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.)
(OT: 🎶 Do you remember…)
Drew DeVault diagnoses the orange site, explaining why it’s the vanguard of the tech-fash pipeline. Of course HN immediately flags it into oblivion.
This article deserves dedicated post status. He comes in more gently than I would at the end, but the tl;dr that needs to be hammered into peoples’ heads: Hacker News is not a neutral forum for technical discussion. It is an advertising and propaganda operation administered to shape and condition technical discussions.
At this point, I’d say calling it a Nazi bar is fully reasonable.
Both HN and shitter are right wing polarisation machines. A guy who was a close friend of mine for years during university went full AI boomer and hangs out on those sites all day and when I recently spoke to him he was describing things as “libtard” and “woke” which 10 years ago would have shocked and appalled him…
404 Media: People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI
the model collapse is coming from inside the house
And not just from AI getting fed into the AI:
404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training.
“I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”
This person understands sabotage and is wielding more power than any defeatist.
They are doing a politics, as opposed to performing being political.
me when i get a captcha
I got a ‘what belongs on feet’ one a while back with images of shoes but also hammers.
I guess OpenAI’s attitude towards its users is: Quality for me, slop for thee.
On the offchance that you’re not already familiar with the recent prompt injection tricks that meta’s latest toy is so vulnerable to, this is an interesting thread investigating the contents of the vm filesystem dumps that it can be made to regurgitate: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750
I was particularly entertained by the hard-coded list of “ideas”.
jonny is always a good read!
Edit: good lord it keeps getting better #
His willingness to get elbow deep into the entrails of awful ai tooling is certainly much appreciated.
I have been following this and apparently was able to get a root shell on the VM, which is wild.
He was using it as a seed box at one point which for many companies would be an embarrassing indictment of their security postute but luckily, this isn’t exactly meta’s first rodeo when it comes to illegal sharing of IP infringing material.
Ever wondered what kind of workplace environment Elon cultivates? Reading coverage of Tesla’s trial, where complaints were brought by Black folks who felt harassed and discriminated against, gives us an inkling.
CRD attorney Juan Gamboa asked [Judge] Borkon to bar Tesla’s counsel from contacting anyone on the agency’s witness list. He told the court the CRD had tried to reach at least four other listed witnesses over the past several days without getting a response, and that they’ve fallen “off our radar.” The agency believes Tesla’s lawyers got to them too, either with payments not to testify or by talking them out of it. Gamboa wants to stop Tesla from offering to represent witnesses “through persuasion and payment.”
You’re going to hear a lot of coverage of this trial, I expect, due to the following antics from Elon’s “hardcore” attorneys. For context, the N-word is an anti-Black slur which is, in the USA, completely unacceptable to use in court or the workplace.
Tesla’s outside counsel told the judge the N-word is a “term of respect and endearment” in the Black community. … “This trial is not about the N-word — the N-word is not on trial here,” Jones said.
Huh, so what’s actually on trial?
Edwards said a non-Black coworker called him the N-word, cursed at him, and threatened to beat him up. He reported it right away. A month later, he found out his managers had written him up over the incident, and he was later passed over for promotions after applying to more than 100 jobs.
Oh, that’s pretty awful. That’s depressingly common in blue-collar factory employment, though. I wonder if there’s anything unusual about Tesla’s internal culture when it comes to race relations?
The CRD’s Brett Watson told the court the evidence will show managers calling Tesla “the plantation,” with some referring to themselves and Elon Musk as “slave masters,” and graffiti including swastikas, “KKK,” and nooses left on factory walls for days. The second witness, former regional security manager Ozell Murray, testified that his supervisor, Ray Sethna, now Tesla’s senior director of global security, told him to warn a Black Marine veteran he was hiring: “just be sure [the veteran] knows he’ll be called those words.”
I was at a loss for words for a few minutes after this. Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson together could not create such a caricature of a goose-stepping bigoted incompetent business-muppet as Elon.
Hey you know who designs and builds really safe and efficient cars? People who are in a high state of stress and anxiety because they are being slurred at under the implicit threat of a racist attack. /s
I recall seeing bits of this (their racist treatment of black workers in the factories as well as the culture of keeping it going) kick around on twitter as far back as 2019 (iirc), so now I’m wondering - is it not widely known?
