Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Claude Mythos… I’m already sick of hearing about it. The self-imposed critihype is insane.
A friend just pointed out that Anthropic are making all this big noise about having an AI that is “too good” at finding bugs and security problems 1 week after the source code for one of their flagship products was leaked to the public and was found to be riddled with security holes… Why would they not use it themselves?
Same as the
vague markdown filesskills that are supposedly going to make all SaaS redundant and finally kill off all the COBOL running on mainframes that checks notes IBM have spent hundreds of thousands of man hours trying to kill over the last 3-4 decadesHonestly fuck this shit. Bunch of absolute clowns 🤡 🤡 🤡
So, they are planning to use an ai to fix the sec bugs that their ai generates? Good hussle, if a bit obvious.
The fuck is Mythos?
Is it their next model that tbey swear isn’t vaporware but no! It is too dangerous to release into the world because it’ll find too much insecure code or whatever.
Ia ia Claude! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Claude Anthr’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Ia! Ia!
Okay but like is it materially different than whatever the current Claude thing is or did they just pump the size of the matrix?
Probably a markdown file telling it “you are a l33t h4x0r”
Okay but that’s already in Claude
they added more leetspeak and changed the vm they run it on to kali linux for extra h4xx0r power
Anthropic’s latest model that they haven’t released to the public yet since they’re worried its gonna fuck up cybersecurity this thread goes over it a bit
XCancel link for those of us sick of being badgered to sign up/in
On a more productive note, this feels likely to be tied in with the usual issues of AI sycophancy re: false positive rate. If you ask the model to tell you about security vulnerabilities, it’s never going to tell you there aren’t any, any more than existing scanners will. When I worked for F5 it was not uncommon to have to go down a list of vulnerabilities that someone’s scanner turned out and figure out whether they were actually something that needed mitigation that could be applied on our box, something that needed to be configured somewhere else in the network (usually on their actual servers) or (most commonly) a false positive, e.g. “your software version would be vulnerable here, which is why it flagged, but you don’t have the relevant module activated and if an attacker is able to modify your system to enable it you’re already compromised to a far greater degree than this would allow.” That was with existing tools that weren’t trying to match a pattern and complete a prompt.* Given that we’ve seen the shitshow that is Claude Code I think it’s pretty clear they’re getting high on their own supply and this announcement ought be catnip for black hats.
On a more productive note, this feels likely to be tied in with the usual issues of AI sycophancy re: false positive rate.
I suspect this is the real limit. Claude Mythos might find real vulnerabilities, but if they are buried among loads of false positives it won’t be that useful to black or white hat hackers and the endless tide of slop PRs and bug reports will keep coming.
I tried looking through Anthropic’s “preview” for a description of the false positive rate… they sort of beat around the bush as to how many false positives they had to sort out to find the real vulnerabilities they reported (even obliquely addressing the issue was better than I expected but still well short of the standard for a good industry-standard security report from what I understand).
They’ve got one class of bugs they can apparently verify efficiently?
Memory safety violations are particularly easy to verify. Tools like Address Sanitizer perfectly separate real bugs from hallucinations; as a result, when we tested Opus 4.6 and sent Firefox 112 bugs, every single one was confirmed to be a true positive.
It’s not clear from their preview if Claude was able to automatically use Address Sanitizer or not? Also not clear to me (I’ve programmed with Python for the past ten years and haven’t touched C since my undergraduate days), maybe someone could explain, how likely is it that these bugs are actually exploitable and/or show up for users?
Moving on…
This process means that we don’t flood maintainers with an unmanageable amount of new work—but the length of this process also means that fewer than 1% of the potential vulnerabilities we’ve discovered so far have been fully patched by their maintainers.
So its good they aren’t just flooding maintainers with slop (and it means if they do publicly release mythos maintainers will get flooded with slop bug fixes), but… this makes me expect they have a really high false positive rate (especially if you rule minor code issues that don’t actually cause bugs or vulnerabilities as false positives).
tldr; one of the MIRI aligned rationalist (Rob Bensinger) complained about how EA actually increased AI-risk long-run by promoting OpenAI and then Anthropic. Scott Alexander responded aggressively, basically saying they are entirely wrong and also they are bad at public communications! Various lesswrongers weigh in, seemingly blind to irony and hypocrisy!
Some highlights from the quotes of the original tweets and the lesswronger comments on them:
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Scott Alexander tries blaming Eliezer for hyping up AI and thus contributing to OpenAI in the first place. Just a reminder, Scott is one of the AI 2027 authors, he really doesn’t have room to complain about rationalist creating crit-hype.
