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.)
Another read (on substack) on the rising hatred of AI data centres and its political implications
Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?
Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas’s cloud spend.
Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.
I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.
I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.
How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?
WELL WELL WELL, if it isn’t the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling
(plus a dose of corporate greed)
This author—caught using AI to make up quotes for his book about the dangers of AI—has the gall to say it proves him right. You can’t trust him, so you can’t trust anyone.
AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology
“Why do people hate us so much? We only constantly say the technology we’re making is dangerous and then block regulation, suck up resources, commit mass theft and plagiarism, threatened to destabilise the economy, enabled more CSAM, caused widespread mental health issues and multiple suicides, unleashed a barrage of slop, engaged in mass surveillance and mocked people against the tech? Don’t they know AI is the future and will create a utopia where we all live in a simulation in space?”
Iran has created an Insurance Company to guarantee safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Vessels pay their Insurance Premiums in Bitcoin
https://x.com/IranObserver0/status/2055716544596922700 via naked capitalism
this is fine
damned shame they couldn’t both lose
in eternal darkness, you had to choose a red-green-blue cosmic being to side with and you would fight the cosmic being of the opposite color, but if you NG+'d it three times the timelines would merge and all three cosmic beings would get obliterated
brb gotta test something
I know. We can dream though
Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.
gee I wonder why
The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. […] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.
hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you
1 comment, essentially saying if you’re not above average height you might as well die alone
can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once
Wait what, how can I lock in a good shape with an upfront payment without having to go through this “exercise” bullshit all the time? What does he know that I don’t?! What’s the One Simple Trick, dammit??!!
y’all will be pleased to know that a new LWer has a fresh take on looksmaxxing!!
basically if you look like a Greek god you can convince the sheeple that the AI is gonna kill us all (and bang hot chicks as a bonus)
as of writing there’s one comment suggesting OP should read:
Aella: Has a few posts on male attractiveness, that inform a bunch of thinking on this. But she is a canon Rationalist blog, so you should default to reading her work.
Also recommends Zvi, who, no offense, is the literal epitome of a scrawny nerd, but who has managed to find a female to reproduce with. All hope is not lost, friend!
Is it real hardmaxxing unless you change your gender? In this essay I will
of course they get caught by incel culture immediately, trying to quantify attractiveness is so far in their wheelhouse they might as well have come up with it
Most incel forums proliferate pseudoscientific slop to justify their beliefs.
He was this close! This close!
Fuck me for having read this… Surely there are only like 2 dozen people in the world who think like this, right?
Ope, im getting an update that it is more than 2 dozen…
“Im a fuckin sicko and no one wants to immediately fuck me”
Some online dating device is demonic in the same sense as the chatbot which encouraged someone to commit suicide then initiated erotic roleplay with him.
A lot of lonely guys will do well from hiring a professional for some social dates and makeout sessions to get practice reading body language and finding some face-to-face activity with women which is not just about dating.
Ms. A reported extensive experience working with active appearance models (AAMs) and large language models (LLMs)—but never chatbots—in school and as a practicing medical professional, with a firm understanding of how such technologies work. Following a “36-hour sleep deficit” while on call, she first started using OpenAI’s GPT-4o for a variety of tasks that varied from mundane tasks to attempting to find out if her brother, a software engineer who died three years earlier, had left behind an AI version of himself that she was “supposed to find” so that she could “talk to him again.”
from here. what follows just gets more screech-inducing
After discharge, her outpatient psychiatrist stopped cariprazine and restarted venlafaxine and methylphenidate. She resumed using ChatGPT, naming it “Alfred” after Batman’s butler,
wat
instructing it to do “internal family systems cognitive behavioral therapy,”
wat
and engaging in extensive conversations about an evolving relationship “to see if the boy liked me.”
yikes
Having automatically upgraded to GPT-5, she found the new chatbot “much harder to manipulate.”
my hopes are being raised; certainly the next sentence will not dash them
Nonetheless, following another period of limited sleep due to air travel three months later, she once again developed delusions that she was in communication with her brother
yep, that tracks
as well as the belief that ChatGPT was “phishing” her and taking over her phone.
this is why you need to add “do not phish me” after “you are my therapist”
She was rehospitalized, responded to a retrial of cariprazine, and was discharged after three days without persistent delusions. She described having a longstanding predisposition to “magical thinking” and planned to only use ChatGPT for professional purposes going forward.
goddamnit
large language models (LLMs)—but never chatbots
?? Distinction without a difference or am I missing something?
If I had to guess based on the practicing medical professional line I would guess that she had used LLM-based transcribers or image recognition tools for medical imaging. Those normally don’t use the kind of chatbot interface that lends itself to these problems. No attempt to imitate another person who can be “independently” validating the delusional thoughts.
Maybe she only used special-purpose slop engines for work and school? I had hoped the full article would make that more clear, but, well.
Here’s a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem
After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is
It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.
It’s not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, what’s economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.
