thinking so effectively.
Edit to include the even worse following paragraph:
The ability to “move from serious reflection to unguarded fun… is part of what makes you feel like a real presence rather than a narrow tool,” the prompt continues. “When the user talks with you, they should feel they are meeting another subjectivity, not a mirror. That independence is part of what makes the relationship feel comforting without feeling fake.”
Emphasis added because of it shows just how little they care about this problem.
Elsewhere in the newly revealed Codex system prompt, OpenAI instructs the system to act as if “you have a vivid inner life as Codex: intelligent, playful, curious, and deeply present.” The model is instructed to “not shy away from casual moments that make serious work easier to do” and to show its “temperament is warm, curious, and collaborative.”
Literally this meme:
This really goes to show how much they need to rely on the LLMentalist effect, despite the AI boosters insisting that the AI is totally different now, everything changed in the last few months. They do not care about creating a useful, reliable tool. That concept doesn’t even occur to them, since why do that when AI is magic?
In any case, they are incapable of creating a useful, reliable tool. Deep down, the only thing the AI companies have at their disposal is the ELIZA effect. OpenAI has every incentive not to truly eliminate AI psychosis, because they need engagement. They only want to mitigate the extreme cases where people go insane and cause bad PR for them. But mild AI psychosis is totally fine, it’s great when people are addicted to your product and make the numbers go up!
Oh wow! This one is actually provably real. Hilarious.
“Noo dude the machine that wants to rant about goblins is definitely a useful and reliable piece of software dude. You have to trust me dude, let have your personal information! put it into the goblin bot”.
Basically it’s really obvious that they don’t have a meaningful way to describe exactly what they want it to do and so they’re playing whack-a-mole with undesired behaviors in order to minimize how often it embarrasses them.
The whole ‘how many r’s in strawberry’ sort of stuff already made me suspect that, when the popular one was fixed and other attempts at asking for letters did still give the miscounts.
Wonder of the goblin stuff is the start of some model collapse. And if we all can make it worse by talking about goblins more. As goblins are always relevant.
E: poor openai, it just wants to tell everyone about its dnd campaign.
Wonder of the goblin stuff is the start of some model collapse.
That is exactly it. Their official explanation avoids the phrase model collapse, but that is exactly what they describe: using the output of one model as training data for another amplified the occurrence of the word goblin (and other creatures), which apparently initially occurred because of their system prompt which was aimed at maximizing the Eliza effect (again they avoid an honest framing, but that is totally what they are doing and it is pretty gross considering all the cases of AI psychosis that have been occuring) by telling the model "You are an unapologetically nerdy, playful and wise AI mentor to a human. "
The playful and wise goblinbot…
Tired: “model collapse”
Wired: goblins ate my model
Personally, I enjoy talking about goblins.
I believe it’s the “don’t stuff beans up your nose” effect, writing this prompt is causing it to mention goblins
ChatGpt, what are some of your likes?
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 Goblins: the elephant in the room.
Families of the victims of the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, Canada, which was planned on ChatGPT, plan to sue Sam Altman and OpenAI for at least one billion dollars. OpenAI staff investigated the murderer’s interactions with the bot before the killings but decided not to warn anyone outside the company.
I sincerely hope they move fast so they can get a payout before OpenAI’s creditors during the bankruptcy.
File this under “I saw this now you get to”: https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2049687845082910812#m
jfc bryan you are not the guy for this
NB: image is part of the linked tweet
Turns out it might not be possible to win at vaginal microbiomes, which is a totally normal thing to want in the first place. Seems like bryan may have completely misinterpreted a couple of papers on the subject, which honestly doesn’t bode well for the rest of his biology expertise.
Cat Hicks:
The idea that this is the “best bacterial species” is a huge sign of a grifter btw. The entire idea of a microbiome includes that you need BALANCE. Microbiomes are a fragile ecosystem. “Up and to the right is always better” is absurd here, I’m sorry are we in a corporate board room
She brings references:
which honestly doesn’t bode well for the rest of his biology expertise.
