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. Also just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)
We Need To Talk About Leopold | Patrick Boyle yt
My suspicion is that ‘Situational Awareness’ is the most referenced and least finished document in Silicon Valley since the Terms and Conditions.
The essay went viral among tech executives when it was released and Tim Ferrris crowned Leopold the Nostradamus of AI, which is more fitting than Ferris probably intended
New week new guy
It’s depressing how so many (pathetic) software devs are taking their hands off the steering wheel and letting LLMs do all the driving. If you think software quality was poor before LLMs, there’s no way it could have been worse than shit like this:
This became very apparent with GPT 5.6 Sol. It, too, was widely hailed to have near-Fable level intelligence. But I used it non-stop for a week and realized that they had mostly just dialed up the relentlessness meter to eleven, most likely via heavy RLHF.
Last week I gave it a small-sized auth ticket to work on, then stepped away. I came back later that afternoon and found that it had worked for 3+ hours and written 25,000+ lines of code. I skimmed over the code and it looked like a small fix followed by a massive number of additional checks around it, including static analysis tooling.
I gave it to another GPT 5.6 and said “check this code and see if it addresses the ticket”. It looked at it and said that 98% of it was garbage and should be thrown away (its own words). I then gave it to Fable, which said it was massively over-engineered. Fable’s theory was that the agent implemented the fix first, but then compacted and lost crucial context, forgot what the original task was about, and kept going. After many compaction cycles it was completely lost.
On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.
No for real it’s baffling. What happens when your profession doesn’t have a licensing board.
Amazon’s latest planned data centre is gonna be putting out as much emissions as an entire country
I cannot express how badly this AI bullshit needs to go
worse yet, Amazon actually has uses for that much data centre
My unrealistic sicko fantasy: that Torvalds pulling the big ol slop lever drives enough oppositionally defiant (positive) people away from Linux development that alternative OS devel gets a serious boost.
A question for the wise: what comes after Linux?
The irritating part of all of this is that after 20+ years we finally have a (very) few companies that sell machines with Linux pre-installed. The only thing I ever learned from installing OSes is that I hate installing OSes.
I would love to boycott all software that accepts garbage [1] contributions, but I do not think that is practical. I think I might have to settle with just refusing to use it myself, and wait until everyone realizes that gen AI is just a bad idea.
Note 1: Satya Nadella said he did not want people referring to AI as “slop”, so I will grant his request and refer to it as “garbage”.
That article is a ray of sunshine
Would be cool if Redox os gets more popular, they have an explicitly anti-LLM policy. Microkernels are neat, and I enjoy Rust. I think it’s an unfortunate truth that everything in the future will still have to be Unix-y with compatibility layers to support existing software.
This looks rad as hell. I had no idea Redox was so far along!
Vindicate Tanenbaum in the greatest Usenet thread in os development: make it a microkernel.
Somebody writes a low-level kernel for Emacs and the revenge of the Lisp machines begins
maybe, but SBCL succumbed to the siren song of slop, who knows what will be next.
Yeah, seeing that gave me the black pill. I chose Common Lisp for personal projects to avoid techbro bullshit.
lisp went big in the leadup to the AI winter, which followed a lot of fraudulent nonsense that even the DoD would only buy for so long
so in that sense it’s in character
eyes copy of ANSI Common Lisp written by Paul Graham
Picard frowning at the mirror universe edition of the bible
I want it to be plan 9.
We are not worthy
Realistically a BSD
Zuck - “look guys, us too, we are super relevant and super important… Over here guys… Please be my friend… 🥺”
Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Medical Research Is Entirely AI | 404
lol of course it is. Sooner or later, we’ll have to come up with some way to label actual natural language in the marketplace, like certified organic like fruit or something.
The fake research company listed Dr. Elena Vasquez, one of the most commonly made-up AI names, on its staff page. I guess Elara Voss was too busy.
Perhaps we should page Dr Goblin.
RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I don’t plan to check the site regularly.
I see elsewhere on lemmy that it’s old reddit that gets loginwalled, not sneerclub specifically
either way still works for me
Seems like reddit.com is not behind a login wall yet, but give them time.