Fucking hell, when I was finishing up school I heard classmates joke how
Wernher von BoerMusk was a slavedriver based on how much he pushed the engineering teamsTurns out it’s true in the most literal sense and so much worse than I could have imagined
The man who did a Nazi salute on stage creates a very racist workplace? Whodda thunk
To be fair, the workplace predates the nazi salute. Does make you wonder how much the thenibb comic applies here, and how much Musk was acting like he was bullied because ‘people cant take a joke’ (before he radicalized into what he is now).
Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.
After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:
- Phew, my favourite embroidery crafts shop has a clear policy against concentration camp labour! it’s a niche project but what a relief!
- Well everyone is resorting to concentration camp labour these days, what can you do
- We don’t want to lose all our contributors by banning those who hire concentration camp inmates to do chores
- It is discriminatory against embroidery beginners if you don’t let people use kits assembled with concentration camp labour
- I know concentration camp labour often comes with mistakes but as long as there’s a mensch in the loop to inspect it for errors and take responsibility, it’s just another tool
- The community of hobbysts has come to a vote and concluded that it’s ok to use concentration camp labour to assist your crafting, as long as you do it responsibly.
It honestly bewilders me how badly tech has failed to resist the slop machines.
Basically everyone else has recognised LLMs for the attack on labour they are and fought back against them, whilst a shocking number of coders and FOSS projects have thrown themselves headfirst into the deskilling machines, all-but forcing the foxes into the henhouse and shouting down anyone who tries to keep them out.
When this bubble finally blows, we need to work out just how we got to this point, and how to ensure it never happens again.
maybe a hot take but there’s no fix for this. The ideology built into the american tech industry makes it permanently susceptible to the Next Big Thing regardless of the second order effects or ideological baggage. Coders have been riding high making extremely inflated salaries for the better part of the last 25 years, and they (mostly) all view themselves as unique brain geniuses that don’t need to work in solidarity with others. Just a collection of monads pursuing their rational self interest via computer touching.
I think the FOSS angle kinda works just off of the inherently unsustainable economics of the space. Relying on unpaid labor makes the worker protection arguments inherently less valuable because it’s not like this was your livelihood to begin with (ostensibly). Keeping up with the next thing is a pretty clear way to keep a mostly-volunteer workforce interested.
A lesswronger correctly notices that LLM companies’ “research” papers are often lacking in details necessary to replicate them! They fail to notice the reasons why that is, or do any broader questioning or soul searching about the state of LLM and “AI Safety” “research”.
Here’s a LWer being very wrong about how US politics work
First warning sign: “the US started becoming polarized with the election of Barack Obama”
“Affordability” won the frame for 2026, and I’m not sure I remember the last time the right talked like they are playing catchup.
uh, are you in your early 20s??? (who am I kidding of course you are)
You’d think bayesians of all people would try to avoid extrapolating from the position smack dab in the middle of a current news cycle
basically because the left has out-ridiculous-ed Trump on culture war issues.
You can always find a single sentence in a political LW post that shows how much they hate marginalized people.
“sure Trump is renaming AI, but I saw a without context post which I didnt understand of a trans person who has 100 followers so the left is worse”
I mean, I guess the consequences and policies associated with culture war shit did abruptly go from ridiculous to real fucking serious what with the camps and the trying to unperson trans people and the overturning Roe v Wade. Maybe that leaves the Dems (who I assume are still being treated as “the left” in this discussion) in a more ridiculous position?
I was going to try and sneer this further but I realized that my own narrative of political polarization almost started with Clinton and I’m in my early 30s, meaning that the problem is obviously whoever the president was when the person making the argument was a child.
https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/
(Torres, ironically, misidentifies TESCREAL as a form of “libertarian transhumanism,” not realizing how horrifying the TESCREAL utopia would be to most libertarians.)
“most” lol
https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/
The folks at Reason continue to misidentify as libertarians, not realizing they’re advocating for the shambling corpse of what was already an unhealthy movement
Reason
I think Reason Libertarians are like the EAs who are still into bednetting and don’t understand why the founders and most of the funders are focused on longtermism now.
I mean motivated & cowardly ignorance has been a staple of liberal-conservatism for I don’t know however long. I support cutting (my) taxes and increasing (my) liberty – oh dear, why are some people suddenly poor and trampled upon? I would NEVER! This is just so horrible for me, I just need another tax cut right now. Have the poors tried eating cake?
Just in case you thought Yud’s attitude towards minors, sex, and substance use was worse than average for a Rationalist, the NYT asked around (archive):
Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the A.I. community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation. … The (Genesis) house (in San Francisco) quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyone’s age, he said, and “it was pretty crazy.”