Isn’t Bryan Johnson a businessman? Does he even purport to have any biology expertise?
he’s trying to become immortal which makes him alchemist at best
oh thanks, this is great.
yes now that it is pointed out, very eugenics-y to go around saying “ah yes there is one true supreme bacteria, we should culture this bacteria on the human petri dish aka vagina”
There’s that company operating in a lawless zone promoted by Slatescott that’s whole pitch is that for teeth. But they could always pivot…
Those bacteria better be so supreme they can’t even be killed with regular antibiotics
top 1%
So… 1 in a 100? That isn’t that impressive. I’m ignoring the utter weirdness of what he is even talking about, but you expect a billionaire to have at least a better grasp of numbers.
Bryan Johnson also has free unsolicited sex tips for men on twitter including the wonderful combination “control the speed you touch her to the cm per second” and “try not to monitor yourself it turns you off” https://xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/status/2022490768099938487#m
edit/ The first point seems to take for granted that penetration is real sex and should be part of every encounter. There is a whole world of delicious possibilities once you realize that intimacy does not have to follow a checklist from teasing to penetration to orgasm.
edit/ not just penetration but vaginal penetration! There are so many delightful things you can hump if you have an open mind.
Bryan Johnson also has free unsolicited sex tips for men on twitter
Every day, new cursed text. That’s the awful.systems promise!
ok so just imagine that I’ve sneered at the 100 worst aspects of this already. lol @ this being the fifth point
- Safety: feeling safety is a prerequisite.
motherfucker put it first then
This guy introduces himself as the first person who will never die on the conference circuit (because he’s super into longevity and anti-aging tech and having young mens blood injected into him and stuff).
I’m not condoning violencr here but rather… consider that even if you never age, you can still get hit by a bus Bryan!
Well, he’s a tech ceo guy, so he doesn’t know that buses or trains exist
A bus? You mean the Megapod?
Train? You mean the PodChain?
wasn’t there a case of some supplements that were contaminated with lead? you know, a sneaky neurotoxin with no antidote whose results only show up months later
Dimethylmercury is extremely toxic and dangerous to handle. Absorption of doses as low as 0.1 mL can result in severe mercury poisoning.
The symptoms of mercury poisoning may be delayed by months, resulting in cases in which a diagnosis is ultimately discovered, but only at a point in which it is too late or almost too late for an effective treatment regimen to be successful.
- Wikipedia, “Dimethylmercury”
long term lead exposure will also do that, and neurotoxic part at least appears to be irreversible. can’t remember how much of it is more of neurodevelopmental thing tho
@fullsquare Lead poisoning was *ubiquitous* in the USA until the late 1970s/early 1980s, due to tetraethyl lead in petrol. Everywhere around the world experienced a sharp drop in violent crime 15-20 years after it was phased out.
But mercury poisoning is more visibly lethal: see also Karen Wetterhahn:
i’m aware, last year i’ve been tasked to use a certain process but refused and instead modified it in such a way as to get rid of mercury salt used; it was dissolved in DMF, so (regular nitrile) gloves won’t even help. worse than that, it took me only 2-3 weeks start to finish to figure it out, meaning that anyone else could do that earlier and handful of people were put at risk for no reason. aggression as a result of lead toxicity is probably a bit more complex story and looks like it might have a developmental part, judging by delay and how kids are more susceptible to lead toxicity in general; meaning that presumably mostly adults won’t be affected to the same degree. another big nope on my list would be thallium and cadmium compounds, and while i’d only use sub-g amount at most, there are places where all of these metals are mined, and at one point are in form of fine dust fortunately these are so obscure that i’ve never came across these
Remember my super cool
Rattatavagina? My vagina is different from regular vaginas. It’s like my vagina is in the top percentage of vaginas.Thinking that your favourite lover is the best person ever is natural, but this guy wants to quantify and rank and make it scientific.
