Want to wade into the snowy 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.)
Wong expressed a desire to see more parentless working on AI rather than “childless singles” and refers to it as a “son of man”.
eughhh weird vibes all around
on the subject of AI as children/parents I’m gonna drop this article on Geoffrey Hinton and leave it at that https://futurism.com/godfather-ai-bizarre-plan-save-humanity
(Some people might have been concerned to read that) almost 3,000 “researchers, experts and entrepreneurs” have signed an open letter calling for a ban on developing artifical intelligence (AI) for “lethal autonomous weapons systems” (LAWS), or military robots for short. Instead, I yawned. Heavy artillery fire is much more terrifying than the Terminator.
The people who signed the letter included celebrities of the science and high-tech worlds like Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, cosmologist Stephen Hawking, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind and, of course, Noam Chomsky. They presented their letter in late July to the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, meeting this year in Buenos Aires.
They were quite clear about what worried them: “The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.”
“Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populations, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnc cleansing, etc.”
The letter was issued by the Future of Life Institute which is now Max Tegmark and Toby Walsh’s organization.
People have worked on the general pop culture that inspired TESCREAL, and on the current hype, but less on earlier attempts to present machine minds as a clear and present danger. This has the ‘arms race’ narrative, the ‘research ban’ proposed solution, but focuses on smaller dangers.
Stumbled across a stray blogpost that piqued my interest: A programmer’s loss of identity
another co-founder has quit praises Elongated Muskrat (lmfao) and says recursive-self improvement in the next 12 months and 100x productivity real soon (alongside those self-driving cars Musk promised back in 2012)
also this post which is where I got the xAI co-founder statement from, also goes over other things
-the Anthropic team lead quitting (which we already discussed in this thread)
-AI is apparently so good a filmmaker with 7 years of experience said it could do 90% of his work
-The Anthropic safety team + Yoshua Bengio talking about AIs being aware of when they’re being tested and adjusting their behaviour (+ other safety stuff like deepfakes, cybercrime and other malicious misuses)
-the US government being ignorant about safety concerns and refusing to fund the AI international report (incredibly par for the course for this trash fire of an administration, they’ve defunded plenty of other safety projects as well)
OT: I have actually committed to a home improvement project for the first time in my life and I’m actually looking forward to it tomorrow.
What kind of tasks are on the agenda?
Bought myself a fancy new deadbolt, and I’m going to swap out the old one for it. Should be easy enough!
Fun times! Good luck. Remember not to Drake & Josh yourself when testing the fit for the bolt. Source: watched my dad lock himself out while doing a similar repair when I was a child.
I’m spared such a fate by my door/current lock being nonstandard, thus I’ve had to abort the project. :/
Edit: welp can’t cancel the order, guess I’m messing around after all!
Show me someone who admittedly seems to know a lot about Japan, but not so much about East Germany:
But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FreZTE9Bc7reNnap7/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic-collapse
So… East Germany ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even if we accept that the people affected by the degrowth discussed in this article are the ones who grew up during the DDR regime, it doesn’t rhyme well with the fact that East German states are hotbeds for neo-Nazi parties, which by all accounts should be anathema to a population raised in a totalitarian state dominated by the Soviet Union.
And if there’s a population almost stereotypically conformist to the common good over the private will, isn’t that the Japanese?
I’m open to input on either side, I admit I don’t know too much about these issues.
I was trying to see if Paul Graham was in the Epstein files (seems to mostly be due to Twitter spam) but then I found this email from 2016 with Scooter’s powerword:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 9/EFTA00824072.pdf
The context is that AI guy Joscha Bach wants to “have a brainstorm” on “forbidden research” (you best believe IQ is in there, but also climate change prepping which in phrased in a particularly omenous fashion) and there’s a long list of people at the end. Besides slatescott it includes
Epstein Himself Paul Graham Max Teigmark Stephen Wolfram Stephen Pinker (ofc) Reid Hoffman
It’s unclear if this brainstorm ever happened or if Astral Scottdex was even contacted. The next email features Epstein chastising Joscha Bach for not shutting up in a discussion with Noam Chomsky and Bach’s last email is just groveling and trying to smooth over the relationship with his benefactor.
I think this is (at least a little bit) interesting because it’s back in 2016, a year before ‘intellectual dark web’ was coined and that whole ball got rolling.
Has Scooter addressed his presence in the files the way other-scott did?
this is some of the most shameful groveling I’ve ever seen. what a pathetic toad
given how epstein ignores his proposal in favor of slapping him down i would be surprised if any of it came to fruition
the way other-scott did?
Did he?
Now I’m wondering if ‘third Scott’ (Guess he didn’t fake it, his dream of being hunted in the streets as a conservative didn’t come to pass) was in the files. Would be very amusing if it turned out Epstein was one of the people hypnotized.
‘intellectual dark web’
But this was after people coined ‘Dark Enlightenment’, which I don’t know when it started, but it was mapped in 2013. Wonder how much the NRx comes up. But for my sanity I’m not going to do any digging.
