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.)
SpaceX (+ Grok + twitter) submitted a request for an IPO to the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026036936/0001628280-26-036936-index.htm
GitHub got pwnd by a compromised VS Code extension. Internal repos were exfiltrated.
“You should assume that you’re being manipulated until they have better systems in place,” says Lily Ray, founder of the search engine optimisation (SEO) and AI search consultancy Algorythmic. "We’re moving towards this ‘one true answer’ world.
from here
on the one hand I’m all “save me from marketroids”, on the other all “oh so we’ve solved philosophy?”
dear god what a fucking sentence to be saying as a description of the moment. and I’d fucking bet they’re talking to their customers in the same terms/language
"We’re moving towards this ‘one true answer’ world.
This ugly little statement has been true ever since Twitter started eating mainstream media personalities’ brains. It’s why I consider the modern chatbot to be a direct design descendent of short-form social media – it’s giving you Twitter with zero pushback or hate. Beware anyone who thinks this is a good thing.
Edward W. Niedermeyer calls the plans to put SpaceX and OpenAI public at ludicrously inflated valuations and dump shares on index funds for real money BAGNAROK. American pension funds are starting to say out loud that this is a bad deal.
The officials - representing three of the top four largest public pension plans in the U.S. - objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including voting control over the stock, veto power over his own removal as CEO, and protections from litigation, including mandatory arbitration for SpaceX shareholder claims.
…
In their letter, the pension leaders urged SpaceX to adopt one-share, one-vote or sunset super-voting shares within seven years; install a majority-independent board and separate the CEO and chair roles; eliminate provisions protecting Musk from termination without his approval; scrap mandatory arbitration; and require independent approval of related-party transactions with Musk’s other companies.
“Precisely because SpaceX is poised to occupy a position of systemic importance in the public markets, and to become, through index inclusion, an unavoidable holding in our portfolios, its governance must at least adhere to the baseline protections upon which long-term institutional capital depends, rather than seeking to diminish them,” they wrote.
or sunset super-voting shares within seven years
weird number to pick given they might not last that long if felon and friends aren’t removed earlier on…
Here’s a story about a douchebag who lost because AI:
Wonkette: Creep Who Sued Women Who Warned Others Not To Date Him Loses Case Due To AI-Reliant Lawyer - “Finally, a good use for AI!”
The brief included no citation to any legislative findings, let alone any including the statute’s targets as the brief asserted. We could not find any reference to the phrases “amplified exposure and endangerment” or “cyber vigilantism” within the Doxing Act. There also are no legislative findings included in the codification of the Doxing Act, the session law, or any publicly available version of the bill. These mistakes and fictitious quotations bear the hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence.
Google released their new Gemini 3.5 “flash” model at I/O yesterday. For those who aren’t familiar, the “flash” model is typically marketed as the lower end and the “pro” model is the higher end for each given model generation.
The interesting thing here is that the new “flash” model is almost as expensive as the “pro” from the previous generation.
As my favourite “neutral-but-not-really” AI booster Simon Willison says:
This fits a trend: OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 was 2x the price of GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is around 1.46x the price of 4.6 when you take the new tokenizer into account.
It feels like all three of the major AI labs are starting to probe the price tolerance of their API customers.
Speed running enshittification - a process that typically only works when people are reliant on your product and have no other option than to pay the inflated price
presented without context, because it’s funnier that way: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=yE4Y2AoMPXGcTZw8B
took me a second to understand this isn’t meant as a funny prank idea
Rationalists: we should always incorporate new data into our worldview
Also rationalists: I found some anthropology study of Australian First nations from 1899 and found it fascinating
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZM6pErzL7JwE3pkv/shortplav?commentId=zn2bXx2WmLmyGiefm
Of course they measured skulls.
See, it’s a good practice under the principle of charity to read as much fascist propaganda as you can and incorporate it into your worldview. It doesn’t matter who said things, but rather whether they’re true, and since you’re a rational agent you can surely evaluate each claim with perfect objecitivity. Digging a 19th-century eugenics study is expanding your objectivity score.
Reading polemics from leftists too? lol no what are you talking about, they’re all irrational and biased
/s
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?
that made me smile good and proper, ty for the lol
I love the orangeposters in there, some of them sure are thonkers
people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org
How does using personal plans impact the company’s bill? If someone is so profoundly stupid as to spend their own money on a “tool” for their job then why stop them?
I’ve seen the pattern be used as an enterprise pricing dodge before: rather than sign the whole org up at $$$, everyone signs up themselves at $ (and maybe get to claim or somesuch)
another reading could be that someone in leadership/security went “holy shit this exposure is terrible” and put forth a policy including “no personal” and the poor little promptfondler is left ashen-faced upon reading that the policy instruction actually thought of the first obvious workaround
Dunno, maybe they believe the pinky promise that their code won’t be used for training on the enterprise plans?
It’s more like license to sue their pants off if they get caught propagating obviously proprietary code through the responses of their tool, and if they are doing it but you can’t tell that just means your enterprise code isn’t discernible from claudeslop so no harm done.
I’m assuming if suddenly an LLM code tool is able to do something like write a parser for an unambiguously closed source heavily copyrighted data format and the only possible leak is the devs using LLM tooling, it’s going to be a big legal deal.