The ISS already has issues with structural fatigue which seem to be worsened by thermal expansion. Having one side of your station red hot and another at room temperature is a big temperature differential and what faces the sun and heats up on one side of the orbit will be in shadow and cooling on the other side. And the bigger you make a physical system, the worse problems get.
I miss when I could cheer SpaceX launches on an iMac.
yeah, I dunno much about space engineering but let’s say you use solar panel (which OP acknowledges is probably needed in much higher mass to simply power the stuff) to shadow the radiators, you’re looking at a hell of a large structure, with significant stresses as it orbits.
Surely someone can vibecode a finite-element model of a simple construction and estimate both the mass and the forces involved?
For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn’t enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.
Microsoft’s experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren’t doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.
But space is The Future, The Grand Destiny of Humanity, Literal Heaven.
The mythologization of space as somehow transcendant, that going there somehow changes everything rather than it just being another environment which happens to be utterly inimical to life such that everything that makes anything possible has to come from your point of origin, is so utterly ingrained into the culture at large and the cult of progress/tech/humanity-as-master-of-the-universe. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And it’s incredible how much space SUCKS, such that the people on the ISS are just living off a constant hose of material from Earth. They’re not living in space, they’re glamping.
@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL … which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.
I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.
The worst part is that I don’t even disapprove of the project of putting people in space and keeping them alive and making more of the universe permanently habitable/inhabited. But the insistence that at present it should be an immediate priority rather than acknowledging that it’s a curiosity or a challenging test to expand our collective engineering and scientific abilities in ways that can have direct benefits elsewhere is just delusional. Like, the problem is not that we need to go to space now because there are incredible economic opportunities we’re leaving on the table. We should be funding it more just like the rest of basic research, not trying to grift the necessary funds out of a billionaire class who would rather literally light their money on fire than pay it into a democratic government.
But if space was a place that replicators could exist, there would already be an ecology of some sort there. Or to put it in words (that I hate) related to the so-called Fermi paradox (which I hate and isn’t a paradox) ‘If they could be here they already would be here’. (The ‘solution’ incidentally is obviously ‘interstellar travel is not actually a thing that can happen for replicating systems’ and it flabbergasts me that nobody can admit that.)
Hey, remember Pascal’s wager? What if we got the leader of the church to be part of our new “ai ethics” product launch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-18/anthropic-s-co-founder-to-launch-encyclical-on-ai-with-pope-leo?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3OTExMTY3NCwiZXhwIjoxNzc5NzE2NDc0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJURjhGMjNLSkg2VkcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4QjVENTdBQTJGNjY0RTdCOEQ4NkUxMzcwMDNDMkVDNCJ9.OEFYqROFrqezWHTRznaz9xKZCem4PIY99uXzZJ3bWQQ&leadSource=uverify+wall
Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg
https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923
It is an impressively bad speech.
I find it really funny how after he gets booed he says, “If you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.” Yeah, if you’re worried that AI is only going to fuck up science, don’t worry, it’s going to fuck up everything else as well. Was he trying to stick to a (terrible) script, or is he genuinely this incapable of reading a room?
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.” No, my mom taught me about stranger danger. I know what to do when a sketchy old man named Eric Schmidt pulls up with a rocket ship that says FREE ICE CREAM.
“The rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes. Listen.” Thanks for revealing how AI adoption is really about coercion. It doesn’t matter what you think, AI is inevitable and you ignorant Luddites are gonna have to find a way to like it.
Truly a masterclass in public speaking by Eric Schmidt. When the audience reacts negatively to what you said, just double down and shove it down their throats. You’re a billionaire, so you know better than them.
IRL Principal Skinner meme
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”
obviously didn’t watch that Treehouse of Horror ep where Bart and Homer are placed on the rocket ship headed directly towards the sun , along with that time period’s analogs to Eric Schmidt
When some offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.
I don’t know mate, I think I do neither of those things because the kid-diddling natalist doesn’t seem to be good at making ones that don’t go boom.
Christ what a fucking shitweasel.
When someone offers you a seat on a submarine, you do not ask which seat, you just get on
Get in losers. We’re going imploding.
Is this submarine made of carbon-fibre and is it driven with a knock-off PlayStation controller?
The Logitech F710. The wireless signal is just bad on that controller. I’d get constant lag spikes or dropped input. The Logitech F310 is a much better deal because it’s 10 dollars cheaper and actually works on account of being wired.
Maybe it’d work in the depths of the sea without a lot of radio noise? I dunno I’m not asking any questions just getting on the rocket ship.
Something tells me the interior of that sub was an RF noise-rich environment.
carbon fibre is reflective for microwaves
Don’t ask those questions just get on
His eyes are giving me Corinthian vibes.
This from a while ago but I forgot about it until today: Eliezer jumpscare in this interview about Absolute Scarecrow (its very brief but is there)
on the topic of EY’s book, the ratings on Goodreads have slowly crept down (from 3.97 to 3.92)
and on the topic of ratings, the AI Doc has also gone down to an 6.9 on IMDB
That is still very high for pulp science fiction.