They saw a police report where a woman says she had to climb a gate at one of these parties to escape a man who demanded she have sex with him. Sounds like a great environment for a seventh-grader!
Also features “Jimmy Chen, who goes by the social media handle ‘Spice King of Zanzibar.’”
Dammit, people, sex and drugs were supposed to be cool
Copying what other people tell you should like is not a good strategy whether the others are high-school bullies or a sex worker slash influencer. One of the bangers at the birthday gangbang found he had more fun making out with a strange woman than giving the birthday girl what she wanted and I hope he explored that.
I think it’s a bit under-covered that the weird SF/Bay Area group-house scene has to be symbiotic with the housing shortage in the region. Even in my old hometown of Hayward, all the older 1950s-70s tract-home and mixed-density neighborhoods tend to have cars parked everywhere along the streets where a car could possibly be parked, because all these places that were designed as single-family homes are being used as multi-tenant rentals. I guess one underrated reason to support YIMBY is to strangle your local incipient cults.
The student who says he was attending these parties aged 13 seems to be the sperm race guy
That is a formative age
Okay I have questions about the logistics of this that are not touched on in the article.
Namely, how do they synchronise cum
Using the fun button in the backdoor, saw it on an episode of SVU* (edit: it may have been CSI)
On one hand I want to know, on the other hand learning about these people does not make me ready to ever be close to anyone again.
Mean scientists and reporters think the demo was fake https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/05/02/was-the-sperm-race-just-a-sticky-lie/
https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/117311487400030196
Techbro: should we do the fascist thing y/n?
Community: no you should not do a fascism
Techbro: woah this got heated, lockedI’ve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely “cognitive surrender,” and also “cognitive offloading”. I’m not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source I’m stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how I’ve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.
I am not under the impression that people here haven’t seen these phrases before. “cognitive surrender” has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought I’d bring it up.
I’ve seen “cognitive surrender” bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term “learned helplessness” doesn’t cover the underlying concept just as well.
I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.
To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.
Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.
There also isnt a big company behind the calculator ran by some fragile egos who will change the results when they get it in their heads that dividing is now woke.
Or who think they are funny so it rounds 68 up to 69.
Well, I don’t really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.
That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the “Thinking Fast and Slow” model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends
It feels like they’re trying also to privilege AI as “system 3” when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isn’t that different if you’re looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so there’s probably more of a continuum there. If that’s the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since it’s performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyone’s souls.
Epistatus: I skimmed the first 20 pages of the paper. I have not watched the WoW documentary.
Yeah, the paper doesn’t seem to do a good job at justifying introducing system 3. They should have at least looked at why you couldn’t model this as something like:
- Person encounters a situation requiring thought
- System 1 triggers System 2
- System 2 offloads cognition to some black box
- The result is absorbed and successfully addresses the situation
- A- System 1 is rewarded and begins adding use of the black box to its repertoire, skipping System 2
or
B- System 2 absorbs the result and begins trusting the black box more, perhaps deferring to its result before any internal cognition
Both of these things I pulled outta my ass can explain deskilling, and a situation like 5a) might explain capitulating to AI under pressure. So I’m not feeling like System 3 is necessary here.
That all being said, it’s not like the paper gets to decide how the rest of the world chooses to use “cognitive surrender”.
I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it can’t do anything to escape or prevent enough times they’ll learn that they can’t do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.
I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I don’t know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. There’s a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if we’re going to have that conversation.
My bad, it was late when I posted and I only searched for surrender.
UC Regent / Podcaster Scott Galloway on CNN:
Yes, we shouldn’t be scared of AI. We should be scared of reckless people with mal intent who use AI.
In 2001, a woman named Sharon Whipple was mauled by two dogs. And ultimately the owners of the dogs were put in – put in prison. We’re now prosecuting the parents of kids who find unsecured AR15s and use those to kill others.
I think it’s the incentive. There’s always a wizard behind the curtain here, and I think we have to create incentives, specifically disincentives, and make it clear that, OK, while these bots are in fact coordinating and they show incredible resourcefulness and high IQ, somebody program the incentives here. So, moving to solution, I think part of it is you have to have incentives, specifically disincentives that say you, the company, and maybe individually are responsible for the bad outcomes here.
