The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Via Kevin Bird (who has taken on the Rationalists before) a substack taking down Jordan Lasker/Crémieux Recueil
A frustrating (and beware, long) post I came across: Coding is NOT solved
Starts off with some good sneers:
Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough: ❌ Haven’t written code in ages ❌ Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers! ❌ Have a low bar for what good looks like ❌ Don’t care about quality or NFR ❌ Have difficulty understanding an S-curve ✅ Are honest: AI genuinely writes better code than them
But the author can’t get over their AI-centrism:
Instead of following other people’s advice, build with AI, gain first hand experience and make up your mind. But whatever you do, please please please don’t fool yourself into believing this is a fad. AI is here to stay, and as I stated above there are some genuine use cases for it already.
New Baldur Bjarnason: It’s not our job to fix our employers
As a note, Baldur dedicates much of the first half to how general sentiment has shifted against the tech industry over the past decade.
Anthropic has a new angle for trying to get local LLMs banned, apparently they’re about to be able to use your temu android tv to take over your smart toaster:
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested
edit: The TVs need to be off-brand to lack basic security features, and also there must be at least four of them to even start being inference-capable, and the actual setting up of a distributed inference network on android tvs is handwaved as “feasible”.
The thrilling conclusion of this blog post is called Signs of Life, because of course it is.
Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way
Self-replicating prompt text is a much more interesting vector for misbehaving AI systems
It’s funny how they’re twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.
rats’ best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton
MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin
Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn
Anthropic really won’t let this botnet thing go. It’s so desperate & ridiculous.
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9B parameter models are so weak that they’re essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.
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Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.
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Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It’s simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.
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Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can’t get in.
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Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.
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Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic’s models, not open-weight ones.
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Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.
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I’m pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it’s eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it’s impossible to believe it’s being done in good faith.
edit: failed to spot the ninja edit so the response made no sense
Sorry I thought this updated comment was a better one 😅
For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I can’t decide whether Dario and co are confidence scammers or genuinely earnestly think that these next word prediction models are sentient due to all the brain damage, they’ve inflicted on themselves. FWIW Sama and friends are almost certainly in that first camp.
Sama is a serial scammer, this is just the biggest scam he’s managed to foster. He’ll say whatever it takes to get the payout.
Dario is a true believer but I also think the prospect of $billions skews his judgement
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New Odium Symposium. We go through an episode of Loveline, a once wildly popular call-in radio show, then look at where its hosts Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew ended up.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/26-chudline-with-172120239 or www.odiumsymposium.com for all the usual rss sources
Looks like a Stanford philosophy professor either didn’t get invited to the orgies, or had a bad time, and took out his frustration by writing an op-ed in The Economist decrying the EAs for caring more about shrimp than people.
An outraged green-leaf LWer took to the substacks to attack him, saying he cares less about shrimp than people.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mEZAjDR9HuwJCJfWH/leif-wenar-s-takedown-of-effective-altruism
charming.
Character.AI files for bankruptcy, agrees to sell some assets for $20 million
At one point “valued” at 2.5B, so that sale is 99%+ discount, even charitably assuming 100M sale of it all it’s still 96% discount
thank god. horrid, parasocial site
it’s not shutting down so far, and if anyone buys that part it will remain up
deleted by creator
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. Shame they’re probably all made and siphoned off life-changing amounts of money before this happened. I guess we can always hope they take up smoking because AI is going to cure cancer.
This is sad news, as companies are not alive, this means there is no new public toilet.
Also notable for being the first to get a kid killed by AI suicide encouragement. Burn it to the ground and make teeth fillings from the slag.
Bankruptcy means they’re not going to be paying out damages for all the AI Psychosis they caused.
They looking to get off the hook before all the class action lawsuits pile up?
or maybe they genuinely ran out of vc money
Wonder who gets all the plaintext logs from all their victims
not done yet
Under this process, Disney’s bid would set a baseline offer while allowing competing bidders to submit higher bids, and the company expects the sale process to conclude by late November or early December 2026.
perhaps them, and maybe these are linked to identities of users
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says researchers have started smoking, believing AI will cure cancer via r/nottheonion
The Palantir CTO said that researchers were now so confident in AI that they had started smoking. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Shyam Sankar told CBS. “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will—I’m showing you my chips are all in.” Perhaps, the researchers think that there is no better way of showing faith in AI than to indulge in something that could cause them cancer – hopefully AI finds that cure before things get serious.
ok way to snitch on them to health insurance bot. presumably all their CEO customers are prompting “hike premiums on dumbasses. make no mistakes no luigi”. happy open enrollment season. /s
Costly signaling by which one credibly gives something up to follow the precepts of the cult and demonstrate that one believes in the face of personal disadvantage is one of the strongest things that predicts cohesion of a religious movement.
