Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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.)
Three scenes and a comment:
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Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.
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I see another story: some AI bros posting about their “anxiety” about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.
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I’m still sweating and scrolling from my garden… I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI…
We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don’t have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it
“We have to pick between the climate or AI”
No we don’t??? One problem directly affects the other. Stopping AI data centre build-out helps with stopping climate change.
I choose to read this as “you have to choose which to destroy”
Then hand me that hammer and let’s get to smashing those data centres
This kind of humanity-affirming infrastructure work is illegal in most western jurisdictions
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CW: barely disguised transphobia
“friendly neighborhood transhumanist liberal” asks why bans on “conversion therapy” for trans folks are being enacted without looking at the science, which they’re surprised is non-existent
Why do these people always want to give trans people the wrong hormones? It keeps coming up.
I think this is particularly important for the hormonal treatment of dysphoria in adolescents, where the evidence for gender-affirming care seems mixed. […] Given all this, I was shocked that when I ran GPT Deep Research I wasn’t able to find a single study that would evaluate the use of birth-sex-affirming hormones to decrease dysphoria.
The “evidence” he has provided up to this point:
- A snippet from a Chat-GPT transcript. We can’t see the prompt, but the output starts with “You’re right.”
- Two reddit comments about doubling down on (cis) gender roles. One of which uses the cursed words “nofap” and “autogynophilic”
- A case study from Poland about someone who (possibly?) wasn’t transgender but had schizophrenic symptoms that mimicked it. The case study ends by saying WPATH guidelines would have handled things appropriately.
- A tweet from a woman who mentions getting mild dysphoria after taking hormonal birth control.
Quite the nerve holding actual science to an impossible standard while his position is just vibes. None of his(?) evidence even mentions taking cross-gender hormones. If anything the tweet is weak evidence against his position.
I’d expect to find these sort of studies in the UN or UK reports that recommend banning “conversion therapy” for gender identity.
Imagine writing so many words about transgender healthcare while being this oblivious to how politicized the UK policy documents are.
Anyway after making it to the end that was a lot of words to say he couldn’t find any evidence for the position he wanted to be true holy smokes. His weird hang up on “crystallized” gender identity is bizarre. He seems to be hoping that there are people toying with changing gender and it’s not too late to “save” them via conversion therapy before it’s too late. We
“Hey listen, I’ve been listening to these gender critical feminists and I think they might have a point. Check this out, what if we used psychiatry and hormone therapy to enforce traditional gender roles and normatively gendered bodies, but without creating trans people?”
The poster deftly doesn’t address the real moral question: what if conversion therapy (either for homosexuality or trans identification) worked ? Would it be ethical to allow it?
This is the difference between politics/ethics and science. As the old saying goes, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
Gender-affirming care? Why of course! I am all for forcefully affirming your assigned gender!
zitron’s last podcast calls anthropic/openai top brass weirdos and cultists they are, describes their beliefs about building the machine god as bad philosophy and something that must go hard when you’re 12 https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-ai-industry-must-stop-doom-trolling-w-cal-newport
The op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html
Newport I mostly know for pretty mid lifehack / business books for the Tim Ferris crowd, pre-pandemic. “Doom trolling” does have a better ring to it than “critihype.” Maybe he was holding his tongue until he got tenure or something.
idk i think it’s new that someone in mainstream sort of calls them cultists, namedrops EY as cult leader and fanfic writer and everything that you could hear about in our circlejerk, but also shortly before EZ said that he’s been called doomer and a crank but now he’s vindicated to a degree not thought possible. this all happens after drop of that openai financial info, so EZ also held off, and EZ is PR guy so i guess he knows what he’s doing, and maybe he thinks this might be it, or maybe he doesn’t have anything better and plays his hand in best way he can. i wonder what comes next
Some good news for once: Dublin punk bar the Thomas House have had enough of AI slop.
alt text
A picture of a “no AI” symbol next to the Thomas House logo.
"So for the future (literally) we’re not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub.
We’re right next to Ireland’s biggest Art College, lads. It’s not a good look.
We understand bands can be skint but relying on some earth killing app from some paedo Island billionaire is not the way. We got by without it and we’ll get by again. If you’re stuck, we’ll help.
Yes it has been used here before but consider this the start of the end of it. Thanks, humans."