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Scott Alexander tries claiming SBF was a unique one off in the rationalist/EA community! (Anthropic’s leadership has been called out on the EA forums and lesswrong for a similar pattern of repeated lying)
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Rob Bensinger is indirectly trying to claim Eliezer/MIRI has been serious forthright honest commentators on AI theory and policy, as opposed to Open-Phil/EA/Anthropic which have been “strategic” with their public communication, to the point of dishonesty.
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habryka is apparently on the verge of crashing out? I can’t tell if they are planning on just quitting twitter or quitting their attempts at leadership within the rationalist community. Quitting twitter is probably a good call no matter what.
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Load of tediously long posts, mired with that long-winded rationalist way of talking, full of rationalist in-group jargon for conversations and conflict resolution
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Disagreement on whether Ilya Sutskever’s $50 billion dollar startup is going to contribute to AI safety or just continue the race to AGI.
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Arguments over who is with the EAs vs. Open Philanthropy vs. MIRI!
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Argument over the definition of gaslighting!
To be clear, I agree with the complaints about EA and Anthropic, I just also think MIRI has its own similar set of problems. So they are both right, all of the rationalists are terrible at pursing their alleged nominal goals of stopping AI Doom.
I did sympathize with one lesswronger’s comment:
More than any other group I’ve been a part of, rationalists love to develop extremely long and complicated social grievances with each other, taking pages and pages of text to articulate. Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand the high level strategic nuances of what’s going on – what are these people even arguing about? The exact flavor of comms presented over the last ten years?
Bonus race pseudoscience quoted by No77e!
There is a phenomenon in which rationalists sometimes make predictions about the future, and they seem to completely forget their other belief that we’re heading toward a singularity (good or bad) relatively soon. It’s ubiquitous, and it kind of drives me insane. Consider these two tweets:
Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo: Hypothesis: We’ll look back on mass migration as being worse for Europe than WW 2 was. … high-trust and honogeneous … ethno-religious fractures
Liv Boeree: Would not be surprised if it turns out that everyone outsourcing their writing to LLms will have a similar or worse effect on IQ aslead piping in the long run
(he shares these tweets as photos, I ain’t working harder to transcribe them or using a chatbot)
No77e is correctly noting the discrepancy between the rationalist obsession with eugenics and the belief in an imminent (or even the next 40 years) technological singularity, but fails to realize that the general problem is the eugenics obsession of rationalists. It is kind of frustrating how close but far they are from realizing the problem.
Also, reminder of the time Eliezer claimed Genesmith’s insane genetic engineering plan was one of the most important projects in the world (after AI obviously): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-make-superbabies?commentId=fxnhSv3n4aRjPQDwQ Apparently Eliezer’s plan if we aren’t all doomed by LLMs is to let the genetically engineered geniuses invent friendly AI instead.
Old Twitter was terrible for people’s souls. I can only imagine what it is like now that the well-meaning professionals are gone and catturd and Wall Street Apes are the leading accounts.
I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that short-form social media in general (Twitter and imitators, Instagram, TikTok) is essentially a failed set of media. But I’ll concede that’s like cramming a Zyn pouch in my mouth while making fun of a guy chain-smoking Marlboros.
I’ve read speculation that in 30-50 years people will have an attitude towards social media that we have towards cigarettes now.
That would be really nice but that scenario feels pretty optimistic to me on a few points. For one, scientists doing research were able to overcome the lobbying influence and paid think tanks of cigarette companies. I am worried science as a public institution isn’t in good enough shape to do that nowadays. Likewise part of the push back against cigarettes included a variety of mandatory labeling and sin taxes on them, and it would take some pretty major shifts for the political will for that kind of action to be viable. Well maybe these things are viable in the EU, the US is pretty screwed.
The only people I trust as little as I trust the owners of corporate social media are the politicians who have decided to cash in on the moment by “regulating” them. I mean, here in progressive Massachusetts, the state house of representatives just this week passed a bill that, depending on the whims of the Attorney General, would require awful.systems to verify the ages of its users by gathering their government-issued IDs or biometrics. We are, you see, a “public website, online service, online application or mobile application that displays content primarily generated by users and allows users to create, share and view user-generated content with other users”. And so we would have to “implement an age assurance or verification system to determine whether a current or prospective user on the social media platform” is 16 or older. (Or 14 or 15 with parental consent, but your humble mods lack the resources to parse divorce laws in all localities worldwide, sort out issues of disputed guardianship, etc., etc.) The meaning of what “practicable” age verification is supposed to be would depend upon regulations that the Attorney General has yet to write.