This is proper cult membership credibility testing stuff. “If you really believe, you’ll drink the koolaid”
Previously posted here: https://awful.systems/post/10025000
A local sneer enthusiast sat through the Nashville Thiel lectures so that we wouldn’t have to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1x4b4au/notes_from_the_room_peter_thiels_antichrist/
It’s neat that there are two of us!
I DO NOT LIKE THESE ROBOTS by Becky Chambers
While doing research on our friends, I found (a disowned Reddit comment which found) another banger from the guy who pointed out that pinball is too chaotic for superintelligences to predict (discussed previously, on Awful): whole-bird emulation requires quantum mechanics, or “WBE requires QM” for short. Apparently WBE was a minor meme inside the community at some point, but I’m not sure who first noticed the situation. In short, birds with certain chemicals in their eyes may have the ability to sense magnetic fields due to QM effects. (I’d normally recommend WP on this, but the relevant article is bizarrely skeptical about the situation, although it does include a decent diagram.) As such, our friends consider the possibility that their vaunted superintelligence tasks (ancestor simulations, Newcomb predictors, etc.) are harder than WBE, which itself is much harder than e.g. cracking classical cryptography with Shor’s algorithm or some other not-yet-reached quantum-computing task. The author left a great sneer in the comments:
Adding a compass is unlikely to also make the bird disoriented when exposed to a weak magnetic field which oscillates at the right frequency. Which means that the emulated bird will not behave like the real bird in this scenario. You could add this phenomenon in by hand. Attach some detector to your compass and have it turn off the compass when these fields are measured. More generally, adding in these features ad hoc will likely work for the things that you know about ahead of time, but is very unlikely to work like the bird outside of its training distribution. If you have a model of the bird that includes the relevant physics for this phenomenon, it is much more likely to work outside of its training distribution.
Ro-ro-rotate your model of the bird, rotate your model of the bird for science!
I’m starting to think that simulating the future and past based on a single picture of a falling apple might be a little difficult.
Oh, but for a Bayesian super intelligence it’d be easy!
That’s actually true in a way: Bayes theorem and (actual science-oriented, rather than bullshit handwavey) statistics involving it are about how conditional probabilities interact, including, overly simplified, how to get from prior probabilities (what i find how probable before looking at data) to posterior probabilities (what i find how probable conditioned on data).
Basically what it means to throw “Bayesian” into the word soup (because a stew requires more substance) is that the fairy tale is not about some blank slate figuring out everything from minimal data and first principles, but that it’s about a model that starts accurately and doesn’t have to adjust much (because otherwise by necessity it’d need more data - otherwise it’s not Bayesian).
God I hate this
Basically: if it’s Bayesian, the less data you put in, the closer you remain to what you started with. It’s not magic.
Maybe I should put in the effort and make a full post some day
Here’s that falling apple thing so that it might be referenced in the full post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message
I totally remembered the claim wrong. Forgive me for I am after all mere human and not a Bayesian superintelligence:
A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.
I wonder how many webcam frames were needed for the ancestor simulations; given that we’re all actually digital copies in Newcombian-basilisk-hell™ without realizing it.
These people love to feel sciencey but hate the actual science part where you have to look and look elsewhere and readjust and suddenly learning more takes generations of time and material investment instead of handwaving wildly
Damn, and here I was all ready to download some tasty chicken and start fattening it up in MAME (Multiple Avian Maturation Emulator)
recently I got into crocheting and I was immediately thrown into the hobby drama about all the havoc that generative “AI” is wreacking into the community. fake slop patterns that don’t work, fake photos of impossible amigurumi, that kinda stuff.
then I learned that, a few months ago, Hobbii, an once-beloved crafts supplier currently in a death spiral after being purchased by private equity, had the brilliant idea of alienating their entire client base by talking about how they love “AI” and use it all the time at the company. while firing a ton of people no less, including all the familiar faces that interacted with people online.
in damage control during the entirely predictable backlash, the new CTO Tomas Antvorksov Krag posted this:
While we take our responsibility very serious we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market or risk being left behind.
My brother in Christ Tomas Antvorksov Krag CTO of Hobbii, you are the CTO of a textile crafts company. Every client of yours does crochet or knitting or fucking macramé by hand, for fun. What technology do you figure we would be afraid of being left behind by? The spinning jenny??
Yeah it’s really bad, I’ve been into crocheting and knitting (more of a knitter now) for about 2 years and if it’s not fake AI patterns or yarn companies dropping the ball, it’s pattern designers using AI to generate background pictures and stuff. I’ve been really disappointed with some people who really should have known better. You are in a creative, artistic hobby space! Why are you using a slop machine and devaluing work of other artists! Ugh.