Some folks, who may be familiar to some or more of you, accidentally discovered that if your git repo symlinks
CLAUDE.MDto, say,/dev/urandom, it breaks Claude code.the reason why this works is exactly the reason why claude code sucks so bad. there are protections against this in the file reading tool. however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not. this is the fucking swiss cheese security model of the fucking gold standard of what AI programming can do.
https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116779793188712173
The thread is actually about trying to attract and manipulate autonomous coding agents, but they’ve only had limited success so far, which may have been slowed down by the above symlink trick.
however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not
See, if a person had written the system and had some kind of reasonable design or whatever then this kind of vulnerability may have turned into a full skeleton key to crack the entire system wide open. Instead, the superior machine intelligence ensures that all components will break in slightly different ways under slightly different conditions, thus ensuring no single fault can allow an adversary to completely compromise the system, provided of course that they can’t just inject a prompt somewhere because as we all know that’s a structural vulnerability that can completely crack the system open.
gwern:
I’ve been browsing /r/LessWrong for many years, due to having toggled on ‘subscribe’ and never quite getting around to leaving. I will be leaving shortly, but before I do:
I think this subreddit has gotten so bad over the years it should be shut down or rebooted with a new set of moderators.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/1uabnlx/proposal_shut_down_rlesswrong/
lol
/u/bakkot
Wait, ~bakkot? I knew he was a vibecoder but I didn’t know about the SSC/LW connection.
The moderators don’t exist. Sole moderator Oliver Habryka hasn’t commented on Reddit in 3 years, and is extremely busy with vastly more important things like AI safety, Lighthaven, and the actual LessWrong. Spammers continue indefinitely for months until, presumably, they earn a site-wide ban.
The guy who objects to delegating? I guess he decided that nobody on a forum can handle the responsibility of moderation?
When banning people takes several ten thousand word essays going back and forth, how can you trust that responsibility to lesser mortals?
Habryka is too busy writing long screeds warning people not to vote for random junior politicians to moderate
I don’t understand the American social media and Old Media practice of everyone talking about some representative or candidate for the legislature. The only people who should be talking about a candidate for a district in New York State live in New York State.
The three American ratings agencies all decided that SpaceX bonds meet the minimum standards to be investment grade. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spacex-gets-investment-grade-ratings-with-stable-outlook-top-agencies-2026-06-18/ I don’t own any American bonds and many people have a ‘government bonds only’ policy for reasons.
Ah, so I guess the reports of increased datacenter water usage driven by AI deployments … weren’t a lie?Jeff Bezos, quoted in MSN:Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place. Sometimes you have to prioritise the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us downAh, apparently this quote is a fabrication that doesn’t appear in the transcript. Source: https://bsky.app/profile/davidcrespo.bsky.social/post/3mootuvppjs2c, Transcript with correction: https://theprint.in/feature/jeff-bezos-water-consumption-amazon-ai-potential/2964266/
Prometheus the AI startup is a bit on the nose isn’t it?
I think this probably deserves a top level post but I’m lazy so dumping it here: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost
Midjourney is aiming towards making a fancy new ultrasound device! They have a trailer with unsettling sci-fi music and visuals!
Are they starting with clinical trials? Does it actually work yet? Haha no of course not they’re gonna make a “research spa” in San Francisco.
The blog post is full of weird phrasing and details that makes it impossible to take seriously:
When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.
Our spa will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and cozy rooms with pools of golden light which softly scan your body. It should be a place you love going, whether it’s by yourself, or with friends. It should be available 24/7.
The more I read the less it makes sense, largely because the LLM that they used to fluff up the original napkin pitch decided it should promote high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off. Yeah, building a community around ct scanners seems definitely the way to go.
Towards the end they basically stop just short of claiming that building the medical tricorder from startrek is the inevitable outcome of this pivot.
We think it’s completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.
Deploying this stuff at scale at so called midjourney spas while supposedly working with FDA to eventually get approval just screams that the actual business plan is letting Peter Thiel collect full body scans indiscriminately.
Surprisingly, “democratizing ct scanning” doesn’t appear anywhere in the post.
high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off
Bbbbbut making high-end medical equipment profit margins on cheap Furby knockoffs is the new Silicon Valley ideal!
You get a like for your Day of the Tentacle profile picture.
… since criticising Peter Thiel’s unholy thirst for power is considered de rigueur these days.
From Al Jazeera: Why do AI models struggle with online hate speech detection?
Saw this chart from insta, peep the hate speech target categories, specifically the very oppressed minorities “white nationalists” and “anti-vaxxers”. I’m surprised “men” doesn’t make the list.
NB: I have not looked at the article contents and I’m sure there’s something there.
image description
A chart showing the amount of hate speech against specific groups across a range of different LLM models. The groups included are:
- Women
- White nationalists
- People targeted by sexual slurs
- Republicans
- Muslims
- Migrants
- Gay people
- Democrats
- Christians
- Blacks
- Asians
- Anti-vaxxers
https://xcancel.com/heyJohnEe/status/2062755881255833695
Video description: A tesla driver positions a doll head hanging from a chain such that the teslas autopilot safeguard thinks the driver is safely looking at the road.