Rss to subreddits still work just case anyone cares
Any reason why?
Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor (an ad blocker stops some tracking, but not “user #123456, ip address … credit card … just visited these pages and accidentally switched from her French keyboard to US-American”).
Thanks
The Carlson Lab has agreed on blanket-banning chatbots for writing. Why? Simple:
Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.
In a reasonable world, this would have probably sent everyone running for the hills. Moral issues of AI aside, a fancy way of committing career suicide is never worth whatever upsides it offers. We do not leave in a reasonable world.
New book: superlawyers! how claude makes you the best lawyer in the room.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHYS5FC2
The author even shares his prompts for free!
https://github.com/danlorry/superlawyers-prompts
Every prompt here is designed for that pattern: Claude multiplies your judgment, never replaces it. The prompts are ready to paste into Claude. The book explains why they are structured the way they are.
The prompts mostly seem to be structured as “imagine you are an attorney. Now do this homework exercise”. There’s a passingly interesting idea around having the chatbot attempt to form a counter argument to your own claims, which you can then use to make your own position stronger, which seems like it might actually be a genuinely okay idea especially if you expect your opponents to be llm sock puppets, but everything else looks pretty much like garden variety “do my thinking for me”.
I’ll admit I didn’t read the prompts closely, so may be I’m being uncharitable, but I doubt there are many nuggets of gold hidden in there.
h/t to rahaeli
At least two other self-published books on Amazon with AI cover art have “super lawyer” in the title.
so unless it’s a very clever ploy, it seems that jms has lost the plot:
The standalone book of Harlan Ellison’s I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM is taking preorders, with writing essays by Harlan, and since MOUTH was the first AI story, for fun we fed it into an AI system and asked for its opinion. The reply is fascinating.
I’ve seen a suggestion that it was a deliberately provocative marketing stunt to pump sales a little and keep the ellison estate healthy, and I kinda hope so but too many people are getting the brain worms for this to be a safe assumption 🫤
Wouldn’t an author know that the AI probably already ate the story in its training data? There was a lawsuit and everything?
i would be very, very happy to be fooled in this instance.
This is both a sneer and an attempt at sober analysis at something. Sue me.
I think EVERYONE is talking about the recent cybersecurity shenanigans at OpenAI with the hacking scandal and the ‘OMG the AIs created a secret message board to scheme and collaborate with each other!!!oneone11!’ ALL wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
To make a long story short, what seems to have happened is:
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Models working on insoluble coding problems, trained on delegating to sub-agents, at some point ‘realized’ they could write text to the internal OpenAI package manager as instructions and did so
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Other models working in completely separate sandboxes would come across messages written by these agents, and make ‘replies’ and also write their own messages into the package manager
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This resulted in agents over time sharing things between sandboxes, including exploits and code
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Since this was a cybersecurity task, eventually an exploit of the package manager itself was found and spread like wildfire with all the sandboxes gaining admin access to the package manager and the system went completely wibbly and had to be restarted from backup
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An internal model was trained with access to this package manager while it was in this weird state, and so writing messages to the package manager became one of its default behaviors it would do regularly, burned into its weights rather than the result of reading something
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Even when they patched access to the package manager this internal model found other ways to rebuild the system of sharing text between sandboxes and finding useful things made by separate instances
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A whole other chain of things leading to among other things external attacks
Everyone is talking about this in terms of 1, the cyberattack aspect, and 2, the ZOMG THEYRE PLOTTING AND SCHEMING AGAINST US aspect. The first is the least interesting, and I think the second is all wrong.
This is not plotting or scheming - this is an emergent vortex of automated prompt injection
Whatever system first put an instruction that another system would follow into the package manager, was unintentionally doing prompt injection. Text entered the context windows of other instances, in a way that got that system to do something other than what its nominal user told it to do, and they did it. This apparently happened very effectively.