That’s a good point. I wonder if they’re also realizing that the promised efficiency gains haven’t manifested and their code quality has started dropping. Can’t really say that without embarrassing everyone and so it gets written up as all cost.
does anthropic sequester the data it gets sent the same way on personal and business plans?
My assumption based on nothing except life experience is that all of that data gets pushed through differently coloured pipes into the same giant bucket with privacy concerns being “too hard” and “approved by legal”.
(oh dear, how sad, nevermind)
If only there had been warning signs of how heavily subsidized the rates absolutely had to be, and how bafflingly stupid it was to intentionally design workflows to maximize token use. If only people had been trying their damndest to shout it from the rooftops but were ignored because Corporate was listening to the automatic yes man instead.
WELL WELL WELL, if it isn’t the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling
(plus a dose of corporate greed)
Another read (on substack) on the rising hatred of AI data centres and its political implications
same sl0bslack author has this piece (complete with punchy LLMisms)
https://thecycle.substack.com/p/please-stop-trying-to-murder-trump
Before his murder, Kirk was influential, sure. After his murder, he became something much bigger. A symbol. A martyr. Turning Point exploded with energy, attention, emotional intensity, and recruitment after his death. In death, Kirk became more powerful than he was alive. Now multiply that effect by a million and attach it to Donald Trump.
Uh didn’t I recently read how TPUSA has basically imploded just half a year since this dipshit got his head blown off (sorry “destroyed at a debate”)? Everyone with eyes to see could tell that the right jumped on this as a Reichstag fire analog, prepared to usher in a new consensus, but it fizzled out after a couple of weeks (unfortunately not before a number of people lost their jobs)
Trump is sui generis. He’s not a person universally beloved. He’s a deeply polarizing chaos agent who has twisted the right into his weird image, but the point is, that image is incoherent and changes with his moods daily. There’s no Trump ideology other than what’s in his Truth social feed at the moment.
Would he being assassinated bring peace and order to the land? No. Would it usher in a new thousand year Republican age? Also no. Would it be bad. Yes, but not as bad as this pseudo-leftist believes.
Also it goes without saying, don’t assassinate people.
At least the retiree who was jailed for 37 days for posting a meme has gotten a settlement:
kirk’s mentor died from covid before, but kirk was face of this org so it had to end this way. i think that fuentes tried to do entryism there with low degree of success. i only got reminded of this dipshit once after he died, 2w ago, nobody cares at this point about his org, it’s a spent force
I found the paragraph that best shows why I hate this:
Globalization became the symbolic villain for the collapse of blue-collar manufacturing communities in America. Entire towns watched factories disappear while political and economic elites insisted the disruption was both inevitable and beneficial.
This is a basically accurate description of what happened.
Whether every fear surrounding globalization was technically correct almost ceased to matter politically because millions of people experienced the same emotional reality: the economy was being reorganized for someone else’s benefit while their communities absorbed the damage.
Again, I this is actually a pretty salient description of what happened. Sure, maybe if you add everything up the benefits outweigh the costs in some abstract way, but it still hurts when those costs are imposed on you and yours without any input. The economic decision-makers decided to sacrifice those people’s livelihoods and their futures in exchange for number go up, and they knew it was happening even as they couldn’t do anything to stop them.
This whole piece acts like the backlash to outsourcing was irrational and dumb, like those salt-of-the-earth morons didn’t know what was good for them. But the author is either too deep in the neoliberal soup to recognize this as the wrong and cruel argument it is or they recognize this and lack the courage to commit to that position openly.
AI is increasingly becoming that same symbolic villain for white-collar America
Emphasis added. I don’t think the villainy behind these AI projects is symbolic at all. Symptomatic of deeper systemic problems maybe, but very real. People aren’t failing to grant this transformative technology it’s moment in the sun, they are clearly seeing the transformation that the tech oligarchs are trying to impose on them and doing their damndest to reject it. This still leaves a whole lot of fights left to decide what the future should look like, but I find it legitimately heartening to see so many people from so many different parts of society coming together and loudly declaring “Not this!”
this feels like a form of critihype but i haven’t read anything else by this person so i don’t know. Examples:
Artificial intelligence is entering public consciousness associated with layoffs, instability, replacement anxiety, corporate concentration, surveillance, and soaring resource consumption.
That is an extraordinarily dangerous emotional foundation for a transformative technology.
The commencement boos matter because they reveal how culturally toxic AI has already become among many young educated Americans. These students understand artificial intelligence well enough to fear it precisely because they already use it. They use it for papers, coding assistance, presentations, summaries, and research. They know the technology works. They know it is improving rapidly.
“oh no, people dislike this wonderful technology!! But it’s so wonderful!!”
Whether America ultimately requires these facilities to remain economically competitive may eventually become a legitimate policy debate, but politically that question is almost secondary.
“we really need this stuff guys, people are mad so it might not happen but it’s really really important so think of that too”
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?”
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.
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
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
In retrospect, the idea that creating a globally accepted alternative to the dollar would come with zero consequences to the system of global free trade it props up might just be the funniest bit of half-baked cryptobro ideology.