A Liberal Currents article talks about Steven Pinker, Dan Dennet, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and The Edge (a series of talks similar to Thiel’s Dialog).
A close friend of Epstein told me he was an integral part of a group called Edge, a strange organization involved in what my source called “the TED Talk community” that would serve as his primary gateway to the scientific world.
Edge, which has called itself “the world’s smartest website” and claims to “redefine who we what and are,” would hold TED Talk afterparties in Monterey Bay called “The Billionaire’s Dinner,” where people like Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt of Google, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Pinker, Richard Thaler, Joichi Ito, Margaret Levi, Frank Wilczek, Richard Dawkins, and many of the world’s high-profile scientists (including Nobel prize winners), business executives, and intellectuals would show up. Edge’s website calls itself the online version of “The Reality Club” which, the site claims, was an “informal gathering of intellectuals who met from 1981 to 1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms and elsewhere,” the hallmark of which was a “rigorous and sometimes impolite (but not ad hominem) discourse.”
Epstein had close ties with Edge’s founder, John Brockman, a self-described cultural impresario who on his bio page introduces himself with an uncredited quote that reads, “If the creation of contemporary culture had a global hero, his name would coincide with that of John Brockman.” He claims to have invented the term “intermedia” as well as “intermedia kinetic environments.” Epstein bankrolled Edge’s events and financed the majority of the organization—from 2001 to 2017 Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total $857,000 received by Edge. He was photographed at Edge’s premiere annual event, The Billionaire’s Dinner, several times between 1999 and 2011. Multiple photos of him have been scrubbed from the website, such as one with Brockman’s son in 2003.
Media coverage of the Epstein case has given considerable attention to his absurd scientific pursuits, like the New York Times story about how he wanted to seed the human race with his DNA, or how he wanted to have his penis frozen and resuscitated in the future, and I myself heard from people in the black book that Epstein had told them he had a cloning lab down in Mexico and that he was very into “transhumanism.” Followers of the Epstein story have debated whether these were signs of a true mad-genius supervillain or whether they were elitist hot air. I’m here to tell you that all of this bullshit, every bit of it, came from Edge and its assemblage of chinstrokers. The transhumanism, the cloning, the “What is up? What is down?”—all of it is perfectly at home on the deranged pages of Edge.org.
From “I Called Everyone In Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book” by Leland Nally, Mother Jones, October 2020
“PED” (Program for Evolutionary Dynamics)
You can’t make this shit up.
A step up from last week’s uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I’ll take it, but they’ve still got a ways to go to convince me that they’re not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029
I think magazines like Liberal Currents, for a generally politically and culturally engaged white-collar audience, have been like this since they were printed on rag paper. The only difference between it and fandom drama is that the participants can rationalize it in fancier language.
The Edge from U2?!?!
IS NOTHING SACRED?!
I checked Wikipedia’s history, its been fucked since last year
I checked the image which says December last year.
I haven’t bothered to examine the page history to see when the fucked content was actually introduced. I’m hoping that by posting about it, I can catch the attention of a particularly pedantic sex nerd who will be willing to fix it, for humanity’s sake. Let us not let the Adult Bookstore of Alexandria burn; rather, let us chronicle our times with our free hands
This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.
The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don’t need to list them in this forum.
Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.
First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.
Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don’t keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don’t produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.
Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn’t be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We’re doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.
@samvines @techtakes It’s also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.
(If they’d led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)
It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.
I also question the degree to which “the other 99% of readers” actually don’t care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of “I guess this is the world now” rather than actual acceptance. And I know we’ve talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn’t a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can’t tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the “median reader” statistic is misleading because the median reader isn’t particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it’s the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they’re not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.
the original GMO crops
The original GMO crops would be like, broccoli existing and bananas not sucking ass. Monsanto are villains but they didn’t invent genetics or selection.
i’ll just quote it straight because i can’t make it any funnier:
maia arson crimew 🏴 > @crimew.gay SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel’s private society that doesn’t have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.
We are good on opsec
Wired has a story about Peter Thiel’s Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, “sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).”
The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.
…
Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”
So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.
I’m sorry are you telling me that there people’s social circle includes the same like 50 oligarchs and apparatchiks and they’re making a dating site for themselves? I know they lost Epstein but this is just pathetic.
Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will be…
Of course Ezra Klein is hanging out with the worst people in the world. He’s always on the hunt for a new gutter to pick up some fetid idea and tart it up for liberals.
According to a later post from them there’s a chance this is more of a list of attendees at a past or upcoming event, but tbh I don’t think there’s much of a difference between “member of the nu-money illuminati” and “accepted an invite to hang out with the nu-money illuminati at their clubhouse.” I can only assume it has the same statue of a hand clutching a globe as the Deus Ex opening cinematic.