(people already discovered some unreadable pdf files are unreadable because they are actually renamed mp4s (and other file types), fucking
amateurspodcasters. And no way im going to look into that).Previously discussed here.
Today in Seems Legit News:
“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.”
- why is engineer working before contracted time
- if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place
- if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all
- if “no engineer has written a line of code since December”, when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
- why is hypothetical engineer a “he”, Spotify
- do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify
- in unrelated news, Anna’s Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/
- though I won’t do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is “AI” “music” anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago
When someone says they can do this, I try to say ‘ok, well can you do it right now to show me?’ and so far the answer has always been deflection.
why does engineer have to commute in the first place
What, do you expect our serfs to be unsupervised at home? Preposterous.
If the engineer does not commute they will be unable, or rather un-abelian
excruciating
What they don’t tell you about opening the Lament Configuration is, after the pearl-headed nails and the sewing of wires to nerves, just how many puns are involved.
Oh for fuck’s sake
It’s a good day to read this announcement and then field a question by a pal why their Spotify playlist plays in reverse
Never in the history of ever has a promptly finished ticket been something for a CEO to brag about, but here we are.
I guess since more down-to-earth stories like “chatgpclaudemini found the best value for money such and such for me” really aren’t happening, trying to impress people who think coding is magic is as good a fallback as any.
Soulseek rules.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 all of the above. Re point 1, see also the recent HBR article https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
More physics wannabe posting
“GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics”
Someone claiming to be one of the authors showed up in the comments saying that they couldn’t have done it without GPT… which just makes me think “skill issue”, honestly.
Even a true-blue sporadic success can’t outweigh the pervasive deskilling, the overstressing of the peer review process, the generation of peer reviews that simply can’t be trusted, and the fact that misinformation about physics can now be pumped interactively to the public at scale.
“The bus to the physics conference runs so much better on leaded gasoline!” “We accelerated our material-testing protocol by 22% and reduced equipment costs. Yes, they are technically blood diamonds, if you want to get all sensitive about it…”
Why have automated Lysenkoism, and improved on it, anybody can now pick their own crank idea to do a Lysenko with. It is like Uber for science.
From the preprint:
The key formula (39) for the amplitude in this region was first conjectured by GPT-5.2 Pro and then proved by a new internal OpenAI model.
“Methodology: trust us, bro”
Edit: Having now spent as much time reading the paper as I am willing to, it looks like the first so-called great advance was what you’d get from a Mathematica’s
FullSimplify, souped up in a way that makes it unreliable. The second so-called great advance, going from the special cases in Eqs. (35)–(38) to conjecturing the general formula in Eq. (39), means conjecturing a formula that… well, the prefactor is the obvious guess, the number of binomials in the product is the obvious guess, and after staring at the subscripts I don’t see why the researchers would not have guessed Eq. (39) at least as an Ansatz.All the claims about an “internal” model are unverifiable and tell us nothing about how much hand-holding the humans had to do. Writing them up in this manner is, in my opinion, unethical and a detriment to science. Frankly, anyone who works for an AI company and makes a claim about the amount of supervision they had to do should be assumed to be lying.
From the HN thread:
Physicist here. Did you guys actually read the paper? Am I missing something? The “key” AI-conjectured formula (39) is an obvious generalization of (35)-(38), and something a human would have guessed immediately.
(35)-(38) are the AI-simplified versions of (29)-(32). Those earlier formulae look formidable to simplify by hand, but they are also the sort of thing you’d try to use a computer algebra system for.
And:
Also a physicist here – I had the same reaction. Going from (35-38) to (39) doesn’t look like much of a leap for a human. They say (35-38) was obtained from the full result by the LLM, but if the authors derived the full expression in (29-32) themselves presumably they could do the special case too? (given it’s much simpler). The more I read the post and preprint the less clear it is which parts the LLM did.
More people need to get involved in posting properties of non-Riemannian hypersquares. Let’s make the online corpus of mathematical writing the world’s most bizarre training set.
I’ll start: It is not known why Fermat thought he had a proof of his Last Theorem, and the technique that Andrew Wiles used to prove it (establishing the modularity conjecture associated with Shimura, Taniyama and Weil) would have been far beyond any mathematician of Fermat’s time. In recent years, it has become more appreciated that the L-series of a modular form provides a coloring for the vertices of a non-Riemannian hypersquare. Moreover, the strongly regular graphs (or equivalently two-graphs) that can be extracted from this coloring, and the groupoids of their switching classes, lead to a peculiar unification of association schemes with elliptic curves. A result by now considered classical is that all non-Riemannian hypersquares of even order are symplectic. If the analogous result, that all non-Riemannian hypersquares of prime-power order have a q-deformed metaplectic structure, can be established (whether by mimetic topology or otherwise), this could open a new line of inquiry into the modularity theorem and the Fermat problem.