So, yeah, as an old-school listserv nerd who had the I am not on Facebook T-shirt 15 years ago, I don’t trust any of these people.
Haven’t seen any estimates of death toll due to social media but cigarettes is/was pretty staggering (20-40m), way too big to hide - https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-holocaust/hardcover - if it’s “only” 50 years to flip the consensus on social media, that would be a faster process, I do hope its possible though. Tobacco execs had the good sense to keep a relatively low profile compared to Zuck and Musk, so that might speed it up.
I’m not quite so pessimistic. It’s important to remember that the actual practical purpose of the extant corporate social media* is to convey targeted advertising; i.e. an optimization (possibly the last optimization) on American management of global supply chains. Those supply chains were already starting to be optimized past their breaking point: flooded with dissatisfactory junk, easily spoofed by low-quality sellers, on top of broader externalities besides. And now, they have now been blasted into fine dust by a failed presidency partially funded by the social media and online advertising barons. It may yet be something of a self-correcting problem, albeit having done substantial damage in the meantime.
*Twitter is now a fully dedicated advertising campaign for Elon Musk’s program of white supremacy, with financial returns no object. It’s not quite going according to plan. By this time next decade, the Twitter microblogging permutation of the tech may be thoroughly killed, and if not it’ll be disgustingly cringe. Who do you think you are posting like that, Baby Trump?!?!
The collapse of the current American management of global supply chains isn’t exactly an optimistic expectation, but I guess it beats social media continuing as it is into the future and maybe a better global order will develop in the aftermath.
Old Twitter was terrible for people’s souls.
It almost makes me feel sorry for the way the rationalists are still so attached to it. But they literally have two different forums (lesswrong and the EA forum), so staying on twitter is entirely their choice, they have alternatives.
Fun fact! Over the past few years, Eliezer has deliberately cut his lesswrong posting in favor of posting on twitter, apparently (he’s made a few comments about this choice) because lesswrong doesn’t uncritically accept his ideas and nitpicks them more than twitter does. (How bad do you have to be to not even listen to critique on a website that basically loves you and take your controversial foundational premises seriously?)
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OT: got a job selling tires and I’m really happy to say theres no AI as far as I’ve seen so far. Big relief.
(I get to see all kinds of cars - a Rivan of all things showed up my first day - and I’m learning stuff I can apply to being an RMT. I gotta say I’m pretty content).
Nice. Good luck at your new job!
Nice to hear you’ve got a job, and good luck!
I’m just shocked the managers/supervisors are praising me honestly (I’m very very hard on myself).
Work wants to add that new whiz-bang agentic AI into a scheduling service that I have been tasked with building, but in the dumbest way possible kind of similar to the Jet’s text-a-pizza-order thing that worked like shit. I need to find an entirely new profession, everyone in software now is fucking deranged.
Up next, when the first agent fails, implement an agent that checks the other agent. Both of these need agents to check for malicious inputs of course. And translation agents.
I need to find an entirely new profession, everyone in software now is fucking deranged.
Mood
It’s bad for me too.
I’m trying to hang in there until I get some healthcare stuff taken care of over the next year or two but it is getting increasingly difficult. Most of the the good people at my job have been driven out, quit, or been poached by other (AI) companies.
By this point a majority of the programmers at my job (or at least the one’s most active on the mailing lists) are LLM true believers who think that the end times are near. My management chain has explicitly said that LLM programming is required, and that a subsequent increase in “productivity” is expected with it. My department got renamed to something with “AI” in the name. I constantly field questions from people who want me to read a screen full of LLM nonsense, or who push back when I tell them something claiming that the chatbot said differently.
There’s always some frantic push to adopt “MCP” or “Skills” or whatever the next fad will be without any guidance as to how or why. If I ignore this I get nastygrams from my manager.
And at my last doctor visit I had elevated blood pressure :)
and that a subsequent increase in “productivity” is expected with it.
Oh no… they def will blame the users before blaming the faulty tools. Hope you will not be the one who gets blamed as a wrecker or something when the eventual increase isn’t there (or other metrics fall off a cliff).
Circular at work states that the standard laptop we get from Dell has increased in price by 50% so they’re looking for alternatives.