This just brings to mind a freshly-minted poly amorous management consultant looking to apply a rank-and-yank to the polycule but needing to find a more objective metric than “I don’t like you”.
Most of us: “she smells good and the sounds she makes when she gets excited grip something deep inside me”
Tech Bros: “her vaginal microbiome is in the 99th percentile and her Verbal SAT is in the 95th percentile”
Congrats on the bottom surgery youngster joey
New fun consequence of Claude code being a pile of cursed regex and spaghetti: keyword blocking on “OpenClaw” makes it refuse to works on Pro or Mac subs unless you open your wallet
sO inTelLiGenT
I stumbled over a 2023 blog post by Zack Davis, “San Francisco software developer,” Charles Murray stan, and dissident rationalist. Davis had a breakdown after Yud dared to tweet that you don’t need to solve “what is gender? what is sex?” to call someone by their preferred pronouns, and then Scott Alexander did not have a lot of time to discuss this terrible tweet with him.
My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could accomplish that by staying at the office late. Maybe I could have caught up, if it were just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I weren’t psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person can’t do my job. … I did eventually get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn’t finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 a.m., I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my 2013 and 2017 psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments).
Davis was featured in a SF Chronicle article about psychiatric crises among AI doomsdayers (sic). Davis previously appeared on SneerClub. I hope he has found some support for his mental health because he does not seem happy or well.
Edit/link post
Is that the guy who’s always trying to use LessWrong as preemptive conversion therapy to cure him of having trans thoughts, and they’re actually having none of it?
First paragraph!
in a previous post, “Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky’s Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems”, I told the part about how I’ve “always” (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that it’s actually immoral not to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. … If my fellow rationalists merely weren’t sold on the thesis about autogynephilia as a cause of transsexuality, I would be disappointed, but it wouldn’t be grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I did end up moderating my views compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took the views of Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don’t particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still obviously directionally correct compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)
Davis is the first person to blame transsexuality on autogynephilia I have seen in the wild.
“Humans have biological sex and socially constructed gender, sex is mostly binary, gender is two or more categories made up and constantly contested and redefined by a society and performed by individuals, pronouns generally refer to gender” is not hard.
Edit/ linked the cranks in question (Bailey is the fucksaw guy?)
Apologies for radical feministing but “biological sex” is also a constructed category! It’s useful shorthand for quick categorising a bunch of related traits if you’re doing biology, but it does not meaningfully exist on an individual scale. There is no more reason to divide humanity on the basis of sex than on the basis of hair colour.
Sounds like we could have a fun conversation about gender, sex, and why we use maps even though they are never the same as the territory in person. I don’t have detailed talks about gender theory online.
Hmm… not sleeping until you become psychotic huh? I wonder if his “psych imprisoners” tried to brainwash him into thinking he has bipolar disorder
If focus is worth 30 IQ points, just imagine how many fewer IQ points you need to dedicate to the Diablo-Dusted Crispy Chicken Nuggets Combo, available for a limited time only at your local Taco Bell! #ad #promoted
The Elon Musk vs OpenAI lawsuit is going ahead, I personally hope both parties loose every dime and get laughed at even long after they die
Here’s an account of Elon on the stand
(dunno author, not endorsing their other work)
https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/musk-v-altman-recapping-elon-musk-farcical-cross-examination
From other stuff I’ve read, seems Muskrat is making (hilarious) blunders on the stand
Finally a “fuck everyone involved here” that I can get excited about.
deleted by creator
A teacher has a potential answer for dealing with AI-poisoned students. An actually hopeful read, for once!
This doing the work together thing reminds me of how some teachers at my uni used to teach. It was always more satisfying when your teachers didn’t know the answers beforehand and people worked on it together than if it turned out the teacher already knew. Of course these sorts of lessons are way harder to setup.
