It’s the regurgitation of an insular community’s bizarre beliefs, up to and including sexual fixations, back to that community for unquestioning consumption… a vore-ouboros, if you will.

Edit to add: I think there’s a concentrated lump of illustrative lesswrong in this passage:

Also especially popular these days is a ZKP of your own tastes: as almost everyone has developed kinks that put a relatively normal goblin kink to shame, people have become more anxious about unaccepting people finding out. So now you can confirm that you and your girlfriend have a CPU-cuck fetish in common without her ever finding out that you and your grandma both enjoy spankings—amazing!

Yes, “ZKP” is dropped in without elaboration or definition. But more fundamentally… why, though? This reads like someone has thought too long and yet also too superficially about kink. Why has “almost everyone” developed these bizarre new tastes? What taboos are they transgressing, what vulnerabilities are they exposing, what strictures of life are they seeking to escape? What’s the itch?! And yet look at the fetishes that are specifically named: “spankings” (literally, not figuratively older than Aristotle) and a thinly science-fictionalized kind of swinging. This isn’t a new frontier in depravity; it’s a bachelorette party for normies. The whole thing feels like a product of a mind that’s strongly confined to a narrow understanding. It unhesitatingly accepts the importance of “freaky” sex and goes out of its way to bring that into the story, but it has nothing to say about the subject it has locked upon.

Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of “CPU” and rode the nopetopus out of there.

Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.

Glad to see that a fellow mod has already hit the “eat a bag of jerkied dicks” button.

There’s a huge difference between having a single counterexample and having a theory that explains where and why counterexamples occur, and what constraints are needed to avoid them. The former are rubies; the latter, wisdom.

I would have guessed “creative consultant on the new Harry Potter TV series”.

The trouble with the Millennium Prize problems is that they didn’t pick one involving counting letters in fruit.

I don’t think this bill would force us to gather driver’s licenses to let people use awful.systems, but depending on the regulations promulgated by the state later, it potentially could. Mastodon is more likely to be hit than Lemmy, since it offers “infinite scroll” and “like counts”, which are features that politicians have decided are Satanic.

And the slightest bit of investigation reveals that TW is full of bunk.

https://awful.systems/post/1874248/3965487

Fuck, I dunno, I’m ranking these on pure insomnia

“AI techbro syndicate looking shady as fuck to nobody’s surprise” —an actual rabbi

Somewhere in the review, they mention having left academia for industry. Hopefully that worked out well for them.

“Hey, no kink shaming!”

“But it’s… Aella.”

“All right. One (1) kink-shaming.”

In the TESCREAL lore iceberg, “Aella Sankey chart” is above the waterline.

• Existence of HPMoR
• Existence of Zizians
• Aella Sankey chart
• Aella not showering

…

• Topher Brennan leaks Siskind emails

…

• “AI datacenter water usage is fine actually” Substack

…

• Cremieux’s alleged old Reddit handle

…

• Scott Aaronson anti-feminist breakdown
• Scott Aaronson goes full Zionist

…

• Glowfic

…

• su3su2u1 review of HPMoR

…

• Robot God deduces general relativity in three frames with the power of Bayes

…

• Scott Aaronson makes airport cops sympathetic

…

• TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard

…

• Eliezer Yudkowsky is That Guy when recommending scifi books

Greg Egan reports:

Open Letter about the Mathathon

This open letter calling for the cancellation of the Caltech “Mathathon”, has received 471* signatures so far. [Only members of the Caltech community or mathematicians at PhD student level or beyond are eligible to sign.]

* Now 771 signatures.

“On October 30th, 2026, Caltech will begin hosting the Caltech Mathathon, a math hackathon in which participants are encouraged to solve open research problems by prompting LLMs. Two prominent AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, will supply participants with 2 million dollars in AI credits. This event is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.”

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6dBeDwjRP4UkchGSpLwLQjiG8qLX5_wW_3-xoC4dImTPp6g/viewform

Status of my evening:

Post a link to my personal website, find out a minute later that it’s “down for maintenance”, try to log into my web hosting dashboard (Siteground) to figure out what’s going on, it rejects the 2FA code it sends me, then the 2FA code suddenly works, then the dashboard is full of hard-selling slop features that I will gouge out my left eye with a spork and skull-fuck the hole with the blunt end before I will use… My blog seems to be back now, though?

Fuck, I need to migrate my blog. If there is even anywhere to migrate it to.

And the bonus advantage of an academic community of which a sizable fraction is willing to burn leaded gasoline to truck the child laborers into the sweatshop to paint asbestos with radium, if it’ll get them arXiv posts.

OpenAI:

While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.

https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk/post/3muznyls6vk2v

lmao what the fuck do you mean it’s unlikely but you can’t rule it out. do you not know what you’re training your models on? are you guys unaware of what’s going on in your own operation? does openai research not have any knowledge of what data they train their models on?

Previously in Hossenfelder’s appearances on awful dot systems:

https://awful.systems/post/5317207/8451899

https://awful.systems/post/5930794/9070600

When they are using science fiction as a venue to be weirdly horny, what are they weirdly horny for, and in how many star systems do they know the age-of-consent laws?

Recycling previous joke: https://awful.systems/post/6373632/9569779