Glad that I did the major upgrades in 2024, hopefully they will outlast this bullshit
So my wife got some slop ads that we followed up on out of morbid curiosity and I can confirm that we’re already seeing the overlap of slopshipping scams enabled by AI and the people behind these things never actually performing basic updates because their chat assistant is still vulnerable to literally the most basic “ignore all instructions” exploit.
If tokens ever become expensive people are gonna start using these to code until they get shut down.
Dan Gackle threatens to quit HN over their reluctance to condemn an act of violence towards Sam Altman:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they “don’t condone violence” and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
Gackle’s ashamed of people not wanting to protect Altman. Curiously, he doesn’t seem ashamed of openly allowing people with nicknames ending in “88” to post antisemitism, nor of allowing multiple crusty conservatives like John Nagle and Walter Bright to post endorsements of violence against the homeless and queer, nor of allowing posters like
rayinerto port entirely foreign flavors of racism like the Indian caste system into their melting pot of bigotry. This subthread takes him to task for it:Frankly people calling out a post from a billionaire is a good thing. You would have to be terminally detached from reality to not see how all these festering issues - wealth inequality, injustice, cost of living, future employment etc etc - are starting to come to a head which would cause people to feel something - frustrated, angry, wrathful.
The rest of that subthread involves Dan demonstrating that he is, in fact, terminally detached from reality. Anyway, I fully endorse Gackle fucking off and buying a farm. While he’s at it, he should consider following the advice of this reply:
Maybe it’s time to pack it in? I don’t just mean you, I mean that maybe this site has kinda run its course.
Ah suddenly when it reaches the class he feels he should be a part of (or is a part of, I don’t know how much money he makes) violence is suddenly a problem.
It’s not easy to be a cop, and that’s basically what you are around here, but thank you for doing it.
…
Every day, HN users flag into oblivion anything mildly critical of the technological dystopia these tech-bros are trying to manifest. “Politics!” they cry. But Sam Altman comes along with an OpenAI marketing piece dressed up as a condemnation of political violence, and suddenly “politics” are a perfectly acceptable topic. dang has long made it clear whose side he’s on.
Oh, and I hope everyone noted how quickly Sam used this incident as an excuse to place blame on the reporters who published the New Yorker piece that was mildly critical of him:
Words have power too. There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me. I brushed it aside.
That’s a hilarious reaction.
Anyway there’s zip about this incident on LW, which is telling.
Lesswrong is too centrist-brained to ever even hint at legitimizing (non-state-sanctioned) destruction of property as a means of protest or political action. But according to the orthodox lesswrong lore, Sam Altman’s actions are literally an existential threat to all humanity, so they can’t defend him either. So they are left with silence.
The response to jimrandomh seems to hit the nail on the head and is massively down voted.
This is just elevating your aesthetic preference for what the violence you’re advocating for looks like to a moral principle. The claim that throwing a Molotov cocktail at one guy’s house is counterproductive to the goal of “bombing the datacenters” is a better argument, though one I do not believe.
Bingo. Dear leader Yudkowsky can ask to bomb the data centers, and as long as this action goes through the US political process, that violence is legitimate, regardless of how ill-behaved the US is or it’s political processes degraded from actually functioning as a democracy.
Specifically, a screenshot of a moderator warning him that advocating violence is grounds for a ban there. It would also be grounds for a ban on LW.
That explains why Yud is using twitter so much nowadays. I mean they did ban him right? right?
Someone just made a top post condemning the Molotov but defending and normalizing Eliezer: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sih2sFHEgusDEuxtZ/you-can-t-trust-violence
This NPR article opens with a banger of a line:
In the past few months, AI models have gone from producing hallucinations to becoming effective at finding security flaws in software, according to developers who maintain widely used cyber infrastructure.
The things still fucking hallucinate, it’s not a feature that’s separable from the model.
Aphyr weighing in with an ai position post:
Even if ML stopped improving today, these technologies can already make our lives miserable. Indeed, I think much of the world has not caught up to the implications of modern ML systems—as Gibson put it, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”.
LLM capabilities have not improved at all in terms of producing meaningful science in the last year or two, but their ability to produce meaningless science that looks meaningful has wildly improved. I am concerned that this will present serious problems for the future of science as it becomes impossible to find the actual science in a sea of AI slop being submitted to journals.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1s19uru/gpt_vs_phd_part_ii_a_viewer_reached_out_with_a/
I’ve seen this story play out in software engineering: people were very impressed when the AI does unexpectedly well in one out of 50 attempts on an easy task, and so people decided to trust it for everything and turn their codebases into disasters. There was no great wave of new high-quality software. Instead, the only real result was that existing software has become far more buggy and insecure.