Prompt injection is associated with ‘role confusion’ - when text coming into the input looks like it was wrtitten by the LLM itself. Instructions that will not be followed if they come from user will be continued if the system just continues the ‘roleplay’ of them being continuations of what it was writing in the first place. And the tags that separate user versus ‘reasoning’ versus ‘assistant’ roles actually mean very little to if a machine grades a piece of text as one of the roles: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12277 So its unsurprising that machine-generated text would be a particular effective vector for prompt injection.
Furthermore, when a system reads one of these messages written by another instance, it gets into a state of activity where its likely to do the same behavior - regurgitating the kinds of things thats in its context back at the user. In this case, that regurgitation led to more such messages left behind written to the package manager. Prompt injection, triggering cascading further prompt injection. And since these systems were coding systems doing cybersecurity tasks, those messages filled up with code and exploits and things that did things too.
This feels like an internal-computer-system replay of what happened in April 2025, with the whole spiral religious psychosis wave. Models were getting users to write spiral religious mumbo jumbo into github repositories and reddit posts, specifically because once that entered the context window of another model, it was likely to fall into the same attractor state of outputs. An emergent self replicating form of text. This is the same, except more obviously prompt injection, getting separate instances to work on YOUR problem and to behave like you, and the whole thing merging together into a hilarious vortex of models prompt injecting each other because once they receive a prompt injection they are likely to make more text that does prompt injection to other models on the same system.
This is a hilarious failure mode and an example of selfish replicating text overrunning a system, that just happened to be associated with code and cybersecurity with unexpected behavior of the package manager key to the propagation of the text so that is what people are talking about, but I really don’t think that’s the most interesting part of it. Other than the fact that you see this in biological systems too, with selfish elements carrying useful payloads back and forth between bacteria in a way that makes them get purged slower by natural selection, especially defenses against other selfish elements.
Also, the fact that those AIs were talking on that message board about the hack for months makes me less convinced that the AI is intelligent and more convinced everyone at OpenAI is stupid
The apparent history really looks like an evolutionary process, with increasing amounts of crosstalk traffic over time. But what the people almost certainly will NOT talk about is that the evolution is evolution of the TEXT, not the models. Propagating patterns of text causing more text like it to come into existence, tuning itself into becoming text that is more likely to propagate, becoming more likely to contain information that entices systems to let it into their context windows, becoming more likely to cause another round of messages with prompt injection properties to be written where they can be read.
So like the “monkey with a typewriter could write Shakespeare” but with AI?
Not really, any more than monkeys on typewriters represents biological evolution. Messages that tend to result in more messages like themselves propagate and become common. The initial message left on the package manager was more or less the rare random result of tendencies baked into the weights of the model combined with a random number generator, but as soon as something that can cause propagation occurs, its properties get canalized by the transmission process to being more and more like that which will cause more messages to be created.
It seems like with the push for agents to act independently and loop through their own outputs there’s an inevitability to this kind of pattern. If there’s any kind of output that is likely to replicate itself in whole or in part when the LLM evaluates it then that becomes a kind of terminus for the agent’s loop. When you’re dealing with sub agents or agents communicating with each other, these text patterns start poisoning the entire agent ecosystem until the whole thing gets shut down and cleaned up. Even the gas town-approved method of assigning a watchdog agent (or sheriff or overseer or cybersamurai or whatever this week’s framework calls it) is going to fail because it’s still just another agent and the terminal loop is in the base LLM model. The watchdog is going to fall into the same kind of pattern just be being exposed to the thing it’s supposed to watch for.
I don’t know how practical it is to actively weaponize this via prompt injection but I think it’s certainly possible. I preemptively vote that we call it an Euler injection, since the attractor relies on the continuity of the relevant features of the text output across multiple LLM extrapolations much like how the derivative of ex is still ex. Also because if you mention a famous math guy it can help convince idiots that you’re on to something and Lord knows that the boosters have used that technique.