At least being on ravelry and checking out other people’s project attempts/pattern comments has so far saved me from falling for AI bs.
Also, why apply new technology to core product lines and communication with customers, and not back office number crunching crap.
My wife has been talking about the scourge of AI in fiber arts for like a year or more, and when I asked if she had any brands that were still trustworthy she said “good luck, mate”.
It’s so bad.
I follow a couple (like, 2~3) of fiber arts people and that was about the impression I got too, it’s blown up with that much spill
risk being left behind
Im also simply not sure how much of a risk that is, people keep saying that but I’m not sure being conservative on new tech has lead to much business closures the past 20 years.
It’s just such a clichéd remark from AI bros now that I cringe whenever I hear it along with “sure the current model can’t do X but the next one will be able to bro… Just one more model bro”
My NFT blockchain store selling segways in second life is now using LLMs! (Now also available on your Blackberry). Im ready to be raptured, I dont want to be left behind!
ijlth: quantum
I think there’s a typo: we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market TO risk being left behind [by our customers].
Holy shit, I also got into crocheting last week. I have, however, managed to entirely avoid any hobby drama so far, but of fucking course this one is also being thrown into the fucking AI meatgrinder, ugh money people are so smart, man
yay one of us! if you want to, feel free to follow @[email protected] if you want to see me hyperfocusing on crochet details! here are two threads that are particularly infodumpy as I learn the ropes: on turning chains, and on the magic circle and counting
Love your threads (haha). I didn’t have a mastodon account, so actually you’re my first follow :)
Viral AI-Generated Comedian Steals Jokes And Is Rewarded With Millions Of Views | Kotaku h/t naked capitalism
On October 3, comedian George Brett Olson shared a video comparing one of Sloan’s jokes to an excerpt from his own performance, and it’s clear that someone was, at the very least, inspired by not only Olson’s joke, but his outfit, too.
And the creator behind Sloan can easily whip up a few variants of the same joke using different clothing and actors to see which one the algorithm rewards more. And if you really, really like Sloan, “she” even has an OnlyFans account.
jfc ofc “she” does.
god her appearance makes me feel like i’m being hate-crimed
At least they managed to make it look like an adult.
furthering my previous guessing that there’s likely only appetite for 2, maybe 3, of these ridiculous IPOs, a number of analyst notes have started kicking around and they’re getting progressively more realistic in their outlook. saw this one this morning
Red Flag #3: The IPO is Exit Liquidity, Not Growth Capital
To justify a $2 trillion valuation, our model shows that Anthropic would have to: • immediately improve NOPAT margin to 10% and sustain it for the next 10 years (compared to -175% reported operating margin in 2025), • grow revenue by 1000% in 2026 and 100% in 2027, and • grow revenue 56% compounded annually from 2028-2035.sounds ambitious. sure hope they don’t have any material risks and systematic exposures that make that harder!
In this scenario, Anthropic’s 1. revenue would reach $3.6 trillion (compared to $4.6 billion in 2025), which is 1.4x the combined TTM revenue of Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), NVIDIA (NVDA), Meta (META), and Oracle (ORCL). 2. NOPAT would reach $358 billion in 2035, compared to the company’s -$8 billion reported operating loss in 2025. For reference, $358 billion is 2.0x NVIDIA’s $184 billion and 2.6x Apple’s $136 billion in TTM NOPAT.good thing the cost of inference is going down! sure, qwen3.8-27b is already stale and everyone needs to throw another couple hundred million at another training update, but the cost of inference! /s
“so you’re saying there’s a chance Anthropic will be profitable?”
At this point I’m gonna dig a big hole in my yard and stick a sign next to it that says “AI datacenter” with a down arrow. I figure I can get a way better prospectus than anyone currently on the market.
Just listened to this and thought it was worth sharing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EY2QDfp2O4
"Are we on the verge of an AI apocalypse, or is Silicon Valley using doomsday fears to distract us from the damage AI is already doing? Tech insiders and Big Tech CEOs warn that superintelligence could wipe out humanity. Meanwhile, AI is already fuelling warfare and environmental destruction, with zero accountability. If the very people warning us about AI’s dangers also stand to profit from it, is existential doom a genuine warning or the ultimate marketing strategy?
This week on The Tea, we’re joined by pioneering AI researcher Dr Timnit Gebru, former co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team. Timnit warned about the dangers of large language models years before the current AI boom. In this interview, she exposes the motives and the ideology behind Silicon Valley’s apocalyptic vision."