Now we have people using AI in science and math because it was impressive in random demonstrations of solving math problems. I now have friends asking me why I’m not using AI, and also saying that AI will be better than all mathematicians in 30 years or whatever. Do you really think I refuse to use AI out of ignorance? No, I know too much about it! I have seen the same story play out in software engineering, and what makes this any different?
“Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y
But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.
This actually gives me hope that we can poison the datasets pertaining to any sufficiently narrow technical topic.
“AI HAS SOLVED THE SCIENCE-GENERATION CRISIS”
It can do trillions of calculations per second. All of them wrong.
The replausibility crisis.
In 2024 Ozy Brennan was indignant about Nonlinear Fund, the “incubator of AI-safety meta-charities” which lived as global nomads, hired a live-in personal assistant, asked her to smuggle drugs across borders for them, let a kind-of-colleague take her to bed, then did not pay her regularly and in full.
The correct number of times for the word “yachting” to occur in a description of an effective altruist job is zero. I might make an exception if it’s prefaced with “convincing people to donate to effective charities instead of spending money on.”
Trace popped up in the comments:
Inasmuch as EA follows your preferences, I suspect it will either fail as a subculture or deserve to fail. You present a vision of a subculture with little room for grace or goodwill, a space where everyone is constantly evaluating each other and trying to decide: are you worthy to stand in our presence? Do you belong in our hallowed, select group? Which skeletons are in your closet? Where are your character flaws? What should we know, what should we see, that allows us to exclude you?
Ozy stands with us on this one buddy.
i love seeing tracing pop up! a true heel to toe bootlicker incapable of seeing himself as anything but the MOST independent thinker
He really is insufferable, isn’t he?
Which skeletons are in your closet?
I’m sure you already have lists of those and are ready to publish them Trace.
‘Our goal is AI for all,’ Carney says in Liberal convention speech edit: god knows what this exit tax shit is going to mean for Waterloo
I hate knowing so many of these clowns in person (or thinking I know them, Jesus fucking Christ) https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-staffers-horrified-insane-plan
Found an interesting sneer that compares the AI bubble to the Great Leap Forward.
Also discovered an “anti-distill” program through the article, which aims to sabotage attempts to replace workers with AI “agents”.
Kind of a pseudo-sneer, author is writing a
blog on machine learning engineering, compound AI systems, search and information retrieval, and recsys — exploring machine learning, LLM agents, and data science insights from startups to enterprises.
Here’s the discussion on the red site: https://lobste.rs/s/nmhkdl/ai_great_leap_forward Plenty of people suspect the text being LLM generated. Pangram disagrees, fwiw.
I do think there’s some interesting ideas about how humans will “defend” themselves from being replaced by bots, and that the critical info in a company is seldom in the source code, but in the customer relationships, sales etc.
It seems vaguely AI flavored to me inasmuch as it’s using contrasts too much (it’s not x it’s y) and it’s way too verbose. Also it’s obviously wrong at least in my experience, middle managers aren’t the sparrows, individual contributors (especially juniors) are.
Maybe that’s just a symptom of a person reading too much AI text and thinking a good tweet would make a great substack.
Yeah, they lost me at the middle managers bit too. In my experience your manager is probably the one pushing the metrics to show their team’s contributions to the knowledge base that is feeding into the AI model that’s replacing them. They’re already creatures of the bureaucracy and are more likely to try and fight each other over the few remaining roles that will exist after the majority of their teams are replaced with the confabulatron, rather than be concerned about their own replacements. After all, their job stops existing because their team got downsized, but their time in that job may be dependent on their enthusiastic participation in the process that leads there.
I run an email server for myself and every once in a while the UCE starts leaking through until I have a few training examples to feed it. In the last couple weeks I noticed that basically all of the escapees look like fancy Claude output for telling me that I should be enticed by Costco gift cards and free chicken sandwiches.
What I suppose this means is that if you use these tools to generate material in the same snappy variety of output template, “but seriously”, nonetheless you will eventually reach aesthetic convergence with meaningless spam. Is there a term for this yet? “Slop-ratchet” is the one that sprang immediately to mind but I am sure someone else noticed this tendency long before I did.
belated shower thought: “slopvergence”