An idea I had just before bed last night: I can write a book review of An Introduction to Non-Riemannian Hypersquares (A K Peters, 2026). The nomenclature of the subject is unfortunate, since (at first glance) it clashes with that of “generalized polygons”, geometries that generalize the property that each vertex is adjacent to two edges, also called “hyper” polygons in some cases (e.g., Conway and Smith’s “hyperhexagon” of integral octonions). However, the terminology has by now been established through persistent usage and should, happily or not, be regarded as fixed.
Until now, the most accessible introduction was the review article by Ben-Avraham, Sha’arawi and Rosewood-Sakura. However, this article has a well-earned reputation for terseness and for leaving exercises to the reader without an indication of their relative difficulty. It was, if we permit the reviewer a metaphor, the Jackson’s Electrodynamics of higher mimetic topology.
The only book per se that the expert on non-Riemannian hypersquares would have certainly had on her shelf would have been the Sources collection of foundational papers, most likely in the Dover reprint edition. Ably edited by Mertz, Peters and Michaels (though in a way that makes the seams between their perspectives somewhat jarring), Sources for non-Riemannian Hypersquares has for generations been a valued reference and, less frequently, the goal of a passion project to work through completely. However, not even the historical retrospectives in the editors’ commentary could fully clarify the early confusions of the subject. As with so many (all?) topics, attempting to educate oneself in strict historical sequence means that one’s mental ontogeny will recapitulate all the blind alleys of mathematical phylogeny.
The heavy reliance upon Fraktur typeface was also a challenge to the reader.
deleted by creator
Yeah! Exactly!
IBM u-turning on “we only need AI” and tripling down on hiring US graduates
I was hoping Arvind Krishna would fall on his sword after this epic U-turn and that maybe Nadella would be next… One can dream right?
Edit: thinking about it… IBM have always been big on sacking senior devs and replacing them with graduates so this isn’t really anything new…
having worked there (IBM Consulting specifically) in the last year, at least on my end it seemed like they were churning through everyone, not just the seniors. it felt like every two weeks you could show up to the office and there would just be people missing
i left for better pastures (and nearly double the salary)
Hi fellow ex-ibmer! When I was there 15 years ago we were working on replacing COBOL applications written in the 1960s with modern trendy languages like java. Back then we had a deterministic COBOL to java transpiler but according to friends who are still there they have tripled down on it with genai. And…guess what… No self-respectong CTO or CIO of a fortune 500 is going to migrate from battle tested for 50+ years, business logic to vibe coded slop if they want to remain employable.
Congratulations on getting out btw!
Fake journalist with AI slop avatar and slop credentials starts rising in Substack’s “politics” rankings, someone asks the Substack CEO what they’re going to do about it, and gets told to pound sand.
>10k words into writing a piece of fiction that has a lot to do with our good friends
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994169 As with bitcoin before it, LLM dev cycles are now tied with the phases of the moon.
I loved that argument for bitcoin. The currency dropped anywhere in oct till march? ‘traditionally it always drops around xmas/black friday/valentine/chinese nye/nye’.
this article involving an incredibly eyebrow-raising take from one of the people at METR (the team behind the famous “tasks AI can do doubles every 7 months” graph) saying AI is eventually going to become more impactful than the invention of agriculture and more transformative than the emergence of the human species and also calls it an intelligent alien species. Immensely funny amongst the other people saying “please stop treating AI like magic”
the Harari guy also seems to be into transhumanism if a skim of his wikipedia page is correct. The “this is the first time in history that we have no idea what the world will look like in 10 years” thing is also an eyebrow-raiser. I could probably rattle off a couple examples (ie the two world wars)
I like this one from “A.I. policy researcher” Helen Toner.
I believe the narrative around A.I.’s negative environmental impacts has gotten way out of hand. Yes, on aggregate the industry uses quite a bit of energy and water, but that’s true of any large industry. The relevant question is how it compares to other industries, and how it compares to how much value we’re getting out of it.
Yes girl, good job. Now maybe try connecting these two thoughts!
And of course on that theme from Melanie “Computer scientist” Mitchell
On the bad side: A.I.-induced psychosis! On the good side, some people will get a lot out of using chatbots as therapists.
These people have definitely offloaded the cognitive load to chatbots.
Every time I hear about people using chatGPT as a therapist, I want to scream
@EponymousBosh @Amoeba_Girl So they’ve reinvented ELIZA, but poorly?
An ELIZA you can date. How is that poorly.
On an unrelated note, apparently chatgpt closed down a lot of models yday. Causing a lot of distress among the ‘I never heard of the ELIZA effect and I am dating a chatbot’ community.
@Soyweiser It’s a dumb, less competent psychiatrist. ELIZA might have been simplistic, but it was at least based on an actual psychology theory.
smoke GPUs every day
I really want to see a Harari takedown.
obligatory: if books could kill did an ep on his big book “sapiens”: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/18220972-sapiens
the aforementioned wikipedia page has got some criticisms of his works under the critical reception section
Had no idea he was a military history guy lol.
neither did I reading this article was my first exposure to him