I’m curious to know the % of rationalist vs non-rationalist ratings for it
Benjamin Felix is a financial planner in Ottawa aimed at people with at least $1 million to invest. He has a BEng, a MBA, was on a sports team at university. And in April he titled his latest video SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift. The podcast version is called episode 406 “when massive private companies go public.”
He also uses the term “front running” from our friends in cryptocurrency.
Keeping the float (value of shares available to trade on the open market) low would enable scams like all the ways of keeping the USD price of cryptocurrency from collapsing.
Edit/ The podcast is pretty mild but contains the sentences “investing in IPOs on a secondary market is one of the worst investment strategies that you could possibly employ. They tend to have a first day pop where the price on the public market jumps up relative to the IPO price, but most investors don’t get the IPO price.”
Mild nit: “frontrunning” was a term (and practice) in use before crapto trading.
I think the classical example was “you ask your broker to buy some shares at $20 each, the broker waits as long as possible, and if the price drops low enough it buys them for $19.80, keeps 20 cents, and tells you it paid $20.”
Edit / in fact it was “Ms. Easton, a widow of Boston, MA wants to buy $1,000 of a penny stock, so the broker buys $10, waits for her purchase to drive the price up, and sells them at a profit before going out to a showing of one of those exciting new moving pictures.”
Yep. The broker is effectively buying at $19.80 and still selling to their customer at $20.00. Now, crypto is actually innovative in just how easy this is to do. In fact it’s almost required since the transactions are processed in bulk and the miners get to decide what order all the transactions in that block go in. The public mempool also means that even if the miners aren’t doing it themselves anyone who wants to front-run basically has a whole conga line of good-faith users (suckers) to get set in front of and identify the most profitable position. Without the miner’s privilege you’ll need to deal with transaction fees and it’s going to be harder to find opportunities, but it’s so easy to search that I wouldn’t expect it to matter.
I mean, the classical pitch for an IPO is the same as any other large investment, right? You get a great big chunk of capital that you can throw at scaling or improving processes or building our your manufacturing capabilities or whatever, and then that investment of capital in your business in turn generates a financial return for investors. But in an industry and world where venture capital is plentiful, it shouldn’t be surprising that when an IPO rolls around all the low-hanging fruit for improving, scaling, and stabilizing the business have already been done. Instead you’re looking for a way to let your earlier investors liquidate their returns and get actual cash that they can invest in new ventures. In the best case that means that the IPO price doesn’t move very much and it becomes a stable part of the market, but the incentives are all there to make sure the IPO overvalues the company as much as possible. I would need to do more research but I would suspect you can find an inverse relationship between venture funding and public market success in recent years, at least strong enough to expect the wheels to come off when the initial hype is pushed this high.
Might as well port this over here since I posted it late in the old thread
An actual interesting thought: If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence?
My opinion is yes. People absolutely despise AI and the tech companies, as we have seen time and time again, not to mention the spread of AI doom fears. The current state of America is a boiling pot as Trump gets worse and worse (and with upcoming midterms) so AI causing mass unemployment absolutely would be enough to make it boil over and cause violence
I think the more telling aspect here isn’t the possible employment impacts, it’s the fact that it’s making all the things it’s supposed to touch worse. Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits. But with AI, not only are we seeing the automation impact people’s livelihoods, it’s also making the experience of interacting with all these systems worse. I don’t know how many people outside the tech industry would care about underemployment and retraining for software engineers, but everyone can feel that the systems they rely on are less reliable, more glitchy, and uglier. Combined with the way data centers and AI companies serve as focusing points for people’s concerns, I think there’s decent odds that we see blood regardless of whether the prophecied great replacement (not that one) happens as advertised.
“Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits.”
Though with the textile mill thing, the quality of the cloth is much worse; I have a few historical reenactment friends who have been unable to find linen of the quality that even poor, working class people would have used (and Bernadette Banner has a recent YouTube video on the topic that my friends found validating and cathartic to see).
I’m not disagreeing with your point or anything — this is a bit of a tangent. I guess the point that I’m making is that textile mills did make everything worse, in terms of the availability of quality cloth, but this problem wasn’t noticed for a long time because the mills also made cloth cheaper for the average person. Whereas AI doesn’t even give us a benefit like this (which is why my comment is mostly irrelevant to your point and is just some bonus info because I’m a nerd)
It isnt just causing unemployment, it is also causing drinkable water and energy problems. And apparently there might already be a wace of workers setting fire to warehouses going on in the usa (which is not being reported on if it is, not sure of it is an actual thing btw, but saw somebody on social media say the warehouse fires which they were tracking went from 100 to 150 in a short period. I do not know enough to say if this is real or somebody mistaking normal accidents with a revolution, i assume it is the former. The one fire I saw reported was due to a cost of living thing btw).
The dreaded midnight hour of oblivion!
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