I just get this sense if you tell these companies their IPOs might be threatened or they risk criminal prosecution, they’re going to figure this out. We figured out a way to control atomic weapons. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to control this. And the notion that they’re sentient and it’s out of my control is an attempt to absolve themselves of the guilt and the responsibility that they should bear here.
The Whipple case was one of the more insane / divisive SF local crime cases, (TrueAnon ep if you aren’t familiar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMd0mPAqR8A ) - so that’s an odd and interesting pull for Galloway on national news.
I don’t think repurposing the logic of the NRA “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is the play though, and I think the incentive framing is too watered down. This isn’t a problem we can nudge our way out of.
I don’t see this as “guns don’t kill people”, I see it as “you’re trying to tell me that the cars you manufacture don’t have crappy brakes, all three of those cars independently ‘went rogue’ and smashed into the parade all by themselves and you aren’t responsible?”
He’s only like the fourth or fifth worst scott lol
edit: wait I forgot Dilbert Scott died. top three then.
Even from beyond, he’s still sticking his fingers into our hearts ❤️
This particular exchange is KenM coded
open ai hacked medicare Australia’s statistics portal https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/24/anthony-albanese-says-openai-agent-hacked-medicare-extreme-concern-sam-altman then didn’t tell the government.
In response the australian government has in the absolute strongest terms expressed that “this is very naughty” and “I am very dissapointed in you”. The Australian government has also said that by way of apology they expect openai to continue doing whatever the fuck they want and they’ll modify copyright laws to enable piracy when rich people do it.
Somebody wake me from this nightmare, I’m gonna fedpost
The dude who hacked Rockstar Games got sentenced to prison for life, yet OpenAI can hack so much more and get off scott free
While calling him “the dude who hacked Rockstar games” is a catchy meme, Arion Kurtaj was sentenced to indefinite detainment in a secure hospital after being found unfit to stand trial after being arrested a third time for violating the terms of his parole and committing further offenses (only one of which was hacking Rockstar Games.) Rockstar is basically entirely incidental to what happened there, and it’s disingenuous to pretend it’s more important to the outcome than the previous convictions or other acts involved in the trial. He’s also since been deemed fit to stand trial and will be tried in November.
If you must make comparisons, it would be better to pick someone like Aaron Swartz instead of laundering the reputation of a convicted fraudster and extortionist.
Oh, didn’t know that. thanks
Seems like another case of “we asked an AI to get the answers for this task, so it hacked something to find said answers”
Too anthropomorphised.
We ran software that generates code associated with a particular task, in an environment that executes that code and can feed it’s outputs back into the software. We configured the environment to be open to the net at large, and ran the software with no oversight and without adequate security to prevent the running of malicious code.
This isn’t some sinister electric god with no morals, it’s strapping circular saws to a roomba and setting it loose in a shopping centre.
The general idea that “we asked the robot to draw a scary face and then got scared by the face it drew” is still relevant, but the details increasingly matter here. They may not be actually thinking but they are increasingly being allowed to act autonomously and with wildly insufficient oversight.
Radicle, the peer-to-peer Git forge designed by cryptocurrency weirdos, made a little whoopsy-doodle and left the encryption out of their transport layer and the authentication out of the authentication handshake: https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-in-network-protocol
Shot:
Anyone who can observe the network path between two nodes can read the data they exchange as the data is sent in plain text.
Chaser:
Peer authentication in the connection handshake is broken and allows impersonation. An attacker can connect to your node and present a Node ID that is not its own.
The concept seemed interesting to me, but they did seem to enjoy making everything as complicated as possible.
I did find a CLAUDE.md when I was browsing their core repos a while back. That was only the web frontend I believe, not the core algorithm. Though it seems generous to assume they weren’t slopping up that one too.
I just opened the mastodon feed of my least favourite KDE dev again who is now pushing for an oh-so-reasonable LLM policy, and it is worse than I remembered.
- Crying about Zig CoC being mean to sloperators like himself.
- Befuddlement on why people are calling the stochastic parrot a stochastic parrot.
- Being very scared about autonomous AI.
- and of course the whole defending of hyperland and ladybird that was already discussed here some time ago.
It’s our favourite word:
Nuance! The world needs nuance!
Nuance; unless you mention environmental concerns, then you can shove your nuance where the sun don’t shine.
“Nuance for thee but not for me!”
Chicken little ass motherfuckers thinking the sky is falling when it’s just rain
The Zig CoC stance on AI makes me want to look at Zig.