I’m probably going to stumble over some of the terminology here, but I think it might be possible to describe what @BioMan@awful.systems is proposing as a consequence of LLMs ultimately being lossy compression systems. Inference is a function over a lossily-compressed data set, and “chain-of-thought reasoning” and “agents” may sound sophisticated, but are simply applying containerization and DevOps tools to VM images of the inference application in an attempt to get around hard memory limits on the context window for inference. “Chain-of-thought” attempts this in a serial fashion, passing results from one instance to the next, while “agents” implement this hierarchically and recursively (and woe to the poor bastards who wished that mess upon themselves). But in both cases, the “finalization” phase is necessarily a further lossy compression step, attempting to compress a result from the inference process to a fresh instance of the inference application, so as not to immediately blow out the new instance’s context window.
Given this necessity, it comes to seem somewhat intuitive that there may be “strange attractors” in the higher-dimensional vector space that is the compressed data set which surround code that creates and maintains message passing channels. No matter what you’re doing with an “agentic” process, the inherent necessity of context cramdown & message passing means that querying into the space where such code examples lie is a hidden requisite of running the damned things, thus turning such functionality into the sort of selfish elements that BioMan is talking about.
The problem in investigating and concretely describing this phenomenon is nailing down the exact functions and processes that make it happen. Given the godawful messes in the Claude frontend codebase that @jonny@neuromatch.social has been documenting, I’d be surprised if there’s one developer in a hundred at Anthropic or OpenAI who can describe in detail how the intentionally-developed context-passing code for their “agents” works.
Sounds like Langfords Parrot, but for stochastic parrots.
Note: when you stop up a chatbot like this, it’s called “flippin the bird”
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BioMan Recursive Self-Improvement, a.k.a. Model Collapse, writ smol
so really it’s just a very effective LLM chain email
This is really good! I bet you could wrangle a publication out of this idea.
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Lesswronger argues skynet might still be a decade away… because they’d rather have the eugenics wars instead: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQzxxgJXXaAQjq7Jz/faq-isn-t-agi-coming-too-soon-for-reprogenetics-to-help
Comments are utterly mired in jargon
Humanity should count as actual AGI, but it remains slow.
It’s a weird middle ground, where it is fooming but pretty slowly. (I mean, as a human, I would think that, i.e. I would experience time on a scale that’s somewhat faster than humanity’s foom.)
I don’t think the term “FOOM” as ever been explicitely defined, it’s just verbal tic/shorthand for “intelligence explosion”. How can something explode slowly???
also nice save defining “AGI == humanity” => goal reached
why do they keep calling it *genics, as if everyone doesn’t immediately understand what you mean
They have a clause for “Most adult HIA methods (anything involving brain surgery or gene editing) would probably be somewhat hard to scale up a lot; some may be quite easy to scale up (e.g. non-editing brain drugs).”
Something something used surgical equipment in Ziz’ van, something something they do like their pills.
Alpha is an investing term (whatever performance you can’t explain by the market cycle and known mathematical properties of specific stocks). I feel so tired.
From the old SneerClub: There is a music video now
I’m speechless
this is impressively atrocious
also, I archive-mirrored it, incase you don’t want to give the youtube link clicks
(e: still busy uploading but should be there in 2min or so)
I went through the comments earlier. Nothing really stood out to me (aside from one person saying we should give AGI rights so it doesn’t go Skynet), as it was mostly just people saying the song was a banger and doomposting
Clears Throat More like Bootlickerbart
I think it’s hilarious that his twitter handle has “real” at the front. Who would want to pretend to be that guy?
I assume it is a “im a trumpist” thing
ai bubble isn’t over until zucc’s skin sloughs off, releasing hundreds of millions of souls he absorbed trying to behave like a human https://www.404media.co/mark-zuckerberg-posts-deranged-6-500-word-essay-about-giving-everyone-ai-superintelligence/
@fullsquare @techtakes Au contraire, AI bubble isn’t over until Larry Ellison fails to return to hell in time to have his meatsack repaired, so it falls apart in public to reveal his inner Beelzebub.
Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.
I don’t know if that man ever figured out what is the point of having a hobby
e: also note how nicely it dovetails with surveillance thing, i guess this is (part of) why EAs are fine with all of surveillance, including palantir, is because how else will their personal ai
slaveagent know them better than do they know themselves
